Tagged: Jesus
How to be Human
Sermon preached on Nov. 15 at Billtown Baptist Church.
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:26-7, NRSV)
***
The image I am about to show you is a bit grotesque, but I think it is necessary in order to reflect on the next essential truth of the Christian faith we are going to tackle today.
The person I am about to show you is Joseph Merrick. Born in 1862 in England, Merrick developed from birth a very rare disorder where his bones began to fuse together and grow lumps.
Again, I warn you that the picture is a bit shocking.
After his mother died when he was 9, his father soon rejected him and remarried, deserting him, seeing him as a monster. As a young boy, he was not able to work well due to his deformed hand, and he soon found that the only work available was in circus, as a freak show act. He was nicknamed the “Elephant Man.”
He rarely went out in public, but when he did, he wore a hat with a sheet around it to cover his face.
While on tour in London, a doctor saw him and felt compassion on him. Dr. Friedrich Treves gave Merrick his card, pledging to offer any medical assistance he needed.
Merrick continued on his tour into Europe, and there even his own circus managers took advantage of him, robbing him and leaving him for dead.
His deformities caused him to lose his voice, but he was nevertheless able to make it back to London, and still holding on to the business card of Dr. Treves, he made his way to the hospital in London.
Dr. Treves found that the deformities were incurable and would eventually be fatal, but he allowed Merrick to live the rest of his days in the care of the hospital. Dr. Treves flipped the bill, and became Merrick’s close friend, visiting him often.
Several years later, Merrick died at age 27. His deformities were so severe that the bone formations around his skull eventually prevented him from getting enough oxygen, and he died of asphyxiation, a terrible way to die, gasping for air.
Who was Joseph Merrick? Was he an abomination such that his own father abandoned him?
Was he a freak, such that the only place he could work was a circus?
Even then, was he just a way of making some money, a resource to be exploited? That is what his circus managers saw him as. What is the difference between a human being and a piece of property?
Or was he a person how Dr. Treves immediately saw him? Not an abomination, not a freak show, not a piece of property, not even a medical phenomenon, but a person of worth, worthy of compassion. Someone to help; someone who had needs; someone who needed friendship.
Was Joseph Merrick human? And if he was, does that mean anything?
Why do we choose to see something of worth in those that others deem worthless?
Is it something in us? Something we do? Or is it a decision of faith? Faith in something more than ourselves?
The Question of Being Human
Admittedly, this is a strange question to ask this morning. It comes out of this week’s readings from the Believe book that I have been told you are going through with Pastor Chris.
The question is this: What does it mean to be human?
It is one of those questions that is fundamental to who we are, but it is of the kind of philosophical nature that we rarely ask. After all, has any of us gotten up in the morning, sat down to our morning breakfast and coffee and asked ourselves questions like, “How shall I be human today?” If you did, I think I would either be very impressed or be a bit worried about you. I know for myself, putting full sentences together before my morning coffee is a bit of a challenge!
At face value it is an almost insulting and obvious question. What is a human? We are humans….silly! That’s like asking the question, “What’s breathing?” …I am sure you will figure it out.
What does it mean to be human? I looked up some definitions in the dictionary. One definition wrote, “A bipedal primate mammal.” Have you ever looked in the mirror and said, “Good morning you handsome bipedal primate mammal?” If you did, I would again worry about you. For some reason, that definition just doesn’t get to the core of who we are.
Another definition said, “Humans are not animals, nor are they aliens from outer space,” which is true, but not really narrowing it down all that much.
Even then, that is probably a bit overstated. Are we that distinct from animals? When we look at the animal world, there are lots of things that animals can do better than us.
Most land animals are faster than us.
Dolphins and Octopuses have problem solving intelligence.
Baby piglets have about the same emotional intelligence as a baby human.
Ants are capable of organizing societies of over 300 million per colony. Given that 300 million is roughly the population of the US, I’d say ants could probably teach us a thing or two about how to be harmonious and productive.
Did you know we are genetically 98% percent similar to chimps? That 2% goes along way.
That 2% accounts for the biggest different between us and the rest of the animal world, a little part of the front of our brains that control the production of language and advanced problem solving.
Think about that: a tiny chunk of pink gooey tissue at the front of our brains makes the difference between civilization and swinging from trees. There really is not that much that separates us from animals, biologically speaking. It is that little bit that goes a long way.
If that is all that it is, what leads us to believe we are special, better than the animals? If we are, again, so similar to chimps, chimps can instinctively kill one another over food. They have been known to cannibalize each other. Are they wrong to do that? Is it wrong if we kill others? Why are we different?
One atheist wrote over a century ago that since we are no different from animals, war is really just nature’s way of thinning out the herd. Is that true?
If not, why are we different? Are we special as humans because we talk and reason; we build and write; and we sing and philosophize?
We are human because of the things we do? Are we human because of the things we can achieve that no animal can?
We have a tendency to define our humanity according to the greatest things humans have achieved. We look to the greats of history such as conquerors like Alexander the Great, scientists like Albert Einstein, athletes like Michael Phelps, or artists like Van Gogh.
But if to be human means something we do, our achievements, where does that leave those that don’t do these things well? Where does that leave the average Joe’s?
If to be human is to have reason and ability, are people with physical and mental disabilities less human?
If to be human is have freedom and morality, are criminals less human?
History has shown that we often define certain people as more human than others based on these characteristics: men were defined as true humans and women defined as “defective males” for centuries in the western world based on the philosophy of Aristotle. In Europe, Jews were less human than Germans. In the United States, whites more human than blacks. In Canada, particularly, indigenous people.
Today the question is whether we really consider immigrants and refugees truly human, and therefore as deserving of care as a citizen gets.
We live in a day where human rights are assumed, but what it means to be human has no agreed answer. And some have even given up bothering with the question all together. Yet we can’t have one without the other.
In an age of white nationalism and mass displacements of refugees, anger and resentment over anyone that might economically threaten us, whether countries like China or different communities here at home like the indigenous fishermen or people in the sexual minority– so much of our laws hang on the notion of our common humanity, but the fact is, agreement on what it means to be human is far from common.
And things are only going to get more complicated. As we develop technologies like gene modification or artificial intelligence or the ability to merge human bodies with robotic parts, this question is not getting any easier. How do respond?
Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us of an important truth: “A human being is one thing, to be human is quite another.”
The problem with questions like “What does it mean to be human?” is that we can’t answer why we are the way we are. Biology and history offer clues, but not answers. Why? Because we did not make ourselves. The answer to who we are as humans and why we are the way were are, and whether we deserve dignity or forgiveness or, more importantly, salvation, must come from the one who did make us: God himself.
In God’s Image and Likeness
How does God see us? It is a question so important, it seems that writers of the Bible had the foresight to include it in its very first chapter: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness… So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Notice a few things in this text:
First is that Genesis is an ancient book and it was written for ancient people. This is a narrative written to say something to poor Israelites who have endured slavery and exile, who obviously did not have science nor thought in a scientific way. It was written to a people that were inundated with mythology that taught that Pharaoh and other kings were the true image of God, that since they are god, they can oppress whomever they choose.
If we are to understand Genesis, we have to understand that it is saying something to these ancient people, and through that, something that applies to us today.
In Genesis, notice that all people, male and female, regardless of age, gender, status, bears the divine image, where everywhere else in the world, kings, warlords, and priests were in the divine image. This idea is unique to Israel that drives Israel forward in thinking about what it means to be human.
What does it mean to be in the divine image? There are many possible answers to this, but we get a hint of it a few chapters later when Seth is described as being in the image of his father, Adam. It is parent language. Children are in the image of their parents. If you were to look at my kids, particularly, Rowan and Asher, and looked at a picture of me when I was their age, you might say they are a spitting image of me. What this means in Genesis is very important: all humans are in God’s image, therefore, all humans are considered God’s children, not because of what we can do and achieve, but because of how God has chosen to see us.
This is important because if we try to start with ourselves, why we deserve dignity, I think, as I just reflected, we will come up short. We will make our dignity conditional on something we have and do. But if we start with God, we realize that God considers us, no matter who we are, where we are from, or what we have done, to be his children.
You are God’s child. Regardless of who you are and what you have done. You are God’s child.
If we want to understand who we are, why we are here, and what we are meant to be and do and to become, we have to look to the one who made us, the one who knows us, the one who loves us.
Notice also that we are made in his likeness. We were made in his image, bestowed with dignity, considered his children, but we were also made in his likeness, intended to be like God.
As God is loving and holy and good, God wants this for each one of us.
If we want to be more human, we must learn to obey him. Obeying here is not God being a tyrant that want us to jump through hoops for his own amusement. The commands of God, understood through Jesus, his example of selflessness, his rule that all the laws are summarized in the law of love, applied for their weightier matters like compassion and justice and humility – so interpreted rightly, God’s commands are his ways for us to be more human. Consider some of the Ten Commandments:
God wants a way of life for us where we stop putting our worth in the things of this world. That is idolatry.
God wants us to stop reducing ourselves to our work. So he commands sabbath.
God wants a life for us where we are honest with ourselves and others. Do not lie
God wants a world where we do not harm one another or life in fear. Do no murder.
God wants us to know that if we love our spouses, our partners in life, there are certain things we simply will not do to them, such as committing adultery.
You can see this with each of the Ten Commandments, understood according to their spirit, how they offer a way that is better for us.
But there is a problem, also, which the next chapters in Genesis tell. The first humans like us today, when it came down to trusting God and choosing a way that was life-giving and good or to go our own way, down a path that was self-destructive, harmful to others and ourselves, and cut off from God. For no good reason, they chose that path, and we still do today.
To be human also is to realize that we are fallible and fallen. We are a admixture of mystery and misery, truth and tragedy, sacred yet sinful. Despite being made for love and life and light, we allow pride and hate and greed and lust and fear to get the better of us. We turn from God and others and even are inauthentic to ourselves, and so, we are can be caught in sin.
I once sat with a man whose wife left him because he beat her in an argument, and how he was consuming himself with alcohol. As I realized, he was punishing himself, drinking himself to death, because he knew he had done something that he could not forgive himself for, destroying his marriage, the one good thing in his life.
As I got to share with him, if forgiveness is up to us, we don’t have the right to forgive ourselves, that is true. The modern notion of Oprah-style all we need to do is accept ourselves is a myth. Forgiveness is not up to us. But whether our lives have worth, whether we deserve a second or third or forth chance, whether our lives are redeemable after we have done things that we can’t even think to forgive ourselves, these are up to the one who made us, knows us, and loved us, who has the right to all judgment, who has the right then to all forgiveness.
Since God loved his children so much, he came as one of us, God in the flesh, God Immanuel, in Jesus Christ as a sign that God is for us not against us.
And when we rejected him, betrayed him, took him and murdered him on a cross, God in Jesus Christ forgave us; he bore our death, so that we could have his life, and on the third day, he rose from the grave to show that nothing can stop the victory of his love over sin.
Because of this, we human beings have love, forgiveness and hope. And I have learned that we humans cannot live without these things.
