(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 3:21-26
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who wrote some important books about families and relationships back in the 1980s. His lectures were broadcast on PBS for a while, and I remember how he used to talk about troubled families in those programs. He used a large mobile—you know, an oversized version of what might hang over a baby’s crib. He would add a piece for each member of the family, but when he start to add extra pieces representing things like addiction or abuse, you could see the mobile twist and contort as it was thrown out of balance. In the end that was precisely Bradshaw’s point: these problems or dysfunctions could throw families completely out of balance.
Think about that as we continue our journey through Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul’s main point is that the world has been infected by sin—that the human family had been thrown out of balance—and that only Jesus Christ could make things right again.
21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
As we begin it will help to remember the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Our text comes right after an extended discussion of God’s faithfulness, and just before a familiar passage about Abraham’s faith. Note the ‘Jewishness’ of the context within Romans—it’s all about the Law and Abraham’s faithfulness.
What should we notice in our text?
“Righteousness by faith alone.”
There is nothing here that is earned by human effort. A lot of times this is the hardest part for people to accept about the Christian faith. We live in a world where we have to earn everything—our pay, our security, even our love sometimes. All of that gets turned on its head here. The greatest gift we can ever imagine—by a long way—comes to us free of charge—free from measuring up—it comes by faith alone.
This is NOT like the end of the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ where Tom Hanks’ character’s dying words to Private Ryan are: ‘Earn this!’ Christ doesn’t ask us to earn anything—he just asks us to believe.
“There is no difference.”
Part of this is about the ancient division between Jew and Gentile—this is Paul consistently making the world-changing case that God has entered the world for the entire world—no one has the inside lane on this. The differences that separate us from each other have been set aside.
Paul’s teaching here points to our shared identity as people who go running after other gods. ‘There is no difference’ becomes ‘we’re all in the same boat,’ or maybe ‘misery loves company.’
What it means is that when we talk about what the gospel means and what it requires, no one is excluded, but no one is exempt, either. This is for everyone.
Proof that God is faithful to his promises.
Remember that the promises God made to the people he chose were simple: Be faithful and I will bless you and make you into a blessing for the whole world. That’s what’s happening in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Through Christ we see not only the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, but also the keeping of the promise to bless the entire world through them.
This is one of those moments when we have to step back and consider just what it meant for God to come, to become human with all its weaknesses and problems, to suffer pain and torment and to die.
How does Christ’s death mean that was God faithful?
All of this is part of a bigger story called the Atonement. We spent some time on that earlier this year: The Atonement is a drama in three acts—the Cross, the Resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The point of this drama is that we’ve been offered reconciliation to God, to ourselves, to each other and to the earth.
But it all begins with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.
What we learn through the Cross is that there is a common plight and a common solution for all of humanity.
Our common plight is what the Scriptures call sin: anything that separates us from living and loving and serving in the presence of God.
The common solution is Christ’s atoning work. Listen to how Scot McKnight describes the meaning of Christ’s death in his book on the Atonement.
McKnight suggests that “we see the achievement of the cross in three expressions: Jesus dies ‘with us’—entering our evil and our sin and our suffering to subvert it and create a new way; Jesus dies ‘instead of us’—he enters into our sin, our wrath, and our death; and Jesus dies ‘for us’—his death forgives our sin, ‘declares us right’, absorbs the wrath of God against us and creates new life where there was once only death…A life shaped by the cross is a life bent on dying daily to self in order to love God, self, others and the world”
The Cross changes everything.
This passage is nothing less than a radical redefinition of what it means to be the people of God. What does this mean for us?
The human family is out of balance—like in that mobile John Bradshaw used to talk about the family. But the atonement puts us back into balance with God—literally, justified by him, through him, and for him.
So what do we do now? Two things:
First, live as people who have been bought with a price. Live as people who are trying to understand the gift we’ve been given in Jesus Christ.
Living that way changes everything—from the way we earn and spend, to the way we love and serve. From our parenting to our business practices—from what we look for in relationships to our treatment of the poor.
Living as people who’ve been purchased with a price becomes the way we define our lives. It replaces our education and careers, the achievements of our kids and the coolness of our cars.
Living as people who’ve been bought with a price transforms the way we fellowship with each other, the way we worship together—it changes the way we focus on growing into mature disciples and eventually the way we reach out to others.
Second, the call is on us to share that good news with the people in our lives. That looks different for each of us, but the principle is the same for everyone:
Experiencing God’s forgiveness in our lives in a real way leads naturally—inevitably—to sharing that forgiveness with the people around us. We do that individually, but we also do it as a community of faith—as this church family.
In ‘Deep Church, the book I mentioned last week, the author talks about the central role the gospel of Jesus Christ has in their church. He writes:
“The gospel is at the center of all we do. The 'gospel' is the good news that through Jesus, the Messiah, the power of God's kingdom has entered history to renew the whole world. Through the Savior God has established his reign. When we believe and rely on Jesus' work and record (rather than ours) for our relationship to God, that kingdom power comes upon us and begins to work through us. We witness this radical new way of living by our renewed lives, beautiful community, social justice, and cultural transformation. This good news brings new life. The gospel motivates, guides, and empowers every aspect of our living and worship.”
Just to close: If the story ended with the pronouncement that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ then we would live lives of hopelessness and despair.
But that’s not the end of the story. The promise God makes to all of us is that no matter who we are or what we’ve done—no matter what we’ve said or even what we’ve believed before this moment.
No matter who we think we are, God sees us as the people he made and loves and gave himself up to save.
Whatever else you think about yourself, the good news is that when you come to him in faith, God sees you as perfect and spotless and shiny and new.
That’s the good news—that’s the gospel of Jesus Christ offered to each one of us, every day.
What’s left for us is to accept it—to live it—and to share it with the world Christ came to save.
Amen.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Clear Enough?
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 1:18-20
It’s one of the great, often true stereotypes about men in our culture. Here’s the stereotype: men usually don’t like to ask for directions or even read maps. I know, I know, some guys aren’t like this, but they just stick out and prove the rule most of the time. Is there a more iconic beginning to a fight in books or movies or TV? The wife says: We’re lost. The husband says: No we’re not. The wife asks the husband to stop for directions. The husband refuses and we’re off to the races…
Julie and I went to Normandy last year, and even though neither of us speaks French, we always knew where we were because the signs were so clear. Everywhere we looked there were arrows pointing to exactly what we wanted to see, and at the very least there was always one large sign that said ‘OVERLORD,’ the operational name for the D-Day invasion. Seriously, I remember thinking to myself that you’d have to be blind to get lost along that northern Normandy coast.
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Before we get into that it’s worth a reminder of the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Last week we heard Paul say ‘I am not ashamed of the Gospel,’ and the point of that for us as we move deeper into this important letter is that we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
So what about our text this morning?
It introduces a section on the state of things when the world rejects God. It starts with an ominous sentence: ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against godlessness and wickedness’…let’s come back to that one.
Then there’s a section listing a broad range of examples of what happens when people lose sight of God, followed by an explanation of God and people and sin and judgment that is rooted in the Jewish tradition—in the Jewish world view.
So let’s talk about how Paul addresses some of these things in our text this morning.
The first thing that jumps of the page is this business about the ‘Wrath of God’. We all have an image in our minds of what that might be. Lightning, plagues, hail, floods—there are all kinds of images we conjure up when someone mentions God’s wrath. For some people it confirms the worst about what they think about God and the Bible and Christians. Why give your life to a faith that’s rooted in fear of the wrath of a God you can’t even see?
But as you read through the rest of this chapter you’ll find that what Paul is actually describing is scarier than that. He says that when people choose to reject God…God lets them do it. Paul says: ‘Therefore God gave them over’ to whatever it is they wanted to do instead of worshipping and serving God. What? No fire…no brimstone? That doesn’t sound very wrathful.
But it does sound strangely loving. It’s the tough love that people talk about sometimes—when a parent has to make the painful choice to let a child make their own mess…and take the consequences. It’s when we stop enabling someone to keep on living in any form of self-destructive behavior—when we stop shielding them from the consequences—in the hopes that they’ll be shaken back into their senses.
God’s wrath is simply that he allows his people to go their own way—the way they choose for themselves.
That leaves a pretty comprehensive list covering everything from slander and gossip, questions of sexuality, and even arrogance and boastfulness. Let’s be clear about this part: none of the individual sins here are worse than any of the others. It’s the idea of sin itself—the things we do that separate us from God and from God’s ways—that’s what Paul is teaching us in this section of his letter.
But then we’re left with what God tries to do to bring us back to him—this idea of the ‘Visibility of God’. Through it all God tries to make himself plain—even obvious—to the world he made. The call to notice and follow: God’s ‘eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen’, Paul says, ‘being understood from what has been made.’
Most of us at some point or another, as we have struggled to know God and to believe that he really exists—most of us have said something like: ‘O God, I’d believe in you if you just showed me a sign.
That’s what’s behind those stories we see every so often about someone seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a piece of fruit or a ham sandwich. It was the foundation of the controversy over the Shroud of Turin. It’s that moment that everyone has experienced where we’re sure we would be the people God called us to be if he would just show himself to us.
Does that ring true for you? Wouldn’t we all love to see a sign that proved beyond any doubt that God existed? What sign would be good enough?
Frederick Buechner imagines a story in his book, The Magnificent Defeat. After hearing the collective cries of his people for a sign, God reaches into the heavens and rearranges the stars so that they spell out ‘I EXIST’ in every language. The response is dramatic: Stadiums and arenas can’t contain local churches; elderly Christians weep at the confirmation that their faith has not been in vain; doubters and scoffers turn to God in passionate faith. After a period where the the Gospel spreads to every corner of the earth, a man walks with his young son to look at the night sky. As they stand together, hand-in-hand, reading God’s unmistakable self-revelation, the boy turns to his father and says,
‘So what?’
The signs that pointed to God’s existence had become so commonplace that those who had not known life without them failed to understand their message.
The point here is that the real question isn’t about whether or not we get to see a sign. The real point comes in the form of a question: Will we see the signs for what they truly are? Remember where our passage comes from—it’s a part of the introduction to an argument—to Paul making the case that God could be trusted in Rome and beyond because he had been faithful to his promises to Israel.
But even that’s not the heart of the matter. At the very core of this section of Paul’s letter is something that’s true for every person whether we admit it or not, and here it is:
Something or someone is going to be lord in our lives.
Bob Dylan said it a different way, of course: ‘You’re gonna serve somebody.’ Either way it’s true—each of us will make something lord in our life. The question that each of us has to answer is ‘who or what will it be?’
There’s no shortage of choices. People turn all kinds of things into gods for themselves: wealth, power, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, even safety. Money as a god has taken a beating in this past year, but even that one is always going to make a comeback.
We’re all going to choose something to be the lord of our life—it’s the way we’re wired. Remember that Paul has a goal in this letter—he’s trying to get Roman Christians to trust God because God has been faithful to his promises in the past.
He knows that God gives us all the freedom to choose whatever we want to follow as lord. Paul’s goal is to convince as many people as possible to choose Christ for that important job.
But first we have to notice him. First we have to see the signs.
The call on us in this passage is to see the indications of God in the world around us—not just in nature but in the beauty and creativity we see in the culture, too.
The call is to see all of that—to see the way that God communicates says ‘I EXIST' through the world around us—to see all of that and not respond by saying ‘So what?’
The call on us is to seek out what we can learn and experience and even know about God through our interactions with Creation, with each other and with the culture.
But even that isn’t enough. Today especially, as we remember World Communion Sunday, it’s important for us to remember that the practice of the Sacraments in worship is one critical way we experience God—experience the sacred—in our regular lives.
In the book that guides the worship in my own Presbyterian tradition, this is what it says about Communion—about the Lord’s Supper.
“The Lord’s Supper is the sign and seal of eating and drinking in communion with the crucified and risen Lord…On the day of his resurrection, the risen Jesus made himself known to his followers in the breaking of bread. He continued to show himself to believers, by blessing and breaking bread, by preparing, serving and sharing common meals…The New Testament describes the meal as a participation in Christ and with one another in the expectation of the Kingdom and as a foretaste of the messianic banquet.”
Communion is just one of many ways God makes himself known to us. We’re going to talk about more of those in the coming weeks and months.
But for now, maybe we have to train our eyes to see—maybe the signs have been there all along and we’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing them. Maybe we’ve chosen other gods and we don’t know how to get out from under those decisions and change our lives.
Whatever might be holding you back, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it’s never too late—there’s no place you can go that’s too far.
There is no shortage of ways we can find ourselves lost, but nothing we’ve ever said or done or even believed before this moment can separate us from the one who made us and loves us.
As we come to the Table today my invitation to you is to experience the presence of the Risen Christ in a real way. To see this meal as a ‘participation in Christ and with one another’ in the expectation of the Kingdom, and as a foretaste of the Great Banquet God promised.
The invitation to all of us who are coming in faith is to see God in the bread, in the cup, and in each other as we share this small feast.
It’s only appropriate that as we come to the Table we remember the one whose Table it is. We come as faithful people to worship and adore Christ the King. As we prepare our hearts today, let’s stand and sing another hymn out of season: 'O Come All Ye Faithful'
Romans 1:18-20
It’s one of the great, often true stereotypes about men in our culture. Here’s the stereotype: men usually don’t like to ask for directions or even read maps. I know, I know, some guys aren’t like this, but they just stick out and prove the rule most of the time. Is there a more iconic beginning to a fight in books or movies or TV? The wife says: We’re lost. The husband says: No we’re not. The wife asks the husband to stop for directions. The husband refuses and we’re off to the races…
Julie and I went to Normandy last year, and even though neither of us speaks French, we always knew where we were because the signs were so clear. Everywhere we looked there were arrows pointing to exactly what we wanted to see, and at the very least there was always one large sign that said ‘OVERLORD,’ the operational name for the D-Day invasion. Seriously, I remember thinking to myself that you’d have to be blind to get lost along that northern Normandy coast.
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Before we get into that it’s worth a reminder of the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Last week we heard Paul say ‘I am not ashamed of the Gospel,’ and the point of that for us as we move deeper into this important letter is that we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
So what about our text this morning?
It introduces a section on the state of things when the world rejects God. It starts with an ominous sentence: ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against godlessness and wickedness’…let’s come back to that one.
Then there’s a section listing a broad range of examples of what happens when people lose sight of God, followed by an explanation of God and people and sin and judgment that is rooted in the Jewish tradition—in the Jewish world view.
So let’s talk about how Paul addresses some of these things in our text this morning.
The first thing that jumps of the page is this business about the ‘Wrath of God’. We all have an image in our minds of what that might be. Lightning, plagues, hail, floods—there are all kinds of images we conjure up when someone mentions God’s wrath. For some people it confirms the worst about what they think about God and the Bible and Christians. Why give your life to a faith that’s rooted in fear of the wrath of a God you can’t even see?
But as you read through the rest of this chapter you’ll find that what Paul is actually describing is scarier than that. He says that when people choose to reject God…God lets them do it. Paul says: ‘Therefore God gave them over’ to whatever it is they wanted to do instead of worshipping and serving God. What? No fire…no brimstone? That doesn’t sound very wrathful.
