Tagged: Love
The Why is Love: Advent and Incarnation
“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).’” (Matt. 1: 22-23)
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things…” (Col. 1:19-20a)
There is a movie by the Coen brothers called Hail, Caesar. The movie is, well, about a movie. A movie studio is filming a movie about the life of Christ through the eyes of a Roman soldier, played by George Clooney, who we find out gets kidnapped. I won’t ruin any more of the plot. If you have ever watched a Coen Brothers movie, you will know that it has witty, dark, dry humour.
And, in my humble opinion, one of the best scenes of the film is also, believe it or not, deeply theological. I think all the best scenes of every film are theological, but whatever.
In this film about a film, Josh Brolin plays the manager of the movie studio, who is shooting this film on the Christ. Brolin, whose character is named Eddie Mannix, knowing this film is going to be the biggest film of the year (think something like the old Ten Commandments or Ben Hur kind of movie), gives a copy of the script to a panel of religious experts: an Eastern Orthodox patriarch, a roman catholic priest, a protestant minister, and a rabbi.
And I know what you are thinking, what next, they all walk into a bar? Not quite.
Brolin’s character explains that this prestige picture is aiming to tell the story of the Christ powerfully and tastefully, so he wants to see if the story is up to snuff.
The Rabbi pipes up: “You do realize that for we Jews any depiction of the Godhead is strictly prohibited.”
Eddie looks at him, disappointed. He had not considered this.
But the Rabbi continues: “Of course, for we Jews, Jesus of Nazareth was not God.”
Eddie looks again, confused but also pleased. He reiterates again that he wants to make sure that the script is realistic and accurate and would not offend any American person’s religion.
The Patriarch blurts out, “I did not like the chariot race scene. I did not think it was realistic.”
Eddie again is confused.
The Priest jumps in: “It isn’t so simple to say that God is Christ or Christ God.”
The Rabbi agrees: “You can say that again, the Nazarene was not God.”
The Patriarch, waxing mystical for a moment, replies: “He is not not God.”
The Rabbi exclaims: “He was a man!”
“Part God also,” says the Protestant Minister.
“No, sir,” says the Rabbi.
To which Eddie turns, trying to smooth things over, but also clearly out of his element: “But Rabbi, don’t we all have a little God in all of us?”
The Priest jumps in again and finishes his thought: “It is not merely that Jesus is God, but he is the Son of God….”
Eddie is now confused: “So are you saying God is all split up?”
“Yes,” says the Priest, “and no,” suggesting it is a paradox.
Eddie is now deeply confused. “I don’t follow…”
The Rabbi interjects: “Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason: these men are screwballs! God has children? What, next a dog? A collie, maybe? God doesn’t have children. He’s a bachelor. And very angry!”
The Priest is upset: “He only used to be angry!”
Rabbi: “What, he got over it?”
The minister accuses the Rabbi: “You worship the god of another age!”
The Priest agrees: “Who has no love!”
“Not true!” says the Rabbi, “He likes Jews!”
The minister continues: “No, God loves everyone!”
“God is love,” insists the Priest.
The Patriarch jumps in: “God is who he is.”
Rabbi replies, upset: “This is special? Who isn’t who is?”
Everyone is getting frustrated with each other.
The Priest tries to bring the conversation back around: “But how should God be rendered in a motion picture?”
Rabbi exclaims, exasperated: “This is my whole point: God is not even in the motion picture!”
Eddie turns, sinking into his chair: “Gentlemen, maybe we’re biting off more than we can chew.”
Now, I probably did not do this scene justice. You will have to watch it yourselves. I showed it to my wife, who, for some reason, did not laugh as hard at it as I did.
Today, we light the love candle. It is the candle we light on the way to Christmas, where we celebrate the deepest mystery of our faith: the incarnation of Jesus. This Advent season, I have been reading a wonderful little Advent devotional compiled from the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called God in the Manger (I deeply recommend this to you for next year’s reading). Bonhoeffer was the German pastor who opposed Hitler, sought to organize the church against the power of the Nazis, and was executed, falsely accused of being a part of an assassination plot.
For this week of Advent, the candle of love, the devotional turns to the question of incarnation, why and how is God with us in an infant, born in a stable? Why and how did God become flesh? Why and how was the fullness of deity pleased to dwell here, bodily? How is that possible?
The questions might evoke the same response as Eddie in Hail Caesar: “People, I think we have bitten off more than we can chew!”
Such ideas feel at best unanswerable: above our pay grade as humans. Or at worst illogical, prone to the endless arguing that the Rabbi, Priest, Minister, and Patriarch fell to.
How the Incarnation?