Learning to be Human Together
Now what does this mean for us here as a church? Someone once told me they don’t go to church. I asked, “Why not?” They responded, “The church is full of people, and I am just not the kind of person that can put up with people.” To which I had to respond, “You do know you are also a ‘people’ too right?”
God has loved us with a self-giving love, and so we ought to love others as we love ourselves. It is in loving others and being loved ourselves that we discover how we are human.
Being human is not merely that we have brains and bodies, sexuality and smarts, it is why do we have them, and what do we use them for? For importantly, it is how do we treat others with the love and respect we wish for ourselves? It is to see ourselves in and through others. That is what we mean by our common humanity.
There is a simple notion that we often forget. We do not control how we are born. So many of the things I take for granted about my identity I did not choose: I am a Canadian born, male, of Dutch descent, born to a middle class family that thankfully provided a good home to grow up in, good schools to go to. I don’t have any major health concerns. I did not choose my body. I did not choose my ethnicity, my sexual orientation, my citizenship, so many things about me. One of my defining characteristics in my career as an academic is my mind. While I worked hard to be where I am today, I also recognize that I did not choose the brain I have.
If we recognize this, we have to realize, I could have had a very different life. If I could have been another, how would I want to be treated? How do I treat others who have been less fortunate than myself? How do we understand people who have made terrible mistakes, destructive choices?
I am friends with a federal level prison chaplain. He works with people leaving prison after committing crimes like murder. He said working this job has been profound for so many reasons. One reason is the most startling: He has come to realize that those that commit murder are not monsters. We want to think of them as such, but the reality is scarier: They are people just like us. We all are a lot more alike than we are different.
We are all humans made in God’s image, and when we realize that, we also know we are all sinners, people who fail to live out God’s likeness. Each and every one of us. We are a lot more alike than we are different.
Sometimes we expect the church to be perfect, to say fundamentally, “I am not like them; those people.” Sometimes we convince ourselves we are: we try to be perfect at church, and put on a face to hide that we are not.
But the church, as I have found, is that place where we learn how to be human. And that means not showing off our achievements and strengths, but contending with our weaknesses and failures.
This is why I believe in the work of the church: It not because the church is perfect. It is the opposite. It is the place we can relearn our humanity by realizing I can’t be who I am without you.
I can’t fully realize how God accepts me for who I am, until I accept others for who they are.
I can’t fully realize how I am forgiven, until I start forgiving others.
I can’t be honest with myself, until I can be honest with others.
I can’t know that I am loved until I am vulnerable about the parts of me that I don’t love myself.
Why? This is all a reflection of who God is, the God that is relationship in his very essence as Father, Son, and Spirit. God is, in the Trinity, a community of being, and we are made in his image to find ourselves in community as well. We are the visible family of God, called together from our diversity into a common love.
And that makes the church, when it is taking its calling to be radically human, both profoundly difficult but also profoundly beautiful.
Our constantly tendency is to define ourselves according to our strengths and achievements, our titles and roles. But this way makes us terrified of failure, of growing old, of losing status or ability.
What if we see ourselves more clearly not in times of strength and success, but in times when we have been the most vulnerable and shown our weaknesses? But what if we see define ourselves not by what we have achieved, but by what we have received?
One of the most powerful books I have ever read is Jean Vanier’s Becoming Human. Vanier’s own life, as we have seen, tells the tale of both the sacredness and sin, but that perhaps allows his work to be all the more applicable: He tells in this book of how his communities for people with disabilities got started. He tells of one man, Eric, so tormented with loneliness and fear from being abandoned due to his severe disabilities, that he would leap on people and squeeze them.
When Eric was brought to Vanier’s community, Vanier realized that this person’s biggest problem was not medical, it was emotional. So, they figured, what if he really does just need someone there. So, they got the biggest orderly they could find, someone that was not going to get hurt by Eric, and they let him squeeze for as long as he needed. And as Eric did, the orderly just hugged him back and reassured him that nothing bad was going to happen, he was in a place that he was loved and accepted. Slowly but surely, Eric’s condition improved. He of course was still severely disabled, but his quality of life and ability deeply improved and it was really only because he had come to know that he was loved.
Eric needed a love that would never let him go in order to heal of his wounds and be all that he could be. We are no different. I think that is what the church when it is being the church, can do.
May you know today, that you are God’s child, made in his image.
May you know that he loves you, has drawn near to you in Jesus Christ, and even has we rejected him and turned from him, even then, God has loved us so much that he died our death and offered us his perfect life.
May you received this love today. May it define all that you are, and may you turn then and show it to others.
And in knowing, in receiving, and in living it out in turn, may we together be as God intended his church to be: fully human.
Amen.
The Unexpected Messiah
I titled this sermon “The Unexpected Messiah,” and this has been a few weeks of the unexpected, hasn’t it?
This week has been a week of frustration trying to work from home, restlessness from being cooped up, of isolation from not seeing family and friends, of anxiety and anxiousness over this pandemic and all the fallout from it. But it has also been a time of unexpected blessings: time with my wife and kids, time that makes one thankful for all that we have, time being forced to do a little more of what the Bible calls sabbath.
And now, here this Sunday, I did not expect to be giving a sermon in front of a laptop today. But I also could not have expected everyone to pull through and come together to make the online service possible. These days are teach us in a new way what it means to be the church. So this has been a season of the unexpected, and now we are here on Palm Sunday, ready to enter Holy Week. I have to ask, if we have made preparations for how the world can give us unexpected twists and turns, are we ready for how God can show up unexpectedly? Let us come to God’s word for what we might hear from him today. The reading is Matthew 21:1-17 from the NRSV:
21:1 When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” 4 This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
5 “Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7 they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”10 When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” 11 The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.
12 Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 He said to them, “It is written,
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’;
but you are making it a den of robbers.”14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became angry 16 and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,
‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself’?”17 He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.
What do we expect kings to look like? What do we think of when we think of power?
Three hundred years before Christ, there arose a man named Alexander the Great. One of the most successful conquerors of all time – up there with Napoleon and Genghis Khan.
A Macedonian prince, schooled by the brightest in the world, his tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, and early in his life, the prince burned with a violent ambition for conquest.
After his father’s assassination, Alexander assumed the throne at age 20. Alexander feared rebellion, and so, he quickly worked to eliminate all possible challengers to his throne. He killed his cousins, two princes, his father’s other wife, her father, who was a general, and her daughter. He killed his whole family.
Once he had done this, he pursued his real agenda. He assembled his army: 48 000 soldiers, 6000 calvaries, 120 ships with crews that amounted to 38 000, and battle after battle, he conquered the known world.
His army was nothing short of impressive. Without radios, without motors, without any of our modern luxuries, his army ran with an efficiency and discipline that would make modern generals blush.
He was without a doubt one of the most formidable commanders in world history, ingeniously outflanking armies several times larger than his own. His victories are the stuff of legends.
In ten short years, his army had conquered all the way to Egypt then out all the way to India, where his soldiers finally persuaded him to turn back and go home.
When he came through Israel, he laid siege to the cities, and as they fell, he ordered his soldiers to kill all military-age males and to take all male children to sell them as slaves, funding the war effort.
Along the way, he founded 20 cities, most of them creatively named, “Alexandria.” As the army returned home, Alexander figured that he would set up a new capital in Babylon, however, one day, at age 32, after drinking some wine, he fell violently sick and died. Most historians suspect it was an assassination.
Alexander’s life was short, but spectacular. This young man conquered the known world by age 30. If you could describe his life in one word, it might be “glorious”: the glory of battle, of brilliance, of victory and conquest. That is why they call him Alexander the Great.
History is full of these kinds of “Greats”: Rameses the Great, Antiochus the Great, Cyrus the Great, Herod the Great, etc.
When Alexander conquered a city he rode in on his favourite horse. He rides his mighty horse, Bucephalus.
Look at almost every city in the world and at the heart of the city is a statue of its great man riding a horse.
Look Rome. Look at London. Look at Washington. Even look at Ottawa. They all proudly display the conqueror on the horse. It is the fundamental symbol of worldly power: The man on the horse, who has brought peace by victory. This is our image of power, wealth, stability, glory. This is what we expect a king to be like. Riding in with his army on the stallion, a Brucephalus.
Jesus did not ride in on a horse. Jesus did not do what we think kings should do. He wasn’t the messiah God’s people were expecting. He came in an unexpected way to give an unexpected message. And who Jesus is and what his message says, still today, two thousand years later, upsets our expectations of what we think God to be.
That is our challenge this morning. Jesus is still the unexpected messiah.
1. The people had the wrong expectation
Throughout the Old Testament, it is the people’s perennial temptation to want a conqueror on a horse. The people saw the great kings, and unfortunately, they wanted to be like the nations.
Look at the horse in the Old Testament, and frankly, sorry horse-lovers, the Old Testament does not look well on horses. Nearly every mention of horses is negative.
Why? Horses were exclusively used in war. You used oxen for farming. You used camels for long travel. Horses were much more expensive. They were kept for a singular purpose: battle.
Horses were the tanks of the ancient world, able to outflank foot soldiers and plow throw them like a knife through butter.
Israel’s prophets watched men like Alexander the Great riding on their horses. Deuteronomy warned that if Israel trusted in human power and a human king over God, the king will trust in his military more than God and lead the people astray. Deuteronomy 17:16 warns that the king must never accumulate horses, “lest they go back to the ways of Egypt.”
But they did.
The Old Testament is a sad narrative at many points. It is the story of God longing to be the king of his people, for them to trust him and accept his reign over their hearts and lives, but they resist for they want a king like the nations do. They want the wealth and security and grander of an empire. And they were willing to follow other gods, if those gods promised these things.
The apex of this quest is during King Solomon’s reign. His God-given wisdom brought wealth and prosperity beyond measure. 1 Kings records that he had so much gold that silver was virtually worthless, as common as rocks. But then he grew arrogant. The Bible records that he started to accumulate horses. It says he amassed 12 000 horses and 1400 chariots. He started to stockpile weapons.
He brokered alliances with pagan kings, and they gave him their daughters in marriage. His greed caused him to collect women like he did gold and weapons. And these wives persuaded him to worship their idols, perhaps because they promised power. Solomon grew corrupt. His kingdom began to fracture from insurrection as he grew more and more oppressive. The nation broke in two after his death into North and South, and as the two dynasties of kings constantly fell into idolatry and injustice, God finally removed his presence of protection.
Israel gets conquered again and again. First by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, and then the Romans in the time of Jesus. Israel lived under the shadow of empires and emperors, in oppression and occupation.
One hundred years before Jesus, the Jews revolt against the a Greek ruler named Antiochus Epiphanies. Antiochus bans Jewish worship and proclaims himself god. He nicknames himself the “Anti-messiah” the “Anti-Christ” in mockery of the Jewish God. The Jews are outraged and are rallied by their high priest, Matthias the Hasmonean. He gathers an army in the wilderness, and his five sons lead the army, headed by his firstborn, Judas the Maccabee. Maccabee means “the hammer” by the way: Judas the Hammer.
The Maccabees succeed in retaking Jerusalem. They come riding into Jerusalem on their warhorses. People cry out in adoration spreading their cloaks on the road. The people greet them by waving the symbol of their house. Can you guess what that is? The palm branch.