But it does sound strangely loving. It’s the tough love that people talk about sometimes—when a parent has to make the painful choice to let a child make their own mess…and take the consequences. It’s when we stop enabling someone to keep on living in any form of self-destructive behavior—when we stop shielding them from the consequences—in the hopes that they’ll be shaken back into their senses.
God’s wrath is simply that he allows his people to go their own way—the way they choose for themselves.
That leaves a pretty comprehensive list covering everything from slander and gossip, questions of sexuality, and even arrogance and boastfulness. Let’s be clear about this part: none of the individual sins here are worse than any of the others. It’s the idea of sin itself—the things we do that separate us from God and from God’s ways—that’s what Paul is teaching us in this section of his letter.
But then we’re left with what God tries to do to bring us back to him—this idea of the ‘Visibility of God’. Through it all God tries to make himself plain—even obvious—to the world he made. The call to notice and follow: God’s ‘eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen’, Paul says, ‘being understood from what has been made.’
Most of us at some point or another, as we have struggled to know God and to believe that he really exists—most of us have said something like: ‘O God, I’d believe in you if you just showed me a sign.
That’s what’s behind those stories we see every so often about someone seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a piece of fruit or a ham sandwich. It was the foundation of the controversy over the Shroud of Turin. It’s that moment that everyone has experienced where we’re sure we would be the people God called us to be if he would just show himself to us.
Does that ring true for you? Wouldn’t we all love to see a sign that proved beyond any doubt that God existed? What sign would be good enough?
Frederick Buechner imagines a story in his book, The Magnificent Defeat. After hearing the collective cries of his people for a sign, God reaches into the heavens and rearranges the stars so that they spell out ‘I EXIST’ in every language. The response is dramatic: Stadiums and arenas can’t contain local churches; elderly Christians weep at the confirmation that their faith has not been in vain; doubters and scoffers turn to God in passionate faith. After a period where the the Gospel spreads to every corner of the earth, a man walks with his young son to look at the night sky. As they stand together, hand-in-hand, reading God’s unmistakable self-revelation, the boy turns to his father and says,
‘So what?’
The signs that pointed to God’s existence had become so commonplace that those who had not known life without them failed to understand their message.
The point here is that the real question isn’t about whether or not we get to see a sign. The real point comes in the form of a question: Will we see the signs for what they truly are? Remember where our passage comes from—it’s a part of the introduction to an argument—to Paul making the case that God could be trusted in Rome and beyond because he had been faithful to his promises to Israel.
But even that’s not the heart of the matter. At the very core of this section of Paul’s letter is something that’s true for every person whether we admit it or not, and here it is:
Something or someone is going to be lord in our lives.
Bob Dylan said it a different way, of course: ‘You’re gonna serve somebody.’ Either way it’s true—each of us will make something lord in our life. The question that each of us has to answer is ‘who or what will it be?’
There’s no shortage of choices. People turn all kinds of things into gods for themselves: wealth, power, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, even safety. Money as a god has taken a beating in this past year, but even that one is always going to make a comeback.
We’re all going to choose something to be the lord of our life—it’s the way we’re wired. Remember that Paul has a goal in this letter—he’s trying to get Roman Christians to trust God because God has been faithful to his promises in the past.
He knows that God gives us all the freedom to choose whatever we want to follow as lord. Paul’s goal is to convince as many people as possible to choose Christ for that important job.
But first we have to notice him. First we have to see the signs.
The call on us in this passage is to see the indications of God in the world around us—not just in nature but in the beauty and creativity we see in the culture, too.
The call is to see all of that—to see the way that God communicates says ‘I EXIST' through the world around us—to see all of that and not respond by saying ‘So what?’
The call on us is to seek out what we can learn and experience and even know about God through our interactions with Creation, with each other and with the culture.
But even that isn’t enough. Today especially, as we remember World Communion Sunday, it’s important for us to remember that the practice of the Sacraments in worship is one critical way we experience God—experience the sacred—in our regular lives.
In the book that guides the worship in my own Presbyterian tradition, this is what it says about Communion—about the Lord’s Supper.
“The Lord’s Supper is the sign and seal of eating and drinking in communion with the crucified and risen Lord…On the day of his resurrection, the risen Jesus made himself known to his followers in the breaking of bread. He continued to show himself to believers, by blessing and breaking bread, by preparing, serving and sharing common meals…The New Testament describes the meal as a participation in Christ and with one another in the expectation of the Kingdom and as a foretaste of the messianic banquet.”
Communion is just one of many ways God makes himself known to us. We’re going to talk about more of those in the coming weeks and months.
But for now, maybe we have to train our eyes to see—maybe the signs have been there all along and we’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing them. Maybe we’ve chosen other gods and we don’t know how to get out from under those decisions and change our lives.
Whatever might be holding you back, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it’s never too late—there’s no place you can go that’s too far.
There is no shortage of ways we can find ourselves lost, but nothing we’ve ever said or done or even believed before this moment can separate us from the one who made us and loves us.
As we come to the Table today my invitation to you is to experience the presence of the Risen Christ in a real way. To see this meal as a ‘participation in Christ and with one another’ in the expectation of the Kingdom, and as a foretaste of the Great Banquet God promised.
The invitation to all of us who are coming in faith is to see God in the bread, in the cup, and in each other as we share this small feast.
It’s only appropriate that as we come to the Table we remember the one whose Table it is. We come as faithful people to worship and adore Christ the King. As we prepare our hearts today, let’s stand and sing another hymn out of season: 'O Come All Ye Faithful'
Monday, September 28, 2009
Nothing To Be Ashamed Of
(This message is part of a series on Romans titled "Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose.")
Romans 1:16-17
16I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
We’re at the beginning of a journey through parts of Paul’s letter to the Christians in 1st-century Rome. As I said last week, there are a few things for us to know as we try to understand this complicated letter.
The Roman church was really a network of homes and converted synagogues where people gathered to worship and learn and serve in Christ’s name. Remember that there were more than 50,000 Jews in Rome at that time, and that a significant number of them had converted to Christianity and were worshipping side-by-side with Gentile Christians from Rome and other parts of the Empire.
Paul was the ideal person to write this pastoral letter. Paul had been a devout Jew for most of his life. He was trained as a Pharisee under the most famous Pharisee scholar of them all, a man named Gamaliel, which I said last week was the equivalent of getting an Ivy League PhD in Jewish law. Saul calls himself a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’, and even leads some of the early persecution of the Christian church.
But Saul becomes Paul when he meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, and everything changes for him. He takes his academic training, his ability to earn and raise money, and his passionate faith in Jesus Christ—he takes all of those into his new job—his new calling as one of the founders of the Christian church. It’s in that new role that Paul writes this crucial letter.
And so what was the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans?
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Simple, right?
It’s not really simple at all, but as we make our way through our text this morning, there are some things to notice about what Paul is teaching here.
First, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in the promises God made to the Jewish people.
Paul says in our text that the Gospel is “first for the Jew, then for the Gentile,” and the text ends with a quote from the prophet Habakkuk: “The righteous will live by faith.” Even in this short passage Paul is making the link between the Gospel of Jesus and the history of God’s relationship with the Jewish people.
Second, that Gospel, wherever it came from, is available to all people.
The Gospel is God’s “salvation for everyone who believes.” This is a key part of Paul’s ministry, and it also shapes the early history of the church. The Christian faith was born out of Judaism, but it was meant for everyone. Remember the promises we read last week and this morning that God made to Abram—that he would make him into a great nation with more descendants than he could count. All of that was meant for a purpose: “…and all the nations will be blessed through you.”
It’s the ministry of Jesus that becomes that blessing—it’s a blessing that comes through Jesus—through Judaism—and offers God’s redemption and reconciliation to the whole world
Finally we experience the full gift of the Gospel by faith alone.
“For in the Gospel a righteousness is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”
This is a tricky one, because it’s in this single sentence that Paul is trying to change the entire world view of his Jewish convert readers. They would have believed from birth that “righteousness”—being reconciled to God, came from following the Law and offering the right sacrifices. Here Paul is saying that the gift of connection to God is just that. It’s a gift that comes by faith alone, and not by anything we can do to earn it.
It’s this theme that pushed Martin Luther into the movement that became the Reformation. So many things had been added by the church to the list of what people had to do to draw near to God. So many layers of religious stuff had been placed between the individual believer and God. When Luther read Paul’s letter to the Romans with fresh eyes, he learned that God had cleared out all of those obstructions—when Luther realized that what God wanted was for people to come to him by faith alone, it changed everything.
In the Jewish tradition tomorrow is Yom Kippur. It’s a day of solemn reflection and confession for sins against God and against other people—it’s also a day of repentance for both individual and corporate sins. The purpose of the day is to be cleansed—to be released from the guilt and shame that come from those things we do that separate us from God (not God from us, by the way).
The message of Romans, and the point that Paul is trying to communicate to his Gentile readers and Jewish converts at the same time, is that we’re not driven or controlled anymore by our guilt and shame. Because God has been faithful to his promises, we can come to him by faith alone.
But that doesn’t mean that ‘shame’ isn’t a real part of our lives.
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who specializes in dealing with the impact of shame on individuals and families. He wrote: “To have shame as an identity is to believe that one’s being is somehow flawed—that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.” That’s what the Gospel is designed to transform in our lives—that feeling of being not quite fully human because of our sin and shame.
That brings us back to Paul’s bold claim: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel.” What was he saying?
Paul was making the point that he wasn’t ashamed of the gospel, because the point of the Gospel was to take away his shame. But mostly he’s saying that as strange as this story sounds, he knew that it was rooted in the history and promises and character of God himself, so there was no need to be embarrassed about it.
Paul said to the Romans: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”
What does that mean for us? The first two things we’ve said already:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in God’s promises and relationship with Israel.
The Gospel is available to all people.
But there’s more.
The Gospel is something we grasp through faith, not science, not blind leap, but through our struggle to trust the God who has demonstrated his trustworthiness through the Cross and Resurrection.
As we grasp the Gospel we find that it takes away the shame we carry with us in our lives. That’s part of the point. As hard as it might be for us to fully comprehend, the Gospel restores us and remakes us into the people that God made us to be in the first place. Part of that process is helping us to acknowledge our sin and ask for forgiveness. The rest of that process is like a deep cleansing that the Scriptures tell us will make us ‘whiter than snow.’
Mostly this text is a reminder that just as he did with Paul, God invites us to stop being ashamed of the gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in history and available to everyone. It has the power to build community and spark reconciliation and give hope to every single person on earth.
But mostly we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
No matter what we done or said or thought or believed in the past, the gospel—the good news that Jesus Christ has come and lived and served and died and rose again—that Gospel takes us where we are, it cleanses us and restores us, and in the end it makes all things new.
When Yom Kippur was celebrated in the ancient world, it was the only day of the year when the high priest would enter the ‘Holy of Holies,’ the most important room in the Temple at Jerusalem. The gift of the gospel—the reason we’re all here today—is that through Jesus Christ we can approach God wherever we are and whenever we want. The call on us to come in faith, to trust in God’s promises, and to share that message with a hungry world.
That desire to share the message of the Gospel is what’s behind our closing hymn today. When Charles Wesley would have one of those moments where he realized the depth of God’s love for him, he would wish for a thousand voices to offer his love and praises to God.
Let’s stand together and ask for the same thing: “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
Romans 1:16-17
16I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
We’re at the beginning of a journey through parts of Paul’s letter to the Christians in 1st-century Rome. As I said last week, there are a few things for us to know as we try to understand this complicated letter.
The Roman church was really a network of homes and converted synagogues where people gathered to worship and learn and serve in Christ’s name. Remember that there were more than 50,000 Jews in Rome at that time, and that a significant number of them had converted to Christianity and were worshipping side-by-side with Gentile Christians from Rome and other parts of the Empire.
Paul was the ideal person to write this pastoral letter. Paul had been a devout Jew for most of his life. He was trained as a Pharisee under the most famous Pharisee scholar of them all, a man named Gamaliel, which I said last week was the equivalent of getting an Ivy League PhD in Jewish law. Saul calls himself a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’, and even leads some of the early persecution of the Christian church.
But Saul becomes Paul when he meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, and everything changes for him. He takes his academic training, his ability to earn and raise money, and his passionate faith in Jesus Christ—he takes all of those into his new job—his new calling as one of the founders of the Christian church. It’s in that new role that Paul writes this crucial letter.
And so what was the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans?
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people.
It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Simple, right?
It’s not really simple at all, but as we make our way through our text this morning, there are some things to notice about what Paul is teaching here.
First, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in the promises God made to the Jewish people.
Paul says in our text that the Gospel is “first for the Jew, then for the Gentile,” and the text ends with a quote from the prophet Habakkuk: “The righteous will live by faith.” Even in this short passage Paul is making the link between the Gospel of Jesus and the history of God’s relationship with the Jewish people.
Second, that Gospel, wherever it came from, is available to all people.
The Gospel is God’s “salvation for everyone who believes.” This is a key part of Paul’s ministry, and it also shapes the early history of the church. The Christian faith was born out of Judaism, but it was meant for everyone. Remember the promises we read last week and this morning that God made to Abram—that he would make him into a great nation with more descendants than he could count. All of that was meant for a purpose: “…and all the nations will be blessed through you.”
It’s the ministry of Jesus that becomes that blessing—it’s a blessing that comes through Jesus—through Judaism—and offers God’s redemption and reconciliation to the whole world
Finally we experience the full gift of the Gospel by faith alone.
“For in the Gospel a righteousness is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.”
This is a tricky one, because it’s in this single sentence that Paul is trying to change the entire world view of his Jewish convert readers. They would have believed from birth that “righteousness”—being reconciled to God, came from following the Law and offering the right sacrifices. Here Paul is saying that the gift of connection to God is just that. It’s a gift that comes by faith alone, and not by anything we can do to earn it.
It’s this theme that pushed Martin Luther into the movement that became the Reformation. So many things had been added by the church to the list of what people had to do to draw near to God. So many layers of religious stuff had been placed between the individual believer and God. When Luther read Paul’s letter to the Romans with fresh eyes, he learned that God had cleared out all of those obstructions—when Luther realized that what God wanted was for people to come to him by faith alone, it changed everything.
In the Jewish tradition tomorrow is Yom Kippur. It’s a day of solemn reflection and confession for sins against God and against other people—it’s also a day of repentance for both individual and corporate sins. The purpose of the day is to be cleansed—to be released from the guilt and shame that come from those things we do that separate us from God (not God from us, by the way).
The message of Romans, and the point that Paul is trying to communicate to his Gentile readers and Jewish converts at the same time, is that we’re not driven or controlled anymore by our guilt and shame. Because God has been faithful to his promises, we can come to him by faith alone.
But that doesn’t mean that ‘shame’ isn’t a real part of our lives.
John Bradshaw is a psychologist who specializes in dealing with the impact of shame on individuals and families. He wrote: “To have shame as an identity is to believe that one’s being is somehow flawed—that one is defective as a human being. Once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing.” That’s what the Gospel is designed to transform in our lives—that feeling of being not quite fully human because of our sin and shame.
