Tagged: Christ

September 3, 2026

God Changes

34 The Lord said to Moses, “Cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you broke. ²Be ready in the morning and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. ³No one shall come up with you, and do not let anyone be seen throughout all the mountain, and do not let flocks or herds graze in front of that mountain.” ⁴So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tablets of stone. ⁵The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name, “The Lord.” ⁶The Lord passed before him and proclaimed,

“The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
⁷keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
and the children’s children
to the third and the fourth generation.”

⁸And Moses quickly bowed down to the ground and worshiped. ⁹He said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, my Lord, I pray, let my Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.” (Ex. 34:1-8)

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¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who^[f] is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1:14-18)

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I read two passages for you. You are probably wondering: “Two passages? Does this mean this sermon is twice as biblical?” And the answer is obviously yes.

The first passage is in the book of Exodus. In this ancient story, God ransoms the people out of slavery in Egypt with the wonders of the ten plagues, humiliating the tyrant, Pharaoh. God brings the people out to the wilderness, crossing the Red Sea. He brings Moses up the mountain of Sinai to reveal his law to Moses, writing it on stone tablets. While Moses is up the mountain, however, the people get Aaron to fashion them an idol, the very thing God was liberating them from. Moses hears the people worshipping this idol and carrying on, and he goes down, and he is so angry that he throws the stone tablets with the commandments on them at the idol. God’s anger burns against the people, and many die that day. In the aftermath of all this, despite the people betraying God, God relents from his anger, shows mercy, and Moses has to go back up the mountain to fashion new tablets.

There, God comes before Moses in the presence of a cloud. God passes before Moses and God reveals the full meaning of God’s name: merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. These qualities, if you do a search through the whole Old Testament, keep coming up. God is praised in the Psalms for having these qualities. One writer suggested that these qualities almost function like the creed of the Old Testament. They form really an essential summary for who God is.

But what about those other qualities at the end? God visits the iniquity of the parents upon their children and on their children’s children to the third and fourth generation? People wonder about that. That does not sound particularly loving and gracious.

If a person announced to you that they were a very gracious person, and also casually mentioned they make a point of punishing a person’s kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids for something wrong they did, you probably, let’s say, have the opposite view in mind: this person seems quite vengeful. So, what is going on here? Hold that thought.

The second passage is, of course, in the New Testament. It is the end of the first section of the first chapter of the Gospel of John. As many of you know, John begins with, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.” John is beginning us off here with an explanation of Jesus as the very revelation of God, God himself, in human flesh. Jesus is the fulfillment of the word, the commandments, the prophecies, the revelations—all of it—in himself.

These two passages, put right next to each other, should raise questions: For instance, what do you mean that the law was given through Moses but grace and truth in Jesus? I did a comparison, and it is interesting that some translations don’t include the word “but” there. They merely read, “the law was given through Moses, grace and truth in Jesus.” However, the word is in Greek. The law was given through Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus. Is John saying that things that occur in the first passage are not true or gracious? Is John contradicting the book of Exodus?

Second question: what does John mean by “no one has ever seen God”? What about Moses here, or Abraham, or Jacob, or Isaiah, or Ezekiel, and so on. Again, what is going on here with John? Is John contradicting these other stories? What is John trying to say? Again, hold that thought.

Last week, I pointed out that when we look at the story of Jesus and his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath in Mark 2, what we take to be something rather obvious and commonplace in our culture actually has a revolutionary point: Jesus allows the disciples to transgress the letter of this deeply important law—it was one of the ten commandments, remember—and the reason why is simply that the “sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath,” Jesus says. The reason he gives is intended to transform how we see the laws of the Bible, which we so often take to be austere and exacting. Yet, here Jesus takes one of the most important commands of the Old Testament, one of the most essential commands about showing devotion to God, and says, actually, the point of it is not to satisfy God; it is to help people. That’s the point.

Jesus is teaching us how to read the Bible in a new way. And this is in keeping with how the whole New Testament shows that the law is to be read through the law of love, discerning the fruit of the Spirit, as the Apostle Paul says. God wants us to follow him and obey him, yes, but God wants us to follow him in the way Jesus shows us, and this Jesus-way of living out the commands of God is radical, so much so, in fact, it got Jesus in a lot of trouble: The great tragic irony of the Gospels is the one who is the logos of God, word made flesh, was executed as a lawbreaker.

Well, I thought about what to preach on this week. I want to follow this up with a similar, perhaps even more radical thought: What if we not only have a Jesus-centred way of following God, but also a Jesus-centred way of understanding God?

Does God Change?

Again, much like our story about picking grain on the Sabbath, much of this might sound somewhat obvious….until it isn’t.

I remember sitting down with someone for a pastoral chat a few years ago. They had recently been diagnosed with a serious illness. I asked what this meant for their walk with God.

Now, often when I ask this, folks respond with saying they have seen God in the love of their family and friends coming around them or they have been reminded in prayer or their daily reminiscing that God loves them. That sort of thing.

The person responded: “God caused this illness. God is punishing me.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said, “Well, why do you think that?”

The person proceeded to rhyme off a number of scriptures. There are stories of God punishing folks with plagues. There are passages in Deuteronomy that those that follow God’s ways will be struck with illness, and that those that do follow God’s ways will be granted health and a full life. The person had done their homework.

The person confessed to me the sins they committed, which they felt must be the cause of this punishment.

Of course, I tried to protest this. But, I remember walking away from that conversation a little bit concerned how quickly this person could chapter and verse a view of God where God causes all tragedies, punishing people every chance he gets.

What I tried to say back then, before I left, was simply: everything you said is technically true. There are those Bible passages and stories, yes, but when I look at Jesus, I have a hard time believing your illness is because God is up in heaven and he has run out of patience for you. I just don’t see it.

After all: nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus ever inflict anyone with an illness. Jesus, the embodiment and bearer of God’s restored rule only heals. That does not mean God stops being angry at wrongdoing or that wrong actions no longer have consequences or that God stops working in mysterious ways, but when we look at Jesus, certain explanations for events in our lives just don’t seem as plausible.

The person turned back to me, skeptically, and he merely asked, “Are you trying to tell me God has changed?”

That question names the tension in the juxtaposition of these two scriptures I read for you.

Does God change?

Aslan Appears Bigger

When we were travelling this summer, while I was driving, I listened to some audiobooks. I got to finish a couple of novels by C.S. Lewis, namely his last book in the Space Trilogy, called A Hideous Strength. With that, I have actually read every novel that C. S. Lewis has written. So, I am kind of a fan.

Well, in the Chronicles of Narnia, books I have read to my boys, there is an interesting moment in the book, Prince Caspian.

If you know the book, or claim to have read the book but actually just watched the movie, the children from the second book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, are magically recalled back to Narnia; what has been only a few years for them in our world has been many centuries in Narnia. Narnia lies in ruins, conquered, and Aslan, the magic Lion who is the Christ figure of the novels, has not been seen in many centuries. Many have given up believing in him.

However, Lucy, the youngest, keeps insisting that Aslan is near. Her childlike faith lets her feel him near when no one else does. She has glimpses of him, and no one believes her. Finally, Aslan appears in full. Lucy looks at him and says,

“Aslan…you’re bigger”. (Imagine me saying that in a British accent, which makes it sound so much more pleasant).

Aslan responds (this time imagine Liam Neeson voice) “That is because you are older, little one”
“It’s not because you are?” Lucy puzzles.
“I am not.” Says Aslan, “But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

Aslan is still the same, but as we grow, he appears to grow as well.

God does not change (or let me suggest that God is beyond what we understand “change” to be), but our understanding changes.

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus once asked why didn’t God just reveal that God was a Trinity right off the bat, right from the get-go? Like right at the Burning Bush: God could have said, “I am who I am, and by the way, let me save you a lot of ink and also say I am Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one nature, three persons.” Why did he not do that?

And he answers, perhaps God reveals himself little by little because God really is loving, patiently teaching us enough about himself each step of the way then a little bit more when we are ready: first the Father, then God reveals the Son, then God reveals the Spirit. It is only after these do we really understand how God is perfect love.

This movement in Scripture then is not a scandal or contradiction; it showcases who God is in the way God was pleased to reveal Godself: gently, patiently.

Not Marcionism, Not Biblicism

Notice what I am not saying: God does not become someone completely different. Aslan did not all of a sudden become a hippo or something.

There was a heresy in the early church called Marcionism (here is your theology lecture for the morning). Marcion was a teacher that looked at this movement and concluded that clearly the difference between depictions of God in the Old Testament and depictions of God in the New Testament is a matter of two essentially different Gods: Old Testament God, evil, New Testament God, good.

And folks in the early church said that this is an error (that’s what heresy means by the way). Sadly, we often do something similar when we write off the Old Testament. I knew one person who only read the New Testament because they believed there was no grace in the Old Testament. That is absolutely not the case, and if you think that you are missing out.

God does not change, but our understanding of him does change.

It is not that all passages of the Bible are all on the same footing, nor is it the idea that God is the Old Testament is bad and in the New Testament he got better.

So, what is it?

The Bible’s Fulfillment in Jesus

Well, maybe the most helpful way to put it is in the New Testament’s own words.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews says, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being”

Ten chapters later in Hebrews, the author puts it this way: “The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves.”

1 John 1 puts it this way, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.”

Paul in the letter to the Colossians says, “Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God.”

All of this might help us understand why John say something as striking as this in the Gospel of John: ^“No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”

There are revelations of God in the Old Testament that are fulfilled in Jesus, and what this means is that compared to the fact that the disciples could sit and eat and converse with and touch Jesus, God in the flesh, it’s like no one had ever seen God up to now, certainly not with that level of vivid clarity. It’s like that the whole Old Testament is a shadow of the person, and now we have the reality before us.

The difference between the Old Testament and New Testament is not Old Testament God bad and New Testament good; it is more like, as Saint Augustine put it, Old Testament hidden and veiled, New Testament revealed.

When I was growing up we ate a lot of cereal for breakfast. My personal favourite was Golden Grahams. Lucky Charms was a close second. Anyways, they always had some kind of toy inside or activity on the back. One of these was you had to rip the box open and find a lens inside and you would take that lens and look at the picture on the box to find a coded message. The lens filtered the colours on the box so that the message would become clear. Do you remember these? I am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running over.

Jesus is the lens that makes the whole Bible clear. (I will also accept that Jesus is the toy in the cereal box of life).

The Bible is a movement, from Genesis to Jesus, of God teaching us about himself, moving step by step from less clear to more clear, and Jesus finally provides that definitive moment where it all comes into focus.

Sometimes this movement looks very straightforward and consistent. In other matters, we see a movement or development. If you look at teachings on war, slavery, treatment of women, and so on, you will see a progressive movement from the law to the wisdom books and the prophets of God teaching his people to treat people more justly (that’s a sermon for another day). And then you see how these land in Jesus: the one who loves his enemies, liberates and lifts the lowly up. God is always just, but this notion of justice gets more and more focused, clearer and clearer.

Or think about this movement like the change from seed to blossom.

Back to Thinking about Punishment

Well, the same goes for how the Bible understands punishment, the question that we began with. Have you been holding that thought?

Exodus 34, the passage we read at the beginning has a notion that remains fairly consistent throughout the whole Old Testament: God’s character is the same; God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Yet is says God punishes to the third and fourth generation.

Is this a different God than Jesus? Does God change? No, but this revelation is not as clear.

If you keep reading in the Bible, you eventually come to a later Prophet named Ezekiel. Ezekiel prophesies that judgment is coming. The sins of the people, generation after generation, have added up. So, the people ask, “What can we do then? Is punishment inevitable because of what our forefathers have done?” That’s how they took that.

Ezekiel gives a resounding, “No.” Ezekiel 18 says, “Suppose [a wicked man] has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things… He will not die for his father’s sin; he will surely live.” Then Ezekiel goes further. “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” The passage ends with God simply reminding the people that God does not punish people for the sins of others. God is not like that: “The Lord is just.”

That’s fascinating, because that kind of sounds like God no longer punishes to the third and fourth generation. Not anymore, or, in fact, he never did. Perhaps the people of God heard something that made sense at the time, but they learned and grew by God’s grace till they were ready for the next step.

But the movement of us learning about God’s justice is getting clearer in Ezekiel comes into perfect focus in Jesus.

Fast forward and what do we see in the Gospels?

In John chapter 9, Jesus encounters a man who is born blind. His disciples ask, who sinned that he should be blind, was it him or was it his parents? Jesus answers saying that no one sinned. His blindness is merely the occasion that God is going to do something good. And Jesus heals him.

Are sick people sick because they have sinned or because their parents sinned? Is God the kind of God that goes around inflicting tragedy on people? Does God cause evil? Or is seeing someone sick merely an opportunity to help them the way Jesus did?

Is suffering the occasion to blame or to have compassion?

Is God the source of the world’s suffering or is God the solution?

Does Jesus cause evil or does Jesus save us from evil?

Does God break his own rules like do not lie or do not murder or is God the Word, the law of God, made flesh, sinless and perfect?

Or to put it another way: is God fully revealed in Jesus? Is God like Jesus? Is Jesus God? Is God then Christlike?

When we look at Jesus and see that God is definitively revealed in Jesus, then it all becomes clear.

Jesus, who is God incarnate, God with us, God Immanuel.

Jesus, who died on a cross as an act of serving sinful humanity.

Jesus, who rose from the dead, victorious, overturning death and evil.

When we look at Jesus we see that God is not far off, away from us. God is beside us. God loves us so much God would endure being executed for our sake. God loves us so fully and wholly, loving us more than his own body and blood—his very life—that God gladly bears the curse of sin and death itself in order to give us life. And so, when we look at Jesus, we see that God is faithful to his promises. God empties the grave. God loves in such a way that evil will not have the final word in this world.

Here, in Jesus, God is made fully clear. If we don’t read our scriptures with Jesus at the centre, we will miss the point.

Sadly, it has taken us humans a few thousand years to learn these truths, and God has been patient with us. However, the truth is, many of us still are not ready.

Does God cause evil?

Does God cause tsunamis and forest fires and global pandemics?

Does God love some people more than others?

Does God take sides in war? Does God approve of slaughtering or oppressing our enemies?

Does God reject people because of where they are born or how they were born?

Does God approve of the domination of women?

Does God approve of slavery?

Does God approve of torture?

Each of these questions might seem to many of us to be an obvious no, but I have seen Christians defend each of these, and they did so with a trusty proof text, cited chapter and verse.

As I said last week, it is entirely possible people can use the Bible in ways that are fundamentally unChrist-like. The same goes for its portraits of God. Take a few passages, take them out of context, ignore the whole sweep of the Biblical narrative, ignore the wisdom of church tradition and discerning leaders and teachers today, and you can portray the God of the Bible in all minds of monstrous ways.

Does our notion of God need to change? You see, if Jesus shows the very heart of God, if love is the essence of God, we are forced to un-deify the things we but in the place of God: power, control, violence, retribution.

Letting go of those things can be hard. Some can’t let go because then they believe they will have nothing left. I have too often seen believers cling to a God they can comprehend, even when that means God is profoundly toxic, rather than embrace the vulnerability of the mystery of love.

It is little wonder that the religious leaders felt they had to execute Jesus in order to preserve their religion.

The question I want to leave you with, Billtown Baptist Church, is how often have we been guilty of doing the same?

God does not change. God has always been Jesus. God has always been the love that Jesus shows in the incarnation, cross, and resurrection. But we need God to change us. We need a “God-change” in our hearts and minds.

August 31, 2026

The Sabbath and Jesus’s Way of Following Scripture

Preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday, August 23rd, 2026.

²³One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. ²⁴The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”²⁵He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? ²⁶In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.”²⁷Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. ²⁸So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:23-28, NRSV)

As an experiment, the journalist AJ Jacobs set out to live out every command in the Bible as literally as possible for one year. He talks about this in his book, A Year of Living Biblically. Jacobs admits he is not a religious person. He is ethnically Jewish, or as he puts is, he is about as Jewish as the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. He has, nevertheless, always felt deeply fascinated by religion and tried it on as an experiment.

And so, he set out to tally and then implement all the commands he could. Some ones we know well: to love your neighbour as yourself. Don’t eat pork (so he had to give up bacon for a year—see that would have been a deal breaker for me). But there are also a lot of others: Don’t wear clothes of mixed fabric, don’t shave your beard. So, he had to put away a lot of his clothes and grow his beard out. I see there are a lot of men who are ritually unclean in the room this morning.

As you can imagine, some of these rules got him in some tense situations. He tells of having a conversation with a man he met walking in Central Park. As they talked, the man wondered about his experiment, given that Jacobs was starting to look more Moses-like, shall we say. When Jacobs asked about the man’s life, the man casually mentioned he was living with his girlfriend. To which Jacob’s stopped and informed him, “Sir, I wish you had not told me that, because there is a law in the Bible about stoning adulterers, so, now I am obligated to stone you.”

“Are you serious?” The man said. Jacobs, obviously not willing to fully go through with that particular command for obvious legal reasons, but still wanting to fulfill it in some literal sense, took a handful of gravel from the side pouch that he had saved for just such an occasion and tossed it at the guy and ran away.

Jacobs’s experiment, as he tells in his book, is full of quirky predicaments. But the book is more than a piece of entertainment. As Jacobs tries his best to commit himself to living fully obedient to the laws of the Bible, he, as an agnostic, comes to appreciate the concern for living rightly and having a sense of awe and gratitude about the world that many of the religious people in his life have. He finds there is something deeply centring about religious rituals (even if you don’t believe in them).

But more to the point, he realized, trying to keep every single law (he calculated 700 laws, by the way) in modern-day Manhattan was impossible. Throughout the book, he talks with Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Christian fundamentalists, and many other religious folk who claim that they attempt to follow all the plain commands of their scriptures, and lo and behold, he concludes that everyone he talked to made certain exceptions that were not explicit in their scriptures for certain particularly odd or burdensome commands. Every single person he talked to did this in some way.

He concludes that no one is a true absolute literalist when it comes to the Bible. Everyone, whether they admit it or not or are aware of it or not, has some kind of set of criteria for when a rule should apply and when it doesn’t, based on context and things like that. You can either be consistent about it or not.

Another discovery he made, perhaps an all too obvious point, is that following many commands of the Bible strictly according to their letter, actually, ironically, goes counter to the very values and principles the Bible holds as central.

If you don’t keep what is central about the Bible at the centre, you can actually do a lot of damage. (Just ask the guy who had gravel thrown at him).