Now the Maccabean revolt was not particularly successful. Israel very quickly becomes a vessel kingdom to a larger empire, but the memory hangs on. People long for the good old days. They are nostalgic for the glory of the Maccabees. They long, you might say, to “Make Israel Great Again,” and so, the people greet Jesus with palm branches because they expected he was going to raise an army just like the Maccabees. He would be the next hammer. He would be a conqueror on a horse: Jesus the Maccabee, Jesus the Hammer.
The irony for us Christians is that we wave palm branches on a day like this, because that is what the passage describes. I have fond memories of holding palm branches in church when I was little. They seem so harmless. But since we are removed from this history, we do not realize why they were holding them. The palm branch was a symbol of revolution. It was like the hammer and sickle.
Perhaps this might change your feelings about waving a palm branch on Palm Sunday ever again. Or perhaps, maybe it is a reminder that we too can still today expect God to be something other than what he truly is.
In my experience, I know many people, Christians included, who assume God is like an invisible Santa Claus in the sky, existing to just give us stuff. This is the God that if you just believe in him, and if you are nice enough, which everyone generally is, you get stuff. You can get whatever you want out of God, and getting stuff is really the most important thing.
Other expectations are far less jolly. There is an expectation of God where God is so moralistic and angry, people live in constant fear and guilt. Their religion can be summarized in one line: “Don’t mess up or else.” This god claims to be loving, but only so long as you obey, never question, never stray.
This is a god that is a reflection of our own failed perfectionism. This god’s grace is limited because we are limited. We expect this god’s grace to be limited because we expect god to act just like us. If we know that we don’t measure up to our own standards, why should god be any different?
Still others believe God is absent from their lives, absent in the same way perhaps their fathers are. Where was God when I needed him most? Somewhere else, with his children, he clearly cares more about than me. This is a God that is never around and no matter what we do, we can never get his attention because nothing is ever good enough.
Still others believe in a God that approves of their politics. God is American. God is western. God is white. God is male. God is on our side. Our nation is God’s nation. Our war is God’s war. God hates everyone I hate.
What is it for you? What is your expectation of God? How have you put Jesus in a box of expectations the Gospel does not fit?
Can you say to yourself today as Isaiah 55:9 says: God your ways are not my ways and your thoughts are not my thoughts.
This easter time, are you ready for God to surprise you? Are you prepared for Jesus to show up in unexpected ways?
The people in Jesus’ time weren’t ready.
2. Jesus gave an unexpected message
Israel expected Jesus to be a conqueror on a horse. They expected him to come in and rally the troops like Judas Maccabee did, to conqueror the nations like Alexander the Great. But Jesus, as we know from the Gospel of Matthew, did not come riding in on a Brucephalus. He did not come with an army, with golden armour or sword. He did something unexpected.
He rode in on a donkey. Donkeys are work animals. They have stubby legs, best for carrying heavy loads, not for speed. If you have ever seen someone ride a donkey, you know it is not the most dignified of animals.
The people wave palm branches, hailing Jesus a warlord King. Jesus counters this with the prophecy of Zechariah, which Matthew quotes the first part of:
Look, your king comes to you
Triumphant and victorious is he
Humble and riding on a donkey,
On a colt, the foal of a donkey.
The next verse is important:
He will end the chariot from Ephraim
And the war-horse from Jerusalem;
And the battle bow shall be ended,
And he shall command peace to the nations
His dominion shall be from sea to sea,
The donkey is not only the symbol of humility, but it is also the prophetic sign of non-violence. Jesus is not their warlord. Jesus is not there to start a war. Jesus is not against the Romans. Nor is he merely the king of the Jews. He is everyone’s king. His kingdom cannot be reduced to this nation or that land or that tribe and that tongue. He desires peace for everyone.
In the 1970’s a Christian by the name of Oscar Romero preached to his church in El Salvador against the oppression they faced. He would be martyred for speaking out against these oppressors. So, the people wanted to rise up in revolution, kill their oppressors. They wanted Romero to tell them God was on their side, that God would approve of their violence. This is what he said:
“We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross; the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.”
Jesus was a disruptor, a resistor, a revolutionary, just not the one they wanted him to be. His is a revolution of love, of justice, of peace, of reconciliation.
The people wanted him to kill all their enemies. Jesus did something more profound and ultimately more dangerous. He exposed the enemy within our hearts.
St. Augustine once said, “It is arrogant to believe that our enemies can do more damage than our own hatred.”
The people were expecting Jesus to come into the temple and perhaps give one of those iconic speeches a general might give, like Mark Anthony’s “Friends, brothers, countrymen, lend me your ears.” They expected him to preach a message that vindicated them and pronounced vengeance to their enemies. We are God’s people! They are not! Kill them, end this occupation, establish your kingdom, make us rich like in the days of Solomon! It says instead that he starts to overturn the tables.
Now let me put to rest an old misconception about this passage: Jesus was not surprised and outraged because there was commerce occurring in the Temple. the priests of the temple were not just having bake sales and fundraisers. In fact, what we know of the temple is that it was very important to the city that it did carry on commerce: The temple contracted barbers, clothing makers, incense makers, goldsmiths, etc. The temple kept a lot of common people employed. This is not the issue.
The issue was not commerce per se, but a certain kind of commerce. Jesus says that the practices turned the temple into a house of robbers. What was the robbery? The text says: Jesus overturned the money changers and dove sellers.
From what we know of temple practice, the temple refused to allow any goods or services to purchased with Roman money. The Temple had its own currency that you had to buy it first at an increased rate just to go buy something else. The temple regarded Roman money as unclean money, and unfit to be used to buy sacrifices with, but conveniently the temple did not have a problem taking that money off a person’s hands. Out of their hands and into the priests’ pockets, who conveniently not defiled to have large sums of it.
What sacrifice was being bough there? The text says doves. That is interesting because the law in the Old Testament allowed two options for a sin offering. If you sinned you could either sacrifice a goat or a dove. Goats obviously cost way more than doves, so if you were rich, you would obviously use a goat. Doves were the choice for the poor.
What we know of temple practices of this day is that doves were being sold at an exorbitant price: two gold coins per pair of doves. The poor had to pay several months of income just to get a pair of birds to sacrifice to God. In other words, the temple was exploiting the poor. The Temple was selling forgiveness. They turned grace into oppression, into a get rich quick scheme.
So the liberator on a donkey, comes into the temple he is supposed to drive out the Roman occupation from, but instead, he starts driving out the religion’s true sickness: greed, exploitation, apathy, hypocrisy. That’s unexpected.
Now we scowl and condemn those Pharisees, how do we do similar things?
How do we limit God’s grace to only those who we think are worthy?
What walls of exclusion have we built for who can come into God’s houses and who do we try to keep out?
Where have we used God’s name to justify our agendas?
How have we invoked our faith to remain comfortable and privileged?
Who have we blamed in order for that to stay the way it is?
If Jesus came into our churches, our lives, while we shout “Hosanna!” what tables would he overturn today?
If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from our culture, full of unbelievers and doubters,” Jesus comes and clears the temple of our own faithlessness.
If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from all those people that are ruining the environment,” Jesus may come and clear out the temple of our own wastefulness.
If we shout out, “Hosanna, make sure I have enough money,” Jesus may come and clear the temple of our lack of generosity.
If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from all those greedy CEO’s and corrupt politicians;” Jesus may come and clear out the temple of our own hypocrisy.
If we shout out, “Hosanna, keep me safe from the coronavirus,” Jesus may come and remind us of our responsibility to the most vulnerable in our society.
As we shout out, “Hosanna,” are we prepared to have God work in us, break us open, overturn our expectations?
3. Who do we expect Jesus to be?
You will notice in this narrative that Jesus had many people respond to him. Some good others not. Which ones are we like?
First, there are the crowds, who proclaimed hosanna with the palm branches, expecting Jesus to be the next military leader. These were the same fickle crowds that just as soon as Jesus was not going to do that, they turned to yell out, “Crucify, crucify!”
When they didn’t get what they wanted out of Jesus, they turned on him. Will we do the same? Will we reject God just because he does not do what we expect him to do? Are we God’s fair-weather friends? Or will we trust God through thick and thin?
The second is the money changers and the Pharisees. These are people invested in the religious system staying the same. They have made their faith all about them. These are people whose identities are built on the idea that they are right and others are wrong. Out of some misdirected sense of piety, they decide who is in and who is out. And of course, they and those like them are the ones who are in and would prefer to keep it that way.
Are we like that? How are we invested in our churches staying the same? How are we invested in our churches looking just like us?
The last group is the sick and the children. The text says that Jesus, after clearing the temple immediately started healing the sick. If you had an illness in that culture, you would have been deemed unclean. In other words, you were excluded from the temple. You could not sacrifice. You could not have forgiveness.
This is not quite the same thing as being quarantined, for the ancient world believed that if you were sick it was because of your sins. You were cursed. You were clearly a sinner.
Jesus healed them, which means Jesus showed them grace and forgiveness that no one else would or could.
This is so wonderful that little children start praising him as the Son of David.
While we take care of those that are affected by sickness in our community, I think if we understand what sickness meant in Jesus’ time, we have to realize something with it. We are all in need of Jesus’ healing.
Without Jesus, we are all excluded from grace. Without Jesus, we are all unworthy.
Without Jesus, we are lost. Without Jesus, we are all broken. Without Jesus, we cannot expect forgiveness.
If we can admit that, can we confess that Jesus everyday – every day – surprises us with even more grace. Why? Because he is just that kind of messiah. He is just that kind of God.
May this prepare us for what lies ahead this week.
As we think about Good Friday, may we trust even more the surprise of the cross: that when we were content to murder Jesus, Jesus was content to love us. Jesus has died our death to offer us his life.
As we think about Easter Sunday, may we trust even more that surprise of the empty tomb, that all that has gone wrong in this world will be put right.
And if we know that Jesus is so unexpectedly patient, unexpectedly loving, unexpectedly gracious, may we be inspired to live that kind of grace out in our world a bit more too.
In a world of ignorance, of greed, of arrogance, of worry and fear, may you be this week a witness for Christ that your neighbours did not expect.
Let’s pray.
The Spirit without Prejudice and Justified Equality
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. (Galatians 3:23-4:7, NRSV)
The year is 1591 in Scotland, a women named Eufame MacLayne is pregnant with twins and goes into labour. The labour is difficult, physically and emotionally taxing. It is painful. So painful that she pleads with the midwifes for relief. Out of compassion, they give her a strong pain-relief drug. She delivers her babies.
This might seem like a reasonable thing, but in the 16th century it was illegal to use pain-medication for child-birth. The ecclesial authorities learn of this crime, and bring the young mother, still recuperating from child birth before a tribunal.
Her crime: trying to lessen God’s curse on women. God mandated in Genesis 3 that women, due to their sin of eating the fruit, should suffer during childbirth, and how dare Eufame MacLayne be so obsessed with her own freedom and bodily autonomy that she would absolve herself of God’s punishment on her gender.
The church tribunal deemed her guilty. Her punishment was no mere parking ticket: She was burned at the stake. Let that sink in for a second.