That brings us back to Paul’s bold claim: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel.” What was he saying?
Paul was making the point that he wasn’t ashamed of the gospel, because the point of the Gospel was to take away his shame. But mostly he’s saying that as strange as this story sounds, he knew that it was rooted in the history and promises and character of God himself, so there was no need to be embarrassed about it.
Paul said to the Romans: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”
What does that mean for us? The first two things we’ve said already:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in God’s promises and relationship with Israel.
The Gospel is available to all people.
But there’s more.
The Gospel is something we grasp through faith, not science, not blind leap, but through our struggle to trust the God who has demonstrated his trustworthiness through the Cross and Resurrection.
As we grasp the Gospel we find that it takes away the shame we carry with us in our lives. That’s part of the point. As hard as it might be for us to fully comprehend, the Gospel restores us and remakes us into the people that God made us to be in the first place. Part of that process is helping us to acknowledge our sin and ask for forgiveness. The rest of that process is like a deep cleansing that the Scriptures tell us will make us ‘whiter than snow.’
Mostly this text is a reminder that just as he did with Paul, God invites us to stop being ashamed of the gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is rooted in history and available to everyone. It has the power to build community and spark reconciliation and give hope to every single person on earth.
But mostly we stop being ashamed of the Gospel when we accept the fact that the Gospel isn’t ashamed of us.
No matter what we done or said or thought or believed in the past, the gospel—the good news that Jesus Christ has come and lived and served and died and rose again—that Gospel takes us where we are, it cleanses us and restores us, and in the end it makes all things new.
When Yom Kippur was celebrated in the ancient world, it was the only day of the year when the high priest would enter the ‘Holy of Holies,’ the most important room in the Temple at Jerusalem. The gift of the gospel—the reason we’re all here today—is that through Jesus Christ we can approach God wherever we are and whenever we want. The call on us to come in faith, to trust in God’s promises, and to share that message with a hungry world.
That desire to share the message of the Gospel is what’s behind our closing hymn today. When Charles Wesley would have one of those moments where he realized the depth of God’s love for him, he would wish for a thousand voices to offer his love and praises to God.
Let’s stand together and ask for the same thing: “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
Monday, September 21, 2009
Based on a Promise, Called for a Purpose
Romans 1:1-7
An atheist was walking through the woods one day, admiring the nature around him. "What majestic trees! What a powerful river! What beautiful animals!" he said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. Turning to look, he saw a 13-foot Kodiak brown bear beginning to charge towards him. He ran as fast as he could down the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was rapidly closing on him. Somehow, he ran even faster, so scared that tears came to his eyes. He looked again and the bear was even closer. His heart pounding in his chest, he tried to run faster yet.
But alas, he tripped and fell to the ground. As he rolled over to pick himself up, the bear was right over him, reaching for him with its left paw and raising its right paw to strike him.
"OH MY GOD—HELP ME! ..."
Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving ... A brilliant light shone upon the man, a thunderous voice came from all around...
"YOU DENY MY EXISTENCE FOR ALL THESE YEARS, TEACH OTHERS THAT I DON'T EXIST AND EVEN CREDIT CREATION TO SOME COSMIC ACCIDENT. DO YOU EXPECT ME TO HELP YOU OUT OF THIS PREDICAMENT? AM I TO COUNT YOU AS A BELIEVER?"
Difficult as it was, the atheist looked directly into the light and said, "It would be hypocritical to ask to be a Christian after all these years, but perhaps you could make the bear a Christian?"
"VERY WELL." Said God.
The light went out. The river ran. The sounds of the forest resumed.
... and the bear dropped down on his knees, brought both paws together, bowed his head and spoke: "Lord, thank you for this food which I am about to receive."
That story has absolutely nothing to do with today’s message, but it was too good to pass up. In any case it’s a good reminder that it’s OK—maybe even recommended—to be very specific in our prayers…
Today we begin an exploration through Paul’s letter to the Romans. It’s the longest and most complicated of Paul’s letters, but it’s also very important for our understanding of who we are and whose we are as Christian people—as a Christian church.
Our text this morning is Romans 1:1-7.
1Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, 4and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5Through him and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. 6And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
7To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now Romans has a bad reputation. As books of the Bible go it has the reputation for being hard—for being too complicated—for being difficult to understand. Here’s a news flash: The reputation is true. Romans is a hard book to read. It’s long, which makes it hard to read in one sitting like you can with the other letters of Paul. But it’s not just its length. Think about what you’re trying to understand in reading this letter. This book of the Bible was written 2000 years ago by a converted Jew who was trained as a Pharisee. He was writing it to a city he hadn’t visited before, and trying to convince them that something that happened in one of the backwaters of the Roman Empire could offer them salvation from a God they were just getting to know.
Of course this letter is hard to read. But still, everyone has their favorite Romans verse, right?
Romans 1:16
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.
Romans 5:8
But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:38-39
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 12:1-2
Therefore I urge you, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Everyone has their favorite passage from Romans. I want to say very clearly as we get started here that these favorite passages, when you take them individually, can get in the way of understanding what this letter is all about.
The point of the letter is in our text, but it’s also rooted in the covenant promises that God made (and kept) to the Jewish people. (See Genesis 12:1-3 here)
Let’s put the letter into context.
The Apostle Paul is one of the central figures of the early church. He was born into the Jewish faith and trained as a Pharisee. We think of the Pharisees as the villains in most of the stories about Jesus in the gospels, but that’s not completely fair. The Pharisees were scholars whose job it was to make sure that people of faith followed the Hebrew laws to the very letter. They believed—they were people of deep faith who took their responsibility very seriously. But that’s what got them on the bad side of Jesus—too much law and not enough heart.
Paul, who starts out as Saul form a place called Tarsus, trained under a famous Pharisee scholar named Gamaliel, which is the equivalent of getting an Ivy League PhD in Jewish law. Saul calls himself a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’, and even leads some of the early persecution of the Christian church. But that’s only the beginning of his story. Saul meets Jesus in a miraculous vision on his way to Damascus. Jesus changes his name to Paul, and calls him to be the one who shares the gospel of Jesus Christ with the world.
Most of Paul’s letters were written within 20 or 30 years after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Paul is brilliant, blunt, abrasive, tender, and fearless—we’ll see all of those qualities as we move through his letter to the Romans.
Paul’s letter was written to the new Christian church in Rome. It was mostly Gentile but it had a strong core of Jewish converts. There were 50,000 Jews in Rome in the 1st century, and many of them converted to the Christian faith. Many of the early Christian churches in Rome were actually converted synagogues, so there was a deep sense of connection between the Jewish and Gentile members of the Roman church.
This letter was written in the year 55AD—fairly early in the history of Christianity. Remember that the Christian movement was still being persecuted at this point, and it would get worse as the church grew.
It makes sense then that the point of the letter would have something to do with both Jews and Gentiles, since both were involved in the Roman church.
And so what was the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans?
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people. It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Keep that in mind not only today but also through this entire series. Paul is making a case—he’s making an argument to the most influential city in the world—and it centers on God’s faithfulness to his promises to the Jewish people.
Let’s look at our text.
Notice in the second verse that Paul refers to the ‘gospel promised beforehand through the prophets and Holy Scriptures.’ That’s a clear indication that we’re supposed to see the life and ministry of Jesus in light of the prophecies of the Old Testament. Just a point of logical detail here, but the ‘Holy Scripture’ Paul mentions here is the Hebrew Bible—the Old Testament—since he’s writing before the New Testament is circulating. The real point, though, is that the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ—is rooted in the promises of the Jewish tradition.
We should also pay attention to the central role of the resurrection in Paul’s argument. It’s the resurrection of Jesus that proves God is faithful to his promise to bless everyone, Jew and Gentile and everyone in between. It’s the resurrection that Paul uses as proof that God can be trusted at his word.
All of this is built on a foundation of God’s grace: ‘Through him and for his name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from everywhere to faith.’ Grace is central to our understanding of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Grace takes on all kinds of different shapes. This past week there was a story about a guy who had been a season ticket holder with the Philadelphia Phillies (that’s an American baseball team, by the way) for years, but he’d never caught a foul ball. The other night a ball came his way and he made a great catch. The whole thing was caught on one of the TV cameras and the whole stadium was watching him. He celebrated with his friends and the fans around him, then gave the ball to his 3-year-old daughter. She smiled and threw the ball back onto the field.
The stadium went silent for a moment, and then the dad scooped up his daughter and gave her a huge hug. The stadium went crazy—the dad ended up on morning talk shows and becoming a local celebrity. When he was asked why he reacted the way he did, he said: “I didn’t want her to feel bad—I wanted her to know she was more important than the ball.”
Someday that little girl will realize what she did that day, but what she’ll really remember is that her father loved her anyway.
I posted that story on my Facebook page this past week, and one of Julie’s old friends commented that ‘that’s an example of parenting as it should be.’
She’s right. The dad in that story is an example of parenting with grace, and that’s the point Paul is making about God here. Through Christ we’re given the gift of grace from God himself, no matter what we’ve done, and it’s that grace that empowers us and gives us strength for the journey.
It’s through Christ that we get reminded that no matter what we’ve done, our father loves us anyway.
What does all of this mean for us?
Paul’s letter to the Romans, with all its theology and teaching and challenge and history—this letter is as much to us in this time and place as it was to the 1st-century Romans. The case that Paul was making to the Romans is the same case we all need to hear and share right now if we’re going to grow into the people he made us to be in the first place.
There are two main points for us to remember as we read this letter and as we seek to be Christ’s disciples in the world.
First, our trust in God is based on a promise. We believe and have hope because God has shown us over and over again that he can be trusted—that he’ll keep his word—that in the end he’ll “make all things new.” None of that means our lives are guaranteed to be rosy, by the way. God’s faithfulness doesn’t always equal an easy life for us. But the point of the resurrection—the reason Jesus Christ was risen from the dead was to prove that the reign of God extended even to the things we fear the most—that God’s Kingdom ruled over all people and all places and everything else, even death.
God has been and will be faithful, but that’s not the end of the story.
The second point for us to remember is this: In response to God’s faithfulness to his promises, we have been called for a purpose. Paul identifies himself in our text as a ‘servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God.’
The same is true about us. Christ calls each one of us to serve him in some way—somehow each of us has some gift or talent to share with the whole body of Christ to make us whole—to make us better. We’re called to be apostles wherever we are—ambassadors of the message that God is faithful, that he keeps his promises, and that he loves all of his creation. Paul the apostle had to start the church. The call on us is to grow it and extend it to the ends of the earth.
Finally, we’re set apart for the gospel of God—set apart to be agents of the Good News in every situation. Now that’s a project that really doesn’t have an end to it—we never really accomplish it or complete it. It doesn’t have an end, but it needs to have a beginning and a middle. To be set apart is to hear the call to live differently—to love and earn and spend and serve in a new way because of what Christ has done for us.
That’s the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Our faith in Jesus Christ is based on the promise that God is who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he would do. Because of that we’re called to a purpose: to share that good news with anyone who will listen.
This letter is to the Roman church, but we’re going to see that it could just as easily be addressed to the churches in London. Hear the last verse of our text in a new way:
“To all in London who are loved by God and called to be saints. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen.
Because the resurrection is so central to this letter, and because we suddenly like to sing our hymns out of season, let’s stand and sing together one of the great Easter hymns—“Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”
An atheist was walking through the woods one day, admiring the nature around him. "What majestic trees! What a powerful river! What beautiful animals!" he said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. Turning to look, he saw a 13-foot Kodiak brown bear beginning to charge towards him. He ran as fast as he could down the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was rapidly closing on him. Somehow, he ran even faster, so scared that tears came to his eyes. He looked again and the bear was even closer. His heart pounding in his chest, he tried to run faster yet.
But alas, he tripped and fell to the ground. As he rolled over to pick himself up, the bear was right over him, reaching for him with its left paw and raising its right paw to strike him.
"OH MY GOD—HELP ME! ..."
Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving ... A brilliant light shone upon the man, a thunderous voice came from all around...
"YOU DENY MY EXISTENCE FOR ALL THESE YEARS, TEACH OTHERS THAT I DON'T EXIST AND EVEN CREDIT CREATION TO SOME COSMIC ACCIDENT. DO YOU EXPECT ME TO HELP YOU OUT OF THIS PREDICAMENT? AM I TO COUNT YOU AS A BELIEVER?"
Difficult as it was, the atheist looked directly into the light and said, "It would be hypocritical to ask to be a Christian after all these years, but perhaps you could make the bear a Christian?"
"VERY WELL." Said God.
The light went out. The river ran. The sounds of the forest resumed.
... and the bear dropped down on his knees, brought both paws together, bowed his head and spoke: "Lord, thank you for this food which I am about to receive."
That story has absolutely nothing to do with today’s message, but it was too good to pass up. In any case it’s a good reminder that it’s OK—maybe even recommended—to be very specific in our prayers…
Today we begin an exploration through Paul’s letter to the Romans. It’s the longest and most complicated of Paul’s letters, but it’s also very important for our understanding of who we are and whose we are as Christian people—as a Christian church.
Our text this morning is Romans 1:1-7.
1Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, 4and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5Through him and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. 6And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
7To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now Romans has a bad reputation. As books of the Bible go it has the reputation for being hard—for being too complicated—for being difficult to understand. Here’s a news flash: The reputation is true. Romans is a hard book to read. It’s long, which makes it hard to read in one sitting like you can with the other letters of Paul. But it’s not just its length. Think about what you’re trying to understand in reading this letter. This book of the Bible was written 2000 years ago by a converted Jew who was trained as a Pharisee. He was writing it to a city he hadn’t visited before, and trying to convince them that something that happened in one of the backwaters of the Roman Empire could offer them salvation from a God they were just getting to know.
Of course this letter is hard to read. But still, everyone has their favorite Romans verse, right?
Romans 1:16
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.
Romans 5:8
But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:38-39
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 12:1-2
Therefore I urge you, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Everyone has their favorite passage from Romans. I want to say very clearly as we get started here that these favorite passages, when you take them individually, can get in the way of understanding what this letter is all about.
The point of the letter is in our text, but it’s also rooted in the covenant promises that God made (and kept) to the Jewish people. (See Genesis 12:1-3 here)
Let’s put the letter into context.
The Apostle Paul is one of the central figures of the early church. He was born into the Jewish faith and trained as a Pharisee. We think of the Pharisees as the villains in most of the stories about Jesus in the gospels, but that’s not completely fair. The Pharisees were scholars whose job it was to make sure that people of faith followed the Hebrew laws to the very letter. They believed—they were people of deep faith who took their responsibility very seriously. But that’s what got them on the bad side of Jesus—too much law and not enough heart.
Paul, who starts out as Saul form a place called Tarsus, trained under a famous Pharisee scholar named Gamaliel, which is the equivalent of getting an Ivy League PhD in Jewish law. Saul calls himself a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’, and even leads some of the early persecution of the Christian church. But that’s only the beginning of his story. Saul meets Jesus in a miraculous vision on his way to Damascus. Jesus changes his name to Paul, and calls him to be the one who shares the gospel of Jesus Christ with the world.