Yet, this question—how and why did God become human?—is the question that all of Christian faith rests on.
How and why did God become human? This week, we light the love candle, and I am going to suggest that incarnation and love—the two are inseparable.
Now, you might insist, that does not really answer the “how” question exactly.
Indeed, let me put the question this way: God is infinite, all-powerful, present to all things, everywhere, all knowing, transcendent, above and beyond all things—how can God be found in human form, let alone the form of a baby?
Put that way, it sounds like trying to fit the ocean into a shot glass. It does not seem like it can work.
Frederick Buechner once said: It feels like a vast joke that the creator of the universe could be found in diapers! He goes on to say, however, that for those of us raised in the church who have grown up with this idea, until we are scandalized by it, we can never take it seriously.
How can God come in human flesh?
As you can imagine, Christian thinkers have found this a bit difficult to answer. Some have said, well, maybe Jesus wasn’t fully human, he only appeared to be human—sort of like how Clark Kent is Superman and only appears to be a mild-mannered reporter. He appears human, but he is actually Kryptonian.
Others came around and suggested that maybe Jesus is not fully God. Perhaps he is like God or has a part of God’s presence in him, but God, the real God, is up in heaven, untarnished by the world, away and transcendent.
Others came around and said, maybe Jesus has the mind of God and the body of a man, or maybe Jesus had something more like a split personality: a divine person in him and a human person in him.
Again, you might be getting the feeling that we have bitten off more than we can chew.
Each of those answers, Christian tradition has found to have its problems. And the ongoing commitment Christians keep coming back to is that in all the ways God is God, Jesus is God. In all the ways humans are humans, Jesus is human, except without sin. Jesus has “two natures.” Well, that still does not answer the question. that still feels like the ocean in the shot glass problem.
Does that mean baby Jesus was omnipotent? Was a little infant, who cannot speak was also all-knowing, knowing about the paths of comets on the other side of the universe? That still sounds like one nature is swallowing up the other.
Bonhoeffer reflects on this problem, and he answers it this way: “Who is this God? This God became human as we became human. He is completely human. Therefore, nothing human is foreign to him. This human being that I am, Jesus was also. About this human being, Jesus Christ, we also say: this one is God. [But] this does not mean that we already know beforehand who God is.”
In other words, Bonhoeffer is trying to tell us that when we look at Jesus, he does not merely fulfill what we expect God to be like in the human Jesus, but he fundamentally redefines God, upsetting our assumption about what God must be like.
He writes, “Mighty God is the name of this Child [based on Isaiah 9:6]. The child in the manger is none other than God himself. Nothing greater can be said: God became a child. In the child of Mary lives the almighty God. [But] Wait a minute!… Here he is, poor like us, miserable and helpless like us, a person of flesh and blood like us, our brother. And yet, he is God…Where is the divinity, where is the might of this child?” Bonhoeffer answers, “In the divine love in which he became like us. His poverty in the manger is his might. In the might of love, he overcomes the chasm between God and humankind…”
How does God, the infinite, transcendent, all-powerful God, become a finite, vulnerable, human baby? The only answer we have is that God is love. Because God is love, God can be all that God needs and wants to be for us. God desires to be with us. So God can.
One church father, Gregory of Nyssa, put it this way: God’s true power is to be even things that God is not. For God to become a lowly and vulnerable human, this is not something that contradicts his power, but rather it is proof of his true power, the power of God’s love.
If we start thinking, you know what makes God a God? Power! If what we worship as God is something we understand as power first and foremost, we will forever see the life of Christ as a scandal. Worst still, we will also probably come dangerously close to worshiping human power as something “god-like” as well.
But if God is essentially love, perfect love is capable of drawing close to us in weakness and vulnerability, and that, ironically, is true power.
That still leave my answer somewhat inadequate. I don’t understand all the mysteries of God. But love is the best clue we have.
Thankfully we don’t need to solve theological mysteries in order to trust them and to be saved by them.
Why the incarnation?
Now, if God was able to become human because of love, maybe we need to back the truck up for a second and ask, why? Why did God need to do this?
Afterall, God is portrayed as loving and gracious in the Old Testament. What does Jesus add to it, if we can call it that? Could God just keep telling us that he is love and that God loves us?
Let’s ask it this way: Why does love need a body?
Modern times cast humans as brains on sticks—the fact that many of us live and work barely moving our bodies as we type on computers can lead us to believe this.
We are told messages that we can surpass the limits of our bodies by sheer willpower; some of us, when we were younger, actually believed that. Then you get a sports injury, and next thing you know, your body aches for no reason, and you catch yourself groaning every time you bend over to tie your shoes. Our bodily’s limits catch up with us.