It does not take you long to see Christians near and far using the Bible to harm rather than to heal. Or even more ironically, Christians using the Bible to not follow Jesus.

This problem is not new. It is one that Jesus specifically came to correct. We just have been very good at listening.

I sat there thinking about what I wanted to preach on this week, and I simply had this scripture placed on my heart. This topic: how does Jesus want us to follow what is in the Bible? If Jesus is the centre, how does he show us how to live out scripture fully and most faithfully? This simply is something we all need.

That brings us to Mark chapter 2. Jesus clearly wanted us to know this as well. In Mark’s Gospel, Mark starts introducing us to Jesus, and one of the first stories he tells us, one of the first acts Jesus performs when he begins his ministry, is this.

Remember Mark is the earliest Gospel. While we sometimes don’t give Mark his due since it is also the shortest Gospel, scholars have pointed out that in many ways, Mark is also the most edgy.

This is the first written account of Jesus’ life, introducing us to Jesus, and as far as Mark is concerned, we are just starting to learn about this mysterious person named Jesus who has been baptized and called the “Son of God” by a voice from heaven and has healed folk like Peter’s own mother and things like that. It seems that one of the opening stories Mark wants us to know about who Jesus is involves Jesus and his disciples walking along, and they get accused of breaking Sabbath law. That is an odd story to begin with if you want to show how Jesus fulfills the law, isn’t it?

So, what happens here? The disciples get hungry, and so they break off heads of grain and chew them as they walk (which apparently you can do to the grain when it is green but not when it is dried out and, technically, ripe—or at least that is what Google’s AI told me when I asked it). I was thinking about that since we passed a wheat field on the way here. I am not going to do that; I’m just saying you could.

That seems innocent enough. My family went hiking while we were on PEI, and the trail we walked on had wild raspberries, so as we talked, some of my kids picked some of the berries and ate them. I am pretty sure the one bush might not have been raspberries at all, but they ate them before I could say no, and they are still alive, so all ended up well. (That’s where I am in my parenting, by the way—when you only have one kid, you are so concerned about every hiccup. You get to five, your parenting rule becomes, “Well, they’re still alive, so I guess it’s fine”).

Not so for the disciples. Why? Because it was the Sabbath. You’re not supposed to do anything like work on the Sabbath: not pick grain, not even prepare after-church sandwiches or coffee (so, some of us are in big trouble).

In fact, there is a passage in Exodus 31:14-15 that reads as follows: “Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it is to be put to death; those who do any work on that day must be cut off from their people. For six days work is to be done, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day is to be put to death.”

You could have the death penalty for working on the Sabbath. That sounds drastic. Why would there be a command like that back in the Old Testament? Can you imagine there being a law like that in Canada? Imagine it being a crime to work on the long weekend?

Why did they have a law like that in the first place? Well, if you think about this along with laws like the punishment for idol worship and things like that, it seems like the people of that time, being rescued from slavery in Egypt, where they worked day in and day out—and this was the way of life they were used to, along with thinking about God through idols—they had a really hard time breaking away from this way of thinking and living. These laws were created wanting to reject that kind of way of life in the strongest possible terms, putting that kind of deterrent on going back to the economically and religiously oppressive ways of Egypt. Now, I am not saying that to make them sound just by today’s standards, but by the standards of the ancient world, this is what they were trying to do. The penalty, as severe was it was, was a way of saying, “this is really important.”

But like so many of the laws, these laws were intended for a very specific purpose that got forgotten. And there is something of an irony that, in creating laws with such strict penalties as a way of rejecting oppressive ways of life, it actually creates its own oppressive way of life. I am sure it does not take much to think about what other commands Christians take in a similar way today.

Well, Jesus and his disciples are walking along; they get hungry, and the disciples pick grain heads off as they walk and eat them. Some Pharisees see them.

Who are these Pharisees? The Pharisees were religious leaders who held to a school of thought that developed about a century and a half or so prior to Jesus showing up. Their name means the “separate ones,” and they put strong emphasis on strict personal adherence to the laws of the Bible, and they developed a whole body of writings on how to do this.

However, along the way, just like how AJ Jacobs points out with fundamentalist Christians, the Pharisees find all sorts of ways of saying “we obey all the commands” while actually making exceptions for the ones that might cost them the most.

They found ways of selectively applying the commands of the Bible in ways that pointed the finger at people outside their group and interpreted other laws in ways that were beneficial to them. This is what Jesus confronts in the Sermon on the Mount.

Again, it does not take much to see examples of this today.

Well, Jesus and the Pharisees have already picked a fight, and so it looks like they were already watching for something to accuse him of. You can imagine them coming up to Jesus, fingers waving: “What do you think you are doing, picking grain on the Sabbath? That’s against the rules!”

And Jesus turns to them—and I love this—he says, “Umm, haven’t you read that…” as if to say, “Oh, I’m sorry, perhaps you don’t know the scriptures very well, let me remind you.” In other words, I think Jesus is actually being a little bit cheeky here.

And more importantly, Jesus essentially out-thumps the Bible-thumpers.

And he says, “Don’t you know that in the Bible, David, when his men were hungry, ate consecrated bread right from the Temple?” They were hungry, and it did not matter that it was holy bread, reserved for God. It appears that God did not mind. It is kind of like making sure people do not go hungry is more important.

Then he gives this profound principle: The sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath.

Now, when you think about this, we who are living 2000 years after Jesus, it seems all too obvious to us what Jesus is saying. We take this story to mean something like this: Following God’s commands are important, but don’t get too persnickety about it or something like that. But put yourself back in their shoes. It’s more radical than that.

At least at first glance, the Sabbath was a command about worshipping God. If anything, it should be absolute because what could be more important than God?

If anything, the line should have read, “Humanity was made for the Sabbath because the sabbath is about God and humans were made for God.” It’s one of the Ten Commandments. If there is going to be an absolute law in the Old Testament, this is it. This fits the bill.

But, this whole notion of having a Sabbath day, in Jesus’ estimate, was to help people. God does not need us to worship him. We need to worship him. We don’t practice a day off from working because the Sabbath is so important. We take a day off from working because people are so important. And if you are so obsessed with following the laws of the Sabbath that you refuse to help people, you have missed the point.

Again, this all might sound obvious to us. Some of us don’t bat an eye about answering emails on Sunday or picking up a shift. If anything, most of us could be a bit more strict about having a day where we refuse work and rest.

But again that is not the radical point being made here: if the Sabbath stood at the heart of Jewish religion (which it did), this is how it might have been heard: Humanity was not made for church, but church for humanity.

Or hear it this way: Humanity was not made for Christianity, but Christianity for humanity.

Putting it that way might give us a clue as to just how revolutionary and provocative Jesus’ statement would have been to those hearing it. And it might also give us a clue as to how much we have ignored Jesus’ own radical way of living out the Bible.

I don’t know about you, but I have literally heard this passage preached to me growing up as “See, because of Jesus, I can mow my lawn this afternoon and not feel bad. That’s grace.” Now, don’t get me wrong. I am going to mow my lawn this afternoon (if the rain lets up), but if that is all we think this passage is about, we have really missed the point.

But it goes much deeper than that: Jesus claims that he is Lord of the Sabbath, if he is the centre of what the Bible is about, and because he is Lord, because the Sabbath is about him, then he actually approves of his disciples of NOT following this command to its letter, which is again, one of the most important commands in the whole Old Testament—so important and absolute you could get the death penalty for violating it. And yet, Jesus says, if it does not actually help people, don’t follow it.

Jesus, here and throughout the New Testament is trying to re-teach the people of God what it means to follow the Bible and what it means to follow God.

Jesus is asked later in the Gospel of Mark what is the greatest commandment, what is the commandment that summarizes all other commandments? Jesus simply says that it is to love God with your entire being and love your neighbour as yourself. Then Jesus says, this is the most important commandment. Notice the language there? Love God and love others is not two commands but a single command.

More radically, if you look at the Gospel of John, which is the latest Gospel, John does not include any specific teachings of Jesus. It’s interesting. John does not pass on the Sermon on the Mount as Matthew does, or parables as Luke does. John has Jesus say this: I’m giving you a new commandment: that you love one another. That’s it. That is what believing in Jesus looks like. Love.

John even has a moment when Jesus says to the religious teachers: You search the scriptures, but if you are doing this without looking at me, you are going to miss eternal life.

This law of love shows up in every Gospel and in all the major writers of the New Testament. The Apostle James calls it the “royal law.” Paul teaches it to the Galatians, a congregation of non-Jewish folk that were being told that if you don’t follow all the rules you can’t be a part of God’s people. But He says, if you trust what the Spirit has done in you, you’re justified, and from there, what rules should you follow? Follow the rule of love, following the fruit of the Spirit. He says, “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. “

This leads me to ask: What if we believe in the Bible the way Jesus did? What if we did this consistently with all the commands we can think of?

Because you know what we often do? We seem to get it well enough that there are those strange laws in the Old Testament that intuitively don’t seem like they apply today.

But do we do this with the commands of the New Testament? Or do we turn around and make the New Testament into the second Old Testament?

Do we take our theologies and say, because we have backed them with Bible verses, we use them as excuses to not be more loving?

Do we actually use the Bible to prevent us from loving others more?

Do we actually use the Bible to get out of following the way of Jesus?

What are the consequences of that? Personally and globally?

Again, it does not take you much to see how this is having disastrous results in the world.

If you want, you can look in the Bible and kinds ancient laws that were intended for a very different time than our own, and cite them, and you can do some pretty terrible things.

One author, Jordan Harrell, put it this way (I paraphrase):

Genocide is biblical; loving your enemy is biblical. [That is, there are commands in different parts of the Bible that suggest both]. But only one is Christlike. [Only one is actually lived and modelled by Jesus]

Slavery is biblical [it’s in the Bible]; Chainbreaking [liberation] is biblical. But only one is Christlike. [Only one is preached as central by Jesus]

Patriarchy is biblical; Counter-culture elevation of women is biblical. But only one is Christlike.

Retributive violence is biblical; Grace-filled restoration is biblical. But only one is Christlike.

Segregation is biblical; Unity is biblical. But only one is Christlike.

And you can go on from there.

That, of course, is not saying that the Bible is bad or that we need to get rid of it. Far from.

What he does mean is that if we don’t keep Jesus central, if we don’t follow the Bible Jesus’ way, we can turn even something as beautiful and true and good as the Bible into something idolatrous and destructive.

There are so many widespread implications to this that we do not have time to get into, so let me limit myself and close with this story:

Like many churches, we have communion once a month. When I was pastoring in Sudbury, we had a communion Sunday very similar to here at Billtown: the same way the deacons pray and the elements are distributed. One Sunday my worship leader invited a family to come to church. She was a single mother with three kids, one of whom had autism. She arrived late, just before we served communion. She kind of sheepishly snuck in the back. Well, when I started going over the communion words, something set the poor kid off, and he began running back and forth at the back of the sanctuary. Then he ran up to me, grabbed the communion cup, and ran off with it.

What would you do if that happened? I stood there stunned a bit, but I got a little nudge from the Spirit, I believe. It occurred to me that if we got really wrapped up with what we were doing with the bread and the wine, we could actually be missing the point of what communion was about, and that was, for this morning, welcoming a family with Christ’s love. That is communion.

Without any prompting, some of the older women came and sat down next to the lady and simply said that they were glad she was here. Of course, a ritual purist might insist that communion is about remembering Jesus and making sure the elements are taken respectfully. But could we say, “Communion was made for humanity, not humanity for communion”?

Again, do we so often miss the radical way Jesus is showing us?

June 22, 2026

Despots and Decor Choices: The Throne of God and the Way that Endures

Sermon preached at Lawrencetown United Baptist Church, Sunday, June 21, 2026.

Sermon Scripture Reading: Revelation Chapters 4-5.

When Pastor Andrew invited me to come speak, he pitched it to me that he was going to preach on the Book of Revelation and that I could do the next passage. My immediate thought was, “Boy, you aren’t letting me off easy here.” My next thought was that I am going to have to go re-read some of my books on Revelation. My next thought was, “Andrew is now the one making me have to do my homework!” Maybe Andrew is trying to get back at me for making him read all those books for my classes.

Well, at any rate, I did enjoy revisiting some of these topics as I thought about the sermon for today.

The Context

But make no mistake: The Book of Revelation is one of the easiest books to misinterpret.

For this reason, in the early church, this book was often given something like how movies have a “PG” rating: this book should be read with care.

G. K. Chesterton once said that the Book of Revelation is a book of visions of many strange monsters, but none so wild as some of the book’s interpreters.

I am sure you all know of examples of weird interpretations of the Book of Revelation.

There is a persistent tendency for us to try to read the Book of Revelation as if it were a code to crack, with the events of today clearly providing the cipher.

Some have thought that the number 666 clearly refers to the former Russian President Mikhail Grobechev because—again, clearly—his birthmark on his face was in the shape of three sixes.

Some have thought that the locusts with “tails of scorpions” in Rev. 9 are clearly Apache helicopters.

Some have thought that the mark of the beast is the bar codes on grocery store products. Others think that the mark of the beast is vaccines. I know one person who believes the mark of the beast is credit cards (coincidentally, they have wonderful credit).

In terms of who is the anti-Christ or the false prophet, throughout church history a slew of people have been suggested: in the early church it was the Caesars who persecuted the church, in the middle ages different kings thought enemy kings were the antichrist, others thought the prophet Muhummad was the anti-Christ, during the reformation, Protestants thought the Pope was the anti-Christ, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries: Napolean Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, and others. In recent memory, the leader of the UN, the Ayatollah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, every president, and, a personal favourite of mine, Oprah Winfrey (I guess some people really don’t like Oprah). All of these people have all been accused of being—again, clearly—the Anti-Christ.

If Revelation is treated as a secret code to crack, predicting the future in outline, do you notice something of a perennial weakness in this? The problem is that every generation assumes they are the ones in the real end times because their age is so much more frightening than the previous one, and this gives them something like a blank cheque for how they want to interpret it. One pastor, Greg Boyd, once referred to the Book of Revelation as a literary Rorschach test: When you look at it, much like the inkblots therapists used to use, what you see probably says more about you and what you choose to see than what is actually there.

The Book of Revelation is a prophecy, but it isn’t a prophecy that tells us the future in exact detail. The Book of Revelation is less about predicting the future and more about knowing the patterns of history

It is less about prediction and more about patterns.

We can get really wrapped up in the “what?” or “how?” questions (you know: What does that symbol mean? How is that going to take place?), but the book is more about the “Who?” This book is less about the how and more about the who: it is about the character of Jesus, his Spirit, whether his way is the only way.

The books of the Bible that deal with apocalyptic, which, as one Baptist writer once said, are meant to teach us how to see all history through the eyes of God.

It is not trying to give us a detailed picture of what the future will literally be like. They are more like symbolic glimpses God gives to churches at particular times and places to keep them on the way to a future we simply cannot imagine. Revelation is written to seven churches in the first century, visions that intend to steer them back on track. And if we read the book with that kind of care, we too might sense our own course corrections from the Spirit.

For those who have been tracking with Andrew’s previous sermon, the Seer John of Patmos sees Christ, the Ancient of Days, and tells him to send seven letters to seven churches, each with their own challenges and strengths, which the writer mentions. It seems that these seven churches face all kinds of issues, like persecution, but also lackadaisical, lukewarm faith. Each one of the letters to the seven churches encourages them to persevere, promising that those who overcome will receive God’s promises.

In this regard, the message of Revelation is quite simple: God’s way will overcome. Trust it.

So, the Book of Revelation is less about prediction and more about patterns of history.

It is less about the “how” and more about the “who.”

It is not a code to crack or calculate; it is about our everyday character.

The question remains at the end of these seven letters: What does it mean to overcome? How do you do it? And the question throughout the book is simply: Are Rome’s ways of empire, violence, idolatry, and greed the true way or does God have a different way for God’s people?

The Throne

And to answer this, the topic shifts from personalized letters to seven churches to John being ushered up into heaven in the spirit to see a vision of God’s throne. Why this after those very personal letters to seven churches? Why the change in genre? What is the significance of God’s throne?

Why does a God that is beyond all things need a throne? I don’t think a God who is incorporeal needs to sit, but if he does, what other furniture does God have up there? Does he have a couch and a TV? Why a throne? In asking that, the reason is obvious, but we have to remember that these are symbols that God is giving us to help us understand a place that is beyond what we think time and space are. So, again, why a throne?

The most elaborate throne in history was reputed to be “the Peacock Throne.” This was the official throne of the Mughal Emperors, who ruled the entire Indian subcontinent from the 1500s to the 1800s. We tend to think that this was the age when European nations expanded and ascended to global power with the rise of the British, French, and other European colonial-imperial projects, but while Europe was sending out ships to colonize the world, the Mughal Emperors ruled an expansive land with 150 million people. And they were so wealthy, these rulers possessed roughly 25% of the world’s wealth at the time.

And so, as a demonstration of their power and opulence, these emperors commissioned the building of a throne that would truly show off their glory. You can look up artist renderings of this throne. It was not just a chair like the throne that sits in Westminster Abbey, for the King of England is called St. Edward’s throne. The peacock throne was not just a chair, but rather more like a gazebo or roofed platform that could be carried, carried, mind you, by a small army of servants. It was a golden platform large enough to hold a company of people, with pillars supporting a roof, all of it in gold. The throne weighed 3,000 pounds (those poor servants!).

The throne was adorned with elaborate textiles and decorated with golden peacock sculptures and real peacock feathers. One witness reports that there were close to 27 000 gemstones embedded in the gold of the throne, one of which was among the largest diamonds in the world.

The peacock throne said something about the emperors who sit on it. Thrones say something about the ruler.

Just think of what this attempted to say to people who came near: This person is so important that they don’t need to walk (they have servants for that), they are surrounded by gold and jewels (just to sit on), and their throne is adorned with sacred birds like the peacock, which symbolizes immortality and prosperity.

World rulers always find a way to symbolize their power in the objects around them, whether it is thrones, crowns, or golden wall décor that is actually just a painting moulding from Home Depot.

Here in Revelation, God shows this fantastic, symbolic vision of his throne, and we have to ask, What is this throne communicating about this ruler?

God’s throne is not only encased in gemstones and has the very rainbow itself encircling it.

God’s throne has cracks of lightning around it. It rests on a sea of crystal.

It is surrounded by 24 elders, presumably representing the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles, both worship Jesus in unison.

And there are these otherworldly cherubim circling around, each with a different animal head.