Most of Paul’s letters were written within 20 or 30 years after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Paul is brilliant, blunt, abrasive, tender, and fearless—we’ll see all of those qualities as we move through his letter to the Romans.
Paul’s letter was written to the new Christian church in Rome. It was mostly Gentile but it had a strong core of Jewish converts. There were 50,000 Jews in Rome in the 1st century, and many of them converted to the Christian faith. Many of the early Christian churches in Rome were actually converted synagogues, so there was a deep sense of connection between the Jewish and Gentile members of the Roman church.
This letter was written in the year 55AD—fairly early in the history of Christianity. Remember that the Christian movement was still being persecuted at this point, and it would get worse as the church grew.
It makes sense then that the point of the letter would have something to do with both Jews and Gentiles, since both were involved in the Roman church.
And so what was the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans?
Romans was written to convince one group of people that God could be trusted because of his faithfulness to another group of people.
Let me say that another way:
The letter to the Romans was written to convince the Gentile Christians in Rome that God could be trusted because he kept his promises to his Jewish covenant people. It was also a reminder to the Jewish people that they hadn’t left their old faith behind for a new one, but that Christ was the completion of the faith they’d held all along.
Keep that in mind not only today but also through this entire series. Paul is making a case—he’s making an argument to the most influential city in the world—and it centers on God’s faithfulness to his promises to the Jewish people.
Let’s look at our text.
Notice in the second verse that Paul refers to the ‘gospel promised beforehand through the prophets and Holy Scriptures.’ That’s a clear indication that we’re supposed to see the life and ministry of Jesus in light of the prophecies of the Old Testament. Just a point of logical detail here, but the ‘Holy Scripture’ Paul mentions here is the Hebrew Bible—the Old Testament—since he’s writing before the New Testament is circulating. The real point, though, is that the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ—is rooted in the promises of the Jewish tradition.
We should also pay attention to the central role of the resurrection in Paul’s argument. It’s the resurrection of Jesus that proves God is faithful to his promise to bless everyone, Jew and Gentile and everyone in between. It’s the resurrection that Paul uses as proof that God can be trusted at his word.
All of this is built on a foundation of God’s grace: ‘Through him and for his name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from everywhere to faith.’ Grace is central to our understanding of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Grace takes on all kinds of different shapes. This past week there was a story about a guy who had been a season ticket holder with the Philadelphia Phillies (that’s an American baseball team, by the way) for years, but he’d never caught a foul ball. The other night a ball came his way and he made a great catch. The whole thing was caught on one of the TV cameras and the whole stadium was watching him. He celebrated with his friends and the fans around him, then gave the ball to his 3-year-old daughter. She smiled and threw the ball back onto the field.
The stadium went silent for a moment, and then the dad scooped up his daughter and gave her a huge hug. The stadium went crazy—the dad ended up on morning talk shows and becoming a local celebrity. When he was asked why he reacted the way he did, he said: “I didn’t want her to feel bad—I wanted her to know she was more important than the ball.”
Someday that little girl will realize what she did that day, but what she’ll really remember is that her father loved her anyway.
I posted that story on my Facebook page this past week, and one of Julie’s old friends commented that ‘that’s an example of parenting as it should be.’
She’s right. The dad in that story is an example of parenting with grace, and that’s the point Paul is making about God here. Through Christ we’re given the gift of grace from God himself, no matter what we’ve done, and it’s that grace that empowers us and gives us strength for the journey.
It’s through Christ that we get reminded that no matter what we’ve done, our father loves us anyway.
What does all of this mean for us?
Paul’s letter to the Romans, with all its theology and teaching and challenge and history—this letter is as much to us in this time and place as it was to the 1st-century Romans. The case that Paul was making to the Romans is the same case we all need to hear and share right now if we’re going to grow into the people he made us to be in the first place.
There are two main points for us to remember as we read this letter and as we seek to be Christ’s disciples in the world.
First, our trust in God is based on a promise. We believe and have hope because God has shown us over and over again that he can be trusted—that he’ll keep his word—that in the end he’ll “make all things new.” None of that means our lives are guaranteed to be rosy, by the way. God’s faithfulness doesn’t always equal an easy life for us. But the point of the resurrection—the reason Jesus Christ was risen from the dead was to prove that the reign of God extended even to the things we fear the most—that God’s Kingdom ruled over all people and all places and everything else, even death.
God has been and will be faithful, but that’s not the end of the story.
The second point for us to remember is this: In response to God’s faithfulness to his promises, we have been called for a purpose. Paul identifies himself in our text as a ‘servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God.’
The same is true about us. Christ calls each one of us to serve him in some way—somehow each of us has some gift or talent to share with the whole body of Christ to make us whole—to make us better. We’re called to be apostles wherever we are—ambassadors of the message that God is faithful, that he keeps his promises, and that he loves all of his creation. Paul the apostle had to start the church. The call on us is to grow it and extend it to the ends of the earth.
Finally, we’re set apart for the gospel of God—set apart to be agents of the Good News in every situation. Now that’s a project that really doesn’t have an end to it—we never really accomplish it or complete it. It doesn’t have an end, but it needs to have a beginning and a middle. To be set apart is to hear the call to live differently—to love and earn and spend and serve in a new way because of what Christ has done for us.
That’s the point of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Our faith in Jesus Christ is based on the promise that God is who he says he is, and that he’ll do what he said he would do. Because of that we’re called to a purpose: to share that good news with anyone who will listen.
This letter is to the Roman church, but we’re going to see that it could just as easily be addressed to the churches in London. Hear the last verse of our text in a new way:
“To all in London who are loved by God and called to be saints. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen.
Because the resurrection is so central to this letter, and because we suddenly like to sing our hymns out of season, let’s stand and sing together one of the great Easter hymns—“Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Welcome Back Sunday: Where the Heart Is
(The following is a part of my message from Welcome Back Sunday. The reflection on 9/11 is just below this post.)
John 14:23
This is our season of homesickness. Some of you have just moved here, while others have been here for a while and have just returned from visiting family and friends. That’s where Julie and I are right now. We miss our daughter, our parents and siblings, and the cousins that I an played with while we were back in California. It’s a season of homesickness. Many of us are here today missing places where we feel loved—places where many of the people we love still are. That’s really the essence of homesickness, isn’t it? Missing the places where we love and feel loved.
But it’s not just people and houses that define home for us. There are all kinds of things that we miss when we feel homesick. That gives me a good opportunity to share with you one of my most deeply held beliefs.
It’s something I learned from my grandfather as a child and was reinforced in my relationships at home and at church in my teens.
It’s something that grew in me during my college and seminary years.
It’s my firm and passionate belief that in almost every way that matters, baseball is superior to football. Now I know that football season just started, but that doesn’t change what I believe. I miss baseball, can you tell?
I’m not alone in this. One of the great philosophers of the 20th century agrees with me on the superiority of God’s game, er, baseball over football. Of course I’m talking about George Carlin. Listen to how he describes it:
Football is played on a gridiron. Baseball is played in a park.
Football players wear helmets. Baseball players wear caps.
In football the specialist comes in to kick something. In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Baseball has the 7th-inning stretch. Football has the 2-minute warning.
Baseball gets extra innings. Football has sudden death.
In football the runner gives you the stiff arm. In baseball the runner gets to slide.
But the biggest difference is that in football the main objective is military: The battle is fought in the trenches, the field general (you know him as the quarterback) seeks to evade the blitz and soften up the enemy line with a pounding ground attack and aerial bombardment. Sometimes he uses bullet passes; when he thinks it will work, he goes for a bomb to riddle the enemy defenses and penetrate the end zone.
In baseball, the object is to go home.
See what I mean? There’s no arguing with George Carlin on this one.
23Jesus replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
John’s gospel is a unique book in the New Testament. The other three gospels can be grouped together because they follow the same patterns and tell the same stories, but John is different. He covers a lot of the same events—and a few that aren’t in the other three books—but he tells those stories differently. He uses images like ‘word’ and ‘light’ and ‘life’ that make it easier to understand who Jesus is and what he was trying to do.
John’s gospel is the one we give to new Christians, because it gives people a great foundation for getting to know Christ in a meaningful way. If you’ve never read it from start to finish, or haven’t in a long time, I’d recommend it to you.
Chapter 14 of John’s gospel is the beginning of the ‘Farewell Discourses,’ a series of teachings and prayers to help the disciples learn to live and serve without Jesus being physically present with them.
The chapter starts with some familiar passages: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled…in my father’s house there are many rooms, or mansions,’ followed by a promise to go and prepare a place for his followers. By the time we get to our text in verse 23, Jesus is still talking about the idea of ‘home.’
There’s a little bit of profiling going on in our text. Listen to what Jesus says: ‘You’ll recognize the one who loves me because she’ll obey my teaching.’
Now Jesus isn’t saying that ‘if we’ll do A, then B will happen—that if we love him then God will love us in return’ He’s giving the profile of what a Christian really looks and sounds and acts like: You can recognize the people who love me—they’re the ones living out my teachings.
That’s a big part of what we want to do together in this church over the coming year. To focus on the teachings of Jesus and the way they’re interpreted and explained in the Scriptures is a big part of what we’re all about in this place.
Just looking back on the last year together, we’ve walked through a lot of what Jesus had to say. We spent last fall on the Lord’s Prayer, and how those words of Jesus teach not only how to pray, but how to live.
During Advent last year we talked about Christmas Gifts You Can Use: the way Jesus inspires Faith and Joy and Love and Hope for the world.
During Lent this year we talked about the meaning of the Atonement, of Christ’s sacrifice for all of us. And from there we explored the Resurrection and what it means for us, and then Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and how it transforms our lives individually and as a church.
This past summer we enjoyed the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Starting next week we’re going to begin a journey through Paul’s Letter to the Romans—a letter he wrote to explain what faith in Christ means for people in the most influential city of the day. Because there’s a message for London in this letter to Rome.
Learning the teachings of Jesus—and learning to obey those teachings—is the road map for growth as a Christian disciple.
All of that’s important, but what I really love is the next part of the text. The promise in our passage goes like this: God promises to make his home with the people who love him.
To put that another way, the promise to everyone on the journey of faith is not just that we’ll live with God somewhere, somehow in the future. The promise is that he’ll come and live with us and redefine what home means to us right now.
This past week we remembered the tragedy of 9/11. There was an essay in the Guardian by a writer who described a pair of shoes he keeps in a cupboard in his office. They belonged to his father. They’re scuffed and scratched—they’re covered in dust and sealed in a plastic bag.
The writer’s father had been in one of the twin towers, on the 59th floor, and had survived by making the long walk down the stairs to the street. When he got out of the building, he started walking, and he walked all the way to his family’s home on 71st Street.
The writer can’t make himself get rid of those shoes, or even to store them in a place where he won’t see them as often. The shoes are a part of what saved his father. The shoes are what brought his father home.
That leaves us with a few questions as we reflect on our text today.
What is it that rescues you from the disasters in your own life?
What is it that reminds you that you’re safe and secure and loved?
What is it that brings you to the place where you feel at home?
As a recovering English major there’s a little voice in the back of my head that reminds me that every new paragraph—every new section—every new year begins with a topic sentence. I’ve been thinking about what that sentence should be for us, and here it is:
Jesus Christ is the one who defines what ‘home’ really means for us.
In this church—among this diverse group of people from Britain and America and all over the world. In this place we believe that Jesus Christ offers the true comforts of home to every person. We find out what that means as we learn his teachings, as we become obedient to what those teachings call us to do, and as we grow into mature disciples of the one who made us, redeems us, and calls us into his family.
If you’ve been coming to this church for a while now, then welcome back.
If you’re here for the first time or new to London or just getting started with us—if you’ve come here this morning feeling more than a little homesick, then welcome. You’re among friends, and you’re in for a great year.
John 14:23
This is our season of homesickness. Some of you have just moved here, while others have been here for a while and have just returned from visiting family and friends. That’s where Julie and I are right now. We miss our daughter, our parents and siblings, and the cousins that I an played with while we were back in California. It’s a season of homesickness. Many of us are here today missing places where we feel loved—places where many of the people we love still are. That’s really the essence of homesickness, isn’t it? Missing the places where we love and feel loved.
But it’s not just people and houses that define home for us. There are all kinds of things that we miss when we feel homesick. That gives me a good opportunity to share with you one of my most deeply held beliefs.
It’s something I learned from my grandfather as a child and was reinforced in my relationships at home and at church in my teens.
It’s something that grew in me during my college and seminary years.
It’s my firm and passionate belief that in almost every way that matters, baseball is superior to football. Now I know that football season just started, but that doesn’t change what I believe. I miss baseball, can you tell?
I’m not alone in this. One of the great philosophers of the 20th century agrees with me on the superiority of God’s game, er, baseball over football. Of course I’m talking about George Carlin. Listen to how he describes it:
Football is played on a gridiron. Baseball is played in a park.
Football players wear helmets. Baseball players wear caps.
In football the specialist comes in to kick something. In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Baseball has the 7th-inning stretch. Football has the 2-minute warning.
Baseball gets extra innings. Football has sudden death.
In football the runner gives you the stiff arm. In baseball the runner gets to slide.
But the biggest difference is that in football the main objective is military: The battle is fought in the trenches, the field general (you know him as the quarterback) seeks to evade the blitz and soften up the enemy line with a pounding ground attack and aerial bombardment. Sometimes he uses bullet passes; when he thinks it will work, he goes for a bomb to riddle the enemy defenses and penetrate the end zone.
In baseball, the object is to go home.
See what I mean? There’s no arguing with George Carlin on this one.
23Jesus replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
John’s gospel is a unique book in the New Testament. The other three gospels can be grouped together because they follow the same patterns and tell the same stories, but John is different. He covers a lot of the same events—and a few that aren’t in the other three books—but he tells those stories differently. He uses images like ‘word’ and ‘light’ and ‘life’ that make it easier to understand who Jesus is and what he was trying to do.
John’s gospel is the one we give to new Christians, because it gives people a great foundation for getting to know Christ in a meaningful way. If you’ve never read it from start to finish, or haven’t in a long time, I’d recommend it to you.
Chapter 14 of John’s gospel is the beginning of the ‘Farewell Discourses,’ a series of teachings and prayers to help the disciples learn to live and serve without Jesus being physically present with them.
The chapter starts with some familiar passages: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled…in my father’s house there are many rooms, or mansions,’ followed by a promise to go and prepare a place for his followers. By the time we get to our text in verse 23, Jesus is still talking about the idea of ‘home.’
There’s a little bit of profiling going on in our text. Listen to what Jesus says: ‘You’ll recognize the one who loves me because she’ll obey my teaching.’
Now Jesus isn’t saying that ‘if we’ll do A, then B will happen—that if we love him then God will love us in return’ He’s giving the profile of what a Christian really looks and sounds and acts like: You can recognize the people who love me—they’re the ones living out my teachings.