Genesis 3 the woman’s pain in child bearing is increased, and this is a sign of the fallenness of our existence. The church in the 1600’s deemed it their duty to enforce the curse, to enforce our fallenness, to enforce the consequences of sin. I find that tragically odd. One would think it is the church’s duty and pleasure to undo the curse. One would think!
Notice also in Genesis 3 that as a result of the man and the woman choosing to go against God, turning in blame towards one another, our lives as gendered individuals are marred by competition, and sadly, but patriarchy: : “your desire will be for your husband, but he will rule over you.” The companionship of one flesh in Genesis 2 is sundered into the barriers of sin: rather than mutuality, hierarchy, rather than reciprocity, domination.
Sadly, many churches to this day deem it their duty, much like the church did to Eufame MacLayne’s day, to enforce the curse, setting up barriers to women in ministry, refusing to recognize women in leadership, whether in the home or church or in business or in educational institutions.
The year is 1860, America stands on the brink of civil war between North and South, largely over the issue of slavery. The Baptist Convention, for those who were listening in Dr. Maxwell’s classes, has already broke asunder, as the North barred Southern Baptist slave-owning candidates for missionary work. Southern Baptist preachers defended the right to own slaves as biblical, and moreover, the right to own black slaves for they are dark skinned and therefore under the curse of Ham. Once again, it is the church’s duty it felt apparently to enforce the consequences of sin, rather than undo them.
The North, lead by Baptists like Francis Wayland, argued scripture must be read through one’s conscience, which deems it unconscionable to own another human being. The South saw this as liberalism. The Bible has slavery. “It says it, that settles it.”
The South, as history shows, looses the civil war, the slaves are freed, but in the wake of this defeat, many Southern leaders flow into the ranks of the KKK, and by night carry out brutal intimidation and lynchings, an estimated 5000 lynchings happened over the next decades.
We like to high-brow our American neighbours, but Halifax tells of its own injustices. In 1960, those who lived in Africville, had their homes and their church bulldozed, forcibly relocated so that the MacKay Bridge could be built.
In the name of economic progress, the land and homes of the marginalized are always a reasonable price.
The year is 2020 we are seeing this today, with the fight of the Wet’suwet’en over whether a pipeline can go over their land. If the Wet’suwet’en were White, would we be so eager to ignore their voice?
The dismissive mentality of many Canadians reflects an old habit of the colonizer who came empowered by the doctrine of discovery, that if explorers found a land not governed by Christian lords, it was their right and duty to take over that land to absorb it into Christendom.
It was their duty to re-culture the natives into Christian culture, the tragic folly of this is evident to us in the estimate 6000 children who dead in the squalor and abuse of the residential school system.
I want to tell you that these horrific things were done by godless people, by those that do not know the Bible. The reality is far more sobering: All these deeds were perpetrated by those who chapter and verse’d their injustice.
This truth makes this message all the more urgent today. It makes the work of your studies, of this college, work of organizations like Atlantic Society of Biblical Equality, the holy fellowship I see in this room, all the more necessary: The Bible must be read through the eyes of equality, which is the eyes lightened by the Holy Spirit.
1. We must read the Word of God with the Wind of God
This is a sermon that cannot stand alone for there is so many passages well-intending Christians have invoked to close down equality: Eph. 5, 1 Cor. 11 and 14, 1 Tim. 2. I can’t treat them here, and why I think there are strong reasons why they are often read out of context.
I would hope to impress upon you the necessity that we must read the Word of God with the Wind of God, Scripture by the Spirit: for “the letter of kills, but the Spirit gives life,” says Paul.
We must read the Word of God with the Wind of God. Words spoken without breath will be nothing but a mute whisper in this world.
Or as William Newton Clarke, one of the first Baptist theologians to consider biblical equality for women’s ordination, writes in his profound little memoir, 60 Years with the Bible, “I used to say the Bible closes me down to this, I now realize the Spirit of Scripture opens me up.” I would hope to impress this on you today.
Why? Because the Holy Spirit opened Paul up, in Damascus first, and then, here in Galatia.
As the early church expanded beyond Judea, the Apostles saw the Spirit’s reach exceed their grasp. The book of Acts shows the wonderful accounts of the Spirit disrupting and unsettling and spurring on and causing the church to reach out.
In Galatia we see Gentiles coming to faith in Jesus Christ and wanting to be apart of existing communities of Jewish Christians. But this created a problem: if Gentiles want to be apart of the people of God, a group called the Judaizers insisted they have to become Jewish.
How do you become Jewish? By submitting yourself to the law, which begins in its epitome, circumcision.
As Markus Barth pointed out, circumcision was the church’s first race issue. Here a religious command becomes a racial issue. Jew: circumcised therefore clean; Gentiles: uncircumcised therefore unclean.
How did the Spirit open up Paul? He realized that the Spirit is without prejudice.
2. Because the Spirit is without prejudice, we are justified by our faith
“Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?” Did you do something to make God love you or did God love you and you just had to trust it?
Gentiles who were not circumcised, who were not setting out to live out all 613 some-odd laws of the OT, or to becomes Jews by circumcision, never the less, had the Spirit come upon them.
One should note, Paul does not have a problem with obeying what God has commanded here. People forget that Paul actually tells Timothy to get circumcised in order to be a more effective minister to his Jewish brethren. 1 Tim. 1:8 says, “we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately.” Obedience is not the problem, using the Bible to justify inequality is.
If you are obeying the letter of the law in such away as to delude yourself that this is why God favours you and why you are better than others, why it reinforcers your privilege and superiority against another, you have made the law do something it was never intended to do. And that is what the Judaizers were doing.
Paul responds, “no one is justified before God by the law, the just will live by faith.” He is quoting the Old Testament here. That is what the law is supposed to remind us of. Trust God’s mercy; trust what his Spirit is doing.
That is what qualifies us to be the people of God. This is what makes you a child of God. Period.
Paul then does something profound. Just as Jesus transgresses the letter to fulfill it spirit, Paul says, if that is how you are going to use circumcision. I’m ending it. It’s done.
We often fail to appreciate just how radical this is.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that “The Pauline question whether circumcision is a condition of justification seems to me in present day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation.” That is how radical, progressive, and revolutionary Paul was being.
Circumcision is considered the eternal ordinance in Genesis. But I it got in the way of knowing Jesus. If it got in the way of God’s love. It got in the way of what the Spirit was doing. Well, circumcision just didn’t make the cut no pun intended.
Paul called into question the very centre of his Jewish religion in the name of the love of Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters, we have to ask ourselves, are we going to follow the Spirit, even if that means forsaking our religion too? I hope so.
3. Because we are justified by the unprejudiced Spirit, we must remove all barriers to equality
At the apex of the epistle to the Galatians, he offers this powerful manifesto: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”
Jews and Gentiles are equal in Christ, therefore the physical restriction of circumcision, dividing the two, was removed in the name of what the Spirit was doing.
In Galatians the act of the Spirit is without prejudice in bestowing the gift of salvation, by it we cry out “Abba Father.” In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lists the same manifesto before listing the gifts of salvation. Verse 12:
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit….
Jump down to verse 28 where he lists the result of drinking of the one Spirit: And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues.
Notice that apostleship is in this list, notice that leadership is in this list. If the Spirit is without prejudice in bestowing the gift of salvation, by this same logic the Spirit is without prejudice in giving the gifts of salvation.
Equality of the gift and gifts is part and parcel with the logic of justification by faith. You can’t have one without the other. Because we trust that the Spirit has brought us Gentiles into the people of God, we can’t help but trust the Spirit also calls anyone, regardless of race, gender, or status, to lead his church. You can’t have equality without justification, and you can’t have justification without equality. Gift and gifts are one as the body of Christ is meant to be one.
It would be a gross error in judgment to think that just because Paul is working within society with slavery that Paul is not trying to subvert slavery.
It would be an equally gross error in judgment to think that just because Paul is working within a culture that saw women as subordinate, that his writings are not trying to gently subvert this either.
The church has not done well to notice this, but the Spirit is without prejudice, we are justified in equality, and that is why the physical barriers to this new humanity must come down.
Interpreters from Martin Luther to recent commentators like Ronald Fung have been content to say that this manifesto only pertains to spiritual equality. In faith, slave and free people are spiritually equal, despite one owning the other; men and women are spiritually equal, despite women being subordinate to men. In the words, the barriers to equality in our bodies don’t matter. In other words, dualism.
This does not take into account the bodily nature of circumcision. And if you don’t feel like circumcision has something to do with bodily equality, men, you just have to ask yourself: if a church expected you to be circumcised in order to be a member, imagine if they said that in the bulletin, would you really feel welcomed? The issue of equality is very much a bodily matter.
Women’s equality, racial equality, economic equality, they are all very different and need to be addressed in very different ways, and yet they are connected. We cannot have equality from one without equality for another. Why? We are all human. We did not choose the skin we are in.
I have no control over the circumstances of my birth: I could have been born female; I could have been born native or black; I could have been born in a country ravaged by corruption; I could have been born with a developmental disability or a severe mental illness. Let me push you further: I could have been born with XXY chromosome syndrome and fallen outside the gender binary. I could have been born with testosterone deficiency, and thus been bodily female yet a chromosomal male. That is exceedingly rare and our political discourses have surely marred this discussion, but the fact remains: I did not choose the skin I am in.
If that is the case, with the social barriers out there today, the stereotypes, we must all ask ourselves, if this could have been me, how would I want to be treated? Equality must be our guiding principle, empathy and conscience must guide our interpretation, because Paul says later in Galatians, the whole law is summarized in one command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”
And if we don’t, as Desmond Tutu once said, “If I diminish you, I diminish myself.” Because I could have been you. “We are a lot more alike than we are different” (Charlie Taylor).
Some see bodily differences as the reason for social barriers, the Bible sees our bodily differences as what necessitates the hard work of physical equality. Our physical differences are what makes the equality of the new humanity all the more beautiful.
4. The cost of equality is worth it
About ten years ago I was pastoring in another Baptist denomination that was founded in part by the rejection of women in ministry. I found myself in seminary zealously against women in ministry. Back before this in seminary, my first year of bible college, I wrote a paper why the egalitarian professor at my Bible college, Dr. Bill Webb, should be fired for his liberalism. A word to the wise, don’t ever write a paper about why your professor should be fired. My professor, a lady named Lisa Onbelet, very graciously asked me to rewrite this paper.
Yet, when I took Dr. Webb’s hermeneutics course, I found him able to give gentle, articulate answers about the scriptures I quoted at him, such that I found myself convinced. And this is good advice for anyone as we have these conversations: be gentle and be patient. Know your Scriptures.
Bill was eventually let go from his position, and we all knew it was due to his convictions.
When this happened, I knew that this would have consequences for me as I began to pastor. As I sat down with the leadership of the association I was apart of to discuss further funding for a church plant in the next town over, talk of ministry turned to talk of theology, and the leader wanted to know if I was in or was I out.
I could have remained silent, our first child, Rowan, had just been born. I was doing full-time doctoral studies, working 10 hours week as a TA, 10 hours a week as a soup-kitchen co-ordinator, 20 hours a week as a church planting intern. Meagan had gone back to school on her mat-leave to upgrade her teaching degree along with life-guarding in the evenings. We were barely scrapping by.