A simple reading might say that while emperors of the world try to show off their thrones, their power, their wealth, their opulence, God turns and says, “You think that is something, eh? Take a look at mine!”

But God’s throne and God’s kingdom are more than just a bigger and better version of a worldly throne. God is not like a human king, only scarier. God is not an opulent tyrant in the sky. God is trying to tell us that God’s rule is fundamentally different.

Remember that the throne has rainbows, and while rainbows are beautiful and sublime, they are also a sign of God’s promise never to destroy the world again. This ruler’s throne suggests not opulence but mercy.

Or, notice that the cracks of lightning and rolls of thunder are the same description of what happened at Mount Sinai, when Moses received the commandments. This God is powerful, but God is holy, just, and good.

Or notice that there are 24 elders who worship God, suggesting that while the church is being attacked by members of the synagogue, Jesus is still the fulfillment of all Israel longs for. God is still faithful to his people.

God, the ruler of the cosmos, is different.

In fact, that is what these other-worldly creatures cry out: Day and night without ceasing they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”

This God’s reign is eternal, this God’s power is ultimate, but this God is holy, pure, good, and therefore different, different from all the rulers of the world.

And so, John gets a vision of the throne of God. This is not the first time in scripture that this happens. When King Uzziah dies, and the country is thrown into turmoil, Isaiah has a vision of God in his heavenly temple, seated on the throne, and the train of his robe fills the temple, and his throne is surrounded by angelic seraphim that cry, “Holy, Holy, Holy,”

The second time in the Bible is when the prophet Ezekiel sees the corruption of the temple and knows that God’s presence is no longer there and that dark days of exile are coming, but then he sees God’s throne coming down surrounded again by strange angelic creatures. This time, Ezekiel sees that on the throne there is one like the son of man, the “Son of Man” is Jesus’ most common title in the Gospels.

It seems that when we are going through turmoil, when things look the bleakest, when the world is quaking from the corruption of its leaders, it is in these times that God gives his prophets visions of his throne and says, “Look to me. Look to the one who rules this world, this cosmos. They are not in control, they are not all-powerful, their rules are not eternal, their lives are not infinite, their ways are not perfect. Mine is.”

“I am the one who was and is and is to come.”

I don’t know if you caught this, but the peacock throne is no more. A Persian army successfully attacked the Mughal Empire and carried off the throne as a trophy, but the general was assassinated, and the throne was pillaged.

It is ironic that the throne that symbolized immortality was melted down and broken into pieces, and the dynasty that ruled on it is all but forgotten.

In the time of the churches of Revelation, Rome proclaimed itself the Eternal City and its rule immortal. John sees a vision of God’s throne, heavenly and surreal, and it forces his readers, then as well as us now, to ask: What thrones, what powers do we trust in? What rule do we really think is going to outlast, a human’s or God’s? Which path dies and which path endures?

The Scroll

And if you trust Jesus’ rule, how does that change how you live? As we go through the Book of Revelation, you will notice that it is not merely an apocalyptic book but a book about worship: the angels are worshipping God here, and benedictions are placed throughout the book. It is trying to get us to realize that who we have our allegiance to is who we worship.

The people of the seven churches are being persecuted. Some of them are being martyred for not worshiping Caesar as Lord. Many felt tempted to give in, go along with the Empire, with its idolatry and its devotion to violent subjugation.

You can imagine them asking: But shouldn’t I support the Roman army? I meant, have you seen the economy? Have you seen the price of gas and groceries these days? Don’t worry about the people our country harms and oppresses; you need to take care of yourself. Don’t question the system. It can’t change. Just go along with it.

Their temptation was different from ours, but not all that different.

And that is why this vision says something to us today: When we see the heavenly throne of God, we are forced to ask: whose kingdom has our allegiance? Who is our true king?

John’s vision goes on to see a scroll, and an angel asks, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”

What is this scroll? Well, if this is a throne room of a king, a scroll is a royal decree. Edicts were sealed scrolls that rulers opened and read.

The scroll is no mystery. The Book of Revelation is not God giving Christians the winning lottery numbers before the lottery is called, so we can effectively hedge our bets. Some think the scroll is predicting the next set of events, but that is not quite what it is.

The scroll is justice. Who is worthy of executing the justice of God? And who will this justice vindicate in the end, the martyrs or the oppressors?

At this John weeps because he believes there is no one worthy in all creation to open the scroll, but then he is corrected: No, there is one. The one on the throne, this Jesus is not just a man, he is Lord and God.

He is the Lion of Judah. He is the king. He has conquered.

It makes you think of King David, the great warrior king with his armour and shield and sword, slaying thousands upon thousands.

Maybe that is what we need! All we need is a warrior to round up all the evil doers and get rid of them. We need another King Cyrus. We need another Constantine. We need another Richard the Lionheart. We need to fight fire with fire.

Is that how we solve evil? We certainly think that way.

But wait, look at what it says. John turns, looking for the Lion of Judah, but who does he see on the throne?

He sees the Lamb that was slain. The Lamb is the Lion. The slain lamb is on the throne, and the slain lamb has conquered, victorious.

Power does not have the final say in this world, suffering love does. Ironically, power is not truly powerful; love is true power.

In the Gospel of John, we could say that there is the third vision of God’s throne: the cross. Jesus tells Pilate that he is a king, just that his kingdom is not of this world. Jesus refers to the cross as his exaltation, his glory. John makes a point of saying Jesus was given a crown, a crown of thorns; he was adorned in royal clothes, the purple robe the Roman guards stripped him of and gambled away; he was lifted up, not with a golden chair, but with nails in his flesh. The sign above him on the cross says, mockingly but ironically, here is Jesus, King of the Jews.

While the Book of Revelation gives us this powerful symbolic vision of the glorious throne of God, we must never forget the throne that redeems us is the one that is made out of two rough planks of wood.

And if this is the case, how does God execute his justice? He does so by serving, by solidarity, by suffering with, and these are what eternal life is about.

Salvation came not by God destroying his enemies, but by dying for them. While we were still his enemies, Christ died for us.

“Take heart,” Jesus says, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

And so, Christ challenges us: Do you want the fullness of life? Do you want the life that lasts? Take up your cross.

When the ways of empire and idolatry want us to go their way of pride, complacency, dishonesty, self-preservation, greed, violence, the Book of Revelation says to us, look to the king, look at the one who has conquered sin, death, and the devil, look at the one who suffered and died and rose again.

Again, whose reign dies and whose reign endures?

Whose kingdom will you follow?

Jesus says to the church in Ephesus, “To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God”

And yet, when we admit that so often we stumble and fail, I am reminded that Romans chapter 8 simply says, “In all these things we are more than conquerors,” not by our own power, for it says, but rather, “through him who loved us.”

May trusting the mercy of God daily renew us deeper into the image of Christ, the Lamb. Amen.

March 23, 2026

Laying Down the Stones: God’s Mercy and John 8

Preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday March 22, 2026.

¹while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. ²Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and began to teach them. ³The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and, making her stand before all of them, ⁴they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. ⁵Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” ⁶They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. ⁷When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. ⁹When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. ¹⁰Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” ¹¹She said, “No one, lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” (John 8:1-11, NRSV)

So, Pastor Angela asked me to speak on the next sermon in this series on the rocks of the biblical narrative. When she told me that the next passage was going to be John 8, I was excited but also a bit nervous. John 8 is one of those passages that is powerful but also perplexing.

Let me put it this way. When I was in college, I took a course on the Gospel of John my freshman year. I loved it. As preparation for the course, the professor made us read the whole of the Gospel of John in its entirety twice before we began. I had never done that before, and when you read the Gospel of John all at once in one sitting from start to finish, you start to realize just how poetic, beautiful, emotionally charged, even thrilling, the Gospel of John is. If you have never done that, I would encourage you to.

And if you do that, you will find as I did, there are so many cherished passages: John 3:16, Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus giving his disciples the new command of love, or the promise of the Holy Spirit. But one of my favourite passages is this one right here: Jesus defending this woman caught in adultery.

The course dove into the book chapter by chapter, and so, the week came around that this passage was next. I was eagerly looking into my textbook to learn more. What was Jesus writing in the dirt after all? But I noticed in my textbook, which was a commentary, this section was not treated. The commentary began at verse 12 and simply offered this explanation: “This passage is not in the originals so it doesn’t belong in the Bible. Therefore it will not be treated as such here.” Oh. The commentator, a respected conservative evangelical New Testament scholar, dismissed it and moved on. “What?!” I thought, “Are you telling me this beloved passage actually isn’t part of the Bible?” As you can imagine, I was a bit thrown off (and maybe you are too—maybe you feel a little bit like the rug has been pulled out from under you as I did). Ever since then, I have pondered this passage and researching it, wondering about it.

Now, before we even get to what God might be telling us in this passage (which I do believe God very much has say something to us through this), we must ask the difficult questions of this passage: Where did it come from? Does it actually belong in the Bible?

For those of you who think I or my textbook have suggested something farfetched or even blasphemous, you can look at any Bible like the ones in our pews (I checked before the service). All of them will say in the little footnotes in the bottom, something like, “not in the earliest manuscripts.” So, don’t shoot the messenger.

I admit I felt tempted to just skip over this issue and pretend it was not there. Most of us would be none the wiser. However, I feel like we owe it to ourselves to be honest with this. Woe to the version of Christianity where you cannot talk about the tough parts of the Bible! Perhaps you have seen that line in the footnotes and wondered. I remember seeing that line in the footnotes in my NIV Bible when I was in high school, when I first read through my Bible. I asked my pastor about it, and he more or less just struggled it off as nothing important and said all we need to do is keep believing. That answer did not really satisfy me and I can’t imagine it satisfying you either.

So, when it says that this passage is not in the earliest manuscripts, what does that mean? One thing that is fascinating to study is the history of the transmission of the manuscripts of the New Testament from the earliest times to now. If you do that kind of study (which I admit some of my colleague are much better studied on this subject then I am), it overwhelming shows just how meticulous and faithful the copies have been preserved from generation to generation.

But I have to admit this instance is one of those head scratchers: This passage first appears in the copies of the Gospel of John in the third century. Why did this passage all of a sudden get tacked on at the bottom of a manuscript of John’s Gospel in the third century? If this is the case, why is it still in our Bible despite Bible translators knowing about this?

Does this mean the Bible has been corrupted and we, modern folk, are just cluing into the conspiracy? Is this like something out of a Dan Brown novel, where the truth has been hidden for centuries by some evil secret order of the church? That is where our mind goes because we live in a culture that is deeply sceptical about institutions and claims to authority.

Well, the reality is actually less exciting. It seems that the Bible copyist in the third century tacked this passage on because he really did feel this was an authentic account of Jesus’ life. It was meant, it seems, like some kind of appendix to the Gospel of John, noting there is another memory of Jesus’ life that the copyist wanted to preserve. Over time, later copyists simply copied it into the main text of the Gospel of John.

But later copyists wondered about this passage, and they would often copy it with the rest of the Gospel of John but put a note around it, flagging that they were not sure if it was original. Copyists have been doing that since the third century to the modern day.

Well, those are the facts. As I said, that is not as exciting as Tom Hanks uncovering a conspiracy as the illuminati chase him, but there it is. That is the non-sugar-coated truth about this passage. So, why did this copyist, two centuries after the events of the New Testament think this passage was an authentic story of Jesus’ life? What gave him the gall to tack it on to the end?

Well, the only reason I see as to “why?” is that there was a common understanding that this was a short memory of Jesus. In fact, there are writings from just after the time of the Apostles where their students and successors talked about what they had been taught. One of these people is a man name Papias, who lived from 60 AD to 130 AD. So, he was a young man when the Apostles were old. Papias was a church leader and, in his writings, he talks about how the Gospels were written by the eyewitnesses of these events and that is why they are trustworthy.

But, of course, there were many more eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and deeds than just the writers of the New Testament. What is also interesting is that Papias also talks about a story about how Jesus intervened when a woman was caught in adultery. So, it seems like this is a story of Jesus’ life that the early church knew about.

It seems that this cherished story was passed along from generation to generation until it was finally tacked on to a manuscript of John’s Gospel in the third century.

This passage may have been written by an apostle or at the least may trace its origins to an eyewitness to Jesus’ life, who that was, we don’t know.

This passage does not seem to have been added out of any deceitful intention. It looks like the copyist really did think this was legit and wanted to preserve it.

Well, what do you do with that? As I said, my textbook in seminary insisted it should be taken out of the Bible. Perhaps, you feel the same. If that is the case, this sermon could have been much shorter.

On the other hand, one New Testament scholar, far from wanting to take it out of the New Testament, has argued it should be left in and we should recognize it as something like a very short “fifth Gospel.”

Others think that maybe God was up to something in having this story come into the New Testament. Perhaps the whole thing was providential rather than scandalous.

I will leave you to ponder that, but for me, perhaps the most interesting argument for seeing this as part of the New Testament is not in my mind the level of certainty I have about where it came from. It is what it says.

When it comes to what is says, we can at least recognize, as whoever it was that copied it down centuries ago, that this story really does sound like the Jesus of the rest of the New Testament. This story sounds like something Jesus would do.

On that note, I think we can continue to ponder all the perplexities of where this story came from, how it got into the New Testament, and what that means for how we understand the nature of the Bible as inspired and things like that. Those are all interesting questions that I continue to ponder and think about—and I continue to ponder them because, I would hope to impress on you that God very much wants us to ponder these questions; God is not threatened by us asking difficult, honest questions, nor do I believe that the central truths of the Bible are harmed by the existence of a difficult passage like this. We can continue to ponder and think about these questions, but as we do, we can also ask God, “What are you trying to say to us with this passage?”

When we ask that question, there is little wonder then that the church, even Christians that knew about these complications about its origin, have nevertheless cherished this as a story that profoundly speaks about who Jesus is. Jesus challenges hypocracy and condemnation with mercy. That sounds like who Jesus is from Matthew to Revelation.

As one Canadian Baptist writer, Stanley Grenz, once put it, the “Bible is the book the Spirit uses.” This story, despite all the questions we might have of it, is a text that the church has heard something from the Spirit for the last 1700 years.

What is the Spirit saying? This story challenges us with Jesus’ prophetic mercy and justice.

A woman, who is caught in adultery is brought to Jesus while he is teaching and a crowd has gathered. Jesus is stealing the show from the religious leaders, so they try to do something about it. She is brought to him in order to test him, to try to trap him. They try to do this in other instances. Think of them coming to ask Jesus about taxes, seeing if he will say something against Roman taxation that will get him in trouble, but Jesus brilliantly says to them after getting them to point out that Caesar’s image is on the money they love so much, “Render unto Ceasar what is Caesars, and what is God’s onto God’s.” Jesus outsmarts them.

Here they try to see if they can pit Jesus’ compassion against his message of justice. Jesus has been eating with tax collectors and sinners, enraging the religious leaders. By included these people, he is robbing the leaders of their status. So here, they try to force his hand: Will he condemned her to death and contradict his practice of showing mercy to the unworthy? Or, if he doesn’t, then they have him explicitly refusing to carry out a command of the Bible.

After all, there is a law in the book of Deuteronomy that said if a couple is caught in adultery, they are to be stoned. If Jesus resists having her stoned, they got him. Or so they think.

Of course, one cannot help but notice how the law says that both the man and the woman who are caught cheating should be stoned. Interestingly enough it is only a woman. Where is the man?

Also, the law stated that witnesses had to be brought forward and a formal trial had to take place. That is not happening here.

This woman—while she by all accounts seems to have the act in question—she is also a victim of sexist injustice. You don’t need to go far today to see this happening today: cover-ups instead of inquiries, sex scandals in the church where the male leadership protects other men while the woman gets scapegoated.

So, are these religious leaders even interested in justice? It seems they are only interested in their own deeply skewed, self-serving version of it. Again, you don’t have to go far to see examples of that today.

It looks like Jesus sees through this. But how does he respond? He does kind of a weird thing: Jesus starts writing in the dirt.

Weird time to start doodling, right? What was Jesus writing in the dirt? We are not really sure, but there is a passage in the prophet Jeremiah that says that God writes the sins of the people in the dirt, and so, some wonder whether Jesus was writing the sins of the religious leaders down in the dirt, and this is one of the things that spooks them, pressuring them to back off as Jesus says, “Let he who is sinless cast the first stone.” Subtext: You’re not, and you need to get off that high horse.

When we look at the laws of the Old Testament, there was nothing in them that said you must be sinless in order to carry out an execution. Yet, for Jesus to declare this, he is in essence challenging the religion of his day to step further into God’s justice, true justice. The laws of the Old Testament where just the beginning of the journey God has us on, teaching us and leading us into deeper and better ways of living.

In the Old Testament, God begins to teach us justice and fairness, that there are consequences to sin that we need to take seriously and avoid. But are the consequences the point?

It should be noted that the early church, while the Old Testament had laws that had the death penalty, based on who they understood Jesus to be, we see that they simply stopped practicing it. Jesus revolutionized how they saw their scriptures.

Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “Justice dies when dehumanized, no matter how exactly it may be exercised. Justice dies when deified, for beyond all justice is God’s compassion.”

If you think faith is about how right we are and how evil everyone else is, how people deserve punishment and how we are safe, you have missed the point.

It has been said, “If justice is an eye for an eye, the whole world would be blind.”

And the sad reality is that many Christians are blind, and when we are they inevitably give our vices a free pass and judge the vices of others as so much worse and unforgivable.

These folks come to Jesus trying to trap him and they are the ones that end up getting trapped. They come to Jesus trying to get him to contradict his message of love and compassion using the law of God, but in the process, Jesus exposes how they are the ones who fundamentally don’t get what the law of God is about.

Jesus starts writing in the sand, some think he starts recounting their sins, and then he dares them: The one who is without sin, cast the first stone.

The Prophet Micah says, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humblywith your God.”

Justice, God’s justice, can only happen when we are merciful and when we stop thinking of ourselves as better than others.

So, the leaders are caught, do they come forward to throw the stone, if they do that, they will look really arrogant, and I think they realize that. They are the ones who are caught.

And so, each leader sheepishly drops their stones and slips away, leaving just Jesus and the woman.

Jesus turns and says, “Where did everyone go?” And of course, Jesus, who actually is one who is sinless, he turns to her and simply says, “Well, if they don’t condemn you, I don’t condemn you. You’re free. Go and have a new life.” Jesus frees her from condemnation and frees her for a new life.