That’s a big part of what we want to do together in this church over the coming year. To focus on the teachings of Jesus and the way they’re interpreted and explained in the Scriptures is a big part of what we’re all about in this place.
Just looking back on the last year together, we’ve walked through a lot of what Jesus had to say. We spent last fall on the Lord’s Prayer, and how those words of Jesus teach not only how to pray, but how to live.
During Advent last year we talked about Christmas Gifts You Can Use: the way Jesus inspires Faith and Joy and Love and Hope for the world.
During Lent this year we talked about the meaning of the Atonement, of Christ’s sacrifice for all of us. And from there we explored the Resurrection and what it means for us, and then Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and how it transforms our lives individually and as a church.
This past summer we enjoyed the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Starting next week we’re going to begin a journey through Paul’s Letter to the Romans—a letter he wrote to explain what faith in Christ means for people in the most influential city of the day. Because there’s a message for London in this letter to Rome.
Learning the teachings of Jesus—and learning to obey those teachings—is the road map for growth as a Christian disciple.
All of that’s important, but what I really love is the next part of the text. The promise in our passage goes like this: God promises to make his home with the people who love him.
To put that another way, the promise to everyone on the journey of faith is not just that we’ll live with God somewhere, somehow in the future. The promise is that he’ll come and live with us and redefine what home means to us right now.
This past week we remembered the tragedy of 9/11. There was an essay in the Guardian by a writer who described a pair of shoes he keeps in a cupboard in his office. They belonged to his father. They’re scuffed and scratched—they’re covered in dust and sealed in a plastic bag.
The writer’s father had been in one of the twin towers, on the 59th floor, and had survived by making the long walk down the stairs to the street. When he got out of the building, he started walking, and he walked all the way to his family’s home on 71st Street.
The writer can’t make himself get rid of those shoes, or even to store them in a place where he won’t see them as often. The shoes are a part of what saved his father. The shoes are what brought his father home.
That leaves us with a few questions as we reflect on our text today.
What is it that rescues you from the disasters in your own life?
What is it that reminds you that you’re safe and secure and loved?
What is it that brings you to the place where you feel at home?
As a recovering English major there’s a little voice in the back of my head that reminds me that every new paragraph—every new section—every new year begins with a topic sentence. I’ve been thinking about what that sentence should be for us, and here it is:
Jesus Christ is the one who defines what ‘home’ really means for us.
In this church—among this diverse group of people from Britain and America and all over the world. In this place we believe that Jesus Christ offers the true comforts of home to every person. We find out what that means as we learn his teachings, as we become obedient to what those teachings call us to do, and as we grow into mature disciples of the one who made us, redeems us, and calls us into his family.
If you’ve been coming to this church for a while now, then welcome back.
If you’re here for the first time or new to London or just getting started with us—if you’ve come here this morning feeling more than a little homesick, then welcome. You’re among friends, and you’re in for a great year.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Remembering and Shaking Free from Memory
It's an awful sort of anniversary.
I've been reading posts today about where people were and what they were doing when the attacks came. My East Coast friends were on their way to work, people near where I lived in Southern California were mostly waking up to the deed already done, and folks here in the UK were at lunch. Everyone remembers. Everyone does something different with their memories.
Some have come to see the world as a far more complicated place than they thought it was. No one can fully grasp the full array of ethnicities and religions and cultures around the world, but most know more than they did on 9/11. Some have devoted themselves to seeking common ground with those who committed (and supported) the attacks, as if conversation alone would prevent fanatics from being, well, fanatics.
Others have allowed their memories of that day to make them hard and angry and defensive. Many of these people were like that before, which really points to an odd sort of resistance to the impact of the attacks: they really weren't changed by them at all. But there are many who evolved into a reactive form of fearful bitterness, and it's those people who grieve me the most.
Because in my little corner of the world, most of my close friends and family are Christians. Not only that, but many of us would identify ourselves (with varying degrees of volume) as evangelicals--people who believe that Jesus Christ died to redeem the world, and that it is every believer's task to share that message. That specific description of our faith and ethics is important, because I fear that it has become yet another casualty of the terrorist attacks eight years ago.
There is a disconnect these days between the faith we assent to and the decisions we make. I suppose that's always been true: Christian history is dotted with decisions and events that seem to go directly against the doctrinal and ethical beliefs of the faith. But I can't do anything about the Crusades or the Salem Witch Trials or slavery. What I'm talking about, in the historically disciplined words of Pete Townsend, is my generation.
My generation of evangelicals has allowed the attacks of 9/11 to separate their faith from how they interact ethically and politically.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan offer a case in point. Now I'm not much of a pacifist, but I do recognize the inherent theological challenge of violent action for the Christian. It's John Calvin's 500th birthday this year, so let's give him an opportunity to weigh in. After making a solid case for a government's responsibility to provide for national defense, he says this:
But it is the duty of all magistrates here to guard particularly against giving vent to their passions even in the slightest degree. Rather, if they have to punish, let them not be carried away with headlong anger, or be seized with hatred, or burn with implacable severity.
Calvin continues with what I believe to be the point in all of this:
Let them also (as Augustine says) have pity on the common nature in the one whose special fault they are punishing.
That's the part we evangelicals too often seem to have lost. True evangelicalism is driven by compassion for people who haven't yet experienced the forgiveness and restoration that comes from Christ alone. True Christianity is marked by the compassion demonstrated by Jesus himself in his earthly ministry: sacrificial, redemptive, and available to all. True Christian discipleship leads us inevitably to the awareness of our own redeemed depravity, and teaches us to humbly acknowledge what we have in common with our enemy.
Not much of that is working its way into public discourse about the wars we're fighting, which is catastrophically disappointing to me for a country that enjoys the myth of being built on Christian principles.
Which brings me (strangely) to the current debate over creating a public health service in the US. I'm glad the debate is taking place. It's long overdue, and I believe there are important philosophical questions to be asked about the role of government in the lives of individuals. I believe that to be true, and yet the people disappointing me the most are my evangelical Christian brothers and sisters. Few that I have heard, even if they have perfectly valid objections to the expansion of social programs, have articulated a Christian response either to the problem or to the proposed solution.
Most of the people I have in mind have a sort of hero-worshipping relationship to Winston Churchill. They admire, as I do, his courage and tenacity and his strong leadership in a time of war. Most will be shocked to learn that he gave strong, early support to the formation of the National Health Service. Listen to what he said in 1944:
The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.
I'll pause to let that sink in.
Most will be even more surprised to learn that after the NHS was established by a postwar socialist government, Churchill returned to power and had the opportunity to close the entire thing down. Even under pressure from his own Conservative party, he refused to do it.
I think we could learn a lot from the later views of Winston Churchill. The Second World War was far more devastating than the 9/11 attacks, and it was far more traumatic in the UK than in the US. And yet, on the other side of that horrible event, with most of his cities still in bombed-out rubble, Churchill came out more compassionate, more sacrificial, more willing to make sure his neighbor was taken care of.
I know I've read those principles somewhere before.
It's an awful sort of anniversary, but maybe there's still time to redeem something from it. There is an enormous amount of room for debate on the issues that confront us these days, but I have little patience for Christian people who refuse to wrestle with Christian principles in those debates. To call Jesus your Savior without acknowledging your enemy's need of salvation is a sin. To enjoy the benefits of Christ's sacrifice without being willing to sacrifice in turn for your neighbor is a scandal.
On this awful anniversary my prayer is that we'll resist the temptation to use the memory of 9/11 to fuel our bitterness and anger and fear. My prayer is that we'll take this day to pray that God would soften our hearts, sharpen our minds, and make us into more mature disciples of Jesus Christ.
I've been reading posts today about where people were and what they were doing when the attacks came. My East Coast friends were on their way to work, people near where I lived in Southern California were mostly waking up to the deed already done, and folks here in the UK were at lunch. Everyone remembers. Everyone does something different with their memories.
Some have come to see the world as a far more complicated place than they thought it was. No one can fully grasp the full array of ethnicities and religions and cultures around the world, but most know more than they did on 9/11. Some have devoted themselves to seeking common ground with those who committed (and supported) the attacks, as if conversation alone would prevent fanatics from being, well, fanatics.
Others have allowed their memories of that day to make them hard and angry and defensive. Many of these people were like that before, which really points to an odd sort of resistance to the impact of the attacks: they really weren't changed by them at all. But there are many who evolved into a reactive form of fearful bitterness, and it's those people who grieve me the most.
Because in my little corner of the world, most of my close friends and family are Christians. Not only that, but many of us would identify ourselves (with varying degrees of volume) as evangelicals--people who believe that Jesus Christ died to redeem the world, and that it is every believer's task to share that message. That specific description of our faith and ethics is important, because I fear that it has become yet another casualty of the terrorist attacks eight years ago.
There is a disconnect these days between the faith we assent to and the decisions we make. I suppose that's always been true: Christian history is dotted with decisions and events that seem to go directly against the doctrinal and ethical beliefs of the faith. But I can't do anything about the Crusades or the Salem Witch Trials or slavery. What I'm talking about, in the historically disciplined words of Pete Townsend, is my generation.
My generation of evangelicals has allowed the attacks of 9/11 to separate their faith from how they interact ethically and politically.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan offer a case in point. Now I'm not much of a pacifist, but I do recognize the inherent theological challenge of violent action for the Christian. It's John Calvin's 500th birthday this year, so let's give him an opportunity to weigh in. After making a solid case for a government's responsibility to provide for national defense, he says this:
But it is the duty of all magistrates here to guard particularly against giving vent to their passions even in the slightest degree. Rather, if they have to punish, let them not be carried away with headlong anger, or be seized with hatred, or burn with implacable severity.
Calvin continues with what I believe to be the point in all of this:
Let them also (as Augustine says) have pity on the common nature in the one whose special fault they are punishing.
That's the part we evangelicals too often seem to have lost. True evangelicalism is driven by compassion for people who haven't yet experienced the forgiveness and restoration that comes from Christ alone. True Christianity is marked by the compassion demonstrated by Jesus himself in his earthly ministry: sacrificial, redemptive, and available to all. True Christian discipleship leads us inevitably to the awareness of our own redeemed depravity, and teaches us to humbly acknowledge what we have in common with our enemy.
Not much of that is working its way into public discourse about the wars we're fighting, which is catastrophically disappointing to me for a country that enjoys the myth of being built on Christian principles.
Which brings me (strangely) to the current debate over creating a public health service in the US. I'm glad the debate is taking place. It's long overdue, and I believe there are important philosophical questions to be asked about the role of government in the lives of individuals. I believe that to be true, and yet the people disappointing me the most are my evangelical Christian brothers and sisters. Few that I have heard, even if they have perfectly valid objections to the expansion of social programs, have articulated a Christian response either to the problem or to the proposed solution.
Most of the people I have in mind have a sort of hero-worshipping relationship to Winston Churchill. They admire, as I do, his courage and tenacity and his strong leadership in a time of war. Most will be shocked to learn that he gave strong, early support to the formation of the National Health Service. Listen to what he said in 1944:
The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.
I'll pause to let that sink in.
Most will be even more surprised to learn that after the NHS was established by a postwar socialist government, Churchill returned to power and had the opportunity to close the entire thing down. Even under pressure from his own Conservative party, he refused to do it.
I think we could learn a lot from the later views of Winston Churchill. The Second World War was far more devastating than the 9/11 attacks, and it was far more traumatic in the UK than in the US. And yet, on the other side of that horrible event, with most of his cities still in bombed-out rubble, Churchill came out more compassionate, more sacrificial, more willing to make sure his neighbor was taken care of.
I know I've read those principles somewhere before.
It's an awful sort of anniversary, but maybe there's still time to redeem something from it. There is an enormous amount of room for debate on the issues that confront us these days, but I have little patience for Christian people who refuse to wrestle with Christian principles in those debates. To call Jesus your Savior without acknowledging your enemy's need of salvation is a sin. To enjoy the benefits of Christ's sacrifice without being willing to sacrifice in turn for your neighbor is a scandal.
On this awful anniversary my prayer is that we'll resist the temptation to use the memory of 9/11 to fuel our bitterness and anger and fear. My prayer is that we'll take this day to pray that God would soften our hearts, sharpen our minds, and make us into more mature disciples of Jesus Christ.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Comings and Goings
(The following is part of a message given at the American Church in London this past Sunday, as we said goodbye to Kate Obermueller.)
Judges 18:1-6
1 In those days Israel had no king. And in those days the tribe of the Danites was seeking a place of their own where they might settle, because they had not yet come into an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. 2 So the Danites sent five warriors from Zorah and Eshtaol to spy out the land and explore it. These men represented all their clans. They told them, "Go, explore the land." The men entered the hill country of Ephraim and came to the house of Micah, where they spent the night. 3 When they were near Micah's house, they recognized the voice of the young Levite; so they turned in there and asked him, "Who brought you here? What are you doing in this place? Why are you here?"
4 He told them what Micah had done for him, and said, "He has hired me and I am his priest."
5 Then they said to him, "Please inquire of God to learn whether our journey will be successful."
6 The priest answered them, "Go in peace. Your journey has the LORD's approval."
The Book of Judges covers the period between Joshua and King Saul—between the wars fought over entering the Promised Land and the establishment of the Nation of Israel. You might recognize some of the names of the judges: Gideon, Deborah, and Samson.
It was a tough time, but the judges helped by governing and organizing the 12 tribes into one nation. At times they all wondered if the journey and the conflict and the moving around were worth it. In our passage one the leaders is trying find out if his efforts fit in with God’s plan for his people.
You heard the response: ‘Go in peace. Your journey has the Lord’s approval.’
What a great thing to hear.
After more than 20 years in different kinds of ministry, among all the things that people ask me, there’s one question that comes up more than all the rest.
It’s some variation of: How do I know where God wants me to be?
Now some people have more basic questions about who God is and if he really exists. But for those who have made a commitment to be followers of Jesus Christ—people who want their lives to reflect their faith in a meaningful way—questions about how to determine God’s leading–God’s plan for our lives—is the one we ask the most.
How do I know where God wants me to be?
How do I know what God wants me to do?
How can we as a congregation know where God wants us to be?
One of the movies I watched on the plane this summer was the new Star Trek. It’s sort of prequel—it tells the story of how Jim Kirk and Spock and Bones McCoy met before we saw them on TV in the 60s. Capt. Kirk earned his reputation by changing the rules of a leadership test so that he could survive a no-win situation.
I try to do the same thing when people ask me how they should figure out where God wants them to be. I’ll never give a straight answer to that kind of question. Partly I do it because answering the question for someone else is a no-win proposition. But I also do it because I’ve never really had a lightning-bolt experience before. No voice from heaven or burning bush has ever really helped be make a life choice. To be honest, the closest I’ve ever experienced to that was the call to come here, to this church, to make the move from California to London to be your pastor.
When people come to me with the ‘How do I know where God wants me to be?’ question, my goal is usually to reframe the question into something slightly different. The important question for us isn’t as much where we’re supposed to live as it is how we’re supposed to live. We spend an enormous amount of time waiting to hear from God about where we should go and what we should do. But it’s what we do in that wherever we are that can make all the difference.
