Tagged: Ezekiel
Making God’s Name Holy
Delivered at Billtown Baptist Church, Feb. 23, 2025.
So, we are going through the Lord’s Prayer. Pastor Angela has covered “Our Father in Heaven.” She’s been taking her time. She began with “Our,” then “Father,” then last week, we were away in Halifax for family day, but she tackled “in Heaven.” I got a whopping four words to cover this morning. At this rate, we may be done this series sometime next year. I am only teasing.
I tease but I feel like doing this reminded me to slow down. I am the kind of person who reads and reads and wants to get things done and move on to the next thing. That is how we live our lives. Our lives can so often be the rat race of getting things done on to the next thing to get done.
I remember one time at Laurentian University, where I used to teach; my day would also be so filled with things I needed to get done and events I had to plan that I would make a to-do list in my head and motor through them. One of those, often, was getting books from the library, which was several buildings away from my office, so I would quickly walk there and try to get back as fast as I could. One day, I remember I was just feeling a bit tired so I got a cup of coffee in the Starbucks in the lobby just before going into the library. I remember pausing for a second to sip the coffee, and then I looked up and realized there was a massive art piece on the wall coming into the library. It was of several blue orchids painted in that impressionist style that was simply stunning, and I had this moment of realizing that I had passed by this art piece many times and just never bothered to notice because I was too busy.
We can do the same thing about God, and we can do the same thing with the Scriptures, too, if we don’t slow down.
And this is particularly important with words that often are so familiar to us like these ones. We can say them and not stop to think about them. I remember talking to a pastor one time, and he talked about how growing up, his dad would always pray the same prayer at dinner time (I am totally guilty of this—by 5:30, I’m tired and but hangry, originality or anything profound is just not coming out of my mouth as my kids bicker—often my prayers just end up sounding like parental auto-suggestion: “God help us all to be nice and be grateful for our food. Amen!”). Nevertheless, this guy’s dad would pray the same puzzling words every day: “God bless this food and antenna juice.” And for years, he said to me, he was always puzzled about why his dad prayed for the “antenna juice.” Finally, he could not hold it in any longer and he asked his dad one day, “What is going on with the antenna juice?” And did you figure out what it is? His dad, puzzled, said, “I pray ‘God bless this food for its intended use.’” Ohhhh! (The other moral of the story is that a little annunciation goes a long way.)
“Hallowed be your name”…?
Words we recite day in and day out can end up becoming routine. We can say them without thinking about what they mean, and I particularly feel that with this line in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by your name” (as I learned it in King James English). I remember thinking as a kid, “Why is God’s name hollow?” that does not make a lot of sense. Of course, eventually, I figured out that it is actually “hallowed” or “to be made holy,” but that didn’t really clear things up either: Why is God’s name need to be made holy? Isn’t God already holy? How do you “hallow” something, especially when that something is God’s name?
There is something really important and nourishing about slowing down and thinking about the Scriptures little by little, word by word. That is what I am going to do this morning. Let’s re-ask those questions: What is God’s name? Why is God’s name being brought up here rather than just God? What does it mean to be holy? And why does this line of the prayer petition God to make God’s name holy?
So, first, what is God’s name? Some folks think “Father” is the name of God in this prayer, and that is not actually accurate. Father is a title of God with its own particular history that Jesus used to talk about how he is the Son of God, the Messiah.
What is God’s name then? We see what it is back in the book of Exodus. Moses comes to the burning bush, and God says he has heard the cries of his people. He says he is going to send Moses to liberate the people from slavery, and after that, Moses asks, “That’s great, but, by the way, what do I call you if anyone asks?” And God gives this strange answer, “I am who I am.”
Ancient names meant something. At some point when Meagan and I were dating, we would chat about whether we were to have kids and how many (the answer at the time was three, by the way). But we also talked about hypothetical names for our kids, and we could never agree on one. I remember one time at the church we attended in Cambridge, Ontario, this couple introduced themselves to us, and then they turned and said, “This is our boy, Rowan.” I remember thinking to myself, “I really like that name.” Then I turned to Meagan, who had a look on her face like she was thinking the exact same thing. Then I realized in my heart what we had to do: We could not be friends with these people because we needed to steal this name and claim we creatively thought of it ourselves as good millennials.