I could have stayed silent, but I knew that I couldn’t. I would not be able to live with myself if I denied my conscience and my convictions.
The association leader gave an ultimatum then: shut up and toe the party line or have your funding cut. I pleaded with this man for several hours over coffee to no avail.
“Why can we not centre our denomination’s unity and how we do the Gospel on something like the Trinity, who God is?” I insisted. His response, which I had to write down because I couldn’t believe it, he said, “No, Spencer, gender roles is more important to the Gospel than the Trinity.” For many Christians that is the case.
That night I said to Meagan I am going to have to fire up my resume and leave the denominational family my grandfather, Fritz Boersma, was a founding pastor. After dozens of resumes were sent out and no call-back, no church wanting to hire a doctoral student, but finally First Baptist Church of Sudbury called.
In hindsight this was a small cost in the end compared to women I knew that studied at this Bible college to realize no church would ever take a chance on them no matter how talented or passionate or godly they were.
There is still work to be done. I just got a message from a woman wishing me luck and she mentioned she was speaking with her church about why they can have women pastors. I realize I will never have to do this. I will never have to justify my profession or my vocation because of my gender. That is precisely why I am saying this now.
But it was a wonderful experience pastoring a church that had long supported women in leadership, cultivating a thoughtful open-minded community, but also I can tell you that while our denomination or congregations as a whole upholds equality in principle, it still has a long way to go in practice.
Whether it is women’s ordination or reciprocity in marriage, racial justice, indigenous reconciliation, hospitality to refugees, dignity rather than disgust for sexual minorities, or seeking to treat those who face poverty with the material support a person made in God’s image deserves, each one of these were weekly struggles in pastoring.
With every new face around the church came the question of what toxic, half-baked, youtube-google-searched theology are they bringing in with them. Many I found have built their entire faith on staying safe. Many love justifying social barriers with scriptures. Many Christians love treating the New Testament as the second Old Testament, shall we say.
There is that option pastoring and in preaching when you know a sermon illustration that the text calls for will upset important members of the church who are set in their ways and each month you know the church’s budget is holding on by the skin of its teeth, it is easy to just not talk about these matters and offer people a comfortable, spiritualized Gospel.
I was pleased and humbled to have First Baptist Sudbury grow well in my five years there, but I know it also came with one sermon after another where so-and-so wasn’t there the next week, all to find out that they didn’t like being “pushed on those issues,” and eventually “moved on” to the next church in town.
I also found pastoring that just as many women were opposed to equality as men were. For some, the notion of being restricted meant they don’t have to be responsible and don’t have to worry. The idea that God might call them to something more risky and vulnerable and messy, well, subordination meant safety.
After all, the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt, didn’t they?
Proclaiming God’s word will cost us. It will cost us in a culture that has fractured into tribes of self-interest. It will cost us pastors even more as we pastor churches that have too often created cultures that cater.
I worry that there are many that want to ignore this conversation on equality let alone our duty to uphold it. And from a worldly perspective, why should I as a Western, English-speaking, white, straight, middle-class, male be asked to give up something for people I don’t know? One might say, “White privilege? Life is hard for me too you know!” If freedom is the point of rights, why would I give up my freedom for another’s rights?
But for Paul, this is not his line of thinking, and it can’t be ours. His equality is founded on the God who took on our flesh, “born of a women, born under the law.” A God who gave up his freedom so that we could be free.
We are equal because the barrier of heaven and earth was broken, because the king became a slave, because the holy one took on our curse, the blessed one took on our cross, because the righteous one became sin, because the first became last, because God removed every barrier between God and sinner with his very body, so that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come… nor anything else in all creation, can to separate us from the love of God; because of this, we are one, we are free, we are saved, we are blessed, we are counted as God’s people, considered God’s children, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven itself. Living this out is our equality.
God bore the cross so we could be free, and now we must bear our crosses so that others can know this freedom.
Equality will cost us, but I also know there is so much more to be gained, when we see churches that embrace all the gifting of the Spirit regardless of race, gender, or status. This is when the kingdom shines through the beautiful mosaic of Christ’s body all the clearer. The cost is worth it.
Because the kingdom is Paul’s equality, he is able to say, I am willing to endure hardship, hunger, persecution, peril, even the sword, to make this equality possible for another, especially those whom this world as forgotten. He is able to say, for him living is for Christ and to die was gain. The cost is worth it.
May we die to self today, and may we embrace new life in Christ.
May it be the case for us today and hereafter.
Let’s pray. [Given the topic of this sermon, I am going to take a different form then the normative pattern of prayer to the Father in the name of Jesus, and actually, pray to the Holy Spirit as the Book of Revelation does]
Holy Spirit, Spirit of Christ addressing us now, Sophia-wisdom of the Father before all creation.
You hover over the deep of our soul with a creativity that formed the heavens and earth.
In you we live and move and have our being. We sense you in our midst; we feel you groan with sighs too deep for words over the state of our broken world.
Forgive us for neglecting you. You are the Spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. You make the equality and freedom we seek possible.
Forgive us for the ways we have refused to see the image of God in another. Be with the marginalized of this world. Give eyes to see them and ears to hear them.
Be with our female pastors, who face barriers our male pastors do not. Be with our pastors that work for racial equality, indigenous reconciliation and care for those in poverty. Call us all to work for equality in all forms, even if it costs us. No cost compares to the riches of your kingdom.
We thank you that by your love we are justified, by you we cry out “Abba Father!” Teach anew to read scripture with your refreshing breath; breathe upon us the fire of Pentecost to speak your Gospel to the cacophony of this world.
But remind us that the same gentle presence we sense here as we sing is the same that raised our saviour Jesus Christ from the grave. May we never forget it.
By you one day the earth will be filled with the glory of God as water over the sea, by you every knee will bow and tongue confess Christ is Lord in heaven and on earth and under the earth, by you, God in Holy Trinity, will be all in all.
Come, Holy Spirit, Come. We thirst for you.
In Jesus name, amen.
Longing for the Justice, Praying with Persistence
Sermon preached at Wolfville Baptist Church, Sunday, Oct. 20th, 2019.
Grocholski, The Praying Jew, 1892.
It is a privilege to be here with you this morning.
It is also a great privilege to be able to have my friend and colleague, Melody Maxwell, leading the service with me. The irony should not be lost on us all that while she is “interning” here for her ordination, she is a great teacher to all of us. Not only the students, but I myself have learned much from her.
I am the Assistant Professor of Theology at Acadia Divinity College up the hill from you, I have been there now just over a year. My wife and five boys have absolutely loved settling into life in the Annapolis valley.
I can’t decide which I like better the people or the food. Its harvest time – you know that is a very really struggle. I had to ask myself recently whether I wanted to go out and see friends or stay in and enjoy a caramel apple pie from Sterlings. The struggle is real.
Perhaps I don’t have to choose most times. It was over delicious food with great people that I came to be speaking here by the way. Pastor Scott had my family over for dinner and as we talked and ate – Scott and I obvious geeked out and talked about theology – he asked me to come speak while he was away.
The scripture that the lectionary presented for us today – in other words I did not choose this scripture, it was the scripture of today in the lectionary, the reading plan a lot of churches in their daily reading – it is one that I think is deeply needed for our world today, for our church today, or us, right here, right now.
Luke chapter 18:1-8: ‘Then Jesus[a] told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” 6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”’
1. What is Prayer?
Why pray? What is prayer?
It is a question that a certain Court of Appeal had to ask as it would have it in British Columbia in 1980. A man accused of arson sat before the court, and as the court deliberated on the evidence as to whether this man did in fact burn down a building, the man, distraught, bowed his head and whispered a prayer. However, in bowing his head, he accidentally leaned into the microphone in front of him, to which the whole court heard him pray, “Oh God, let me get away w this just this once.”
The judge initially discounted this as evidence because a prayer was something private, a conversation between a person and their god, and therefore could not be used. This decision was revoked upon appeal as illegitimate, and so, well, lets just say our boy the arsonist had his prayer answered, just not the answer he wanted.
What is prayer?A court had to think about that and so often we don’t think about what it is. Prayer is talking to God. Prayer is acknowledging God, thanking him, praising him, confessing to him, even listening to him.
Nearly all religions have prayer in it. Ancient Greek religion and philosophy at the time of the New Testament spoke about prayer, with an interesting difference. The Greek believed prayer was important.
Similar to many Christians, they believed prayer helped you become a better person. It is a old proverb that often we pray hoping to change God only to find God has changed us in the process. That is very true.
But the ancient Greeks didn’t believe you could convince the gods to do anything on your behalf. Why? The gods were up there and we were down here. The gods really were not all that concerned about humans and imploring them based on some grand moral cause was seen as pointless because the gods there not moral. They were selfish and aloof. If anything you prayed because if you did not pray, then the gods might be offended at your lack of devotion.
Prayer in the ancient world was like paying a phone bill for a phone that does not work out of fear that if you don’t pay that they will take away your heat and hydro as well.
The Hebrew people, the people of the Old Testament, believed something different. God was a God of love, of redemption, a God that made this world out of his sheer generosity, and is intimately involved with it. Prayer was able to do something, it was able to be answered because God was a relational God, promising to make right what has gone wrong. Our God makes and cares, reveals and listens, relates and rescues.
There is an old philosophical problem that if God knows all things, why would you need to ask him what you need and if he is in deed good, would he be doing that anyway? The only answer to this we see in the implicit logic of Scripture is that God longs for relationship, God will to relate to us, to act with us, and not just by himself.
God did not make himself to be the battery of a clock work universe with you and me as mindless, involuntary cogs and gears. No, the world – we are are invited to be something more like God’s dance partners, invited to dance to the music of redemption, and this dance takes relationship, communication, free will, and vulnerability.
Just as there simply cannot be any good relationship without time spent with one another, without communication, without listening to another, there simply cannot be a Christian life without prayer. Prayer is to faith what communication is to love, and so, prayer is as vital to the Christian as breath is to living.
Jesus reminds us of the need to pray always. 1 Thes. 5:16 says to “pray without ceasing.” Why? Because at every moment God is with you; God is near you; God loves you.
Our God is God Immanuel, God with us. He has stepped into history, the eternal one into time, the infinite one into finite space, and he became flesh, in Jesus he took on our form, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” says Paul, (God had bound himself to our fate to say, “I will come through for you for I have literally put skin in this game”), and so he has shown that there is no barrier or distance between us and him.
God is the very root of our being, the very spark that gives us life, the energy that gives us vitality, the air that gives us breath. He knows us perfectly, and yet he wants to hear from us. He does not want to be a spectator to your life, but an active part. He is what causes our hearts to beat, and yet he is gentle enough to knock and ask to be invited it.
P. T. Forsyth once said, the greatest answer to prayer is prayer itself. What he meant is that God answers prayer, but the fact of prayer of this kind speaks of the beautiful reality that God listens and loves, a God who is with us and for us.