This end of this story feels all too familiar for what else we know about Jesus: The woman at the well joyously goes and tells everyone she knowns what Jesus did for her. Zacchaeus the tax collector is so overwhelmed at the hospitality of Jesus, he changes his life, repaying several times over what he has taken from other people. Jesus’ compassion and mercy transforms people.

This is what the message of Jesus does today.

One time a number of years ago, we were doing a community meal with the church I pastored. At this meal one man showed up. He didn’t look too good. He ate his food. I said “Hi.” He proceeded to want to chat. But he started asking questions. You could tell these were really loaded questions.

He turned to me, and asked, “You’re a pastor right?” “Yes, I said.” “You know about God and stuff, right?”

“I try my best, yes.”

He turned to me and asked, “Is it okay to kill in war?”

I stop, and asked, “what does that question mean for you?” He tells me he has seen war.

We did not get to finish our conversation, but a little while later, I hear this man has ended up in the hospital. So, I got to visit him.

I sit down at his bedside, and he we start chatting. He asks me again, “Is it okay to kill in war?”

I ask again, “What happened to you?”

He told me that he served in the military and he was deployed in a war-torn area. The areas was an area that was ruled by a war lord that had recruited child soldiers, and one kid came at him, and he killed him.

He confessed this to he and I quickly realized, this burden of guilt, the trauma, has been consuming him for years. He felt like he had done something truly unforgivable. His life was marked with this sense of being condemned. Drugs and alcohol, I think for him, was self-punishment.

It wasn’t any use trying to convince him that war is tragic and it was self-defence, at the end of the day, he still had this memory that he kept reliving.

So, I prayed with him and I asked him to close his eyes and imagine that Jesus was in the room with us and just rest in that fact. This is an exercise called imaginative prayer. I read a number of scriptures. I can’t remember if this scripture was one of them.

After a bit, I asked him, can you picture that child, but this time, picture him with Jesus. He agreed to. Is he in a good place now? Yes he said. Is that child hurt anymore? He said no, he is with Jesus now.

I asked him, if he was willing to picture his wrongdoing, to picture it like a box in his hands. He agreed. And I asked him, can you give that chest to Jesus? He agreed.

At this point, he turned to me, with his eyes closed, and he said, I see Jesus taking that box from me. Jesus walked over to a well and he through that box down a well so that it was no more.

I was not expecting that.

I don’t pretend to understand everything what that person saw at that very moment, but I do believe this person realized then and there that Jesus did not condemn him and that Jesus was freeing him from the darkness of his past.

He realized for the first time that God is not the exacting judge in the sky, waiting for us to fail, delighting in pronouncing judgment against us when we fail. God is love and mercy and forgiveness.

If God is revealed in Jesus, God has died the penalty of sin—our penalty—at the cross for us, all to show us that God’s will, God’s justice, is mercy.

If that is the case, if God is willing to invest his very life in us, as I got to say to that person that day and what I am here to tell you today, I just don’t believe that God has given up on us.

The only reason we believe God’s grace is limited is because we are limited people and we have such a hard time fathoming that God is truly love.

As I saw vividly that day, whether or not God is gracious and merciful is not an abstract notion: it can literally make the difference between life and death.

God is not up in heaven holding a stone.

God is with and for us and we can trust it. Can you trust that today?

Can you trust it enough to lay down your stones? Cause we all have our stones. The stones we condemn ourselves with; the stones we condemn others with.

Some of us we cling to that because it’s all we know. We cling to it because freedom is frightening; we cling to it because, at the end of the day, we really don’t want to face the reality that the people we condemn are just like us.

But what if God really does not look at us and divide us up into worthy and unworthy, righteous and wicked, allies and enemies—what if God just looks at all of us, every single one of us, and he simply sees his beloved child; he sees all of us as his family, not one more loved than another? That is an unsettling thing to ponder for what means for our laws, our privileges, our status and place in this world.

What if that whole way of thinking is what Jesus is asking us and that woman to be liberated from when he says, “Go and sin no more”? Are we ready to lay down our stones and step into God’s mercy?

Let’s pray…

September 28, 2025

The Courage to Keep Going: The Journey of Faith

Sermon preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday September 28, 2025.

Scripture Reading: Hebrews 11:1-40 (NRSV).

Faith is like a journey toward God’s destination, a journey we don’t see the end of, but we trust, knowing who God is, that God will bring us there.

Out of curiosity this week, I looked up the longest unbroken walk on record.

The longest unbroken walk on record was done between 1976 and 1983 by a man named George Meegan.

Meegan was born in England. He grew up in a disadvantaged home. His father left him after his mother died of cancer. He was raised by his uncle, and when he was old enough, he ran away to the Navy. He served in the British Merchant Navy until his early 20s and then retired from it with the idea that he would hike the furthest hike on foot anyone has ever done.

He started at the very bottom of South America, walked north, up along the mountain range that runs along the coast (up Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, into Colombia). He went up through Panama, Mexico, into the United States, turned East, and hiked up the Atlantic coast all the way to Canada. From there, he hiked across the Trans-Canada to the West Coast, then went north as far as he could go, ending his hike at the very top of Alaska.

In doing so, Meegan set the world record for longest unbroken walk, walking a total of 19,019 miles. That is roughly 41 million steps.

It took him six years and 12 and a half pairs of hiking shoes.

In crossing into Panama, he hiked through one of the most dangerous areas in the world at the time, the gap between Panama and Colombia, an area controlled by gangs, where he was shot at and someone tried to kill him with a knife. Yet he kept going.

Why did he do what he did? What inspires—or possesses, it depends on who you look at it—what drives a person to spend 6 years of their lives hiking non-stop?

Meegan gave a simple answer: He believed, as a person growing up disadvantaged, he needed to tell the world that “No journey is impossible, especially not if you have the courage to take the first step.”

Meegan went on to be an award-winning educator, inspiring kids in poverty to rise above their circumstances.

Meegan wanted to live his life as if his life was a message to inspire other people: nothing is impossible. Have Courage. You can do it. Take the first step in your life’s journey.

Faith is like a Journey

Faith is kind of like a journey. It can feel impossible, but with God it is possible. Take courage. Keep walking.

One Baptist theologian from about a century ago named William Newton Clarke once put it this way: “Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”

This chapter in Hebrews is really a climactic moment for the book of Hebrews. And for the writers of Hebrews, faith is about continuing on the journey with God.

The author of the book of Hebrews is trying to encourage Jewish Christians who are being ostracized for their faith in Christ to continue and not renounce Jesus and go back to Judaism, even if that lands them in prison.

And so, if you read through the book of Hebrews, a book that some Christian scholars have called one of the most sophisticated books of the New Testament it is rich reading of the Old Testament and its careful presentation of faith in Christ—the book of Hebrews is building this case over 13 chapters that Jesus is worth preserving on with in the journey of faith.

Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word, says Chapter 1.

Jesus is superior to any angel and the law.

Jesus is superior to Moses and the promised land.

Jesus is superior to priests or even the mysterious figure Melchizedek.

Jesus is superior to any sacrifice or covenant in the Old Testament.

Jesus is worth staying on the journey of faith for. And the writer just keeps driving home this message: don’t fall away, keep going, Jesus is greater. The journey of faith in Jesus is worth it.

That brings us to chapter 11, where the writer gives the climax of their argument. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.

By faith, we know the world was made.

By faith, Abel offered an acceptable sacrifice over his brother Cain.

By faith Enoch was carried up to heaven.

By faith, Noah built the ark.

By faith, Abraham journeyed for God and became the father of a great nation.

By faith, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and to the promised land.

Example after example. By faith, great people of the Bible went on the journey with God; they endured difficult things, they did great things for God, and they persevered on the journey. You can do.

God can do amazing things in your life and through your life. Have faith.

Faith as Seeing

Now, I need to say this: Faith involves trust, but that does not mean it is utterly blind faith, nor is it irrational, nor is it foolish, properly understood.

You can only imagine that someone like George Meegan did a lot of planning. He didn’t just crack his knuckles and decide he was going to walk 19,000 miles on sheer willpower.

He had support. He had friends. He had encouragement.

He apparently had good shoes. The record is keen to tell us that they were Italian hiking shoes—fancy—so not just some pair you bought at Walmart for a few bucks in September for a new school year for your kids, since your kids’ feet grow like crazy, then they, in turn, wear out those by November, not like those shoes, thank-you very much. They were good shoes. Just saying.

He had help, but that did not make the task any less daunting.

He still had to start somewhere, and it began with him saying to himself: I want to do this. I believe I can do this. I believe in doing this in order to make myself a better person, to make the world a better place. This, I believe, is something worth doing.

In order to press on in the journey of faith, you need to believe certain things and keep reaffirming that belief. The writer of Hebrews suggests something similar:

And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

This seems like one of those “Duh” moments. If you want to go on a journey with God, you need to believe in God. Thanks, Captain Obvious.

It seems simple, but it is true.

If you want to go on a journey with God, you need to trust that God is there. God is always there, but if you don’t trust that, you don’t know it, and you won’t see it.

One scripture says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

Faith is like a form of seeing. It is how we walk. It’s how we know where we are going. It’s how we know who we are walking with.

What We Believe in Changes How We Walk

Sometimes it is important to state the simple things because we forget the simple things: What we believe about God matters.

If we want to have a sense that we know where we are going and how to get there, we need to grow in our understanding of faith. We need to think about our convictions and work them out in reading our Bibles, studying the advice of saints who have walked before us, praying, and serving. That doesn’t mean we all have to be academics and go on and do courses at ADC (although you can, and that is my shameless plug to convince you to come and study with us there), but we all need to attend to what our convictions are. Why do I believe in Jesus? What does Jesus mean for my life? Why is Jesus’ way the best way?

Hebrews puts a fine point on it as the writer is encouraging Jewish Christians not to go back to Judaism. It probably has the strongest warnings against “falling away” in the whole New Testament. Why not? Why does the author put it so strongly? Does the author really not believe people don’t get second chances? What is so bad about Judaism? Don’t Jews and Christians believe a lot of the same things? In many ways, yes. We share three-quarters of the same Bible.

You can say the same thing about other religions like Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. I am not of the view that we should be putting other religions down. There is much wisdom in these religious traditions, not that all religions are the same. I have read reflections by Islamic theologians that, in many ways, are far more kind and gracious than what some Christians believe.

But I don’t have a problem with this because I don’t believe Christianity teaches that we Christians are superior to others or that we always get things right, far from it. That’s essential advice for the journey.

However, with the author of Hebrews, I can’t get around the fact that Jesus is greater. Jesus is God revealed. Jesus is the perfect embodiment of the law—the perfect way to follow God, the perfect sacrifice—the perfect display of God’s forgiveness and mercy. There is no one else like him.

Jesus, his incarnation, cross, and resurrection show God drawing near to us, dying for us, and giving us hope in a way I just don’t see anywhere else.

Jesus shows us what God is truly like, and that changes things.

And this gives me a different way of seeing myself, others, and our world on this journey.

If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, in his incarnation, I believe that God is on the side of every person. That changes how we walk the journey.

If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who died at the cross, I believe that God is on the side of every person, no matter what they have done, myself included, my worst enemy included. I believe that renouncing the quest for status and power and taking up a way of self-giving love for others reflects the very heart of God. That changes how we walk the journey.

If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who rose from the grave, I believe that death does not have the final say, there is no evil in this world that ultimately has victory, there is no sin that cannot be forgiven, no tragedy that cannot be righted, no pain that cannot be mended into joy. That changes how we walk the journey.

You can say it another way, by trusting Jesus, I know God is with us on this journey.

I know his cross is the best and only way to walk this journey—loving others, sacrificing for God’s kingdom, his justice and truth.

I know because of Jesus’ resurrection that nothing is going to stop us on this journey to God: not sin, not death, not anything.

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Knowing those kinds of things, trusting those kinds of things, sustains us for the journey.

Faith Means Taking the Next Step

But here is the thing: You can have all the right food for the hike. You can have the right shoes, walking stick, everything packed. But it still comes down to whether you are going to choose to take those first steps.

It still comes down to wherever you are, you’ve got to keep on walking: One foot in front of the other.

Some of us are taking our first steps. Some of us are down the road a bit. Some of us —how shall I put this?—may be on their 12th pair of Italian hiking shoes.

God is with us on this journey, but as the author knows, the journey is still tough. It will have rough spots. There will be wandering. You will feel lost at times. You might fall down, trip, and feel like quitting. Or you will have moments where you are walking, but the joy is gone, and you are just dragging your heels.

I can only imagine that after being shot at in Panama, Meegan was probably thinking, “What did I get myself into. I hiked across one continent. Maybe this is far enough.” He probably had a moment where he had to muster up the motivation and conviction to keep going, knowing it would be worth it.

Faith is a journey. There will be obstacles. Keep going.

“Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”

In recounting all the stories of people’s faith, the writer of Hebrews says knowing his audience is facing their obstacle of persecution: Some “were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking, flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy.”

We are not facing the same obstacles that the Jewish Christians of this time were facing. Ours is different. Ours are not the same, but we will have obstacles. If we somehow think that the walk of faith shouldn’t have obstacles in it, we are doing it wrong.

In our day, we could have our own list of modern-day saints, faith-trailblazers.

By faith, Billy Graham presented the Gospel to millions,

By faith, Mother Theresa served the destitute.

By faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed tyranny.

By faith, Martin Luther King fought racism.

By faith, Jimmy Carter worked for peace.

By faith, believers today give witness to Jesus’ coming kingdom in big ways and small.

By faith, God is still working. God is still walking with us. Keep going.

By faith, daily sins are forgiven,

By faith, despair is overcome with hope,

By faith, hate is healed with love,

By faith, injustice is confronted with truth

By faith, lives are transformed by God’s grace.

By faith, God is still working in people’s lives. God is still walking with us. Do you see it? Can you trust this?

By faith, what do you trust God can do with your life?

No matter where you are in your journey, can you, by faith, trust God enough to take the next step?

Whether that is a step into baptism, a step into deeper discipleship and learning, a step into a new way of serving, a step into a new way of giving, a step into a new path for your life or career: big or small.

Can you trust that God is leading us into better things on this journey?

There is an old poem called Footprints about a person walking with God along the beach in life, and the person turns back and notices that during the toughest times of life, there was only one set of footprints. Angry, they turned to God and said, “Where were you in those difficult times?” And God replies, “That is when I carried you.”

My friend has an addendum to this poem: He looked back at some of the best times of life, and instead of footprints, he sees thrashing, claw marks. What happened there, God? God replies: My son, that was when I had to drag you!

Some of us know both of those moments in our journey with God. Hopefully that helps us to be a bit more aware that God is there in the dark times and a bit more ready to step forward in faith into better times God has prepared for us.

May you trust this so that you can take your next step.

And may you trust that wherever we go, God goes with us, leading us deeper into a relationship with him.

Let’s pray,

Faithful and loving God,

God, who is with us in the journey of life.

God, you have never left us or forsaken us.

God help us remember all the moments of our lives, good and bad, and see you there, with us, working goodness, leading us into better.

God, give us your grace so that we can keep walking forward.

God help us to know by trusting you, you are leading us ever deeper into eternal life.

God forgive us for how we stumble. Some of us may be feeling very lost on this journey. Remind us that your grace has no limits. Remind us that you are always with us.

God help us to take that next step.

God, we long to step out courageously as a church, to reach our community, to be witnesses of our kingdom. God give us the eyes of faith to see the opportunities around us.

God, for where you have been with us and where you are leading us, we are thankful.

Amen.

April 13, 2025

The Humility of God: Palm Sunday and How the “Weakness of God” Saves Us

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
    Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
    righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
    and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
    and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
    His rule will extend from sea to sea
    and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zechariah 9:9-10, NRSV)

Zachariah’s Vision of a Lowly King

If you were to skim through the Bible, you would not be hard-pressed to find some grand depictions of God.

Jacob in the Book of Genesis has a vision of God when he is asleep at Bethel. God is at the top of a heavenly stairway, where angels are descending and ascending. It’s spectacular.

In the Book of Second Chronicles, the prophet Micaiah has a vision of God seated on his throne, and again, angels attend to him in a magnificent court.

Or, think of the vision of Isaiah where he sees God the king in the temple, and the train of his robe fills the temple, smoke and thunder bellow, and six-winged angelic seraphim continually praised God, saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” It’s amazing.

Or, you could go to prophet Ezekiel, who has a vision of God on a flying throne of sorts. This vision has this throne laden with gemstones, carried by four surreal angelic creatures, each with four heads glowing and spinning. It’s remarkable.

Or you could go to the prophet Daniel, who has a vision where God stands on the clouds above all the powers of the earth in judgment, and he is called the ancient of days.

God in these visions is majestic, all-mighty, holy, transcendent, and awesome.

These visions were given to these prophets in times of turmoil to remind the people that God is beyond their circumstances. God is of a magnitude that makes all our problems look small.

All of these depictions are true and good and comforting, but that is not what Zechariah does. The passage I just read is a prophecy from Zechariah, spoken to the people during a time of great chaos as well, but the vision takes a very different path to comfort the people than these other ones. Zechariah, in other passages, has similar descriptions of God to the ones we just listed, but here it is different. This one doesn’t give us the lofty vision.

And this morning, I want to reflect on a quality of God that we probably don’t think as much about: the humility of God, the lowliness of God. When was the last time you thought of God as humble or lowly? It doesn’t seem like something God should be.

Zachariah lived more than 500 years before Jesus, and he gives visions in his book that are meant to warn the people of their complacency but also comfort them with hope. Like most prophetic books he begins very heavy on the words of warning but moves into the final chapters with words of comfort, which is where this one happens.

So, what do these visions pertain to? The people have returned from being exiled, and their land has been decimated. Life is hard and uncertain. Enemies prowl the countryside to raid innocent people. There is lawlessness in the land. The great empire of Babylon has fallen, but the Persian empire now reigns. Persia is more tolerant of the Jews, but this is still a far way off from the visions of restoration the earlier prophets spoke about. And so, the people are wondering where is God’s kingdom? Why isn’t God showing up in power and glory, in fire and fury? When is God going to restore King David’s rule? Why isn’t God appearing like he promised to crush our enemies, make them pay, and make things better? Isaiah promised a day of peace so extraordinary cosmic that one day the lion will lay down with the lamb. When is that coming?

Zechariah’s answer to all of this is somewhat strange. God is coming; he is sending his king, his messiah representative, who will bear this redeeming presence perfectly. What does he look like?

See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, but lowly—humble—and riding on a donkey.