Admittedly, we have really only chosen names that have a nice sound to them. That is really subjective. There really wasn’t any deeper meaning to why we chose our kids’ names. Rowan means “from the Ashberry tree.” I still, to this day,don’tt know what an Ashberry tree looks like.
Well, the ancient people took the meaning of names a bit more seriously than Meagan, and I have, and God gives his name to Moses, and not “Bill” or “Dave” or anything you can just casually write on a name sticker with a sharpie during an ice breaker event. It is this mysterious, perplexing name: “I Am who I Am.” What does that mean?
That is kind of a strange name. It almost feels comical, like something out of an Abbot and Costello routine: Who is on first base? Who is. The man’s name is Who. That’s who.
Moses asks, “Who are you?” and God says, “I Am. I Just Am.” That is the name God chooses. Why? Well, in ancient culture, if you knew the true name of a god, you could control and invoke the power of that god as a magical incantation, or so the priests of Egypt thought. For God to reply, “I Am who I Am,” is saying who God is goes beyond this whole exercise of naming and controlling.
I am beyond your concept of what God is;
I am not one god amongst others.
I am beyond all beings;
I am the source of all being itself;
All other gods are nothing compared to me; I am the one who simply is.
God gives Moses this name, which writers in church history have sometimes called the “Nameless Name” (cf. Ps. Dionysius) as a way of reminding people that God cannot be thought of or controlled like other gods. God is simply the one who is.
Salvation in God’s Name
And yet, God also says to Moses, “I am with you.” This God whose name suggests God is the absolute purity of existence, something infinite and incomparable, this God is not far off, aloof and unconcerned with the world; this God chooses to come alongside this small, insignificant, enslaved nation, to walk with people in the midst of everyday life and their struggles. This God chooses to make promises of liberation. And what God does with Israel is a sign of what God is about for all humanity.
This God is the one who is.
This God is the real God.
This God has real power.
This God is truly just.
This God is compassionate and gracious.
This God is on the side of the forgotten and unworthy of the earth.
This God can be trusted.
So, beginning with Exodus, God sets out to, we might say, make a name for himself, and Israel is called to testify of what God does to the surrounding nations. Their history is to be like a living resume to the rest of humanity, showing that God is trustworthy and up for the task of redemption. God sets out to act in such a way that when people hear about the God of Israel, this God who is the I Am, the one who is (or in Hebrew, Yahweh), this God is different.
That is what holiness means, by the way. The Hebrew word kadosh means to be set apart. Something that is holy is different. This God is a holy God. God is different from the rest.
Throughout the Old Testament, you have God’s people invoking God’s name to say, “Come and save us. We know that you are the God who will.” Psalm 53 does this.
1 Save me, O God, by your name,
and vindicate me by your might…3 For the insolent have risen against me,
the ruthless seek my life;
they do not set God before them.4 But surely, God is my helper;
the Lord is the upholder of my life.
5 He will repay my enemies for their evil.
So, the people call on the name of God in prayer and worship by name.
In college, I had a friend who was a part of AA, alcoholics anonymous. He joined AA to clean up his life, and at the same time he found faith in Jesus and eventually felt called to be a missionary, and that is what he was studying for. I remember one time he took me to one of those meetings where visitors were allowed, and it was a humbling time for me to hear his testimony and others.
One part of all the testimonies mentioned one of the steps in the program, namely, trusting in a higher power. I remember talking about that with him one time. He said, you know, in AA, we are told to trust in a higher power, and for most, this could be anything: it could be Allah, Buddha, or some other deity from the great religions; it could be an angel, or the oneness of the universe, or the force from Star Wars for that matter—it really could be anything as long as you believe in something more than yourself since one of the qualities of the steps is realizing one’s enslavement to addiction.