Some of us don’t particularly like our bodies. Our bodies represent our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our imperfections. Companies love preying upon our bodily insecurities to sell us more products. Buy this to fix your hair. Buy this to help lose weight. And so on.
Stanley Hauerwas, Professor at Duke University, wrote one of the great books on Christian medical ethics, called Suffering Presence. In it, he reflects on how medical ethics made him profoundly aware of the significance of our bodies.
He tells this one story of a nurse he interviewed. The nurse worked in a branch of the hospital that dealt with severe infections. Severe inflections have a way of making people hate their bodies. I remember one time in high school, I had a severe tissue infection in my forehead, and I woke up looking like a character from The Goonies. Let’s just say it took a few years for my self-esteem to recover.
Well, for some of these folks with severe infections—gangrenous, swollen infections—the nurse reported that often the people would just want their limbs amputated. Faced with the threat of severe infection, some patients quickly concluded their limbs, their bodies, are irredeemable.
What did she do to prevent that mentality? The nurse spoke about how, when she did her rounds, she would make a point of touching the person’s limbs, even if that strictly was not necessary. You can tell a person their limb is okay, but having a person touch their bodies, the nurses said, reminded them that they were worth saving.
Why did God take on human flesh? Why was the fullness of deity pleased to dwell bodily?
To remind us that our bodies are worth saving.
We can start to see why then that the church fought so much about all this theology about Jesus being fully God and fully human: if there was an element of our humanity that God was not apart of fully, not at one with fully, not able to be found there fully, then that part remained unredeemed. If Jesus is not anything less than fully God and fully human, God is not with us.
Because the Incarnation…
There is a hymn that goes like this:
Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
Good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
Good is the feeding, caressing, and rest,
Good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Growing and ageing, arousing, impaired,
Happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh.
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
Glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
Good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
If you look at so many of the religions around the time of the church, you will see a startling fact: nearly all of them did not care about bodies.
Romans and Greeks often had a deeply tragic outlook on life.
Egyptians were obsessed with escaping this life into an afterlife.
Gnostics believed that if you were spiritual, it did not matter what you did with your body. In fact, salvation was found in escaping from your body. The body was evil.
Eating and bathing, sex and sleep, for many, these were fallen and evil things. Sadly, there are a lot of Christians who still have that mentality today: to be spiritual is in some way to disregard your body, get away from it. The body, for some, is at best an obstacle to be conquered and, worse, a thing to be ashamed of.
However, one reason why Christianity grew in the ancient world is that it rested on a revolutionary truth for people: If God became human, you matter. The incarnation says that God made the world very good. The goodness of creation is a part of what it means to have a body, the body God gives us, the body God is pleased to dwell in. Your life matters.
Because God took on flesh, because God was found in a body, there is nothing we experience that is meaningless to God.
Our hunger and needs, our frustrations and pleasures, our vulnerabilities and our strengths, our desires and dreams, our thoughts and emotions, every event, right down to every mundane moment, these all matter to God. God is found there.
What writer says the message of the incarnation means that “there is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred” (Madeleine L’Engle).
Whether it is singing in church, answering emails at work, eating a bowl of cereal in the morning, or lying still at night: every moment can be the site where God meets with us. Every moment can be a place where we know God’s love finds us. Why? God came in Jesus, God Immanuel: God with us.
And because God took on flesh, we also know God will never let us go. No matter who we are or what we have done. God is on our side. Paul puts it this way:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:38-39)
How did God become human? Why did God become flesh? How do we know we have forgiveness and hope? This morning, we lit the love candle. In it, we have the foundation of our faith: Because God loves us so much, because God is love, God became one of us.
Let’s pray:
The Unlikely Family of God
Sermon delivered at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday October 26th, 2025.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands)— 12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:11-22, NRSV)
Introduction: Animals Adopting
One morning in Churchill, Manitoba—that is a small Innuit village of about a thousand people on the Hudson Bay at the top of Manitoba—Brian Ladoon woke up, made breakfast in the dark of the short winter days, and as he sipped his coffee he look out his window and saw an unusual sight: out his backyard, which was open and stretching out into the frozen countryside, he saw his pack of sled dogs (Innuit dogs that are large dogs similar to huskies). That is not the strange part. The strange part was that his pack of powerful sled dogs were playing with a polar bear cub.
What are sled dogs, known to be powerful guard dogs, natural enemies of bears, playing with a polar bear cub?