Oh, okay? And this is the image Jesus uses when he rides into Jerusalem, praised as a prophet and messianic hopeful by the people. The people expect a mighty king, riding in on a stallion in armor and gleaming sword. The people cut palm branches, which were the symbol of the house of the Maccabees, legendary warriors and freedom fighters from Israel’s history. The people are thinking, finally now that day has come.

Yet, Jesus invokes this passage from Zechariah by choosing to ride in on a donkey: Humble, lowly. You can only imagine this might have been a bit confusing for some of the crowds: this guy?

I mean it is sort of like a world leader strolling into parliament driving a rusty, old delivery van. Somewhat underwhelming, you might think. And let’s be real: that is not what we want our leaders to do. We want the motorcade of limos and police escorts driving in perfect synch with lights flashing and little flags on the aerials. We want the expensive suits. We want people behind them also in suits, wearing sunglasses and eye pieces, concealing body armor and pistols. We want the displays of power.

Because let’s face it, when the going gets tough when my place in the world feels threatened and I feel like I need protecting. I don’t want a pushover in my corner.

If things get tough, who do I want on my team? Do I want Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter who bumbles about, or do I want indestructible Superman flying in in his red cape and laser vision?

Do I want the wussy Prince Adam, or do I want He-Man?

Do I want Popeye before he eats his spinach or after?

The choice is kind of obvious. Or at least it certainly seems so.

But a scan through world history might give us some caution. Just how often are the mighty on the side of the needy? Just how often are the rich on the side of the poor? Just how often are those of status on the side of those who are marginalized?

How often are the powerful good? Not very often.

Zechariah’s description almost sounds contradictory: Righteous, victorious, lowly. It feels like history usually only grants one of those at a single time.

You get one or the other. After all, “nice guys finish last” we say.

History shows that when we feel vulnerable, we don’t want the nice guys. We will choose the Alexander the Great’s, the Julius Caesar’s, the Constantine’s, not the Gandis, not the Mother Teresa’s, not the Desmond Tutu’s. And where does that get us?

How often are the powerful good?

Bonhoeffer and the “Weakness of God”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us of this. Bonhoeffer was a pastor who lived during Nazi Germany. He founded a school that educated pastors against what the Nazis were trying to indoctrinate people with. The Nazis, as I am sure you all know, taught that Germany was God’s nation, the church, and the state were very much not separate, and so its leader must be God’s chosen, and Germany wanted to be strong and indeed was willing to be cruel to reclaim the prosperity it thought it deserved. Bonhoeffer saw this for what it was and denounced it as idolatry, even when most Christians in Germany didn’t listen. (Feel free to draw your own parallels to today’s political situation).

Bonhoeffer was censored by the police, and so, at one point he fled Germany for the US, only to reconsider and return. He believed that he could not rightfully lead the German people after the war if he ran from the problems they were facing.

So he returned, and in an effort to undermine the Nazis, he started using his contacts for the resistance. He began passing information around, some of which pertained to a possible assassination attempt on Hitler, which he was caught with and imprisoned and awaited execution. This part of his story is kind of complicated and debated as Bonhoeffer was, by conviction, a pacifist, but it seems that he was willing to help the resistance, and what that meant for his convictions is not clear.

Whatever the case, as Bonhoeffer awaited execution in prison, he kept a journal and wrote profound papers reflecting on the meaning of Christ in this messy, modern world he saw, this “world come of age” he called it.

Bonhoeffer realized how the power of God came to be used to justify the power of the state, the power of dictators, the privilege of the people against other people, and how the church can get corrupted by all this all too easily. If God is primarily about power—if that is the primary way we think about deity—then there is a dangerous possibility that you can easily slide from worshiping the God who is powerful to simply worshiping power itself. When you do that, you will be more than willing to oppress or even kill anyone who threatens your power.

How often are the powerful good? Not very often.

And so, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer wrote these famous words:

“[God] is weak and powerless in the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us… Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world… The Bible, however, directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.”

The God who can save humanity must be a weak and suffering God, a God humble and lowly.

Why? It is only this that breaks our fatal addiction to power and privilege, our proclivity to solve our problems with violence and greed.

After all, if God is only a God of power like Zeus or Odin or Baal, who will one day obliterate all his enemies, why shouldn’t we do the same?

If God is the lofty God that does not tolerate any grievances against him, why shouldn’t we do the same?

If God is just a dictator in the sky, even if he is the most powerful one, this will never stop us from worshiping earthly dictators and secretly dreaming of how it would be nice to have that kind of power ourselves.

We can never see God’s kingdom by stockpiling power; we will never see the kingdom by eliminating our enemies. It doesn’t work like that. It never has.

This is a part of the lesson Jesus is trying to show us when he rides into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday. See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, but lowly—humble—and riding on a donkey.

Jesus, the King who Refuses Status

Jesus, throughout the Gospels avoids and rejects the marks of status and position. It is not the way. Even though he, of all people, deserves it. He is a descendant of David, after all. He is someone claiming the status of messiah, the rightful king of Israel. He is the one shown by the Spirit to be the bearer of God’s kingdom, God’s presence. The dove descended on him in baptism, claiming, “This is my beloved Son.” He is favored by God.

What does Jesus do with this status? When you look at the Gospels, you see Jesus very intentionally refusing to take up his status or seek recognition. He does things that almost bewilder us like when he heals a person, he just tells them to show themselves to a priest and go on their way as if he does not want any money or fame from it all.

Or when Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus tells him not to tell anyone. That’s a head scratcher: Hold on, there is a new king in town, and you don’t want us to spread the word? It’s like he is a completely different kind of king.

Jesus could have marched himself into a palace and said, “This is mine now.” He could have demanded servants bring him the finest clothes, the best foods, the purest wine, the latest version of the Iphone. He could have raised an army and punished anyone who questioned him. He could have made the masses bow down to him and grovel.

But if he did, would he be offering us anything different from what we see in the world today?

Jesus: born to a poor peasant girl, suspiciously out of wedlock.

Jesus: born in an alleyway stable, found lying in an animal’s feeding trough for a crib, wrapped in rags.

Jesus: the homeless rabbi, who has to live off of the donations of a few women.

Jesus: the miracle worker, who does not want any credit for what he does.

Jesus: who, after giving the most clear instructions on who he is at the Last Supper, took a towel and began to wash his disciples’ feet like a household servant.

Jesus: who when a band of thugs came to arrest him on false charges, refused the path of insurrection and violence and, in fact, even healed one of the men sent against him.

Jesus is showing us a different way.

Jesus: executed on a Roman cross—the most shameful way to die in that world—betrayed by his own disciples, denounced by his own religion’s authorities, abandoned by the people that just days earlier declaimed them his king, did not curse anyone but prayed, “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.”

Let’s just put it simply: If Jesus is the kind of person who cared about being treated with the importance he deserved and if Jesus cared at all to use his power to make sure the people who wronged him got what they deserved, our prospects for salvation would be zero. But that is not who Jesus is.

As Jesus said to his disciples, “The Son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45)

Or Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, chapter 2. Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very natureof a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

Not a “Clark Kent Christology”

Now, often when I have heard this, I know what I have thought, and I think a lot of Christians have a tendency to read this with what I like to call the “Clark Kent Christology.” Because, again, we want Superman. We want the power, not the humility. We prefer to believe that Jesus really is Superman incognito. He came for a short time disguised as Clark Kent. But you better watch out, because any moment he is going to go into a phone booth and come out in all his glory and start beating people up.

Yes, Jesus is coming in resurrected glory, but it would be a fatal error to see this as different from what he has been showing us his whole life till that point.

And if we make that mistake, we are back to where we started again: A God whose power works all too similar to the powers of this world.

But the Gospels are not trying to say this: Jesus did not become less God by becoming human or any less God by becoming a servant or any less God by dying on the cross for us. Quite the opposite.

The Apostles use all kinds of language to express this mysterious truth: The Gospel of John says Jesus is the logos of God, the word made flesh. Paul says in Colossians that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God; Jesus, the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily. The Letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.

These are all trying to get us to see that when we look at Jesus, the God who gives up the powers and privileges we think God rightfully has, we are actually looking at the very essence of God: a God who forgives the worst wrongs done to him, a God willing to suffer with us in our darkest moments, a God willing to be in those god-forsaken places like an execution cross.

This God does not put his status above others. This is a God of humility, and this is how we know God is with us.

The Gospel of John even goes so far as to call the cross of Jesus his “glorification” as King, as if to say, if you miss seeing God here in Jesus, on this cross, suffering and dying in this wretched place. If this is not the apex moment for how you think about God, you have missed the point, and you are very likely going to miss seeing God with you in your lowest point, too, sadly. The two are connected.

That is the point of Palm Sunday. The humility of God is the true power and glory of God. Neil Copeland writes about this in a poem:

Mary sang to the unborn Christ,“The Lord on high be praised,

Who has brought down the mighty from their thrones,

and the humble to honour raised!”

And if she had heard the laughter of God,

Still she would not have seen the joke,

When her son rode into Jerusalem,

Riding his borrowed moke,

As all through the shouting jostling crowd,

And over their cloaks he trod—

The highest of all on a poor man’s beast,

And a donkey the throne of God!

Copeland’s poem says there is almost an ironic humor to the whole thing—the “laughter of God,” “the joke”—God raises up the lowly by showing us the true power of humility.

It is the humility of God that is our hope. It is the weakness of God that saves us. It is a notion so counter-intuitive to what we want and know. It sounds almost blasphemous to think about the weakness of God, but that is the words the Apostle Paul himself used to get us to realize the truth we need to hear:

“Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.” (1 Cor. 1: 24-30)

The Humility of God is the Possibility of the Church

Did you hear the connection there? The humility of God, the weakness of God—this is also the possibility of the church, the possibility of real change, for this is the true wisdom and power of God.

How often do we forget this? In the 1990’s, the Baptist Pastor Jeffery Brown came to a small church in a dilapidated part of Boston. Violence in Boston at the time was careening out of control. Gunshots could be heard through the night most nights. Brown tells the story of how he prayed that God would do something, feeling powerless, like he was too insignificant to be able to do something about what plagued his community.

When a young man was killed on the doorstep of the church, Brown realized that God was calling him to do something. Sometimes, when you pray for change, God calls you to be that change. So, what did he do? He decided he would start a group of pastors, and they started staying out at night, coming up to gang members and befriending them, hoping to see if this would make some difference. People said that doing this was a waste, unbecoming of a pastor to do. In fact it was not safe.

Yet, in time, the gang members started trusting these guys and the pastors started asking these boys, “Do you really want to live like this? What can be done to actually help make sure you boys are safe so that you don’t need guns, drugs, and violence?” They listened, and they were able to engage community services.

Through Brown’s efforts, gang violence went down nearly 80%. The result, you can listen to Jeffery Brown’s amazing Ted Talk on this. It came to be called the “Boston Miracle.” They call it that because, sociologically, that level of violence reduction is impossible.

The change did not come by some slick politician making promises. It did not come with some grand show of force to clean up the streets, to arrest and jail all those criminals that society deemed irredeemable. It came by ordinary people, these pastors, getting over their feelings of security and status to go out and dwell with struggling kids on the street. That is all it takes for miracles to happen.

If God can use the cross to defeat sin and death in all its weaknesses, God can use you. God can use us. God can choose people who feel they have no business claiming to be holy and respectable, let alone powerful and important, to do the things we sometimes only believe are reserved for those who are worthy.

The kingdom of God does not come through billionaires or celebrities. It does not come to the extraordinary and special. It is not reserved only for some elite class of super-spiritual folk.

The kingdom of God is possible in you and through you, in us and through us: the body of Christ.

If you can imagine the strange sight of a group of pastors hanging out with drug dealers, playing basketball with gang members at 2:00 in the morning, you are not far off from the feeling it might have been to see Jesus that first Palm Sunday.

And what will we see if we dare to imagine Jesus’ way in our lives, in our communities today?

See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, but lowly—humble—and riding on a donkey.

Amen.

December 16, 2024

A Difficult Joy

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
    you who seek the Lord.
Look to the rock from which you were hewn
    and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father
    and to Sarah, who bore you,
for he was but one when I called him,
    but I blessed him and made him many.
For the Lord will comfort Zion;
    he will comfort all her waste places
and will make her wilderness like Eden,
    her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her,
    thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isa. 51:1-3 NRSV)

Hope to the Exiles

One of my favorite Christmas songs is O Come O Come Emmanuel. It is probably one of the oldest songs we sing in church, being written in 800 AD (1200 years ago). This old hymn was sung by monks as part of their Christmas vespers or prayers.

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel;
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

One thing I love about it is its slow and lamentful tone, as well as its proclamation of hope and joy.

This verse speaks to what this passage in Isaiah is really talking about: the difficult joy of God’s hope. The people are in exile and ruin. Their capital city, Jerusalem, Zion, with its temple, the centerpiece to how the people relate to God, how they know God is present to them, has been leveled to the ground and burned, reducing the countryside, as the prophet describes here, to a waste.

They have experienced the loss of their homes. Many of their family members were killed, and the people were divided. Poor peasants were left to the broken countryside of a now vassal state for an oppressive empire. If you were educated or useful in some way, you were taken captive in Babylon to serve the imperial house in some way. Many of these people were innocent people. These were not sinners being punished, but people who sought righteousness, the text says, yet endured the trauma of seeing Jerusalem fall and the hardship of exile. This is what Daniel and others faced, and they wondered where God was in all this. Why wasn’t God coming to their rescue? Why did it seem like they were getting punished with the rest of Israel that went the ways of idolatry and corruption? It did not make sense.

Captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here.

And while the people of God were able to come back to their homeland after the exile, they still faced the oppression of being ruled by tyrannical foreign powers till the time of Jesus. One empire after another oppressed God’s people in history: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and, finally, at the time of Jesus, the Romans.

Year in and year out, the people had to live with a sense that things were not right; things are not as joyful as they were promised to be.

Difficult Christmas

I think many of us can feel the same way about Christmas approaching, that it is not as joyful as it should. I don’t know what it is about this year, but I feel like I have heard a lot more about people having a hard time finding joy at Christmas. I don’t know why.

I spoke to one lady. We talked about favorite Christmas traditions. I had just put up my tree with my kids, which I love doing because we have so many ornaments on our tree that represent different memories and milestones for our family (I also have a sweet set of Star Wars ornaments).

She turned to me to confess that she really could not get into the Christmas spirit because of how bad her relationship was with her father, who was particularly mean around the holidays.

Another told me that they don’t really do much for the holidays since they don’t have family in the area. They were probably just going to treat Christmas Day as a day off and watch TV; otherwise, remembering it was Christmas just made them feel really alone.

I spoke to another person who just said that the expectations of Christmas, whether the food or the gifts, or the winter heating bill, were always so expensive, and it was always hard to get into the Christmas spirit amidst all the worries about money. For some, the Christmas holidays are often just one day off, packed with more busyness than one is expected to do, all before having to go back to the grind of working a difficult, stressful job.

Another person voiced to me that this year, the state of the world has impacted them so severely: the wars that are happening, the political turmoil, and climate change. It makes any privilege we do have to feel bittersweet, even joyless. It is hard to celebrate and be merry when it feels like the rest of the world is burning.

This week, we light the Joy candle, but sometimes, we have to recognize how difficult joy can be in our world. It does not come easy. Have you felt that? Have you had a Christmas that just did not feel joyful? Perhaps you are having that season now?

The holiday season does something: it often amplifies whatever you are feeling. What do I mean by that? If you are having a pretty fortunate year, if you have lots of family and food around you, Christmas can just magnify those feelings of gratitude and fulfillment. However, if your year just isn’t going well, you are feeling down on your luck, feeling a bit alone, Christmas can intensify those feelings also, not to mention you can feel guilty for not feeling happier.

Can we be honest about those feelings? Because if I am honest, I sometimes feel those things too. I often feel them around this year, but especially this year.

Tuesday, Dec. 17^th, will mark the 15^th year since my mother died. That has been really weighing on me. Let me tell you the story. Forgive me for dumping my emotions on you this morning, but here it goes…

My mother died of breast cancer that went to her liver. Meagan and I had gotten married in May of that year. She looked well at our wedding like she had beaten the cancer. That is what we all thought. She had been battling it since I was in high school.

Then, the cancer returned according to a diagnosis in the early fall. It was everywhere. My mother was obsessed with new-age alternative medical treatments, thinking they would do something, but they didn’t work. I got a text from my brother, “Spencer, the doctors say she only has a few more months to live.” She was in denial at first, but we all knew it was true. She did not want to go to the hospital, so my sister, who lived at home, cared for her for the most part. Meagan and I came on the weekends. Her physical condition got worse and worse.

It finally came to the point where she had to go into hospice care. It was approaching Christmas time. There was no snow on the ground in Hamilton, but it was bitterly cold with strong winds off the lake. My brother, who lived down in the US, flew in to be at her bedside. We all took shifts, but we more or less all lived at the hospital for the next week. We survived on cafeteria food and coffee.

A lot of relatives and friends came by to visit my mother at this time.

Her state worsened over the next day or so. I just sat with her. She was awake less and less. In the moments then, I just kept telling her that I loved her and I would pray. Her breathing took on a rattle. Someone remarked that it sounded almost like coffee percolating—thanks to whoever said that—because for almost a year after, I could not be in the room while a loud coffee machine was brewing (and if you know me, you know that I love coffee, so that was awful).

The time had come, the nurse informed us. The family was all there by her bed. Someone invited me to pray. I prayed, thanking God for her and inviting her to go and be with Jesus. My mother took her last breath, and that was it.

We sat there for a few minutes in sober silence. The nurses came in and took her body away.

We slowly turned to practical matters like planning the funeral. We had the funeral the day before Christmas Eve. I don’t remember a lot of the service, but I do recall a friend of the family playing “In Christ Alone” for the service.

That Christmas, my family was all assembled at my mother’s home: my brother, sister, Meagan, and I.

On Christmas Day, we all sat together around the tree. There were no gifts because none of us really thought about buying anything in all the chaos.

I used to hear that some people did not like Christmas, and I thought those people must be some sort of mean, Grinch-like, Ebenezer Scrooge-like, Baw hum-bug grumps. Now I understood it. The next Christmas just was not all that enjoyable. Everything reminded me of my mom when I heard Christmas music, like my mom’s favorite Christmas song, Feliz Navidad. The lights, the food, the sounds, the ornaments—the expectation of being merry did the opposite.

Finding joy was difficult.