Well, he said, that is all fine and good, but he said, I don’t know how you can believe in those other things and have any assurance you are going to be okay through all this. Of course, he did not mean it like Christians are better or that if you are a Christian in AA, you are obviously never going to struggle or fail at your addiction or any of that. What he meant is that lots of people believe in God or believe in a higher power, and that often helps make people better people. But the question becomes, what is God like, and how do you know this? If there is a higher power, that’s great, but is this higher power merciful? That is where the God of the Bible made a difference for him.
For him, it simply meant his higher power, the one he looked to for strength to succeed in sobriety and forgiveness when he failed, had a name. His higher power, whom he trusted, has a track record of being there for sinners. In fact, his higher power loves sinners so much that he died for them as one of them and rose from the grave to give them hope.
The name of his higher power that he trusted was Jesus, whose name means “God saves.” Jesus is the ultimate display of this “I Am” God capable of being with us.
This does not mean that we pray in “Jesus’ name” like it is a magic formula to make God do things or the secret ingredient in a recipe. Surely, God hears the cries of anyone, anywhere, regardless of how they pray. But we pray, invoking the name of God, the identity of Jesus, God’s Son, to remind ourselves and others that it is this particular God who answers prayer, who has shown himself to be faithful.
God’s Name is Being Profaned
Well, that still does not answer why Jesus tells us to pray, “Make your name holy.” In fact, that really makes things more confusing: Isn’t it already holy, isn’t that why we are praying to it?
Well, to answer that, we need to remember that things did not always go rosy for Israel, and things are not the way they should be in the world. Israel disobeys; they are unfaithful to God; they commit idolatry; they neglect the poor and engage in dirty politics with the empires of the world, and so, they get conquered and carried off into exile.
The people disobey God and feel the consequences, but God does not stop being their God. God has made promises of faithfulness and restoration that God has said he will keep despite their unfaithfulness. And so you have these prayers then in the later parts of the Old Testament, longing for God to come.
Ezekiel 39 gives a vision that one day, God will come, and he will make his name holy. Let me read the ten verses:
And you, mortal, prophesy against Gog, and say: Thus says the Lord God: I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal! 2 I will turn you round and drive you forwards, and bring you up from the remotest parts of the north, and lead you against the mountains of Israel. 3 I will strike your bow from your left hand, and will make your arrows drop out of your right hand. 4 You shall fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples that are with you; I will give you to birds of prey of every kind and to the wild animals to be devoured. 5 You shall fall in the open field; for I have spoken, says the Lord God. 6 I will send fire on Magog and on those who live securely in the coastlands; and they shall know that I am the Lord. 7 My holy name I will make known among my people Israel; and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel. 8 It has come! It has happened, says the Lord God. This is the day of which I have spoken. 9 Then those who live in the towns of Israel will go out and make fires of the weapons and burn them—bucklers and shields, bows and arrows, hand-pikes and spears—and they will make fires of them for seven years. 10 They will not need to take wood out of the field or cut down any trees in the forests, for they will make their fires of the weapons; they will despoil those who despoiled them, and plunder those who plundered them, says the Lord God.
Gog and Magog are nicknames of the areas where the brutal Babylonians and Assyrians came from. Meschech and Tubal are in the northern mountain region of modern-day Iraq and Turkey. The Bible geeks in the room might know the phrase “Gog and Magog” from the book of Revelation, which re-uses the phrase as an archetype for any brutal military power, which, for the writer of Revelation, was the empire of Rome.
Ezekiel’s vision, which if you found it bizarre and jarring that is exactly what apocalyptic visions do to get us to think differently, is that these arrogant and violent nations oppressing people will come to an end, as all empires will, whether that is Assyria, Babylon, or Rome, or whether that is Russia, China, or the British empire, or the America empire. Their armies will be destroyed, but not only that, their weapons will be gathered up and burned for firewood, so much so that the people of God will be warmed by its heat for years to come, and they will live in safety, no longer needing weapons of war anymore.
Most importantly, (did you hear the line?), it says, “My holy name I will make known among my people; and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore.”
God’s name was in a state of being profaned: insulted, tarnished, desecrated. Why? Because oppression is rampant on the earth and the innocent suffer.