Because being God’s faithful disciples is less about where we should be, and more about how we should be wherever we are.
To put it in other words: It’s not ‘Where does God want me to be?, but rather ‘What does God want me to be like?’
When we frame the question that way we can see some tangible answers for ourselves.
We know we’re called to pray and to worship, to study and to serve. The Bible is pretty clear that we’re supposed to work for justice and to forgive each other—that we should share our own stories of faith with the people we encounter in our daily lives. There are all kinds of answers to the ‘What does God want me to be like’ question.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to discern where God wants us to be. There’s still something important about listening for God’s call to a new place—something critical for each of us about hearing that call and acting on it at different times in our lives.
That’s what we’re celebrating today as we say goodbye to Kate. I have a very clear memory of our first conversation on the phone back in 2007. We talked about life and ministry and food and movies—the really important stuff—and then she cut the call short so she could go jump out of an airplane. As the call ended I decided that if she survived that day, she might make a good assistant minister.
The last two years have confirmed Kate’s sense of call to this place—and our invitation to her—over and over again. Through children’s ministry and work with our youth groups. In the midst of relationships with the young adults and her service on Council. Kate has lived out the call on her life to serve in this place. She makes it easy to say, as we heard in our passage today: ‘Go in peace—your journey has the Lord’s approval.’
It’s with that same hope that we call Stephanie to come and serve here starting next week. The gifts and training and qualifications are all there, but the most important quality she’ll being is the same one Kate brought with her—a willingness to hear God’s call and act on it—a desire to be the person God made her to be, and to serve our young people and this church in Christ’s name.
In the end that’s what God wants from all of us, in big ways and also in those little everyday situations that tend to change the world. God calls us to be people who fellowship in true community, who worship with passion and creativity, who desire to grow in our knowledge and faith, and who will turn outward in service so that people will hear and experience the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our lives.
Next week we officially begin a new church year in this place. As we say goodbye to one friend and welcome a new one, my prayer for us is that we will offer ourselves in service to Christ and to this church—that we’ll commit individually and as a community of faith—to allow ourselves to be transformed into the people God made us to be all along.
As we come to the Table this morning, my prayer for each one of us is that we’ll listen for God’s call on our lives—whatever and wherever that may be—that we’ll hear that call and follow it with faith and humility and passion.
Let’s pray together.
Judges 18:1-6
1 In those days Israel had no king. And in those days the tribe of the Danites was seeking a place of their own where they might settle, because they had not yet come into an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. 2 So the Danites sent five warriors from Zorah and Eshtaol to spy out the land and explore it. These men represented all their clans. They told them, "Go, explore the land." The men entered the hill country of Ephraim and came to the house of Micah, where they spent the night. 3 When they were near Micah's house, they recognized the voice of the young Levite; so they turned in there and asked him, "Who brought you here? What are you doing in this place? Why are you here?"
4 He told them what Micah had done for him, and said, "He has hired me and I am his priest."
5 Then they said to him, "Please inquire of God to learn whether our journey will be successful."
6 The priest answered them, "Go in peace. Your journey has the LORD's approval."
The Book of Judges covers the period between Joshua and King Saul—between the wars fought over entering the Promised Land and the establishment of the Nation of Israel. You might recognize some of the names of the judges: Gideon, Deborah, and Samson.
It was a tough time, but the judges helped by governing and organizing the 12 tribes into one nation. At times they all wondered if the journey and the conflict and the moving around were worth it. In our passage one the leaders is trying find out if his efforts fit in with God’s plan for his people.
You heard the response: ‘Go in peace. Your journey has the Lord’s approval.’
What a great thing to hear.
After more than 20 years in different kinds of ministry, among all the things that people ask me, there’s one question that comes up more than all the rest.
It’s some variation of: How do I know where God wants me to be?
Now some people have more basic questions about who God is and if he really exists. But for those who have made a commitment to be followers of Jesus Christ—people who want their lives to reflect their faith in a meaningful way—questions about how to determine God’s leading–God’s plan for our lives—is the one we ask the most.
How do I know where God wants me to be?
How do I know what God wants me to do?
How can we as a congregation know where God wants us to be?
One of the movies I watched on the plane this summer was the new Star Trek. It’s sort of prequel—it tells the story of how Jim Kirk and Spock and Bones McCoy met before we saw them on TV in the 60s. Capt. Kirk earned his reputation by changing the rules of a leadership test so that he could survive a no-win situation.
I try to do the same thing when people ask me how they should figure out where God wants them to be. I’ll never give a straight answer to that kind of question. Partly I do it because answering the question for someone else is a no-win proposition. But I also do it because I’ve never really had a lightning-bolt experience before. No voice from heaven or burning bush has ever really helped be make a life choice. To be honest, the closest I’ve ever experienced to that was the call to come here, to this church, to make the move from California to London to be your pastor.
When people come to me with the ‘How do I know where God wants me to be?’ question, my goal is usually to reframe the question into something slightly different. The important question for us isn’t as much where we’re supposed to live as it is how we’re supposed to live. We spend an enormous amount of time waiting to hear from God about where we should go and what we should do. But it’s what we do in that wherever we are that can make all the difference.
Because being God’s faithful disciples is less about where we should be, and more about how we should be wherever we are.
To put it in other words: It’s not ‘Where does God want me to be?, but rather ‘What does God want me to be like?’
When we frame the question that way we can see some tangible answers for ourselves.
We know we’re called to pray and to worship, to study and to serve. The Bible is pretty clear that we’re supposed to work for justice and to forgive each other—that we should share our own stories of faith with the people we encounter in our daily lives. There are all kinds of answers to the ‘What does God want me to be like’ question.
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to discern where God wants us to be. There’s still something important about listening for God’s call to a new place—something critical for each of us about hearing that call and acting on it at different times in our lives.
That’s what we’re celebrating today as we say goodbye to Kate. I have a very clear memory of our first conversation on the phone back in 2007. We talked about life and ministry and food and movies—the really important stuff—and then she cut the call short so she could go jump out of an airplane. As the call ended I decided that if she survived that day, she might make a good assistant minister.
The last two years have confirmed Kate’s sense of call to this place—and our invitation to her—over and over again. Through children’s ministry and work with our youth groups. In the midst of relationships with the young adults and her service on Council. Kate has lived out the call on her life to serve in this place. She makes it easy to say, as we heard in our passage today: ‘Go in peace—your journey has the Lord’s approval.’
It’s with that same hope that we call Stephanie to come and serve here starting next week. The gifts and training and qualifications are all there, but the most important quality she’ll being is the same one Kate brought with her—a willingness to hear God’s call and act on it—a desire to be the person God made her to be, and to serve our young people and this church in Christ’s name.
In the end that’s what God wants from all of us, in big ways and also in those little everyday situations that tend to change the world. God calls us to be people who fellowship in true community, who worship with passion and creativity, who desire to grow in our knowledge and faith, and who will turn outward in service so that people will hear and experience the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our lives.
Next week we officially begin a new church year in this place. As we say goodbye to one friend and welcome a new one, my prayer for us is that we will offer ourselves in service to Christ and to this church—that we’ll commit individually and as a community of faith—to allow ourselves to be transformed into the people God made us to be all along.
As we come to the Table this morning, my prayer for each one of us is that we’ll listen for God’s call on our lives—whatever and wherever that may be—that we’ll hear that call and follow it with faith and humility and passion.
Let’s pray together.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Vacation Update 2
We spent a week at my Mom's house in Shell Beach. My grandmother bought the place when I was 7 years old (in 1970), and it's been a special place since then. We hung out with my sister and her family, our daughter and her husband, and some friends from our last church. It was a really good time. Here are some pics.
The view down the street from Mom's place.
Ian and Ericka looking for hermit crabs.
The kids headed out to the tidepools.
Ericka and Julie.
Ian riding around in my Aunt Lynette's old cart. She died a few years ago but my Mom lets the kids drive it up and down the street. It's a lot of fun, and they tell stories about Lynette as they scoot around.
Relaxing with son-in-law and brother-in-law after a rough day at the beach.
Ian and a friend with some retro candy (remember Wax Lips?).
Ian fished for the first time ever. We went to the San Luis pier where I learned, and he caught 5 fish in his first hour. We celebrated with ice cream afterward.
Ian and some of his cousins in front of Mom's house.
The kids had their own campfire.
Ian met a local girl...
The view down the street from Mom's place.
Ian and Ericka looking for hermit crabs.
The kids headed out to the tidepools.
Ericka and Julie.
Ian riding around in my Aunt Lynette's old cart. She died a few years ago but my Mom lets the kids drive it up and down the street. It's a lot of fun, and they tell stories about Lynette as they scoot around.
Relaxing with son-in-law and brother-in-law after a rough day at the beach.
Ian and a friend with some retro candy (remember Wax Lips?).
Ian fished for the first time ever. We went to the San Luis pier where I learned, and he caught 5 fish in his first hour. We celebrated with ice cream afterward.
Ian and some of his cousins in front of Mom's house.
The kids had their own campfire.
Ian met a local girl...Thursday, August 06, 2009
Vacation Update
I've been in California for a week and a half now, reconnecting with friends and family, and most importantly with Julie and Ian. We were apart for almost three weeks, which was the longest ever for us, and I didn't like it much at all.
Julie and Ian picked me up from the airport and took me straight to In-N-Out for dinner. That has become a tradition for return visits, but she also surprised me by having most of our old small group there to meet us. It was great to see all of them, jet-jagged and all. I spent the next few days adjusting to LA time and playing with Ian.
Last Sunday we went to our old church, where I heard Stephanie Kremmel (our incoming Director of Student Ministries) preach. She was great, and I got to lead a prayer for her as she transitions out of Glendale Presbyterian Church and into the American Church in London. Stephanie and I spent Monday and Tuesday getting to know each other and walking through the first part of her orientation.
Most of the rest of my time here has been filled with amazing meals shared with people I love. What a blessing to come back to LA and find that our community is still here, still behind us, still as crazy funny as ever. My mother-in-law has done her best (which is quite good) to fatten me up on all kinds of delicious foods.
Today I was up early to finish the last forms related to Stephanie's visa. The church has to be licensed to bring workers from outside the UK, and so I have been working on getting that license for a few months now. It was just approved this week, which left me with another set of forms to complete so that Stephanie can send in her own visa application. Now we're praying that everything is completed to the UK Border Agency's liking, and that the visa comes through in time for Stephanie's flight to London on the 20th. When she gets there Kate will complete her orientation to London and to the position.
Tomorrow we head up to Shell Beach for a week. My grandmother bought a house up there in 1970, and it's been a favorite vacation spot ever since. My sister and her family will be there for the first half of the week, and then some friends with kids are coming up on Wednesday.
Through all of this my church family in London is never far from my thoughts and prayers. We have so much good work ahead of us as we grow in faith and service--part of me is anxious to get back, though I know that I need this time away. I've been reading Daniel Kirk's recent book on Romans, and am getting ready to teach and preach on that important letter in the fall.
But first I'm going to continue this time of R&R. Keep us in your prayers...
Julie and Ian picked me up from the airport and took me straight to In-N-Out for dinner. That has become a tradition for return visits, but she also surprised me by having most of our old small group there to meet us. It was great to see all of them, jet-jagged and all. I spent the next few days adjusting to LA time and playing with Ian.
Last Sunday we went to our old church, where I heard Stephanie Kremmel (our incoming Director of Student Ministries) preach. She was great, and I got to lead a prayer for her as she transitions out of Glendale Presbyterian Church and into the American Church in London. Stephanie and I spent Monday and Tuesday getting to know each other and walking through the first part of her orientation.
Most of the rest of my time here has been filled with amazing meals shared with people I love. What a blessing to come back to LA and find that our community is still here, still behind us, still as crazy funny as ever. My mother-in-law has done her best (which is quite good) to fatten me up on all kinds of delicious foods.
Today I was up early to finish the last forms related to Stephanie's visa. The church has to be licensed to bring workers from outside the UK, and so I have been working on getting that license for a few months now. It was just approved this week, which left me with another set of forms to complete so that Stephanie can send in her own visa application. Now we're praying that everything is completed to the UK Border Agency's liking, and that the visa comes through in time for Stephanie's flight to London on the 20th. When she gets there Kate will complete her orientation to London and to the position.
Tomorrow we head up to Shell Beach for a week. My grandmother bought a house up there in 1970, and it's been a favorite vacation spot ever since. My sister and her family will be there for the first half of the week, and then some friends with kids are coming up on Wednesday.
Through all of this my church family in London is never far from my thoughts and prayers. We have so much good work ahead of us as we grow in faith and service--part of me is anxious to get back, though I know that I need this time away. I've been reading Daniel Kirk's recent book on Romans, and am getting ready to teach and preach on that important letter in the fall.
But first I'm going to continue this time of R&R. Keep us in your prayers...
Monday, July 27, 2009
My Goodness
2 Thessalonians 1:11-12
I’ve been cleaning up my office, trying to get it in shape for Craig before I go on vacation. Last week I found this little book—it’s a reprint of a little manual for proper behavior from back in the late 1800s. The title is simply: ‘Don’t’
Some of the rules have to do with table manners, like this one: “Don’t tuck your napkin under your chin, or spread it upon your breast. Bibs are for the nursery.”
Others have to do with personal hygiene. “Don’t cleanse your ears, or your nose, or trim and clean your fingernails in public. These should be done in the privacy of one’s apartment only.”
Some of the rules are downright strange: “Don’t have the habit of smiling or grinning at nothing. Smile or laugh when there is occasion to do either, but at other times keep your mouth shut and your manner composed. People who laugh at everything are often capable of nothing.”
Another says: “Don’t be over familiar. Don’t strike your friends on the back, nudge them in the side, or give other physical manifestation of your pleasure. Don’t indulge in these familiarities, or submit to them from others.”
Women come in for some special rules: “Don’t over-trim your gowns or other articles of apparel. The excess in trimmings on women’s garments, now so common, is taste little less than barbaric, and evinces ignorance of the first principles of beauty.”
And finally, the author decides it’s important to comment on women’s diets: “Don’t indulge in confections or other sweets. It must be said that American women devour an immense deal of rubbish. If they would banish from the table pickles, preserves, pastry, cakes, and similar indigestible articles, and never touch candy…we would see their cheeks bloom like a rose.”
Too often we define goodness—being good—with a list of things that we don’t do. Some of you will remember the saying—it might actually be a parody of a real saying: ‘I don’t drink, smoke or chew, or go with girls who do.’ I actually did go out with someone who tried some of my chew in my wilder days, but we’ll leave that for another time.
The point is that as we think about goodness as one facet of the fruit of the Spirit, we’re going to have to get away from thinking of it as simply following a list of ‘don’ts’.
11With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. 12We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
On the front of your bulletin you’ll find the text that’s guiding us through this summer series. The fruit of the Spirit is a new way of life, redeemed through Christ’s work and empowered to live in a new way through the Holy Spirit. The ‘fruit’ here is singular—it’s a list of nine qualities or behaviors that work together as an expression of what the Holy Spirit does in our lives—how God’s spirit shows in us as we grow in faith and service.