The Shepherds

It is in this context, this place, this space, this situation of joy being difficult, that we find the Christmas story. Or better stated, the Christmas story finds us. The reasons it was for them back then is different from us today, but we see a promise that applies to both.

There are many folks in the Christmas story that we could describe as in a place of difficulty.

I think of Mary, the poor young girl who agrees to bear Jesus. Joseph, who now had to navigate this strange new relationship and responsibility, how this will look with his family and his reputation in the community, how he had to flee political threats now from Herod.

But I am drawn to the shepherds in the Christmas story, in Luke chapter 2.

Shepherding was one of the poorest jobs one could have in that society (and not to mention dangerous, out in the wilderness with the elements, wild animals, and bandits). It was a job for outcasts. It is a job for people who were down on their luck.

Remember that King David was once a shepherd. He wasn’t one because the job was prestigious. He was the youngest of a large family, and so his father gave him the least desirable job in the household, tending flocks out in the wilderness. It was a job for the unwanted.

What would be the equivalent of their job today? Overnight Gas station attendant, perhaps. People who work at call centers are forced to do telemarketing because they need the money. People who have to drive taxis for a living. These are, according to reports, some of the least desirable jobs in our communities. Shepherds were marginalized folk, folk that did not have a lot to be joyful about in their lives.

Yet, this is who the Gospel is announced to. The angel announced, “Do not be afraid, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy for all people.”

Sometimes we can hear “good news for everyone,” but it can sound like “good news for people except me,” or “except for them.”

Isn’t it interesting that while the glad tidings are good news for all people, the angels did not appear to everyone? They appeared to the shepherds as if to say, if this is good news for you, for the least fortunate of society, then people can understand that this is good news for everyone.

The shepherds go and find Jesus, and the angels say that you will find your messiah wrapped in ragged cloth and lying in an animal feeding trough, a manger, and these things will be a sign to you of God’s good news for everyone. Most commentators of this passage say that this sign is just how to find the messiah, sort of like if you meet a person you have never seen, and they text you saying I’m the one wearing a red shirt.

However, I think it is more than that. These things are a sign to you. You will find the messiah born into poverty, lying in a dirty feeding trough, wrapped in rags, not expensive clothes, not in a golden crib. This messiah is a messiah for those in difficult circumstances. He is your king.

This is a sign that God understands us. God understands what we are going through. God is with us.

Since God is with these folks, we know God is with everyone.

If this event were to happen here, what would be the equivalent of the manager? We have such a whitewashed notion of the manger scene, so clean and regal. It is not a dirty alleyway stable; it is in so many nativity scenes.

It was this kind of space that Jesus was born in, wrapped in someone’s tattered second-hand coat. Who might come to see him? The poor, the drug addicts, the folks that work night shift struggling to get by realize if this baby is going to be our leader, things are going to get better, but he’s one of us.

Today in Kentville, you could imagine Jesus being born by the dumpers in a parking lot at Center Square.

A messiah born into poverty rather than power and privilege: This messiah is good news. He gets us. He is on our side because if God is on the side of the least of us, God is for everyone.

These are glad tidings of great joy that will be for all people.

You don’t have to love all the running around, all the expenses, or all the expectations of Christmas. You don’t have to love eggnog fruit cake or turkey (although I don’t know how anyone could not like those things). You don’t have to love movies with Macaulay Culkin or Chevy Chase in them (again, I don’t know how, but everyone is different). There is a lot about Christmas that can be exhausting and difficult, with or without carrying heavy emotional burdens. We can admit that.

However, we can still have joy, joy for the least of this world, joy for all.

How do we live joy?

How do we live joy when it does not come easy? It got easier over the years, and here are the things that worked for me. Let me give you a few things I learned over the years.

First is to rest in Jesus, rest in the joy of Christ: the truth that God understands us, God has drawn near to us; God is with us; God is for us.

Take time in all the business for prayer, reading scripture, sitting in silence, or perhaps just listening to the words of some Christmas carols and reflecting on their words. It might not be immediate as healing takes time, but doing these things keep our hearts prepared for better things. And better things will come.

The second is to cherish the simple good things that remind you of the good around us.

I remember when my mother died, and we all sat around the tree with no presents under us; I remember thinking that the gift we had that year was simply each other.

There is something about the pain we feel, when it reminds us about the fragile nature of life, it can also remind us of the preciousness of life.

Third, it will be different for everyone, but for me, have our kids made Christmas enjoyable again, whether it was watching Home Alone with them or decorating Christmas cookies. Seeing their joy at Christmas became a source of joy for me.

Perhaps that was one of the most significant ways I learned to have joy at Christmastime, when I realized bringing another joy deepened my own. Bringing joy to another helps us to have joy ourselves

Enjoying another’s joy. It reminds me that the year after my mother died, I worked as the coordinator of a soup kitchen in downtown Toronto. It was a rough job as I worked with homeless people, people facing really difficult circumstances. Many of the people I worked with had been abused by churches and pastors. They had been abandoned by Christians.

Yet, I remember doing our Christmas meal at the soup kitchen, and afterward, we sang Christmas carols. Suppose you can imagine a whole gym full of folks singing Joy to the World. I was struck by seeing people whose lives were so much more difficult than my own, people whose stories involved so much more hurt than my own, singing Christmas carols with joy. It changes your perspective. It permits you to have joy again.

Fourth, being in a space like that reminds you also that there is a responsibility to joy. As I sat with people who were homeless or in severe poverty, I often felt challenged. Many folks in poverty were not the lazy people who were draining my hard-earned tax money, a notion I was taught growing up. These were people often with mental health or physical disabilities, people who faced terrible abuse when they were young, or people who faced tragedy.

The terrible fact was that I could have just as easily been one of those people. We do not choose the family we are born into or the circumstances of privilege we are given. We don’t choose our brains or our bodies, nor do we choose what tragedies we will experience.

That means there is a sort of responsibility to joy. If we have been blessed, if we have been fortunate, Jesus’ way implores us to look for others to help, to bring joy to, to help those in need in our communities.

I feel like we have not been doing a good job here. So many of us have been so concerned with our financial hardships, we have forgotten others that are in more need than us.

Do you know a man was found frozen to death in one of those tents down by Miner’s Marsh? A 52-year-old man named Bobby Hiltz, a man that struggled his whole life with addiction and mental health. He was forced out of his home because his landlord spiked their rent. I wonder: What would have been a sign of glad tidings for Bobby Hiltz?

I believe our community has failed to address the poverty and care for the marginalized around us. We have failed to bring joy to those who need it.

We have glad tidings of great joy for all people. Will we live that this Christmas for everyone?

Will we be that sign?

The Christmas message is that God is bringing about God’s kingdom, where the first will be last, and the last will be raised up first. If you have experienced God raising you up, will you turn and do that for another?

Luke, two chapters later, says, it is the message of good news to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free. I am reminded of the verse in Joy to the world that says

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as far as the curse is found.

Christmas is the sign that God keeps his promises. God’s blessings flow as far as the curse is found. God will undo and restore all that has ever gone wrong in this world, making it new.

As Isaiah says, he will comfort Zion and he will turn her wastelands into Eden again.

Are we preparing ourselves to let that reality into our lives this season?

Are we prepared to live that reality for others?

That is, as I have learned, a difficult but also beautiful joy.

Let’s pray.

God of all hope and comfort, God of all goodness and joy.

God who has come in our lord Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us.

God, we bring our struggles to you, our burdens, our worries, and maybe perhaps our frustrations and hurts.

God, remind us that you know us; you are closer to us than even we are to ourselves. You know what we have gone through, and you have seen our lives with perfect mercy and grace.

God, remind us of all the good things around us, the small graces we sometimes forget. God, give special gifts of your comfort and joy to those who especially need it this season.

God, also give us the eyes to see and ears to hear the needs for comfort and joy around us. Give us opportunities to be your hands and feet this Christmas.

God, our joy is your gift of hope, that you are a God of love and grace, that you have come to redeem us from our sins, to heal this broken world, to set right all that has gone wrong, to restore all things.

God, you give us so much. Give us the joy of thankful hearts in you in these coming days.

These things we pray in your name, amen.

June 15, 2024

Longing to be One (Or Alternatively Entitled: Why God is Not an Egg)

Preached at ADC Chapel, January 24, 2024 (some will recognize earlier versions of this sermon from earlier posts on this blog).

In the Gospel of John, John records Jesus on the night of his betrayal, instructing the disciples about many things. He tells them about things like his new command of love and about the coming of the comforter, and here he does something particularly remarkable. Jesus prays for the church.

²⁰“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, ²¹that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²²The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, ²³I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. ²⁴Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. ²⁵“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. ²⁶I made your name known to them, and I will make it known so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.” (John 17:20-26, NRSV)

Here, John uses this language that within God there are two identities (and a third he mentions a few chapters earlier): Father, Son, and the Comforter, Holy Spirit, and these three identities, these persons, these three somethings are one, a mystery the church has puzzled over ever since, speculating on the meaning of person, being, substance, relations, and a whole lot more terminology. Sadly, the Trinity is nothing but terminology for many.

Dorothy Sayers, a Christian novelist and a friend of C. S. Lewis, once joked that she felt like the doctrine of the Trinity was something theologians thought up one day to make life harder for the rest of us. Ya, caught me, Dorothy! While that was a joke, we have to admit that probably most of us at one point have sympathized with Sayer’s feelings on the matter, and for some, that may have been around week 12 of Christian Theology Part One last semester (I don’t know, just a guess). Rest assured; this is not a sermon about why you need to know the historical context of terms like homo-ousia or hypostases, as important as those are. For surely, the Trinity is more than concepts and vocabulary.

Too often, the Trinity is relegated to the equivalent of the appendix: an unnecessary fixture next to our large intestine that some will just eventually have removed. Or worse: Too often, the Trinity is the club to bludgeon the dissenter with rather than a bandage to nurse the sick soul. Most often, when the Trinity is mentioned in some churches, it is to point out just how wrong some people are and how right we are. (And if that is what we think doctrine is meant for, we have missed the point).

Or we try to over-explain. If you grew up in the church, you might have been subjected to quite possibly the most overused theological explanation of all time: “The Trinity is like an _____ (egg!). There is the shell, the yoke, and the white part. Or God is like water because it can be a solid, liquid, or gas.” There you go. Solved it. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find the idea that God is like an egg all that comforting. And we wonder why Christian beliefs don’t connect with people.

I mean, at least we could have chosen a better food. The Trinity is like waffles: the waffle, the butter, and the syrup poured out like the Holy Spirit. Look, see, there are three, and they are delicious!

The Trinity is like bacon. I can’t think of three aspects of bacon, but if God is like bacon, I want it!

Well, analogies have limits, especially when it comes to mysteries. Dorothy Sayers followed up her joke about the Trinity with a really good piece of advice: if you want to understand the doctrine, you need to look at the drama. If you want to understand our Triune God, look at the story of Scripture. It is here that we encounter the character of God.

To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator of all that is reveals Godself in the history of a people, the Israelites, a people oppressed and enslaved under idolatrous tyranny. This God says God is One, the I am who I am, the living God and this God rescues the Israelites out of bondage to be a chosen people, a nation of priests, to reflect God’s character to the rest of the world, and this One God longs to be one with us.

If you want to know that doctrine, you need to know the drama. And so when we look at the narrative of the Bible, we see this One God revealing who God is in this pursuit of being at one with us in a way that mysteriously takes on—for lack of a better word—different dimensions to God’s self: the God who is beyond all things, infinite, transcendent, and almighty, is also the root of all existence, the breath of life, the presence of beauty, one in whom we live and move and have our being, the movements of love, known as Spirit.

As the narrative shows, these dimensions relate to one another. God sends his messiah, the king, but a king that is more than another human king; he is God’s only begotten Son, yet one with the Father. The Father sends the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness, this reconciling oneness with all things Israel was called to, and Jesus does so through sending the Spirit.

This is probably where it gets confusing for people (and we do not like confusing). What does it mean to be at one? Isn’t all this oneness talk just impractical abstract mystical stuff? Are we right to ask, as modern people, is all this really useful?

Or does it name something we long for? On December 31, 1989, Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, aired the band’s dirty laundry in a radio interview. The band was on tour with an album some regarded as evidence that the band was over the hill. The reality was the band was burning out. Bono had had his first child, and being away from his family was emotionally draining. Another member’s marriage was crumbling. The band was on the verge of breaking up. Meanwhile, members of the band were becoming interested in activism but struggling to make a difference. They were navigating how they could express their religious convictions in music while wrestling with the religious hypocrisy of much of Christianity. When the band got together to write music a few months later, the song “One” came out of a space of brutal honesty about where their lives were and what they longed for. Let me read you a few stanzas of it:

Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you, now
You got someone to blame?

You say one love, one life
When it’s one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you, baby, if you don’t care for it…

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?

Did I ask too much? More than a lot
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got
We’re one, but we’re not the same
Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again

You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on to what you got
When all you got is hurt

One love, one blood
One life, you got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other

Some of you noticed the interconnected themes of love, marriage, justice, religion, responsibility, hurt, blame, differences, and division, all tied to that word Bono keeps singing over and over: “one,” oneness.

Some of you started singing that in your head. Others just sat there wondering why Spencer is quoting old people music. Some might be thinking, “Spencer, isn’t there any recent good music out there you could have quoted to connect with the younger generation?” And the answer is, “No, there isn’t.”

You can fight me on that later, but I hope you all noticed the theme: Oneness. U2, struggling with their marriages and what it means to be one life together, feels like that is one instance of a larger struggle all humanity participates in together. They use the notion in a very similar way to how Jesus uses it in John. In a similar way, my life is bound up with my spouse, how we are one flesh, how we are partners in life, and how we affect each other; God pushes us to see others that way.

“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.” It is a clue into the very heart and essence of God, just as much as it is an insight into the very essence and longing of our humanity. We are creatures that are connected to each other.

The past few years have continually illustrated the fact that we are connected. I have been thinking about the wildfires we had last year. It was being talked about on the news the other day.

Hundreds of homes were destroyed by a 25,000-hectare fire caused by such dryness that is unheard of for a province that literally has ocean on all sides of it. The weather is getting more and more severe because we are dealing with the effects of climate change that can turn a spark and a few embers into a wildfire the size of a city.

We are realizing that how we treat the environment affects one another. And at the end of the day, all it took was one person to burn some leaves in their backyard, and hundreds of families lost their homes.

We all longed for rain back in June, and then, you know what happened? We got rain, so much rain there was flooding all over the province. Then, a hurricane happened. Now, we are experiencing a strange winter, which is more severe than usual, while the rest of the continent is hit with Arctic winds. Our world is out of balance, and we are disconnected from it and each other.

It is things like a forest fire and flooding that remind us that a city of a million people like Halifax still needs to be a community, depending on one another, needing one another, affected by the choices of one another; that our providences and nation, just like individuals are not self-enclosed, independent, self-reliant units, able to carry one without help or helping others.

We are dependent on the earth and the seas, the fish and the animals, for the very processes of life that sustain us. We are dependent on each other. We are learning the hard way that we are all connected. Where one acts irresponsibly, all are affected, and also, where one suffers, all suffer.

We have been reminded again and again vividly over the last few years that we are all connected.

We are feeling how industrial practices on one side of the world affect farming on the other.

Health practices on one side of the world affect the health of communities on the other.

Wars on one side of the world affect life on the other.

We can’t get away from it. We are profoundly connected, but we continue to ignore this fact, retreating into our little empires of autonomy (some of us even use our Christian convictions to do so).

And yet, our lives are marred with reminders that we are living alienated from nature and each other. We are divided against the very things we need most. We are killing ourselves because we are constantly failing to see ourselves, our fate, and our identity as dependent on others.

We know we need to be one; we long to be at one with each other; we long for unity and harmony where we can all be ourselves, and others can be themselves in peace with the earth, and yet, we are not at one. We have given in to greed and selfishness or just slipped into an easy thoughtlessness, too concerned with the rat race of life.

We find ourselves reliving this story of humanity again and again, which comes to a particular intensity when people rejected Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God. John says at the beginning of his Gospel: “The world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” We know how this story goes.

Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution seeking to preserve its own power, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with, his own disciples his friends. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our tendencies to refuse to be at one with God and others, even when literally God is staring at us face to face.

But it is in these dark moments that God showed us who God is.

For Jesus to die one with sinners, yet one with the Father, reveals God’s loving solidarity with the human form—our plight, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see God’s self in us and with us, never without us. God chooses to bind himself to our fate to say I am not letting you go.

John records Jesus putting it this way: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And he counts the ones in front of him, the ones who he knew would betray him the worst—he counts them as his friends.

So often, we are tempted to lose heart, to recoil and collapse under the weight of our guilt and shame, when we think about the state of our world, our complicity in things like racism, war, climate change, consumerism, all the toxic squabbles we see on social media, or just our individual apathy to the needs of others we encounter on a daily basis— there is so much that might cause us to shrink back and say we don’t deserve a better world. We deserve what is coming to us.

To be a part of the people of God is to trust in Jesus Christ; it is to remember that in these moments of condemnation, we have been encountered by the presence of the Spirit, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son. The same love that God has for God in the Trinity, God has for sinners, for you, and for me. God is not going to give up on us. Trust this. Trust this.

God is the God who, throughout history, stands with the undeserving, the least of us, the oppressed, the god-forsaken, the outcasts, the sinners—all humanity—announcing as Jesus did to the unfaithful disciples: “peace to you,” announcing God’s will for us is and has always been eternal life.

When we are suffering and scared, our cross becomes his cross.

When we are lost and hopeless, his resurrection becomes our resurrection.

This God who is God above has come and walked with us in Christ as God beside us and has redeemed us with the Spirit, leading us forward as God within us and through us, a love so undivided and unlimited, it is making all things one.

As John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.”

And so, John challenges us to be at one with each other in a similar way to how the Father is at one with the Son: “May they be one as we are one.”

He prays for his disciples. He is praying for the church, which means he is praying for us today. In a world that is broken and divided, be at one with each other. Model the kind of empathy, acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and encouragement that says, “I need you; I can’t be me without you; I cannot succeed unless you succeed; If you are hurting, I am hurting; We are one.”

“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.”

That is Jesus’ prayer. God knows I could use some prayer on this. I had my family call me from Ontario, wondering if I was safe through all the fires and floods. I tried to explain to them that not all people in Nova Scotia live in Halifax (a point that is routinely lost on them), but I also caught myself saying, “I am okay. This does not affect me.”

I caught myself doing something we all too easily do: since hardship or oppression does not touch my immediate experience, my job, and my family, I conclude I am not affected.