God looks at the state of the world, the state of his people, the cries of the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed. God sees the rampant war. God sees hard-heartedness in God’s people, and God sees his name profaned.
Boy, I am sure glad we solved all those problems in the Old Testament, and that stuff never happens today!
Notice God’s response: God doesn’t just turn to us and say, “Well, I gave you a choice, and you really messed that up, so too bad, not my problem.” Although we certainly have made choices that have messed things up.
God doesn’t just turn to us and say, “See, you might think all this evil is bad, but I am actually all-powerful; I am in control; I can do whatever I want, even if that means causing or allowing terrible things to happen. So be it. So, how dare you question me?!” He doesn’t do that either, even though that is what many of us were taught growing up.
I remember talking to an atheist one time, and I asked him why he believed what he believed (there are, of course, many reasons for why someone is an atheist). The person said how he looks at the world and the evil in it, and he sees this as a contradiction to the existence of a good God.
I had to say, “I agree. But that is why I believe in God. Evil does not belong here.” Thankfully, I think God agrees too: God sees the evil of the earth, and God sees this as a contradiction to who he is. God takes the evil and tragedy of this world personally.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book, The Prophets, writes about this:
“Why does religion, the essence of which is worship of God, put such stress on justice for humanity?… Perhaps the answer lies here: righteousness is not just a value; it is God’s part of human life, God’s stake in human history. Perhaps it is because the suffering of man is a blot upon God’s conscience; because it is in relations between man and man that God is at stake. Or is it simply because the infamy of a wicked act is infinitely greater than we are able to imagine? People act as they please, doing what is vile, abusing the weak, not realizing that they are fighting God, affronting the divine, or that the oppression of man is a humiliation of God.”
God looks at this world, broken and corrupted, this world he created, this world that belongs to him, this world he loves, and his people in his image, all humanity as God’s children, whether we have acknowledged him or not, us who are hurt and hurting others, and he makes promises to us: I am going to do something about his. It is an affront to who I am.
Do We Dare Pray this Prayer?
And so, Jesus, the one who is God Immanuel, gives a prayer to his disciples.
Pray this way: Our Father in heaven—Father of all creation, all humanity, a father to the oppressed and forgotten, the unworthy and unforgiven—our Father.
May your name be holy—God may you do something about how the state of this world is an insult to your justice and goodness, your reputation of the true and perfect God.
Look what it says after this: May your kingdom come and you will be done, on earth as it is in heaven—May your perfect goodness come to reside, be made manifest, break-in, shine through, restore and reorder every square inch of reality back to the way things ought to be, the way you desire them to be. So much so that when we look at heaven and we look at the earth, we won’t be able to tell the difference.
This is what this prayer is telling us to pray. There will be a day when what God desires for things and the way things are will be one and the same. One day, God’s name will be fully, unreservedly holy without exception or remainder.
This leads us to admit a kind of sad irony to how we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We recite the Lord’s Prayer, and it is so commonplace for many of us—so much for me, that I have caught myself yawning. Have you (no judgment)?
And I will be honest: Part of me would have been much more content if I just carried on reciting this prayer in the same thoughtless, boring, safe way. Why? Because thoughtless faith easily becomes selfish faith. And thoughtless faith does not bother to notice. Deep down, it does not want to.
I can recite this prayer, as I so often have, and my big takeaway from the prayer, if I think about it at all, is that God is in heaven. This world is awful and hopeless, so God wants me to go to heaven. So, God forgives me of my sins and promises to provide for all my needs, which is really convenient because, you know, have you seen the price of gas and groceries lately?! And that’s it. Amen.
And so, for many of us Christians, we can sing worship, delighted with how we get to escape earth and go to heaven, missing our calling that we are invited to bring heaven to earth, to live in such a way on earth as it is in heaven. We are called to make God’s name holy.
If this is what this prayer is saying, I’ll be honest with you: far from yawning at this prayer, we should ask ourselves: do we dare say this prayer?