Notice that these are relational qualities—the Spirit’s fruit teach us how to live with God and with each other—with family and friends and even strangers. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control—all of these together describe a radically different way of relating to each other.
But it’s still important to remember that these are a package deal—there’s no picking and choosing here. It’s all or nothing.
The fruit of the Spirit—shown in all nine of these qualities—is the result of us allowing God to show us how to live in a different way.
Today we’re going to focus on where ‘goodness’ fits into this package deal.
The apostle Paul was the founder of the Thessalonian church, which was in a major port city in Roman-controlled Greece. There are two surviving letters to this church community, and in this one there are two important themes that he’s trying to communicate.
The first has to do with the Hebrew idea of the ‘Day of the Lord,’ the day when God would come and complete his plan for the salvation of his people. There was a disagreement in the church about whether or not this had already happened, and Paul spends part of his time helping them to understand.
But the other part of the letter has to do with living honorable lives as followers of Christ in a culture that was hostile to the faith. That’s where our passage comes in. Paul is praying for the Thessalonians—praying that they will live and behave in a way that reflects their relationship to God—that their actions would flow naturally from their faith in Christ.
We’ve been talking about these nine qualities that Paul calls the ‘fruit of the Spirit.’ That’s what he’s calling his readers to in our text today.
Think about the image of the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of anything is the product that comes from the blending of ingredients or parts into something new—it’s what comes from the actions and reactions of all those pieces.
An apple isn’t simply made up of ground up seeds, water and fertilizer—who’d eat that? An apple comes out of the process that takes a fertilized seed, the right amount of water and nutrients and sunshine, and grows them into something completely different—something new and useful and delicious.
That’s how we can understand the goodness that comes from God—the goodness that enters into us by his Holy Spirit—the Christ-like goodness that joins with our gifts and skills and personalities to become something new and unique and precious.
When we think about it that way, ‘goodness’ becomes so much more than just following a list of rules.
Goodness becomes that way we live differently because of what God has done for us.
Goodness becomes the way God himself works in and through us.
Goodness ends up being the best way we communicate the truth of the Gospel to a world that doesn’t believe it anymore, but needs to hear it anyway.
Earlier this year I met someone at a party. We talked for a while, and then the host came by and introduced me as the minister here. The guy looked at me and blurted out something about how the church had no place teaching morality to contemporary society, because it had done a poor job of it in the past. Now I think he couldn’t have been more wrong, but I understood his point.
We have a lot to say about personal and social morality—about ethics and goodness—we just tend to say it poorly. When we focus on the rules we miss the chance to talk about the radical, transforming power of God in our lives—of what it means to have the God who made us and redeems us and gives us hope—to have that same Savior living and working in us and through us.
That’s what it means to be good—to show that part of the fruit of the Spirit that we call ‘goodness.’
But I know this isn’t easy. Being an agent of goodness in a world that would just as soon trample you as allow you to help is a hard thing. This past week I was rereading part of Stephen Carter’s book called Civility—it was published in the mid-90s. Carter is a law professor at Yale who writes on issues of ethics and morality, and also faith and public policy. Listen to how he described this concept of goodness in the context of Christ’s command to love our neighbors.
“In both Christianity and Judaism, the ability of the human to love other imperfect humans is a symbol of God’s love for his creation. That is the significance of Jesus’ calling on his followers to love one another as he has loved them. The idea that we are called upon to love because God loves is more solid, more satisfactory than the competing secular moral ideal of compassion…And yet, whether our motivation for treating our neighbor well is religious devotion, secular moral understanding or even simple self-interest, the one thing that remains crystal clear is that loving our neighbor is hard work.”
That’s true, isn’t it? Loving our neighbor—being good—showing the goodness of God in our lives and relationships—that’s all hard work. But it’s also a key part of what it means to be a Christian—to be a mature and maturing disciple of Jesus Christ.
When Germany occupied France in WWII, the Nazis forced local governments to turn over all Jewish citizens so they could be moved to concentration camps. Most of the towns and villages complied with the order, but in the little village of Le Chambon something very different happened. A minister in that town led his congregation, which represented most of the community, to resist the order and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis. This wasn’t just a household here and there, but virtually everyone in town played a part in the conspiracy. For the people of Le Chambon it was more important to live out their faith than it was to preserve their own safety—even their own lives.
After describing the terrible risks those people took to save their neighbors—to protect innocent lives even when it would have been easier to let the Nazis have their way—after telling the story of how a group of French villagers came to be examples of good in the world, the author who researched the story said this:
“Goodness is the simplest thing in the world, and also the most complex—like opening a door.”
Being agents of goodness in the world can be a challenging thing—because it’s hard—because it can be complicated sometimes. Goodness is challenging, but let’s be honest—few of us will ever have to face the same sort of challenges as the people of Le Chambon. But still, it’s a core part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus—it comes naturally, even when it’s hard—it flows naturally out of our belief that Christ is who he said he is, and that he’ll do what he promised he would do. It happens when we open the door to living life in a different way.
One writer said that this kind of discipleship-based goodness “is the visible proof that a [person] has really and gratefully grasped the new opportunity for existence” as a follower of Christ.
What does that mean for us? What does it mean for us to grasp a new opportunity for existence? Do you feel like you’ve grasped that new existence in your own life?
It goes against our mindset to hear what I’m about to say, but I’m convinced that it’s not only true, but that it’s the only way true goodness and the rest of the Spirit’s fruit can be present and active and flowing from our lives.
Are you ready for this?
The only way for this to work is to remember that the fruit of the Spirit is the Spirit’s fruit and not ours.
This is one of those places—one of those times in our lives of discipleship individually and as a community of faith—this is one of those times where we have to acknowledge that only God can make this happen. It’s one of those times when we have to step aside and allow the Spirit of God to do God’s work in our lives.
My prayer for us not only during this series but always, is that we’ll be wise enough and faithful enough and brave enough to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us and through us to shape us into the people we were meant to be all along.
My prayer for this place is the same one Paul prayed for the Thessalonians:
“We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Amen.
I’ve been cleaning up my office, trying to get it in shape for Craig before I go on vacation. Last week I found this little book—it’s a reprint of a little manual for proper behavior from back in the late 1800s. The title is simply: ‘Don’t’
Some of the rules have to do with table manners, like this one: “Don’t tuck your napkin under your chin, or spread it upon your breast. Bibs are for the nursery.”
Others have to do with personal hygiene. “Don’t cleanse your ears, or your nose, or trim and clean your fingernails in public. These should be done in the privacy of one’s apartment only.”
Some of the rules are downright strange: “Don’t have the habit of smiling or grinning at nothing. Smile or laugh when there is occasion to do either, but at other times keep your mouth shut and your manner composed. People who laugh at everything are often capable of nothing.”
Another says: “Don’t be over familiar. Don’t strike your friends on the back, nudge them in the side, or give other physical manifestation of your pleasure. Don’t indulge in these familiarities, or submit to them from others.”
Women come in for some special rules: “Don’t over-trim your gowns or other articles of apparel. The excess in trimmings on women’s garments, now so common, is taste little less than barbaric, and evinces ignorance of the first principles of beauty.”
And finally, the author decides it’s important to comment on women’s diets: “Don’t indulge in confections or other sweets. It must be said that American women devour an immense deal of rubbish. If they would banish from the table pickles, preserves, pastry, cakes, and similar indigestible articles, and never touch candy…we would see their cheeks bloom like a rose.”
Too often we define goodness—being good—with a list of things that we don’t do. Some of you will remember the saying—it might actually be a parody of a real saying: ‘I don’t drink, smoke or chew, or go with girls who do.’ I actually did go out with someone who tried some of my chew in my wilder days, but we’ll leave that for another time.
The point is that as we think about goodness as one facet of the fruit of the Spirit, we’re going to have to get away from thinking of it as simply following a list of ‘don’ts’.
11With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. 12We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
On the front of your bulletin you’ll find the text that’s guiding us through this summer series. The fruit of the Spirit is a new way of life, redeemed through Christ’s work and empowered to live in a new way through the Holy Spirit. The ‘fruit’ here is singular—it’s a list of nine qualities or behaviors that work together as an expression of what the Holy Spirit does in our lives—how God’s spirit shows in us as we grow in faith and service.
Notice that these are relational qualities—the Spirit’s fruit teach us how to live with God and with each other—with family and friends and even strangers. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control—all of these together describe a radically different way of relating to each other.
But it’s still important to remember that these are a package deal—there’s no picking and choosing here. It’s all or nothing.
The fruit of the Spirit—shown in all nine of these qualities—is the result of us allowing God to show us how to live in a different way.
Today we’re going to focus on where ‘goodness’ fits into this package deal.
The apostle Paul was the founder of the Thessalonian church, which was in a major port city in Roman-controlled Greece. There are two surviving letters to this church community, and in this one there are two important themes that he’s trying to communicate.
The first has to do with the Hebrew idea of the ‘Day of the Lord,’ the day when God would come and complete his plan for the salvation of his people. There was a disagreement in the church about whether or not this had already happened, and Paul spends part of his time helping them to understand.
But the other part of the letter has to do with living honorable lives as followers of Christ in a culture that was hostile to the faith. That’s where our passage comes in. Paul is praying for the Thessalonians—praying that they will live and behave in a way that reflects their relationship to God—that their actions would flow naturally from their faith in Christ.
We’ve been talking about these nine qualities that Paul calls the ‘fruit of the Spirit.’ That’s what he’s calling his readers to in our text today.
Think about the image of the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of anything is the product that comes from the blending of ingredients or parts into something new—it’s what comes from the actions and reactions of all those pieces.
An apple isn’t simply made up of ground up seeds, water and fertilizer—who’d eat that? An apple comes out of the process that takes a fertilized seed, the right amount of water and nutrients and sunshine, and grows them into something completely different—something new and useful and delicious.
That’s how we can understand the goodness that comes from God—the goodness that enters into us by his Holy Spirit—the Christ-like goodness that joins with our gifts and skills and personalities to become something new and unique and precious.
When we think about it that way, ‘goodness’ becomes so much more than just following a list of rules.
Goodness becomes that way we live differently because of what God has done for us.
Goodness becomes the way God himself works in and through us.
Goodness ends up being the best way we communicate the truth of the Gospel to a world that doesn’t believe it anymore, but needs to hear it anyway.
Earlier this year I met someone at a party. We talked for a while, and then the host came by and introduced me as the minister here. The guy looked at me and blurted out something about how the church had no place teaching morality to contemporary society, because it had done a poor job of it in the past. Now I think he couldn’t have been more wrong, but I understood his point.
We have a lot to say about personal and social morality—about ethics and goodness—we just tend to say it poorly. When we focus on the rules we miss the chance to talk about the radical, transforming power of God in our lives—of what it means to have the God who made us and redeems us and gives us hope—to have that same Savior living and working in us and through us.
That’s what it means to be good—to show that part of the fruit of the Spirit that we call ‘goodness.’
But I know this isn’t easy. Being an agent of goodness in a world that would just as soon trample you as allow you to help is a hard thing. This past week I was rereading part of Stephen Carter’s book called Civility—it was published in the mid-90s. Carter is a law professor at Yale who writes on issues of ethics and morality, and also faith and public policy. Listen to how he described this concept of goodness in the context of Christ’s command to love our neighbors.
“In both Christianity and Judaism, the ability of the human to love other imperfect humans is a symbol of God’s love for his creation. That is the significance of Jesus’ calling on his followers to love one another as he has loved them. The idea that we are called upon to love because God loves is more solid, more satisfactory than the competing secular moral ideal of compassion…And yet, whether our motivation for treating our neighbor well is religious devotion, secular moral understanding or even simple self-interest, the one thing that remains crystal clear is that loving our neighbor is hard work.”
That’s true, isn’t it? Loving our neighbor—being good—showing the goodness of God in our lives and relationships—that’s all hard work. But it’s also a key part of what it means to be a Christian—to be a mature and maturing disciple of Jesus Christ.
When Germany occupied France in WWII, the Nazis forced local governments to turn over all Jewish citizens so they could be moved to concentration camps. Most of the towns and villages complied with the order, but in the little village of Le Chambon something very different happened. A minister in that town led his congregation, which represented most of the community, to resist the order and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis. This wasn’t just a household here and there, but virtually everyone in town played a part in the conspiracy. For the people of Le Chambon it was more important to live out their faith than it was to preserve their own safety—even their own lives.
After describing the terrible risks those people took to save their neighbors—to protect innocent lives even when it would have been easier to let the Nazis have their way—after telling the story of how a group of French villagers came to be examples of good in the world, the author who researched the story said this:
“Goodness is the simplest thing in the world, and also the most complex—like opening a door.”
Being agents of goodness in the world can be a challenging thing—because it’s hard—because it can be complicated sometimes. Goodness is challenging, but let’s be honest—few of us will ever have to face the same sort of challenges as the people of Le Chambon. But still, it’s a core part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus—it comes naturally, even when it’s hard—it flows naturally out of our belief that Christ is who he said he is, and that he’ll do what he promised he would do. It happens when we open the door to living life in a different way.
One writer said that this kind of discipleship-based goodness “is the visible proof that a [person] has really and gratefully grasped the new opportunity for existence” as a follower of Christ.
What does that mean for us? What does it mean for us to grasp a new opportunity for existence? Do you feel like you’ve grasped that new existence in your own life?
It goes against our mindset to hear what I’m about to say, but I’m convinced that it’s not only true, but that it’s the only way true goodness and the rest of the Spirit’s fruit can be present and active and flowing from our lives.
Are you ready for this?
The only way for this to work is to remember that the fruit of the Spirit is the Spirit’s fruit and not ours.
This is one of those places—one of those times in our lives of discipleship individually and as a community of faith—this is one of those times where we have to acknowledge that only God can make this happen. It’s one of those times when we have to step aside and allow the Spirit of God to do God’s work in our lives.
My prayer for us not only during this series but always, is that we’ll be wise enough and faithful enough and brave enough to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us and through us to shape us into the people we were meant to be all along.
My prayer for this place is the same one Paul prayed for the Thessalonians:
“We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Amen.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Kindness: Real 'Haute Couture'
Colossians 3:12
The Guardian ran a story a week or so ago on haute couture—on high fashion. Now I’m even less qualified to talk about fashion than I was last week to talk about patience—I’m a Men’s Wearhouse/Tie Rack kind of guy. But you know what I’m talking about. It’s that strange line of designer clothing that makes the news every year—designers spend millions on the dresses and shows, even though historically haute couture lines never turn a profit. I know I’m supposed to understand or at least appreciate this sort of thing as an art form, but to me it tends to look like tall women in enormous hats and tiny dresses, all looking as though they wish they could be somewhere else.
The comments I usually hear, even from people, even those who appreciate this stuff more than I do, go like this:
Where could anyone really wear an outfit like that?
When would I ever wear that?
Is that really useful?