I know this from pastoring. It was often my privilege to lead a person in their first prayer. Often I would have coffee with someone that I met in the community and I could explain to them that God loves them and that God was always waiting to listen to their cares in prayer, they just needed to voice them. Often the prayers were wonderfully simply, “Um, hey God, its me Josh…um, you’re great. I need help. Thanks in advance…bye.” It’s funny but we sometimes we have over complicated prayer and made it too formal. I love a prayer that is intentionally worded to speak to my heart, but I know God sees that prayer is just as beautiful.
Do you know you can talk to God at any moment? Do you know you can tell him anything? God is the kind of God that delights in hearing what is on your heart. Tell him.
2. Sometimes we can lose heart
Jesus tells us to continue to pray and not lose heart. Is he saying that we need to pray in order to not lose heart? That prayer teaches us to hope as we acknowledge God, remind ourselves of who Christ is and what he has done?
As I have said, it is true, we often come to prayer longing for change in the world or in God perhaps, all to find that God is using prayer to change you: to have a heart of hope, to have a character more confirmed to his, to be comforted by his presence.
Or, and I think this is the more likely reading, is he saying that as the disciples continue, they will pray for many things in a world that is dark they may get discouraged? Have you every prayed for something, something you knew had to be good and if God is good he should obviously want to do this good thing?
Perhaps you prayed for a clear path in the midst of confusion and complexity, all to find that the option that you thought that seem like God’s best option for your life was not what ended up being the case.
I know of a couple that felt called to be missionaries in another country. They were educated, they raised money, they learned new languages and sold their home. Yet when they arrived in their new place of ministry one of their children got fatally ill, and they had to come home permanently, shocked with grief and having to adjust to a life they never foresaw, they wondered how could this be in God’s plan for them as opposed to being out on the mission field? The path seemed so clear, the option obvious.
Perhaps you have prayed for a spouse to change or a marriage to mend.
Perhaps you prayed for a friend or family member struggling with cancer. All to see the cancer slowly over take them.
When I was in college, both my parents died of cancer. My mom had been battling breast cancer since I was in high school, then suddenly my father got pancreatic cancer my third year of college, and he died five months after that, two weeks after I graduated. My mother two years after that, after the cancer that we though she had beaten came back suddenly.
I know God heals in miracles. I have seen what I can only explain as miracles, and yet I don’t know why my parents died where others lived.
Perhaps you have gone through something similar.
Perhaps you have looked at this world, this broken world, and you have prayed for healing and peace and reconciliation and liberation, as I have, all to feel like this world is growing darker.
As we hear of shootings and crises in immigration, news of economic strive that our churches are all feeling the pinch of, or of global warming or the latest dire news about the Kurds, fighting for their lives and loosing their homes, all messages delivered to us in our newsfeed accompanied by articles and memes spouting a new hate, a new irrationality, a new indifference and apathy that has caused me sometimes to wonder in prayer, “Where are you God in all this? Why aren’t things getting better?”
It is easy to look at this world and lose heart. It is easy to pray and feel discouraged.
3. The Parable of Persistence
Jesus knows this. And so, he is telling his disciples, who will face persecution, who will face the oppression and tyranny of the Roman Empire. This disciples will see many of their family members disown them, many of their friends get martyred, all to come to martyrdom themselves, most of the disciples executed for their faith in Jesus. Jesus knew that they are going to see things that would discourage them.
Jesus knows his disciples will pray, they will pray for things that they knew were good, and yet they will see things happen that are disheartening. Jesus knows this.
Jesus does something unexpected, odd even, but brilliant here, he comes into that hopelessness and gives us an analogy in this parable that reminds us that there is hope, that there is always hope. He gives us to the situation of a widow who keeps coming to a cruel judge for justice.
The persistence of the widow – someone with little power or wealth or status, nothing in her but the God-given will to see something better – succeeds where there is no reason for her to succeed other than by her persistence.
The judge, cruel but also apathetic, so apathetic that in the face of persistence, he allows justice as a path of least resistance, in order to not get worn out. Evil is its own demise.
This parable has taken place many times over in the pages of history. People of little power or status or wealth, succeed against all odds, against terrible apathy and evil, why? Perhaps nothing other than persistence, that we can see God behind.
Look to history, we see Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg, brought in arrested before inquisitors, having to escape for his life, writing books hidden away in a tower, all by his persistence he sparked the reformation, what some have called the most powerful social movement of the last half millennia.
We see examples like the persistence of William Wilberforce, who against the wickedness of the slave trade with all its corrupt wealth, was able to write and persist and convince the English world of the evil of slavery.
Look at Emily Stowe, a Christian Quaker, the first female physician and first advocate of women’s suffrage in Canada. Facing sexism, she persisted in advancing her ideas creating the first associations for advancing women in education, in difference professions, and in arguing for the right to vote. She persisted!
Look at Gandhi in India, a person who used hunger strikes and the forms of non-violent resistance, leading a movement against the British who subjugated India and so he successfully persisted in seeing India become independent and free. In the face of imperial power, he won hearts without shedding a drop of blood.
Look at Martin Luther King, in the face of the racist bigotry of segregation, King used again nothing other than non-violence, intellect, faith and persistence in his civil rights campaigns. While he was attacked, stabbed, threatened and eventually assassinated, through his efforts the apathetic heart of President Johnson was moved and the whole American people with him.
King once said that “the arch of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
And I can name many more, whether Dorothy Day or Desmond Tutu, or perhaps today we see the example of Greta Thunberg.
Jesus chooses a parable, it is a situation his disciples will know. They will live this parable.
Jesus is perhaps saying, remember that change is possible, a new world is possible, and that is why we can keep praying.
While the disciples did not see the end of persecution nor did they get to live out their lives in quiet, dying in peace, they did see justice: they saw the kingdom coming; they saw the Gospel proclaimed; they saw the Spirit moving; they saw hearts changed.
In all these instances and many more, while history has its darkness, its valleys, it also has its peaks, its beacons of light, its triumphs. Do not forget them! And do not forgot that with God all things are possible!
Why is change possible? Because God is not a tyrant like the unjust ruler, and if a despot can be moved, there is nothing with God who loves us and cares for us that can’t be moved.
How can God not want the best for us if he is the God that died for us?
How can we not have hope when the forces of evil could not keep our Lord Jesus Christ buried in the tomb?
How can we not persist when we see his Spirit moving?
4. Will we be found faithful?
So the text says,’7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”’
Perhaps sometimes we pray: “God solve all this sickness and poverty and war and ignorance. Do something about it!” And God says, “I am going to do something about it: I am going to send you.”
God surprises us some days with unexpected miracles, other days he tells us that we have everything we need already.
We pray longing for the kingdom, but we also praying knowing as Jesus says just a few verses earlier: the kingdom of God is among us. It is within us.
Sometimes we pray for the hand of God to intervene; Sometimes God reminds us that we are his hands and feet. We are his body.
When we pray for the end of poverty, God stirs us towards generosity.
When we pray for the end of war, God moves in us reconciliation.
When we pray for healing, God gives us compassion.
When we pray for liberation, God gives us persistence.
If you are wondering today why the path of the world has taken a step back, when you cry out to God longing for the kingdom, for justice, can you consider the possibility that the God is calling you to step forward?
Here is another odd truth: you are the widow of this parable. The widow was a person, as I said, without status, wealth, or power. You can say to yourself I am not strong enough, not smart enough, not financially stable enough, too young, too old, to make a difference. Yet God can use you to be the difference we long for in this world!
Do not lose heart, persist in prayer.
The question I want to leave you with then is Jesus’ Wolfville Baptist Church, will Jesus find you faithful? Will he find us faithful?
Will he find us speaking honesty in a world that does not want truth.
Will he find us being humble in a world of arrogance.
Will he find us being loving in a world that has stopped caring.
Will he find us being generous in a world of greed.
Will he find us being gentle in a world of violence.
Will he find us being just in a world that is cruel.
Will he find us confronting the powers of darkness by the light of his Holy Spirit?
Will he find us being faithful?
Let us take up that invitation today right now, and let’s pray with persistence…
All for Jesus
Mark 8:27-38:
27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”[h] 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
This passage challenges us to be the church God has called us to be in so many ways. Here we see who Jesus is, therefore who we are as followers of Christ, and what the way of Jesus is all about.
Jesus is our why for being who we are; Jesus is our how for being who we are; Jesus is our everything.
Let’s mediate on this story for a few minutes. Notice its subtleties, notice all the things God’s spirit has to say to use through it today…
1. Jesus Is Our Why
So Jesus asks the disciples: Who do you say that I am?
Some thought he was John the Baptist, who has recently been killed by Herod, but when Herod found out that there was a man working wonders in the wilderness, he was afraid that God had resurrected John the Baptist. Others thought Jesus was Elijah returned, the figure that would herald the coming messiah. Thus not the messiah, but the herald of the messiah.
Both would be flattering descriptions for Jesus to be likened to, but both fall short.
We also live in a day where there are lots of people saying who Jesus was. Jesus is just a Jewish prophet, a provocative philosopher, or lesser: the invention of the disciples or later tradition, a mere symbol of spiritual truths. These are all good things, but they too fall short.
Who did Peter say he was? “You are the messiah” Matthews Gospel expands Mark’s short and pithy narrative and says “You are the son of the living God.” As I was thinking about this, I had a moment of pause. We don’t talk that way do we? If someone asked you if you believed in Jesus, you might say, “He is my personal lord and saviour” or “he is my God, redeemer and friend.” None of these answers are wrong, but I don’t remember the last time I hard someone say, “He is the messiah.”
And yet for Peter to say this, it means he understands the man in front of him to be the culmination and fulfillment of thousands of years of yearning. As the people sinned, where carried off into exile, returned, rebuilt the temple, and still fell to idolatry, still witnessed empires sweep in and oppress them – the memory of Israel preserves this longing for God’s kingdom, a longing for true justice to be restored on earth, for the poor to be lifted up, for the humble to be exalted, for the people to be healed of their sin for the inside out. All of this to be through the messiah, God’s anointed, the king of Israel who will bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth.
You see in forgetting to acknowledge with that important title, messiah, we have given ourselves over to modest hopes. Jesus is my personal lord and saviour, but his way does not effect my job or my relationships. Jesus is my salvation, but he just does not have any relevance for how I think politically. Jesus is my lord, but I don’t want him to interrupt my comfortable middle-class way of life.
We often make Jesus the saviour of our soul, not the messiah for this broken world.
For Peter this means, in Jesus Christ was not just someone he had an idea about in his head or merely the name for why he was confident he had an afterlife. Jesus Christ was the subject of all his hopes and aspirations, politically, socially, personally, spirituality – all of it. When we acknowledge this, we have to then say, Jesus what would it be like if your lordship was made visible in every aspect of my life, in every aspect of my town, in every aspect of my province and country.
When we turn on the news and hear of starvation and strife and war, when we listen and here of poverty and drugs, or we learn of struggling families and the great void and emptiness that inflicts so many of our lives. Does your heart yearn? Do you long for healing in our world? When we do we long for Jesus the messiah once again.
As we celebrate, do we also anticipate. As we remember this morning, can we also hope?
As we remember the faithfulness of the Spirit in our past, trust the Spirit to light a fire deep inside us, to help us to hunger again for the way of Jesus, to thirst again for the Gospel.