One of the Ten Commandments is “You shall not take God’s name in vain,” and that is not referring to the words that come out of our mouths when we hit our thumbs with a hammer. It is whether we who know of God, who confess God, take seriously what that means with the way we live our lives. Have we taken God’s name in vain by reciting this prayer and refusing to live it?
The fact is sometimes we pray for God to answer our prayers, and the answer he gives is us. Be the answer to this prayer. Brothers and Sisters, will we make God’s name holy?
Do we dare to live this prayer?
Let’s pray.
Can These Bones Live?: The Resurrection of the Body and the Mission of the Church
Preached November 21, 2021, at Brookfield Baptist Church for their 159th anniversary service.
Let me read to you a text of hope for our troubled times. It is a vision of Ezekiel’s from Ezekiel chapter 37:1-14:
37 The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’” 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army. 11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’” (NIV)
God bless the reading of his word.
I remember my first day as a lead pastor. This was after several months of applying around, resume after resume, each church turning me down – they did not want to take on a doctoral student, they also wanted someone with more experience.
Life then was so uncertain back then. I was just beginning my dissertation for my doctorate at the University of Toronto. My contract as a coordinator of a drop-in center for those who faced homelessness and poverty in downtown Toronto had ended due to the funding cuts to social programs in Toronto. My wife and I just had our second child, Emerson, a few months prior. We had just bought a home and now were realizing we might have to sell it. My contract as an intern for church planting in another Baptist denomination had come to an unfortunate end: the denominational leaders found out that I was in favor of women in ministry, and for this Baptist denomination, such a belief was beyond the pale. I had a meeting with a denominational leader, a card-carrying fundamentalist, who gave me an ultimatum: he put on no uncertain terms that the belief that men lead (and are the only ones that can be pastors) and women submit – this conviction was for him and the denomination essential to the Gospel, and that meant for me that I had to either shut up or have my funding as a church planter cut. I decided I could not in good conscience continue. It was hard leaving the denomination that my grandfather was a founding pastor of. When you have to leave the church family you were raised in, it feels like you are leaving Christianity itself, since it is the only Christianity you know. When you are literally threatened and attacked by your church family, the one that raised you, attacked over the beliefs you feel are biblical, if you have ever had a similar interaction with some of your Christian friends, it can make you wonder, does the church have a future? If it does, is it a future with me in it?
So, in all the uncertainty, a Canadian Baptist church, the 120 year old First Baptist of Sudbury hired me. They wanted a young pastor. First Baptist Church of Sudbury was a little church four hours north of Toronto, a place I had only visited once when I was in high school in the winter, a place that gets down to minus 40 in the winter, and I wondered how any human being could live here. It was this church that voted to hire me.
All of that is to say, I remember walking into my office to see that the interim pastor had left a report on my desk. It was a church growth flow church, charting the birth of a church, the peak years of a church, and then qualities and stages that indicate decline, and finally twilight and death. There was a big red circle around the word death.
This was a church, as I found, that had experienced over a decade of turmoil to no fault of its own. Two pastors one after the other had really done a lot of damage to the church. One ran off with the wife of one of the deacons. The other was hired and did not tell the church he was going through a bitter divorce with his wife and then divided the church. I remember that summer the church attendance was less than a dozen people.
It was not a very encouraging first day as I reflected how we just moved my family 400 kilometers away to a small church, all of which were twice and sometimes three times my age. Does this church have a future? Does the church have a future?
This is a question I think many are asking especially in this time of the aftermath of the Pandemic. Financially the pandemic has rocked Canada: the Toronto Star has estimated that pandemic has costed Canadians 1.5 billion dollars of every day of the pandemic. For the United States, the total cost to date is estimated to be over 16 trillion dollars. People are worried whether there will be enough to go around.
Yet, it is the human cost that is most important. According to the most recent numbers on John Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center, there has been 256 million reported cases globally and there has been 5.1 million deaths attributed to the virus. Canada has seen 29 000 deaths. We call that being fortunate, but it is really so, so tragic. Many of these individuals have been seniors in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. But make no mistake: this virus is unpredictably deadly. I heard that a classmate of mine a few months ago, a woman my age with a child, got the virus, went to bed, and did not wake up.