Keep those questions in mind as we hear our text this morning. This passage comes in the middle of one of my favorite books in the New Testament. Paul’s letter to the Colossians is a guide to faith and practice not only in the 1st century, but today as well. In the 3rd chapter of the letter Paul is talking about how we align our lives to our faith in Christ (notice that it’s not the other way around). He’s encouraging his readers to set our hearts and minds on Christ as a regular part of our decision-making—as a part of the discipline of living in families and communities and society.
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
On the front of your bulletin you’ll find the text from Galatians that is guiding us through this summer series. The fruit of the Spirit is a new way of life, redeemed through Christ’s work and empowered to live in a new way through the Holy Spirit. The ‘fruit’ here is singular—it’s a list of nine qualities or behaviors that work together as an expression of what the Holy Spirit does in our lives—how God’s spirit shows in us as we grow in faith and service.
Notice that these are relational qualities—the Spirit’s fruit teach us how to live with God and with each other—with family and friends and even strangers. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control—all of these together describe a radically different way of relating to each other.
But it’s still important to remember that these are a package deal—there’s no picking and choosing here. It’s all or nothing. The fruit of the Spirit—shown in all nine of these qualities—is the result of us allowing God to show us how to live in a different way.
Our text today shows us an important facet of how all the fruit of the Spirit function in our lives. Our text today reminds us that in the covenant relationship we enjoy with God, sometimes something is demanded from us.
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
My friend Cameron preached on this passage a few years ago. He used the image of looking into a closet, trying to decide what to wear—how to look—what to communicate about ourselves—to the people with come into contact with. His point was that we have to choose how our lives will reflect God’s presence in us.
One of the fun parts for me of working through these nine qualities we call the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ has been seeing how the individual words have been used in other parts of the Bible. The word that Paul uses to mean ‘kindness’ evolved from a word in classical Greek that meant suitable and proper and…useful. The word was often used to describe a nice, mild wine, and more broadly, any food that was pleasing and satisfying.
In the Old Testament the word was used to describe the qualities of God—how he sustains us gently and lovingly, even when we’re less-than-perfect followers of him.
In the New Testament we return to an old use of this word. Luke uses it in his parable about new wine in old wineskins, and again later as a way of describing how generous we’re called to be to others—in light of how generous God has been with us.
But I’m drawn to this link between kindness and being useful.
Not just in a practical sense. There’s an important difference between usefulness and utilitarianism, where people and things are valued and defined by their function. The usefulness here is more like the experience of a good meal—something tasty and filling and nourishing and communal. Kindness, as Paul uses it, accomplishes something important for the body—for the church—for the Kingdom. By using this word for ‘kindness’ Paul is describing a sort of holy usefulness.
Tomorrow we remember the 40th anniversary of the first people to walk on the moon. I met Buzz Aldrin here in London a few weeks ago—he still looks like he could take on another moon mission. The anniversary of the moon landing is bringing back my childhood memories of that day. I can remember all of us gathered around our state-of-the-art black and white TV, listening to Walter Cronkite describe the events taking place. I can remember Neil Armstrong’s words about small steps and giant leaps.
But my favorite memory of that day came after my friends and I got bored watching the news reports and cooked up an idea for turning it all into a game. The three of us got backpacks and our football helmets (mine was in the old blue and white colors of the LA Rams), and went to the park to re-enact the landing. What I remember most is walking very slowly, pretending we were trudging along in zero gravity. I’m not sure how we decided who was who, or what we did with the third kid. Maybe we had him circle the park as Michael Collins. I do remember that we had a great time doing it.
Hard to imagine that was 40 years ago—getting back to the moon seems like such a remote possibility these days. One of the main reasons the US and other nations stopped going to the moon is the enormous cost of planning and executing missions like that. But so many of the inventions that came from the space program have become central to our lives—so many useful things came out of the research that made space exploration possible.
Have you ever seen the list of inventions from the space program that improve our lives today?
Baby food, satellite dishes, padding for shoes, high-resolution body scans, the ear thermometer, smoke detectors, firefighter protection, cordless tools like dustbusters and drills and saws. We have the space program to thank for the joystick controllers we use in our video games, the Teflon that prevents so many kitchen disasters, and also for pens that will write in zero gravity. Now about the pens, NASA spent something like $25000 developing a pen that would write in space. The Russians simply gave their cosmonauts pencils.
But apart from that, so many useful things came out of the creativity and enormous investment that it took to send those astronauts into space.
In our text today, and in the list of the fruit of the Spirit, what we see is a call to live as people who have received a great gift from God—a gift that came at a huge cost—the call to show a genuine, useful sort of kindness as a mirror or reflection of the kindness God has shown us. One writer said that Paul’s “purpose is to show the meaning of kindness in the life of a [person] whom Christ has grasped…As a direct outworking of God’s love, it is always alive and active, breaking out spontaneously in the life of a [person] who is led by Christ.”
How often do you feel “grasped” or “led” by Christ?
How often do you see this useful, nourishing sort of kindness breaking out spontaneously in your life?
I don’t think I experience this nearly enough, and yet it’s so central to the life God calls us to—it’s so central to the life we can live when the Spirit gets in and starts to work in us and through us. But it begins with us making a choice to clothe ourselves, as God’s people, holy and dearly loved, with “compassion, kindness, gentleness and patience.”
I went to the National Prayer Breakfast here in London a few weeks ago. All around Westminster Hall there were church and political leaders talking about big programs and all the great things they wanted to do. At one point a young Irish folk singer named Foy Vance went up front and sang for the entire gathering.
The song was called “An Indiscriminate Act of Kindness,” and it told the story of a desperate young woman who stumbled into a hotel tired and cold and broke. She asked for a room, but made in clear that she had no way to pay for it. The concierge showed compassion to her and gave her a room, dried her off, and sat with her as she cried.
In the morning the young woman says to the concierge: “What you did for me was hard to believe.” But he said back to her: “I was only doing what was right. No one who knows love could leave you out there on such a night.” If you can help someone, bear this in mind, and consider it an indiscriminate act of kindness.”
There’s a temptation for us to see ‘kindness’ and the rest of the fruit of the Spirit simply as nice personal qualities to have, like clean hands or fresh breath. When we do that we miss the point. We miss the radical, transforming power of relating to each other and the world in a new way. We miss the way that all nine of these examples of the Spirit’s work demonstrate the presence of the Kingdom of God in the world.
That takes me back to my friend Cameron, and his image of staring into the closet and deciding what to wear.
As followers of Jesus—as people who have known love—Paul’s words to the Colossians leave us with some questions:
How do we want to look to the people around us?
How do we choose a way to look and to be that communicates the work of God’s Spirit in each of our lives?
As we stand in front of the mirror and prepare to meet the world, what do we reflect about how God loves us, how he forgives us, and how his kindness changes our lives forever?
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
That’s real high fashion—not the kind you see on the catwalk, and not the kind you’ll see in any magazine, but it’s the life we’re called to—the sort of life that changes the world one indiscriminate act of kindness at a time.
My prayer for us as we move through this season of looking at how the Spirit works in our lives—my prayer for myself and each person here, is that we’ll clothe ourselves with the love and compassion and useful kindness we see in the Scriptures. Not just so that we’ll be nicer people, but so we can share the blessings we’ve received from God to a tired, hungry world. Amen.
The Guardian ran a story a week or so ago on haute couture—on high fashion. Now I’m even less qualified to talk about fashion than I was last week to talk about patience—I’m a Men’s Wearhouse/Tie Rack kind of guy. But you know what I’m talking about. It’s that strange line of designer clothing that makes the news every year—designers spend millions on the dresses and shows, even though historically haute couture lines never turn a profit. I know I’m supposed to understand or at least appreciate this sort of thing as an art form, but to me it tends to look like tall women in enormous hats and tiny dresses, all looking as though they wish they could be somewhere else.
The comments I usually hear, even from people, even those who appreciate this stuff more than I do, go like this:
Where could anyone really wear an outfit like that?
When would I ever wear that?
Is that really useful?
Keep those questions in mind as we hear our text this morning. This passage comes in the middle of one of my favorite books in the New Testament. Paul’s letter to the Colossians is a guide to faith and practice not only in the 1st century, but today as well. In the 3rd chapter of the letter Paul is talking about how we align our lives to our faith in Christ (notice that it’s not the other way around). He’s encouraging his readers to set our hearts and minds on Christ as a regular part of our decision-making—as a part of the discipline of living in families and communities and society.
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
On the front of your bulletin you’ll find the text from Galatians that is guiding us through this summer series. The fruit of the Spirit is a new way of life, redeemed through Christ’s work and empowered to live in a new way through the Holy Spirit. The ‘fruit’ here is singular—it’s a list of nine qualities or behaviors that work together as an expression of what the Holy Spirit does in our lives—how God’s spirit shows in us as we grow in faith and service.
Notice that these are relational qualities—the Spirit’s fruit teach us how to live with God and with each other—with family and friends and even strangers. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control—all of these together describe a radically different way of relating to each other.
But it’s still important to remember that these are a package deal—there’s no picking and choosing here. It’s all or nothing. The fruit of the Spirit—shown in all nine of these qualities—is the result of us allowing God to show us how to live in a different way.
Our text today shows us an important facet of how all the fruit of the Spirit function in our lives. Our text today reminds us that in the covenant relationship we enjoy with God, sometimes something is demanded from us.
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
My friend Cameron preached on this passage a few years ago. He used the image of looking into a closet, trying to decide what to wear—how to look—what to communicate about ourselves—to the people with come into contact with. His point was that we have to choose how our lives will reflect God’s presence in us.
One of the fun parts for me of working through these nine qualities we call the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ has been seeing how the individual words have been used in other parts of the Bible. The word that Paul uses to mean ‘kindness’ evolved from a word in classical Greek that meant suitable and proper and…useful. The word was often used to describe a nice, mild wine, and more broadly, any food that was pleasing and satisfying.
In the Old Testament the word was used to describe the qualities of God—how he sustains us gently and lovingly, even when we’re less-than-perfect followers of him.
In the New Testament we return to an old use of this word. Luke uses it in his parable about new wine in old wineskins, and again later as a way of describing how generous we’re called to be to others—in light of how generous God has been with us.
But I’m drawn to this link between kindness and being useful.
Not just in a practical sense. There’s an important difference between usefulness and utilitarianism, where people and things are valued and defined by their function. The usefulness here is more like the experience of a good meal—something tasty and filling and nourishing and communal. Kindness, as Paul uses it, accomplishes something important for the body—for the church—for the Kingdom. By using this word for ‘kindness’ Paul is describing a sort of holy usefulness.
Tomorrow we remember the 40th anniversary of the first people to walk on the moon. I met Buzz Aldrin here in London a few weeks ago—he still looks like he could take on another moon mission. The anniversary of the moon landing is bringing back my childhood memories of that day. I can remember all of us gathered around our state-of-the-art black and white TV, listening to Walter Cronkite describe the events taking place. I can remember Neil Armstrong’s words about small steps and giant leaps.
But my favorite memory of that day came after my friends and I got bored watching the news reports and cooked up an idea for turning it all into a game. The three of us got backpacks and our football helmets (mine was in the old blue and white colors of the LA Rams), and went to the park to re-enact the landing. What I remember most is walking very slowly, pretending we were trudging along in zero gravity. I’m not sure how we decided who was who, or what we did with the third kid. Maybe we had him circle the park as Michael Collins. I do remember that we had a great time doing it.
Hard to imagine that was 40 years ago—getting back to the moon seems like such a remote possibility these days. One of the main reasons the US and other nations stopped going to the moon is the enormous cost of planning and executing missions like that. But so many of the inventions that came from the space program have become central to our lives—so many useful things came out of the research that made space exploration possible.
Have you ever seen the list of inventions from the space program that improve our lives today?
Baby food, satellite dishes, padding for shoes, high-resolution body scans, the ear thermometer, smoke detectors, firefighter protection, cordless tools like dustbusters and drills and saws. We have the space program to thank for the joystick controllers we use in our video games, the Teflon that prevents so many kitchen disasters, and also for pens that will write in zero gravity. Now about the pens, NASA spent something like $25000 developing a pen that would write in space. The Russians simply gave their cosmonauts pencils.
But apart from that, so many useful things came out of the creativity and enormous investment that it took to send those astronauts into space.
In our text today, and in the list of the fruit of the Spirit, what we see is a call to live as people who have received a great gift from God—a gift that came at a huge cost—the call to show a genuine, useful sort of kindness as a mirror or reflection of the kindness God has shown us. One writer said that Paul’s “purpose is to show the meaning of kindness in the life of a [person] whom Christ has grasped…As a direct outworking of God’s love, it is always alive and active, breaking out spontaneously in the life of a [person] who is led by Christ.”
How often do you feel “grasped” or “led” by Christ?
How often do you see this useful, nourishing sort of kindness breaking out spontaneously in your life?
I don’t think I experience this nearly enough, and yet it’s so central to the life God calls us to—it’s so central to the life we can live when the Spirit gets in and starts to work in us and through us. But it begins with us making a choice to clothe ourselves, as God’s people, holy and dearly loved, with “compassion, kindness, gentleness and patience.”
I went to the National Prayer Breakfast here in London a few weeks ago. All around Westminster Hall there were church and political leaders talking about big programs and all the great things they wanted to do. At one point a young Irish folk singer named Foy Vance went up front and sang for the entire gathering.
The song was called “An Indiscriminate Act of Kindness,” and it told the story of a desperate young woman who stumbled into a hotel tired and cold and broke. She asked for a room, but made in clear that she had no way to pay for it. The concierge showed compassion to her and gave her a room, dried her off, and sat with her as she cried.
In the morning the young woman says to the concierge: “What you did for me was hard to believe.” But he said back to her: “I was only doing what was right. No one who knows love could leave you out there on such a night.” If you can help someone, bear this in mind, and consider it an indiscriminate act of kindness.”
There’s a temptation for us to see ‘kindness’ and the rest of the fruit of the Spirit simply as nice personal qualities to have, like clean hands or fresh breath. When we do that we miss the point. We miss the radical, transforming power of relating to each other and the world in a new way. We miss the way that all nine of these examples of the Spirit’s work demonstrate the presence of the Kingdom of God in the world.
That takes me back to my friend Cameron, and his image of staring into the closet and deciding what to wear.
As followers of Jesus—as people who have known love—Paul’s words to the Colossians leave us with some questions:
How do we want to look to the people around us?
How do we choose a way to look and to be that communicates the work of God’s Spirit in each of our lives?
As we stand in front of the mirror and prepare to meet the world, what do we reflect about how God loves us, how he forgives us, and how his kindness changes our lives forever?
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
That’s real high fashion—not the kind you see on the catwalk, and not the kind you’ll see in any magazine, but it’s the life we’re called to—the sort of life that changes the world one indiscriminate act of kindness at a time.
My prayer for us as we move through this season of looking at how the Spirit works in our lives—my prayer for myself and each person here, is that we’ll clothe ourselves with the love and compassion and useful kindness we see in the Scriptures. Not just so that we’ll be nicer people, but so we can share the blessings we’ve received from God to a tired, hungry world. Amen.
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