We can do that with so many things. Injustice does not affect me. Poverty does not affect me. Illness does not affect me. War does not affect me. That person’s financial troubles, that person’s health risk, that person’s views: not my problem. It’s theirs, not mine. And so, we choose to forsake the invitation into oneness of love again and again.

One reason the Trinity feels abstract is that we so often use it as just one more way to honor God with our lips (and perhaps our cognitive minds), but the reality is our hearts are far from God.

Two days ago, I was driving into work, and CBC radio mentioned police charged a guy with accidentally starting the fires, as I mentioned before. A 22-year-old decided to burn some dead leaves in his backyard. I remember uttering things to myself about what I hope that guy gets for being so stupid and thoughtless. But then the radio had an interview with a man who had lost his house, his farm, and even his cottage on the other side of the forest fire. The man was asked how he felt about the person charged, and all he could say was, “I can’t blame him. I’ve done a lot of thoughtless stuff over the years. Mine, thankfully, just didn’t have as severe of consequences as his. His mistake could have just as easily been mine.” I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot, just having a moment to take those words and that profound lesson in humility I just experienced. To the one who had caused all this destruction, this man who had every possession of his destroyed in those fires chose to see himself in the other. He chose empathy and mercy. He chose oneness.

Again, folks are so often tempted to see the Trinity as some abstract idea (and we theologians can admit some part in that), but the Trinity flows from our relationship with God and each other. It is an invitation into the movements of worship and prayer, service and sacrifice, solidarity and forgiveness that speaks to the essence of who God is and who we are and the only way we can move forward as people: We are connected; we belong to one another, and in God’s choice to be bound to us, to refuse to let us go, we are awakened to our responsibility to others—more than this: our privilege, our witness, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

May we, daily in choices, grand or small, step into the oneness of God as a college, a community, a church, awaiting the day when God is all in all.

June 10, 2024

A Surprising Holiness

Preached at Valleygate Vineyard, Sunday, June 9, 2024.

Well, I am so glad to be with you again. It has been a busy week for me. It was my birthday on Friday. Last weekend, I flew out to Denver, and I presented a paper at a conference there (that is what we theology nerds do when we are not teaching classes, by the way, among other things). I presented at a society that is mostly a Catholic theology society, with a few of us who were Baptists. So, that means around this time last week, I was attending a Catholic mass that the organizers of the society put on, trying rather hopelessly to flip through the booklet of what prayers to recite and things like that. Now I am here, at a vineyard church. So, I feel like I have experienced the spectrum of worship styles in Christianity this week, from high church to charismatic.

The weekend was a good time connecting with colleagues and friends in Denver, but I must admit that I don’t like traveling. Specifically, I don’t like airports. This time, yet again, proved my point. The only time Meagan would be off and be able to come get me involved in a long layover in the middle of the night in Toronto for me. So, I tried to sit there in the concourse and rest. I ended up reading all the books I had purchased at the book vendors at the conference, which was not so bad, but when my flight finally arrived, I felt completely done and tired. Then, of course, they announce that there is something wrong with the airplane and we have to switch flights; the next available plane will be here in a few hours. After spending some 24 hours in transit, I was picked up by Meagan in Halifax, and I was a vegetable—a hungry, smelly, tired, incoherent vegetable.

On the plane, while I was wired awake from too much coffee, I thought about what I wanted to speak with you about, and one passage kept coming to me. It is one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, and I have never had the chance to preach on just this text. So, I am excited to share it with you today. It comes from the Prophet Hosea.

Hosea is part of 12 books at the end of the Old Testament called the “Minor Prophets,” 12 short books, although calling them “minor” feels like that does not do them justice.

Hosea was a prophet who started his ministry of preaching around the mid-700s BC, so 700 years before Christ.

Hosea is also one of the most fascinating prophets because he had possibly the most bizarre calling. Hosea was called by God to marry a prostitute named Gomer, have children with her, and then when she left him to be with another man, God called Hosea to pursue her. God did this to use his life as an illustration for how God’s people had acted unfaithfully to him and that Hosea could now understand the hurt in God over Israel’s infidelity because he felt it with his wife. But also, despite all the unfaithfulness, God continued to pursue Israel out of God’s rich love, and so also, Hosea had to do this, learning and exemplifying what this striving kind of love is like.

Now, there is a whole sermon on just that right there—there are so many truths there that are as bewildering as they are beautiful—but what I really want to talk to you today about is in a passage 11 chapters into the book. You see in this travail of the people being unfaithful to God, and God warning that if the people go their own way, they will face the consequences, there is an astonishing passage. After the prophet blasts the people for their sins, God, quite surprisingly, tells Hosea to say this to the people:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
    and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more Icalled them,
    the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
    and offering incense to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
    I took them up in my arms,
    but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
    with bands of love.
I was to them like those
    who lift infants to their cheeks.
    I bent down to them and fed them.

They shall return to the land of Egypt,
    and Assyria shall be their king,
    because they have refused to return to me.
The sword rages in their cities;
    it consumes their oracle priests
    and devours because of their schemes.
My people are bent on turning away from me.
    To the Most High they call,
    but he does not raise them up at all.

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
    How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
    How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart recoils within me;
    my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
    I will not again destroy Ephraim,
for I am God and no mortal,
    the Holy One in your midst,
    and I will not come in wrath.

Hosea 11:1-9, (NRSV)

I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

What is Holiness?

What is holiness? Any bible scholar or even a Google search will give you the standard definition of holy, which comes from the Hebrew word, “kodesh,” which means to be “set apart.” When we look at some of the early foundational stories of the Bible where God is talked about as holy, we get a sense that the holiness of God is potentially quite frightening. God is so perfect and pure and transcendent that to come in contact with this is as beautiful as it is terrifying.

The Prophet Isaiah had a vision of God in his heavenly temple, where he saw the angelic Seraphim flying around chanting, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and Isaiah describes this experience as ruining him. Seeing the holiness of God makes him feel unclean as all the goodness in him, the righteousness he thought he had compared to the people that he spends several chapters chastising, pales in comparison to the pure holiness of God. Isaiah exclaims, “Woe is me, for I am ruined.”

Even more severe, there are stories that speak about people coming into contact with something holy, whether it is the temple, touching the ark of the covenant, or stepping onto the foot of Mount Sinai; if they did this unprepared or even if they did this unintentionally, there are narratives that speak about how they risked death. The holiness of God is so pure it’s dangerous.

Growing up, I often felt like the holiness of God was portrayed as something like radioactive plutonium or something. Moses came down from the mountain, and he was always pulsating in all the children’s bibles. I admit, I may have had an overactive imagination.

Well, there is something certainly important about these stories. The holiness of an infinite God is an awesome thing. These stories help us see that God’s holiness has to be taken seriously. Things that are holy—the temple, the ark, the Sabbath—in the ancient mindset are the things that have been set apart, that possess the power and presence of purity and thus orient life properly, and so, must be respected. To violate these things is to invite defilement, disorder, and destruction.

In a way, the plutonium analogy is not too far off: plutonium can be used to produce awesome energy to power whole cities but is also not something you would want to fool around with. You have to handle it with care, knowing what it is capable of.

Well, all of this is true, but to just say that is to miss quite a lot. In fact, you have actually profoundly missed the point with its own dangerous consequences if holiness only means this.

What are those consequences?: A few years ago, I met for coffee with a person who faced addictions. I remember one particular morning we sat there for coffee and this person shared her story of going through some really dark times, some rock bottoms that I just cannot even fathom.

Out of my pastoral training, I felt obliged to ask her after she gave her story, “Where do you think God was in all of this?” I was hoping for some obvious Sunday School answer: “I know that Jesus was with me and that he loves me”—something like that.

My heart sank as she confessed that she did not know where God was in all this in her life. In fact, she insisted God could not have been with her. She had rebelled against God and was unfaithful. God is not with people like that. She had sinned again and again, and there is one thing she knew from growing up in church is that God cannot stand the presence of sin. God is holy.

God is holy, and that is why she was certain God could not have been with her, a sinner. Is that what that means? God can’t be with us because of who he is?

How many of us have heard messages like that?

You see if your notion of holiness is about being morally perfect and how God cannot stand the presence of anything that cannot measure up to this kind of moral perfection, you, like many Christians, probably have an idea of God in your head where God actually is not with sinners at all. God really just tolerates us.

Now, to say it like that, many of us would immediately know that to be untrue. However, as I had illustrated to me on that day, in the ups and downs of life, certain convictions we are taught growing up have a way of staying deep in us, lying dormant, festering, waiting to come out one day when life has you down: You mess up, people desert you, the ones you love hurt you, or you hurt them, you get caught in sin’s vortex of lies and bad choices and more lies—whatever those dark moments could be, and all of a sudden it occurs to you, that if God is holy, God probably wants nothing to do with a sinner like you.

Perhaps you were raised with a strong perfectionism like I was, where you may have been taught, “With enough faith, you should be able to stop sinning. If faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, surely a little bit of faith is all you need to stop committing this sin or that sin.”

And so you say, “If God can do miracles, why can’t he take away this sin in my life?” And you are left wondering, “Maybe it is just because I don’t believe enough.”

Perhaps some of you have come to those dark moments—like I did one day, and you said to yourself, “If I am saved by faith, but I don’t have enough faith to stop sinning, maybe I don’t have enough faith to be saved at all. Maybe I’ve committed that unforgivable sin that one scripture talks about. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, I took God for granted one too many times, and I filled up my quota; and that was it; God cut me loose.” After all, as people are fond of saying, God is loving, but he is also holy.

The “but” there suggests love and holiness in most people’s heads is a zero-sum game, one limited by the other.

Many of us have heard messages like that, whether we were taught it growing up or it is just the voice of our inadequacies trying to get the better of us.

Holiness as Surprising Mercy

As I said, while God is perfect and pure and holy, yes, and God wants us to live in the right relationship with God and others, yes, if we leave it there, we shortchange the discussion because effectively this says that God loves us only when we perform best, when we get things right, and when we don’t mess up. And if not, God is done with us. Is that what holiness means?

The people of Hosea’s day were stuck in their sins. They had gone after idols and were unfaithful to God. They had forgotten all that God had done for them, and they had been doing this for hundreds of years.

And so, God sends the Prophet Hosea to warn them. If you keep worshiping idols, you’re going to keep getting hurt. If you keep making dirty political alliances, your luck will run out, and the empire of Assyria is going to come and conquer you. If you keep oppressing the poor, you are going to have more and more problems in your society. Wrongdoing has real consequences, and the Prophet keeps warning them: “Stop acting this way.”

Hosea condemns the people for their apathy and corruption, but then something unexpected happens. The people had not repented, and yet God out of the blue in Chapter 11, confesses God simply cannot bring himself to give up on the people. God looks at the people as God’s precious child and says:

How can I give you up? You are my child. I fed you. I taught you to walk. I led you as you took your first steps. Even though you rebelled against me and ran away, even though you hurt me, I simply can’t go through with punishing you. My heart recoils, and I feel my compassion growing warm and tender. I love you too much.

How can this be? Why is God doing this? God simply says: I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.

The logic of this passage goes in an unexpected direction from all the other passages before it on holiness. Indeed, God is holy—pure, unpolluted, and perfect—but there is something about God, the living God, where God is always surprising us.

When we are tempted to think our worth is found in our own moral performances…

When we are tempted to think God’s grace has limits…

When we are tempted to think that God simply is not there…

God says, I am holy; I am completely different from the god you have expected me to be.

I am holy, and therefore, I am uncontrollable and have unlimited compassion.

I am holy, and therefore, I will not use fierce anger.

I am holy; therefore, I will not punish.

My holiness is my limitless, unimaginable, incomparable love, love unlike anything else out there.

When you run from me, I still choose to be with you. That is who I am.

If you have a child who did something terrible, and yet you simply cannot bring yourself to punish them, you may have a sense of what the Prophet is trying to communicate.

In our very worst moments, God simply looks at us and seeks not the sinner, the screw-up—God does not see all the damage we have caused or all the disappointment—God simply sees you, his child.

God made you, sustained you, and simply is not going to give up on you.

When we look at the story of Scripture, from Genesis to the Gospels, we see a God whose holiness is full of surprises, constantly amazing us with how much deeper his love is.

How Jesus Shows Us Holiness

Indeed, we keep reading, and we learn that God so loved the world that he came in the form of a baby, the Holy One of Israel, God Immanuel, God with us, as Matthew says. And Jesus continued this work of surprising people with the holy-different love of God.

Jesus did things like touch an unclean woman, but in doing so, he healed her.

Jesus did things like invite the riff-raff of society, the folks the religious leaders saw as disgusting and degenerate—Jesus invited these people over for dinner and ate with them.

And while these things got Jesus in a lot of trouble, we have to look at these stories and ask, if Jesus truly is the holy one, God himself, how are these actions showing us the true meaning of holiness? It is a holiness that is radical compassion. It is a holiness that says, “I am not afraid to get my hands dirty to show you that you are loved.”

And in the most surprising act, Jesus goes to the cross. God incarnate, who came as the messiah of God’s people, chose to come and die on an executioner’s cross.

At the cross, we know God is with us because, God became a godforsaken corpse. The holiness of God was found in the place viewed as the very opposite of God. Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree, one scripture says. God chose to be there in order to say that there is no place God is not with us.

God died in the place of a sinner to say nothing separates us from God.

God’s love binds Godself to our fate, saying, “I love you so much that if you are lost in the death of sin, I will be with you there.” What happens to you happens to me, and that is how I will prove to you what love I have for you. Through this I will show you the hope of resurrection.

Why? Because God is a holy God, different from all our expectations of what God should be.

When we are lost in sin, when we expect God to condemn us, when we deserve nothing less, the holiness of God appears.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you have heard it before. There once was a woman who said she had visions of Jesus. The bishop of the area heard that one of his older parishioners was claiming to have had visions of Jesus, and so he, quite skeptically, goes to investigate. He tells this woman, “This is how I will know that your visions are authentic: ask Jesus, ‘What were the sins I confessed in my last confession?’” The woman agreed to ask Jesus this.

Sometime later, the woman claimed to have another vision of Jesus, and so the bishop went to investigate. The bishop stepped into her house and said, “Well, did you ask Jesus my question?”

The woman answered, “Oh yes. Come sit.” At this, the bishop grew afraid and sat down trembling. The woman took the bishop’s hand in hers, and said, “I asked Jesus what were your last sins you confessed. And he told me, ‘Tell him that I don’t remember.’”

That is the holiness of Jesus.

In our worst moments, God shows us his best. When we are farthest from God, that is when God chooses to be nearest to us.

Living as a Holy People

And this causes us to ask ourselves: how are we to live out this kind of holiness? God says to be holy as I am holy. How do we do that?

We all know that other version of holiness. Baptists had a rhythm I heard growing up: “We don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and we don’t date girls who do.” That list of no’s was considered what holiness was, and certainly, there is truth to some of that. There are things that are not good for us. Sure, but if that is all holiness means, we have missed the point.

However, holiness in the way that Hosea witnessed and Jesus modeled has a whole lot more to do with what we are willing to do so that others can know that they are loved by God in the way we have seen in our own lives.

A life of holiness says I have encountered a God who is remarkably there for me and so I am free of the obstacles in myself that keep me from being there for you, even if these obstacles come from my religion.

I realized this one day when I was pastoring in Sudbury. Early on, a friend of mine, an Anglican priest, sat me down for coffee, and he gave me the most astute observation about the city I would learn for my ministry there. “Spencer,” he said, “Sudbury is not an unchurched town. It is a de-churched town.” What he meant by that was simply that most of the people I met in Sudbury had grown up in church or had some bad experience with one of the churches in town. However, as I realized, this meant nearly everyone I met knew what Christianity was basically about but had been burned by a judgmental church or cut loose by a pastor who clearly thought it best to go after less time-consuming sheep.

They knew Jesus, but how Jesus was modeled to them said that God was no different than all the other conditional forms of love in their lives.

I remember talking to one pastor who proudly admitted that he took his holiness so seriously he rarely hung out with non-Christians…hmmm…Well you can imagine churches like that have a lot of people fall through the cracks.

I said to myself, you know this whole game churches have been playing for all these years. It is great at attracting people whose lives are relatively put together, but if we are really going to reach people in need, we have to be different.

I adopted two rules that I felt were necessary to pastor in these parts: one was I believed that the love of God convicts people of sin. I don’t need to condemn folks or finger-wave. Enough Christians have already done that to them and a good deal of people I encountered were much harsher on themselves than I could ever be. So, I would be different. I would let the love of God convict people.

Two, if someone needed help in my town, even if it seemed like they never stepped foot in my church at all, I was going to do my best to help them. Believe it or not, I was criticized for this. One pastor I knew thought that was foolish. You aren’t going to grow the church that way, he said.

One day, I took a few guys to the food bank, and afterward, I invited them out for coffee at the local Tim Hortons. One guy remarked beforehand that he was on new medication, and he just did not feel like himself.

Well, over coffee, our conversations took an unexpected turn. They, one guy started going on about he realized that Snoop Dog is probably named Snoop Dog because he actually looks like a real dog. The other guy found that remark offensive and told him that he did not care for what he said. The first guy kept going, “No, no, no, I am not being racist or anything. I am just saying. He looks like a dog; that’s why he’s called Snoop Dog.”

Before I knew it, a chair was flung across the room, and the two guys were up in each other’s faces, yelling. Meanwhile, the third guy just sat there with a dopey grin on his face. Turns out he was sauced the whole time. To all of this the manager yelled, “Get out, all of you, and don’t come back. You’re banned from here.” She motioned at all of us.

We all walked out. I was stunned and a little bit mad. Did I just get banned from the only coffee shop in town? I turned to the two guys and said, you need to go in there and fix this.

So, they tried to go back in and plead with the manager to unban them. A minute or two went by. The manager came out, looked at me, and motioned that she wanted to speak with me. “So, they tell me you are their pastor.”

Sheepishly, I said, “By God’s grace, I supposed I am.” And I promised her that if I could keep them in check, they could keep coming around.

I remember coming out of that Tim Hortons, a bit annoyed, and looking at those guys. It was that look in their eyes, “Is this it for us? Is this where pastor spencer just says this is too much trouble; I’m going to focus my energies on more deserving folk?”

At that moment, I realized that the witness of holiness for them wasn’t really about whether I was a morally perfect person (which, of course, I am not,) nor was it about all the things I don’t do. In a moment where it seemed quite natural to be mad and storm off, holiness was saying, “I am not going to give up on you.”