For many, it has been the emotional toll that people have felt the most: feelings of isolation, burn out, anxiety. Churches have felt this as their pastors have been over worked to put services online and adapt to new health standards. All our churches have felt distant from members of the community but also feeling obstructed from doing ministry in the wider community.
As we look out at a post-pandemic world, as it moves to endemic stage, while we are still facing waves and new variants, it feels like we are surveying the wreckage. It feels like we are the survivors of a battle.
In my reading of Scripture, recently I went through the book of the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a prophet and a priest that proclaimed messages and visions from God about 600 years before Christ. Ezekiel watched a foreign empire, Babylon, come and destroy his home. The Jewish armies were decimated by a cruel and brutal military superpower. The people then were brought into exile. Ezekiel went with them where he served as a priest and teacher to a small expatriate community, living in exile.
Such hopelessness and insecurity can make our own situation seem so insignificant, but then again, we too are feeling a sense of dislocation, insecurity, and uncertainty, and when we come to Scripture, the Spirit of God animates these ancient words to say something to us today, something we need to hear.
It is in this context that Ezekiel has a vision of the aftermath of a battlefield, filled with corpses, dry bones, and it is a vision that is symbolic as it explains, but it names the spiritual reality that God’s people were in: a state of feeling defeated.
Yet, the spirit of God is not. God says to Ezekiel: Can these bones live? And Ezekiel replies in the most human way he can: “I don’t know. I don’t know the future. But you God do know.”
And he is given this vision: he sees the dry bones being raised up, the breath of God, the Spirit of life that animated all humanity and all living things in creation, this breath now is causing death to be reversed, a new creation.
God says of these bones that they are the house of Israel. They are God’s people who have said, “Our strength is gone, our hope feels lost. We feel cut off and separated.”
And God says to them, “I will restore you. I will bring you home. I will put my spirit in you and renew you.” God is saying this to us today, I believe.
It can feel like the church in Canada has lost a battle or just barely is scrapping by. So many of us have sent the past year stressed and anxious, our bones feel dried up, our hope feels lost.
And yet, the Spirit of God has not been defeated. God is still God, the Lord Almighty, the God of all possibilities, the God whose plans are always good, the God whose promises will not be thwarted.
Our God’s will and plan and promise is to bring salvation, forgiveness, healing, life, love, and liberation to all people – these have not been stopped for they cannot be stopped: God’s kingdom is still coming so that earth will one day be as it is in heaven.
And we know this definitely because this vision here is a prefigure of what happens to Jesus, God’s son, the messiah. For when the forces of darkness, of death and despair came against Jesus, Jesus gave himself up as a ransom to liberate us from these things, dying on a cross, a god-forsaken death. God became a cursed corpse. By this we know God is with us in our darkness moments. And in that time of hopelessness, in the time that it seems like the plan of God was truly foiled, that Jesus’ claims to being the messiah were disproven, on the third day the tomb was found empty; Jesus is risen from the grave by the Spirit.
As we celebrate where we have come today as a church, we must remember that we stand on the hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are his body as the church, and the body of Christ, while it was bruised, beaten, and crucified, the Spirit raised this body to new life.
This is our hope for a time that has seen such death. This is our hope in a time that has seen such sadness. We have the hope of Jesus.
The church is founded on this truth, and we cannot forget this. We live because Jesus is Lord.
The same Spirit that raised Jesus is the same Spirit that came on the first disciples to begin the church at Pentecost. It is the same Spirit that moved the first Baptists in Nova Scotia, prophets is like Henry Alline, to speak God’s word boldly, to live God’s gospel courageously, even in the face of all that has gone wrong in this world. It is the same Spirit that moved that is alive with us today.
As we remember God’s faithfulness to our churches in the past, and ask the question what does the future have in store? Our question sounds very similar to what God said to Ezekiel, and our answer must be the same:
O Lord God, you know. We trust you and your way. You know because you are sovereign. You know because you are good. You know because you have made promises you keep, plans that will come true.