Who do you say that I am? This is the question not just for the disciples but for us, for all people. This is the question that defines everything. This is the question that defines eternity? Who do you say that I am? Who is Jesus to you?
In order for us as a church to celebrate where we have come and where we are going, we have to re-ask this question: Who is Jesus Christ to us? Is this question front and centre?
If Jesus is not our why, if he is not the reason for everything we are and do, we simply do not have a church.
2. Jesus Is Our How
Jesus warns his disciples not to tell anyone. He does this several times in the Gospel of Mark. He silences the unclean spirit in the synagogue and he silences those he heals as well. Why does he do that?
Jesus silences people because he does not want to be proclaimed the messiah for military reasons. He does not want to appear as another messianic hopeful, inciting violence against the Romans. He silences these early pronouncements because he is not looking for praise. He is a humble messiah.
Jesus also wants his identity to be fully understood through his cross and resurrection.
Or else you misunderstand Jesus. The cross is Jesus Christ and therefore God in focus. If you want to know what God is like in Jesus Christ, look at the cross.
See what happens to Peter. Peter wants a messiah, but not the way of the cross. He sees Jesus as the messiah – all his hopes and aspiration in him, but then Jesus says, “by the way, me saying these things, means the pharisees are going to have me executed. The people will reject me, but this will be part of the Father’s plan of salvation.”
Jesus tells him the plan, but Peter can’t handle it. Wait, you mean you are not going to conquer and kill all those Romans? You want us to love our enemies? You mean I am not going to be rich and powerful at the end of all this when you come into your kingdoms? You mean I have to become a servant? Wait – you are actually saying the path to salvation is through rejection, execution, crucifixion, death…? This is the example you are setting?
That’s not what I signed up for. That can’t be!
The text says that Peter actually went so far as to rebuke him, as if what Jesus was saying was wrong and Jesus need to repent to be in accordance with Peter’s way of seeing things. That sounds ridiculous but how often do we do that? God that is not what I signed up for! God, the Christian life is supposed to be easy! God, salvation was supposed to me things simpler! God, prayer was supposed to mean I get what I want! Or God, church was supposed to always be blissful and happy! God you need to change this or else. I didn’t sign up for this! This is not my plan for you!
We do that sometimes don’t we? Some of us don’t say it with words, not directly, but we say that with our hearts. We often have no problem believing in Jesus, but then we have to follow Jesus. We love the notion of salvation; we don’t want the cross. Neither did Peter.
But today we must reaffirm that Jesus way is our way. Is obedience and compassion, honesty and humility, service and sacrifice our way, or is our way the way of the world?: Convenience, indifference, power and comfort?
If Jesus is not our how than we simply do not have good news to share.
I pastored First Baptist Church of Sudbury before coming here. Sudbury area was a very needy community. The church was surrounded by low income apartments. As I was told by one wise pastor when I came: Sudbury is not an un-churched town it is a de-churched down. It is a town with many who have been hurt by pastors, priests, churches that did not respond with Christ-like love.
I found that particularly of the poor of the city. They were treated as worthless. I put it out that if anyone needed a ride to the food bank I would drive them and if they wanted a coffee after I was more than willing.
Doing this taught me in whole different and new ways how the Gospel must be shared with Christ’s way.
One time two guys got into an argument as I was sitting with them for coffee. The fight sprung out of an argument about who does Snoop Dog look like. Apparently both guys had been using new meds and that made both of them snappy. One jump up and started yelling at the other. They got in each other’s faces as I sat there dumb-founded. The manager quickly yelled at them to leave, and outside, they quickly became apologetic with the manager. The manager came in and looked at me, “So I hear you are their pastor.”
“By the grace of God, yes, I am,” I said. Then I pleaded with the manager to give the guys a break. I came out to find them standing there ashamed. I told them they had to apologize, but I did manage to talk the manager out of banning them.
I think a moment like that was when most pastors would have said, “I am done. This is too much hassle. This is not safe, and there has to be easier sheep to save.” But this moment I realized was an opportunity.
That moment of being there with them, earned me the opportunity to listen to their story as one that did not give up on them. As I listened I heard terrible stories of abuse and neglect. I also found that many of the individuals did believe in God, but the God they had in their brains, told to them by many churches in the area, was that God’s grace had run out, and that meant that God was just like their absent fathers.
It was so often my pleasure to say to them, “How can God not love you? God in Jesus Christ died for any and all the punishment you think you deserve. God bore all the darkness you have ever faced; how could he be the kind of God that would give up on you?”
These words, I can tell you have given hope to people in suicidal despair.
I believe and know they are the only words that can.
3. Jesus Must Be Our Everything
How do we live out Jesus today and in the future?
The story takes place in Caesarea Philippi. Many times the Evangelists mention the place of something, there is often a significance to it. For instance in Luke, it is not coincidence that salvation is brought to the home of Zaccheaus, who lives in Jericho, the city whose history represents the victory of God’s people over the Canaanites, but also the slaughter of many. Here Jesus, the new Joshua, defeats the new Jericho, not with violence, but mercy.
Earlier in Mark, Jesus casts out a demon in the land of the Garesenes. Here the demon’s name was Legion, the name of the Roman army. This land was a place where the Jews fought Rome and lost. Mentioning it that way implies that Jesus is here to truly defeat the oppressors of God’s people, but also, the true enemy of God’s people is not Rome, it is a demonic darkness in the human heart that only the authority of Jesus can cast out.
So, what is unique about Caesarea Philippi? The name says it. Caesarea Philippi was a temple town devoted to Caesar, named after him, and in it was pagan temples devoted to the Roman gods, particularly the god, Pan. When the disciples ask Jesus who he is, they know where they are and what it means when Jesus answers. They are in occupied territory. They are surrounded with the reminder that their world had a different lord.
Our home setting is not that different: We live in occupied territory here in secularized Canada. We see the traces remaining of Christianity, some of it we are trying to keep hold of, other parts we need to just let go of, but surrounding us is a culture, sometimes quite overt other times quite subtle, that holds its allegiance to something else.
We may think we are sophisticated enough to not by into those ancient Gods like Pan or Zeus, but that is really not the case. Our world worships gods – gods of wealth, power, war, fear, goddesses of vanity, popularity, consumerism – yes, our world has its gods, we just call them by different names.
The temples of our days are different: Where are they? I have seen something simply to worship in shopping malls, in front of televisions or cell phone screens, at sporting events.
Someone told me they don’t believe in organized religion because organized religion makes people violent. Ignoring the fact that there are pacifist religion and how sloppy a statement that was in general, I said, pointing out they were wearing a NHL jersey. You do realized at the last Stanley Cup riots broke out causing the injury of dozens of people? And yet you still believe in organized sports?
His response: “Pff…We’re all human, you can’t blame a sport on the actions of a few bad people.” Exactly. To be human is to be religious, even if you don’t believe in anything remotely spiritual or supernatural. The question is will be focus our convictions, rituals, experiences, and deep longings on things that drive us towards humility, love, and peace, or things that will fill us with a meaninglessness that results in arrogance and violence?
We very much have gods today. We very much have worship and temples and religions in secular Canada, we just call them by different names.
What do we do when our world and the very structure of society is becoming dismissive to faith? Churches feel the pinch as people have less time and money, the Christian way being seen as backwards or just strange.
Some have lamented the loss of Christianized Canada, and there is much to lament, but we do know something for sure: in a culture where it is less easy to be a Christian we have to be more intentional in choose Jesus as our everything.
While we do not welcome the loss of Christian values, we do welcome any opportunity to walk faithfully and unreservedly with Jesus Christ.
For us there is really just one simple path: that is to follow Jesus. This path might look difference in the future than what it did in the past. The future might me we have to learn to trust Jesus in a whole new way.
What ever way Christ calls, we know it will take sacrifice. This is not our burden; this is our privileged; this is our way.
Jesus reaffirms that there cannot be any belief in Jesus without discipleship, without dying to self, without making Jesus our everything.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
You see the cross is Jesus Christ paying our ransom for sin. He paid this ransom with living in complete obedience to the Father, even to the point of becoming last, humiliated, death on a cross. It is becoming last he was exalted to first in the resurrection, defeated death, despair, disobedience, all the darkness of sin.
And he invites us to this path. Commentator Ched Myers points out that if the disciples were ready to follow Jesus way, there should have been 12 more crosses, but they declined the honour.
As the disciples realized so do we today. We have so often fail to live out the path Jesus sets before us. All we can do is what the disciples did. When they saw the resurrected Jesus, they could only trust his mercy. And that is the God we are celebrating today: Jesus died our death to offer his life. There is no sin he did not die for and therefore no opportunity of salvation he is unwilling to give. So, while we so often fail, God in his grace never gives up. He invites us to trust him with our everything today.
We must live as the missionary to Ecuador Jim Elliot once said when going to the indigenous tribes there meant certain death, “He is no fool to give up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot loose. ” Jim Elliot went to Ecuador, ministered among the tribal people there and was sadly caught by a raid of violent neighbouring tribes people and lost his life. The world might look at that and thing he was careless with his life, that he lost everything. But in the final day, when we all stand before the risen lord, we must ask ourselves what true success and true failure really is.
For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
Or as the British Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon once said, “If Jesus is not everything to you he is nothing to you.”
Today, brothers and sister, I want to ask you afresh as we remember what God has done: Is Jesus your everything? Is Jesus the reason we exist as a church? Is Jesus our only hope and passion, joy and pursuit? Are we willing to dedicate our lives to him again today? Nothing held back? Is the way of the cross the only path we are willing follow? If so, one the day of the Lord’s return, on the day that our faith is made sight, there on the day of the restoration of all things, we will know that the way of the cross is worth it.
Benediction:
Then today may you know that Jesus is the messiah, son of the living God. He has shown us the way; he has conquered sin; his kingdom is coming, and his will will be done.
As you are willing to give up everything to the one who has already given his all to you, may you know afresh the assurance of his immeasurable grace.
May you go from here, renewed in Christ’s love to live the way of Jesus Christ with hope for this broken world.
Let’s pray.
“What Do You Want to Be Known For?” My Final Sermon at First Baptist Church of Sudbury
What do you want to be known for?
Interestingly you can take courses online on how to be known for things. They are called personal branding courses. They are marketed to business people, and the theory is just as a company should be known for a motto and a certain style, so you should be too. The course essentially gets people to think in simple terms:
Because I am x, I am known for doing y. Or Since I do y, I am x. Answer that yourself. Think about it.
What do you want to be known for? What does First Baptist want to be known for? It is something I have thought about this week.
A few people have asked me, “Now that it is your last sermon, you get to say whatever you want, because you are leaving.” Like I can now air out a list of grievances that I have kept to myself for five years, like this is Seinfeld’s Festivus: “I got a lot of problems with you people and now you’re gonna hear about it.” [Spoken in Jerry Stiller’s voice, of course].
I have to admit, I really don’t have grievances or axes to grind or anything of that sort.
As I looked through the scriptures, I came to 1 Cor. 2, which actually had Paul reporting to the Corinthians what he resolved to do and be when he was with them, and therefore, I think, what he wanted to be known for.