God says, “I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.”

And so, we who have encountered this love, this holiness, how we will live so that we say with our lives, “I am not perfect, but I have been encountered by a God who sees us all as his children.”

Holiness says I keep messing up, but God is the kind of God that simply does not give up on us.

Holiness says I have ignored God, ran from him, acted like he does not exist, but God is simply the kind of God that chooses to be with us, no matter what.

Holiness says I am here today because God is a God very different than what I expected.

And our message as a holy people is simply this: because God is different, that is why I will not give up on you.

Let’s pray…

May 13, 2024

We’ve Missed The Point: Ascension and the Meaning of the Bible

Preached at Lawrencetown United Baptist Church, Ascension, 2024

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:44-53, NRSV)

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called The Book of Eli. It starred two great actors, Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. The movie takes place in a time when the world has been destroyed in an apocalyptic event, possibly a nuclear war. The survivors believed that the old ways in some way caused these events, so in anger, they burned all books, particularly religious books.

Many years later, the world is dark and chaotic, made up of brutal tribes. Only a few elderly people know how to read, let alone know about religion and books like the Bible.

A man named Eli (played by Washington) emerges, walking along the road to somewhere with the last Bible in existence. And he believes he is on a mission from God to bring it to a place God has shown him.

As he passes through one town amongst the desolate wastes, a warlord named Carnegie (played by Oldman) learns that he has the last Bible. He, too, is an old survivor. He remembers, as a boy, seeing televangelists on TV and how much power they had by invoking that they were speaking words from God himself. He remembers his own mother, a struggling single mother, desperate, sending money to a televangelist, money she did not have, and telling him that faith is the most powerful force out there.

Carnegie wants this power: the power to control desperate people. He realizes that the power to speak on behalf of God could allow him to rule unquestioned.

So, he sets out to get this last Bible from Eli.

Two Ways of Using the Bible

The movie sets up a stark contrast between Eli and Carnegie. Both want to use the Bible but for two very different purposes.

In fact, there is a scene in the movie where Eli is sitting there reading the Bible in an inn, and a woman comes to him, sent by Carnegie (she is his slave), and she tries to seduce him in order to get this prized possession.

Instead of taking her up on that offer or condemning her, he turns and has compassion. He sees in her despair over life. So, he encourages her to be thankful and to cherish her life as something valuable, a gift. The woman is confused and admits she doesn’t think that her life is worth anything. But she asks, how do I do that?

So Eli takes her hands and folds them and tells her there is this old practice called prayer, which is something you can do to be thankful and have hope. He teaches her to recite these ancient words: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” He tells her about the words of the book he reads, that these words are the words of hope and love.

Instead of condemning her or using her, he uses the Bible to give her hope.

Now, in one of the more entertaining but theologically unsound aspects of the movie, when Carnegie comes after Eli, we realize that Eli has God’s supernatural protection. What kind of divine protection, you ask? Good question: Eli has supernatural gun-fighting skills, slaying a small army’s worth of Carnegie’s men when they come at him. I feel like the writers of this movie may have missed a passage or two from the New Testament.

Or, maybe this is trying to allude back to someone like Samson in the Old Testament. Maybe I may have missed one of the lesser-known spiritual gifts in the New Testament. Or, maybe this is just a movie made by Hollywood, and we all know guns and explosions sell tickets.

Be that as it may, the movie is not perfect, but it draws attention to an aspect of this narrative we read today: The resurrected Jesus, just before he ascends to the Father in victory and vindication, opens the eyes of the disciples and they see how the scriptures are fulfilled in him, in his cross and resurrection, fulfilled in his way.

This is something Luke is trying to impress on us from chapter one of his Gospel: The Bible does not make sense without seeing it through Jesus and his love and hope for the least of this world.

You see, Eli and Carnegie represent two ways of thinking about faith and the Bible. Both want to use the Bible, and both have an idea of the authority of God, but their approaches couldn’t get any more different.

One wants to use the Bible for power, control, to bring himself closer to God over others. There are folks in the Gospel that want to do this, whether it is the Pharisees or even Jesus’ disciples. Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven, and his disciples, James and John, immediately saw Jesus as a pathway to power and status. That is not what Jesus was about. Jesus said, “I came not to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many.” He also said, “If you want to be my disciples, you have to take up your cross and follow me.”

So, there is also the way Eli uses the Bible: to use the Bible to bring others closer to God, bring hope, compassion, and encouragement. You see that happen in Luke’s Gospel: Jesus heals on the Sabbath; Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners; Jesus proclaims justice and liberation.

Again, both want to use the Bible, and so, in the loosest possible sense of the term, both want to be “biblical,” but I think we all know that just because someone can quote the Bible does not actually mean they are using the Bible for what it was meant for.

One uses the Bible in a way that points to who Jesus is and what Jesus was about. The other does not.

This is a part of the epiphany the disciples had to learn on that day all those years ago, and it is what our eyes must be awoken to today if we are going to be faithful Christians of our ascended Lord today.

Ascension and the Lesson Jesus Wanted His Disciples to Know

So, it was Ascension this week. If you don’t know what Ascension is, it is the day of the year that traditionally Christians remember Jesus being taken up to heaven after he was resurrected, celebrated 40 days after Easter.

For some reason, we don’t give gifts. We don’t have a turkey. We don’t even eat chocolate eggs (However, some of us still have chocolate eggs hidden from our kids from Easter, mind you). For some, the day of Ascension comes and goes without us realizing it, usually because it coincides with Mother’s Day (Happy Mother’s Day, by the way). Despite it being the conclusion of the Gospels, the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, it just never seemed to have caught on the way Christmas, the beginning of the Gospels, did. Nevertheless, it is a day in the Christian calendar all the same and it is worth celebrating.

After the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus finally helps them see all that they did not understand but can now know in hindsight. He gives them new eyes to see and new ears to hear what is going on in the Bible.

Ascension is that pivotal point where Jesus brings his earthly ministry to a conclusion before going up to heaven and reigning as our mediator at the right hand of the Father, and it seems that Luke is keen to tell us several times here that Jesus explains how the scriptures are fulfilled in him.

We see this in the passage before, where two of Jesus’ disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus and the resurrected Jesus appears to them and walks with them, and they don’t know it is him. They lament how the prophet Jesus was killed. They were disappointed because they really thought he could have been the Messiah.

They thought that Jesus was going to rise up and kill the Romans, liberate the people, and restore the kingdom of God that way, with violence. So, obviously, the cross, the execution of Jesus at the hands of both the Romans and the religious leaders of Israel kind of kiboshed that.

Or did it?

Luke tells us that Jesus revealed himself to them and explained to them along the road to Emmaus how the whole of the Old Testament scriptures pointed to him, to him going to the cross and rising again.

The cross, its brutality and shame, its lowliness and powerlessness—it did not disprove Jesus as the Messiah; it fulfilled it. To us church folk two thousand years later, we don’t consider just how contradictory this probably sounded: A crucified messiah was an oxymoron, like “jumbo-shrimp.”

The law says that anyone who hangs on a tree is cursed. Surely, God cannot be with a man who dies a death like that. Surely, God would protect a true Son of God from such evil. And surely, no one who claimed equality with God could be anything other than a blasphemer if this happened to them. That was what the assumption was.

But as Jesus went to the cross, as all the Gospel writers tell in different ways, Jesus was speaking the words of the Psalms, embodying the patterns the prophets lived, fulfilling in his very body what the Word of God is truly about.

“Why have you forsaken me?” That is a line from David in Psalm 22, who wondered where God was to protect him and the innocent righteous. And yet, to have Jesus speak these words, who claimed to be at one with God, here was God identifying in solidarity with all those who feel forgotten by God.

The disciples could not get their heads around this. This was not supposed to happen in their minds. He could not be the messiah if this happened.

Yet, when you look at the narratives of the Old Testament, you see the truth of the cross. You see Joseph, whose honestly lands him in prison. You see David, whose anointing as king means he spent his early years hunted and hated. You see Job, who endures pain and tragedy to show that he loves God for no benefit. You see Jeremiah, who is branded a traitor, shoved down a well to die, and exiled, all for speaking God’s words.

You see the truth of the cross in the Old Testament: that the good, the just, and the innocent often suffer in this world and are attacked and scorned by the powers of sin.

This leads so many of us to ask: Is evil winning in this world? Is there anything we can do? Is love and hope in vain?

One writer put it this way: Biblical faith makes us realize that if you have not loved, you have not fully lived, but if you love fully, you will probably end up dying for it.

That is what happened to Jesus. Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, that the first will be last and the last will be first, that God is here for the humble and the humiliated, the pure and the peacemaker, the merciful and those in mourning.

Jesus came preaching that the law is summarized in love, and the powers and the principalities felt threatened and killed him for it. Jesus’ own people, the leaders of his own religion, saw what he was saying as blasphemous. Yet even in the execution of the cross, the worst evil the people could do to God’s messiah, Jesus is shown praying for them: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”

The cross is the moment when the evil in the human heart and society shows its ugly head, and God chooses this moment to show us in Jesus the kind of God he is: A God willing to love us and die for us.

God loves us with his very best, even when we are at our very worst.

Evil did not have the final say over Jesus that day, nor does it have the final say over history, nor does it have the final say over you, your life, your future.

Jesus rose from the grave. Death, the devil, the powers of disobedience and despair, oppression, and bigotry were overthrown by victorious love.

Today is Ascension, and Ascension means who Jesus is and where Jesus is now, which means that love and not hate are in control of this world.

Grace, not domination, is what wins in the end.

Forgiveness, not fear, is what prevails.

That is the point of the Bible.

From creation to covenant, from exodus to exile, from tabernacle to temple, from Moses, the judges, the kings, and the prophets, the whole Old Testament was preparing God’s people for Jesus. All its figures, its imagery, its laws, its longing, all were anticipations of Jesus.

Jesus is who the whole of the scriptures, the law, and the prophets have been longing for.

Putting it this way says something about what the Bible is all about that we need to remember in this age so badly.

It is not merely that some of it points to Jesus. Jesus insists that it all points to him that Jesus’ way fulfills the deepest concerns about what the Bible seeks to teach.

We Have Missed the Point

It is sad to say this, but we Christians have not been particularly good at keeping this in mind. We so often lose the plot of the Bible and use it in ways that do not fit its purpose of pointing to Jesus and Jesus’ way.

Let me give you some examples:

My mom, bless her soul, had a book she read when I was little. I’d say she read it religiously, but that pun might be too on the nose. It was called the Maker’s Diet. Some authors combed through the Bible, arguing that if you want to live a long and healthy life, all you need to do is follow the Bible’s God-given recipe for healthy eating. Now, there is obvious wisdom to the dietary laws of the Old Testament in its own day and age – I am not disputing that – sure, these laws were to aid in maintaining the health of Israel, and certainly, God wants us to be healthy today, but the idea we could sift those laws out of the ancient world and drop them into our own. The purpose of the Bible isn’t a diet book.

When I was in high school, a book called “The Bible Code” came out. Do you remember the Bible Code? Some believed that since the Bible is divine revelation, there are obviously hidden messages and prophecies in it, sort of like how people believed that if you played a rock band’s LP in reverse back in the ’60s, you hear a secret message. Well, the Bible Code took all the letters of the Bible, and lined them up in a long ribbon and searched every other letter or every fifth letter and things like that, and lo and behold, some of the search results came up with things like “JFK, plot” or “Japan, bomb” or things like that. This was a sensation that became a best-seller, but unsurprisingly, when others found similar results from other long books like Moby Dick or War and Peace, the sales kind of tanked. Again, that is kind of a silly example, but I still know people who come to the Bible and treat it more like a crystal ball or, in particular, the Book of Revelation, some kind of mystical code to crack. That isn’t the point of the Bible.

Again, those are silly, more short-lived examples, but Christians throughout church history have come to the Bible to get the fast answers on a lot of subjects rather than discerning difficult matters with the wisdom the whole of the Bible is trying to instill.

People in the 1500s believed you could teach science right out of the Bible, and for them, the Bible clearly taught that the sun revolved around the earth. Then, a guy named Copernicus and his student Galileo came along, and it has been a bit messy between science and faith ever since. However, the point of the Bible is not science; it is an ancient text written before people had science. It does not tell us much about the what or how of nature, but it tells us why and, more importantly, who. Look at the references to Genesis 1 in the New Testament—passages like “In the beginning… was the Word”—and you realize that if you were to ask what the doctrine of creation the Apostles had, they would have answered, “It’s Jesus.”

For centuries, Christians believed that you could build a system of government using the Bible and that, of course, it was a monarchy or possibly a holy empire where the leader had unquestioned divine-ordained authority. But then religious dissenters came around, like Baptists and others, and said maybe a wise way to do government is to have leaders accountable to the vote of the people. Maybe if Jesus is king, we need to be a bit suspicious of giving anyone god-like authority.

Of course, the examples can get a whole lot darker from there.

Some folks came to the Bible thinking they found a timeless way to run their households, and the result was centuries of slavery and subservience of women, completely ignoring the context of a lot of these passages. If you have ever wrestled with those passages, you have to ask yourself: if the point of the Bible is Jesus giving up his power to liberate others from sin and injustice, it just does not make a lot of sense that we could use this passages today to control and limit others. That is not the point of the Bible.

When settlers came to this land centuries ago, they saw themselves as just as the Israelites entering a new promised land; the only problem with that is that this allowed them to treat the indigenous peoples of this land similar to how the Israelites responded to the Canaanites. In the name of saving people’s souls, Christians oppressed indigenous bodies. In the name of getting people to heaven, Christians did the opposite of the ways of the kingdom of heaven.

And if you read the reasons why people did these things, as I have studied, you will surely find passages quoted with pious intentions. That is a scary thing. It is a frightening reminder that the best of us is capable of terrible things when we lose sight of the center of Scripture.

They did these things because they failed to ask themselves that if the Bible is God’s word, how would Jesus, the word of God in the flesh, want these words to be spoken? How did Jesus live these words for us to follow?

Whether it is the smooth manipulative messages of televangelists, the crazy conjectures of conspiracy theorists, the justifications of war and corruption by world leaders, or the bigotry of some bible thumpers, we know that we are terribly prone to using the Bible in ways that don’t point to Jesus.

In fact, Jesus warns about this in his own day. When he speaks with Pharisees in John’s Gospel, in chapter 5, he says this: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

Jesus is talking to some religious people who know their Bibles really well, but they don’t seem all that gracious and loving with it, and since they are refusing to read the scriptures through Jesus, culminating in Jesus, they have failed to grasp its most important message: the message of true life.

Paul does something similar in 2 Cor. 4: “We have renounced the shameful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.”

Notice what Paul is saying there. He is saying that there are folks who, by the very way, are using the scriptures, using the message of the Gospel, using it for personal gain and power and manipulation; Paul says they have falsified God’s word. Sure, they might be able to quote the Bible, but if they aren’t doing it in the way Jesus would say it, then it is not the words of Jesus. Simple as that.

Perhaps you have had a discussion like this with someone. Somehow, the conversation turns to talking about a serious topic, and instead of listening and appreciating how complicated a problem can be, the person just turns and says, “The Bible clearly says,” end of story. Thoughtfulness need not apply.

Sometimes, I have literally heard people say, “I’d love to be more loving or gracious on this matter, but the Bible won’t let me.” Yet, the law of love is the rule Jesus tells us to measure what law applies and which ones do not. Every Gospel, as well as Paul and James, all report this. I have news for you. If the Bible is preventing you from being more loving, you are reading it wrong.

Usually, when I have those discussions, I end up saying to myself, “Why didn’t we just keep talking about the weather or how our local sports team was doing? Why did I have to open my give mouth?”

We, Disciples, Must Be Different

And yet, I so deeply believe that if we want to follow Jesus, if we care about the Bible, we must study it with the care that it deserves. This does not mean we all have to be academics, although that is what I have been called to, and I try to serve in teaching as best I can. For many of us, it simply means we have to take the time to wrestle and contemplate who Jesus is and what his will is with all the wisdom we have available to us.

That might sound like a tall order, but the consequence of failing to live Scripture out in a way that points to Jesus is one tragic display all around us.

I have realized that if you want to justify pride and power, privilege and prejudice, if you want to condone violence and hatred or reinforce apathy and inaction, you can go to the Bible and cobble together proof texts here and there until you have a surprising case for whatever you want.

C. S. Lewis, the great Christian thinker and novelist, wrote this in a letter:

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.”

Today, in terrible ways, we are seeing the Bible used as a weapon. Make no mistake: hundreds of thousands of people have died this year because people have justified their violence with Bible verses.

And rather than give up on the Bible, on faith, or the church, we who are Jesus’ disciples, his students, must show the world otherwise.

You see these scriptures, these documents that Christians in time collected into 66 books, two testaments, bound and printed. These scriptures are a remarkable tool for the church to stay on the right path and understand who Jesus is. These scriptures are, as Paul says in 2 Timothy, “God-breathed,” animated with the Spirit of life who is seeking to transform every soul into the fullness of life with God.

But never forget that these words, these pages, don’t make sense and, in fact, can do profound damage when we stop reading them for how they point to a God that loves humanity, every human being, with a love that forgives every sin, knows every pain, a love that is willing to die sin’s death and yet heal every wound, a love that refuses to stop until God is all in all.

If we don’t listen for that voice speaking, that love breathing through the pages of the Scriptures, we have missed the point.

And so, Lawrencetown Baptist Church, on this Ascension Sunday, may you know that in Jesus Christ, his cross, and resurrection, the scriptures have been fulfilled.

May your eyes be opened, and may you hear afresh how in Jesus Christ we have forgiveness of sins, the fullness of love and truth and grace.

May we be witnesses of this good news, the Gospel that is for all people: comfort for the discouraged, liberation for the oppressed, hope for this broken world.

May we, by God’s help, have the faith to take up our crosses and the courage to live these words out this week.

Let’s pray,

Almighty and everlasting God

you raised our Lord Jesus Christ

to your right hand on high.

As we rejoice in the culmination of Jesus’ earthly ministry,

Imprint your word upon our hearts and minds so that we more every day be conformed to the image of your Son Jesus Christ.

Teach us to love like him. Teach us to be truthful like him.

Teach God, even though we so often forget.

Ready us for Pentecost and fill us with his Spirit,

that we may go into all the world

and faithfully proclaim the Gospel and welcome your coming kingdom.

We ask through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, forever and ever. Amen.

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