These are words I know I needed to hear when I first started pastoring. Because the fact is many of us have convinced ourselves that we can control the future, that we can predict it and change it by our power and skill. I thought that pastoring. Looking at that depressing church growth document all those years ago in my office, I thought to myself: I can change that. I thought I could save the church.
I became obsessed over the next few years of starting programs and fundraisers and advertisements. Many of these did not have much effect (at best people from other larger churches came to these programs, used them like a free service and continued attending their own churches), and after two years of it, I just found myself burnt out and wanting to quit.
It was in that moment that I realized I don’t know what the future of this church will be. Only God knows. But what I do know is that I must be faithful to live what God is calling the church to be.
The church was located in the town of Garson. The church relocated out there in the 70’s hoping that this new suburb would be the next up and coming neighborhood. The reality was the city zoned it to be where the poor of the city were sent: supplemented income housing was built on all sides of the church. Many of the stores had graffiti on it. You would very often see police cruisers making stops.
One day a guy called and wanted a ride to church. He lived in a one room apartment around the corner from me, and as I got to know him, he faced a lot of mental health challenges. He had attended other churches that frankly saw him as a burden and ignored him. Other churches wanted to grow the church by attracting easier, and I should say, richer sheep.
This was the person God had given us, our family of faith, so we did our best, and I soon found he had a lot of friends. I put out a sign in his building that if anyone needed a ride to the foodbank on a Tuesday afternoon, I would drive them to the other end of town and have coffee with them after.
Many would ask me, “Are you just being nice to me to get me to come to your church?” And I would say emphatically: “While I strongly believe that a community of faith and weekly worship is important to our spirituality, I will always be there to help you, even if you never set foot in our church.”
I realized in those experiences that if the church is to have a future, it will be by taking up our crosses in a new way. The church must die to self: it must lay to rest its obsession with money that causes it to see the poor as worthless; it must lay to rest its expectations of what a successful Christian life is, which causes so many to feel they are not worthy to be in the family of God: the mentally ill, those who face addictions, those whose love lives are messy and complicated, those who are in the sexual minority. The church must take up its cross in a new way, embracing the discomfort the Spirit is calling us into.
It was in those moments that I know I saw the church, what it can truly me, a place where th outcasts was welcomed, a family of misfits. Let’s face it: we all are seeing very pointed reminders of the failures of the church today: racism and residential schools, stories of bigotry and abuse, or just the stories of apathy and irrelevance where churches just don’t actually care about doing what is right or sharing God’s love.
One elderly lady in my church said to me, “Pastor, I don’t know what to do with some of these people.” And I said to her, “I get it, I don’t know how to handle some of these issues either, but at the end of the day, a lot of these individuals are people without parents. I know you know how to be that.” So, the ladies of our church started cooking meals and putting them in Tupperware containers to give out. We organized community meals for people in the common area of the apartment building. It was the old folks of the congregation that said, “We know we need to be open minded, because we know what happened when we weren’t.”
It was pastoring this little church that renewed my confidence in the church: the church that is not a building, but a community of disciples, imperfect but willing to bare one another’s burdens, living like a family, being family to those that have no family.
It is amazing what can happen when the church is ready to take up its cross.
And it must be said, if we want to see the reality of resurrection, the Spirit moving and breaking in and causing new life, it will only happen, when a church is ready take up the cross, to sacrifice all that it is and even can be.
I emphasize here “can be” because so often we go out on mission for the purpose of the “future of the church,” but that really means we just want to keep what is ours. And when we do that, we will ignore those who don’t matter to our budget, our building maintenance, our membership lists. We will be vulnerable to politicians that promise power to the church. We will make the church and its mission about us.
While the future offers no guarantees – I know I constantly worried: “Will we have enough money to pay the bills? Will we have to amalgamate with another church?” – the promise of God in this passage is that God will do wonderful things, surprising things, in the valleys of dry bones.
I had a bunch of stories I wanted to tell, but here is just one: In ministering in Sudbury, I came across a young man, who also lived in the low-income housing development.