I think it is the right answer. It is the answer that we should all strive for. He writes:
“I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” – 1 Cor. 2:2
I have resolved to know nothing, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Paul wants above all else to be known for the Gospel. I do not want my last sermon to be about me (although I will tell a story or two). As I planned out my final sermon, I have resolved to center it on the most important thing I can be about and First Baptist can be about: who Jesus is, the Gospel.
The Gospel is our salvation, our purpose, our unity, our joy and hope.
1. The Gospel is Our Salvation
“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4: 7-10)
“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel,” (2 Tim. 2:8)
I admit, 1 John 4 is probably my favourite chapter in the Bible. I had to mention it on my last sermon! God is love because God was found in the person and work of Jesus. That is our Gospel.
Our Gospel is that God is love. God is our creator. He made the world out of his generosity. He has made every human being in his image and likeness, as his children even though we, as prodigal sons and daughters, have failed to realize him as our Father.
We worship a God that made us, loves us, and will not see any of his creation be lost. We do not worship a God that only loves some of his creation or only seeks to save some of his creation, but a God the loves perfectly without limitation.
We know God is love because God is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an eternal community of love in one being. Before the world began, before creation and sin, God is love.
God came in Jesus Christ, in human form, in sinful flesh, to show the loving solidarity of God with all sinful humanity, and the restoration of God’s people in him.
God in Jesus Christ died on a cross, died a cursed death, the death of a sinner for all sinners, to show us sinners, he has died our death. It is the mystery of our faith that constantly baffles me: God in Christ loved us more than his very bodily self. God is that kind of self-less love.
God our Father raised Jesus from the dead to show a love that is victorious and powerful. As Jesus has taken on our flesh, now in Jesus, we all have the hope that the very worst of this world, the very things that have stolen us away from his love – these things do not have the final say.
As my friend, Brad Jersak was saying this week, “God is love. God is not love but also just or holy or wrathful. God is love period.”
God’s love is holy because it is pure. God is infinite because his love is immeasurable. God’s love is powerful because it is unfailing. God’s love is just because he is in equal measure merciful. God’s love is capable of anger because God’s love passionately cries out to a world gone astray, hoping that we would change and come back to him.
We understand all of God through Jesus. We understand all of God through Jesus’ cross. If there is an idea of God that contradicts the display of a God who would willing give up his very life for us because of his great love for us, we simply have departed from the God of the Gospel.
God’s love is not simple or sentimental, it is complex and mysterious, surprising even uncomfortable, but it always comes back to love. It is always understood through love.
If we can define God in any way other than love, as I have found, we will inevitably find ourselves without a Gospel that offers salvation to us sinners.
We stand on the Gospel that God is love. If God is not a God of consistently personal, perfect, and powerful love, we simply do not have a Gospel. Period.
One pastor told me that preaching is the fine art of being a broken record. If I have been a broken record these past five years, I have also learned that this truth is so counter-intuitive to our limited, sin-soaked minds, that we have to constantly remember it, re-hear it, re-tell it, and re-live it.
Otherwise we simply forget it. Never forget this, First Baptist Church.
2. The Gospel is Our Purpose
“To live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:21).
The Apostle Paul writes this to the Philippians saying life for him is serving Jesus, walking with Jesus, being willing to die for Jesus, death being nothing in comparison to having Jesus.
When you know what you are about, you have purpose, nothing else matters.
Funny story: I know a person that put that as their high school year book blurb, and the school called the police because they were worried he was suicidal.
We ended up going to college together. He is now a pastor in BC. He is not suicidal, he just believes in something this world does not understand. Although he probably has gone a little nuts since he has a big batch of kids like I do. As long as I have known him, he has lived with purpose.
When we rest in Jesus Christ, when we draw close to him, when we resolve to know nothing but his Gospel, we are captivated by the beauty of what he is, and we want to live that love out to others. That is our purpose: We live to see what the Gospel can do in us and others. That is what gets me up in the morning (other than screaming babies).
Sharing the Gospel can take on implicit and explicit ways. I have gotten to share the Gospel on Sunday mornings, at weddings, at funerals, in times of blessing and in times of tragedy. I have gotten to share the Gospel over coffee and over board games, on the street and in my office. I am always surprised at when people say they are reluctant to share their faith since they are worried about a negative reaction. When we set out to live and speak good news for others, saying and doing something good to them and for them – without an agenda of trying to force them to become a Christian or come to our church or believe this or that, but simply being there for them, to listen, to give hope, and share ourselves, my experience has been overwhelming positive.
Yes, a lot say no thanks. A lot say they want to but there is no follow through. It does require patience.
I think of our McCourt meals and taking people to the food bank on Tuesdays. This simple an act of service and fellowship has openned doors for me to sit and pray with dozens of people, many of whom as shut ins are too sick to come to church, but are precisely the kind of people that God has a special heart for. Or others are people that face terrible mental illness. Many times I have gotten the privilege to be an ambassador of Christ to be the first person that sees them as a person of value and worth, and when they ask, “why do you do this for people?” I get to tell them why.
Sometimes sharing the Gospel is quite explicit and decisive, other times it is a simple act of kindness or service.
Or it can be planting a community garden to promote community and food healthy food in our community. That lead to Alexander Kuthy to start coming here. Remember Alex? He sadly passed away a little while ago, but he shared his testimony with us. An irreligious man that hated the church growing up because a priest tried to sexually assault him. He lived most of his life completely unconcerned with God until he had an accident and he said, “All of a sudden I was aware that I needed God.” Alex would stroll into my office and chat with me. In five years, I can probably count on my one hand how many appointments I had at my office that were actually booked in advance. That’s just fine, my life is far more interesting for it. Alex lived with a new purpose. You saw that in him. He said he lived all his life for himself, now he was making up time living for God. He believed in devoting his life to “spreading peace” as he said it often.
I hope everyone goes home, reads some scripture, meditates, and prays upon it, and asked themselves, “What is my purpose? Is my purpose living the Gospel, completely without reservation? Is my reason for being alive walking in God’s love, worshiping in God’s love, showing others God’s love?”
If it is and the person next to you agrees, that is the church, brothers and sisters. That is what we are doing here together.
3. The Gospel is Our Unity
“If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)
It is such a simple phrase. Jesus is lord, and salvation is in trusting that work of the resurrection. Jesus is our unity. We so often make it Jesus plus a hold lot of other stuff, or Jesus can only mean the way I relate to Jesus.
I have spoken before that I was raised with a very fundamentalist faith. My grandfather was a fundamentalist Baptist pastor, and that is what formed me growing up. Fundamentalism is a lot of things. While many come by it sincerely, as I did, at its very worst, it is an arrogance that all my thoughts and interpretations are the right and infallible ones. It is often obsessed with control and certainty and simple pat answers; that affective sense of certainty in essence shields the reality that since most fundamentalists do not believe God loves all people perfectly, there is a deep sense that God might actually not love them either, unless they do and think a certain way. It is also oddly then obsessed with very specific and convoluted doctrines, whether about creation, the Bible, the atonement, how Jesus will return, you name it, and perfectionist behavior, usually obsessed with sexuality above any other sin. Each doctrine or behavior is then turned into a litmus test of who is truly a Christian and who is not, disregarding the historic creeds of our faith and that our communities must embody grace. It also sees everyone who believes differently and acts differently as dumb, delusional, or dangerous.
I know this not because I look down on fundamentalists, but because I used to think that way. I really did not know any other way to be honest.
I have learned the simple biblical truth that, as James McClendon has put it, “Fundamentalism just isn’t fundamental enough.”
When I came to First Baptist, I did see something different. First Baptist, like many other historic First Baptist Churches in North America, has a long history, enduring all the movements over the last century. Some of our members have been in this church for over 50 years. It has learned to endure diversity. Many of the First Baptist Church family when I came had lived together as a community for so many years they just resolved to keep being a family together, no matter what.
Being committed to being historically Baptist we have upheld the liberty of the conscience of members of this church to interpret the Bible for ourselves in community as our denomination on the whole upholds that our churches are autonomous yet partner together for the Gospel.
For the last five years I have marveled at just how diverse First Baptist is, the different faith backgrounds and experiences, the different doctrines and ideas of faith and how they have functioned in people’s lives, and the sincere commitments to keep learning the Bible together.
That is rare. It is difficult to live out, but it is refreshing in this divided world we live in.
It has been oddly refreshing to lead a Bible study hearing all these perspectives come out, and sometimes quite heatedly, but then have a recognition that we are all sincerely trying to follow Jesus together, and he is our unity.
First Baptist is a diverse place, we all don’t think the same, and we have to reckon with all our diverse backgrounds and experiences and ideas, whether on theology, politics, or on what color the carpet should be.
But if Jesus is our unity, we are bound by blood as family.
As we do this within our walls, we have a vital witness outside our walls. The Gospel has been our unity with all the other churches here in Garson and Coniston. I don’t think you realize the high regard we are held in by the other churches. And it has been an honor working with so many excellent pastors and priests.
One of the most powerful moments in my years here was when we gathered for worship with St. John’s, Trinity United, and the Anglican churches.
I remember the second ecumenical service I participated in here, we went to St. John’s. That year the liturgy called for each person to pair off with a person from another church, and come to a font of water, dip your fingers in it and make the sign of the cross over the other person’s head, asking forgiveness for the sins we have done against each other.
I have never seen the Spirit move so powerfully. People broke down crying in repentance and hugged right there.
That moment was not of ourselves. That was the Spirit moving as we, Christians from very diverse traditions, simply came together to worship Jesus.
The Gospel, the simple Gospel, is our unity. Nothing else should be or can be.
4. The Gospel is Our Hope
“But Christ, as the Son, is in charge of God’s entire house. And we are God’s house, if we keep our courage and remain confident in our hope in Christ.” (Heb. 3:6)
When you are able to be there and see our God working. It is the best thing in the world.
While pastoring can be quite difficult, it is propelled along by the conviction that God never gives up hope on people and neither do we.
One more story: Some of you remember Jered. He does not live around here anymore. A troubled young man, who had been in and out of prison, with so much chaos in him you could immediately tell just from hearing him talk.
The chaos and pain with him was so bad, he once told me he resolved to stop believing in anything because his mind was so unreliable he just had had enough. If you can imagine living like that and being at that point?
I remember coming home that day shook-up by his words. “How can the Gospel reach someone that unstable?” I thought. How can our Gospel mean anything if it can’t bring hope to someone like him?
A few days later, I remember seeing him at the residence. He came up to me: “Spencer, I had a really difficult night. I was in a really dark place…Then he showed up.”
“Who?” I asked. Jered just pointed upwards. “He did. I can’t be an atheist anymore,” he said. God showed up for him in a time of need, far beyond what I or anyone is capable of. In that dark moment God appeared and told him he had worth and that he was loved and that there was hope.
That is the hope of our faith. God does not give up on people. He has not given up on me; he has not given up hope on you; therefore he will not give up hope on anyone. He simply will not give up on this broken world.
Because of this – this good news – we live with purpose, with unity, with joy and hope.
Let us pray…
Benediction:
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)
Spencer Boersma 