Early twenties, a poor kid, as I got to know him, he had endured the worst in this world: terrible abuse, such that just to talk with him, he was deeply erratic. It did not take long in his presence to know his soul was in deep chaos: that lethal mix of hatred and hurt.
I would come by his apartment from time to time to check on him. He was on welfare, but there was a strong possibility that it would run out, so he was looking for a job. He was about the same height as me, so I gave him some of my dress clothes. We practiced interviews. He applied around all over the place. Each time, employers would just hear how he talked, how it was hard to hold down a conversation with him and go with someone else. Didn’t matter he was willing and able. As he applied here and there, the more downcast he got.
One day, I did rounds around the apartments asking if anyone needed a ride to the food bank. I would take them as per my Tuesday noontime routine. I knocked on his door, and he answered, a bit dishevelled. I figured he was just getting up. He decided to come along to the food bank that day, even though he did not need anything.
I turned to him in the car and gave him a Jesus Calling devotional. I had gotten a bulk order of these things, figuring this was an easy way for some of the people, who were not strong readers that I ministered to, could nevertheless hear an uplifting Scripture spoken over them on a daily basis.
While the one guy went in, this young man turned to me and said, Spencer, I was sitting in my room thinking I got nothing to live for. I have no peace in my life. I was ready to end it when you knocked at the door.
I prayed with him, and I suggested, let’s see what words of encouragement the devotional he had in his hand had to offer. Turns out that day, the topic was scriptures relating to finding peace in life.
He did a stint in the hospital. After he got out I met up with him again. He seemed to be in a bad state of mind. I learned that previous to me meeting him, he had committed a crime, which he was going to be sentenced for. The possibility was weighing heavily on him. I asked him about what he believed in, whether he trusted God’s love and forgiveness in all this.
He turned to me and said that he admitted his mind is so erratic, so faulty, he resolved at some point to just stop believing anything. He figured his brain is just so unreliable, there isn’t any point to believing in anything. He told me he felt ashamed about all the ideas that would get him worked up. So, one day he just decided he would stop believing in anything.
I tried to offer some words of encouragement, but I was taken back. How do you get someone to believe in Jesus, when they don’t even think they are capable of believing anything?
I went home that day particularly distraught. I remember praying, “God how can a person like that be reached? How could a person like that be discipled? God you’ve got to reach this person, but if the Gospel means anything, it has to mean something to a person like that. The Gospel is good news to everyone, especially a desperate, troubled young man, who needs hope in his life.”
My prayers for the next little while took on a tone of frustration and disappointment.
A little while later, I came by his apartment. I found him in the apartment’s communal kitchen. He turned to me. “Spencer, I was sitting in my apartment. I was ready to end it all. I just felt so worthless. But then he showed up.”
“Who showed up?” I asked. He just pointed upward. In that dark moment, he heard a distinct voice say to him, “Your life is worth something to me.”
“Spencer, I don’t know what I am, but I know I ain’t an atheist anymore.”
God surprised me that day. God surprises us most often when we are ready to be the Gospel for the broken and when we are willing to be broken for the Gospel.
It is a beautiful irony that church growth did not happen when I obsessed about growing the church. The church started growing when we resolved to be there for those in need in our communities even if it could cost us “the church” as we know it.
The church will only find itself when it is ready to die to self. It will only rise when it is willing to dwell in the valleys of dry bones.
As we celebrate today, Brookfield Baptist Church, where we have come from, where we are now, where we hope to go. Remember we are the body of Christ: We live in this world crucified and only in and through this, we can see moments of resurrection.
Let’s pray:
God of hope and new life, we praise you that you are faithful. You have been faithful through the years in this church, and so we trust you with our present and future.
Lord, we do not know what the future holds. And we have seen so much discouragement these days.
Lord, teach us in new ways to trust your Spirit. Inspire us in new ways to take up your cross.
Empty us into this world, so that we can be with those who need to hear about you.
Permit us to see moments of resurrection, moments of your kingdom come.
We pray longing for the salvation of all people, the restoration of all things.
These things we pray in your name. Amen.
Spencer Boersma 