As Ladoon investigated, he realized that this cub wondered into his backyard looking for food after its mother was killed a way away. The pack of dogs, as I said, would normally be the natural enemy of a bear, but this family of dogs saw the vulnerability of the cub, and adopted it into its pack. And so, to the befuddlement of Brian Ladoon, he watched his dog pack raise a polar bear cub. You can see a video clip of this on the internet. This was some years ago, and the polar bear grew to full size, and so you can see the strange sight of a fully grown polar bear running and rolling around playing with a pack of dogs.
The phenomenon of one animal species adopting the member of another animal species is not unheard of.
Dolphins have been known to adopt orphaned whales. Lionesses have adopted leopard cubs. Eagles have been known to adopt hawks. Ducks and loons have been known to adopt each other’s young.
Those I think are at least a bit more understandable as at least leopards and lions, hawks and eagles have some similarities.
But there are instances of orangutans adopting lion cubs in zoos or mother tigers adopting piglets. Those just don’t seem to make sense. Those two species have nothing in common. But it does happen.
These examples from the animal world illustrate a profound truth: you don’t need to be biological related to be family.
Of course, we humans know that full well. Ask any family that has ever adopted a child. Why do some folks adopt? Some are not able to have children biologically. But there can be all kinds of reasons. You commonly hear things like “Well, we just had more love to give” or “We recognized there were children in need out there and we just decided to open up our home.” Often adoption happens in foster families as the family seek to care temporarily for a child and then says, “You know what? We just can’t see ourselves being a family without this child.”
You don’t need to be biologically related to be a family. Families come in all shapes and sizes. Families can be composed of members that are all quite different from each other but have resolved to be a family.
So, what makes a family, a family? I am going to channel my inner John Lennon here and say it seems that all you need is —you know what the word is, starts with an L and rhymes with dove—love. That sounds like a platitude, but it is true.
It begins with compassion, the recognition that others are in need, a realization that love can go further, a strong bond that claims the other as one’s own, the ongoing practices of care and concern. While these things often normally happen through biological reproduction and the sense of family obligation from that biological bond, whether of parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren, children to their aging parents in turn. Not all families are biologically related. Some come together simply because individuals have chosen to love each other and to care for one another.
God’s Quest to Recover God’s Family
This is what God is trying to show with the church. God is choosing to bring God’s family together from folks that would not normally see themselves related. Through God’s love overflowing and God’s care always going beyond, God is bringing together people that are not normally biologically related into one greater human family.
This visible display of family, these weekly practiced routines, this global reality is called the church.
When we look throughout scripture and history, we see that God has been trying to bring us together as one family ever since the beginning.
In the book of Genesis, God is described as making humanity in God’s image and likeness. What does it mean to be in the image of something? Well, if you were to look at my sons, you might say, particularly Rowan and Asher, they are spitting images of me (by the way, why spitting? Where did that adjective come from?—I don’t know). That is a clue: God looks at humanity, these creatures that are quite clearly not gods, not infinite or perfect or anything like that, but God says, I am going to make you and I will regard you as my children. You are in my image and likeness, you are my children, my family, I choose to see myself in you.
Family begins with unconditional love, seeing the other as having worth, needing care.
If you can remember the first moment you held your child or a niece or nephew or a grandchild—that feeling of delight in this little one being related to you. It’s mixed with a sense of obligation: I need to care for this little one. This little one depends on me. This is my family.
Well, the church is God prompting us to take that feeling, extend it further: see the person sitting in the pew next to you as someone you are responsible to. If they are hurting, do you feel sad with them the way you would with your own family? If they are in need to do, try to care from them the way you just would want anything bad happening to your family. That bond of care is what God wants for his church.
We are not all biologically related. Some of us are (it is the Annapolis valley after all), but the ways of growing more and more into a family of love and care for each other is what the church is. The church is the family of God.
We know that the human family did not stay a family. Cain killed his own brother out of resentment and jealousy. God asks him where Abel is and Cain answers, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (well the answer to that question is yes: families keep each other safe). But Cain’s answer was, in other words, I don’t care. He is not my problem. I don’t care that we are family.
As long as there have been humans, we have been turning from God and turning on each other, and we have been tragically prone to showing the next generation how to do those things as well.
When we stop seeing God as our source, we stop seeing our fellow humans as are siblings.
How many of the world’s troubles today come down to our refusal to see other human being as having dignity we need to uphold, deserving of our care? Instead, we say things like sorry you’re not my problem. You’re not a member of my tribe, whether that my family, my ethnic group, nation, or local sports team. I’ll say it again: When we stop seeing God as our source, we stop seeing our fellow humans as are siblings.
Of course, God was not content to just let this be the case. God attempted to restart and rebuild. The Biblical narrative shows the calls of God to individuals to recover this ideal of the family of God as a way of being a light and example to others.
God takes a man named Abraham and says, I am going to bless you and your descendants and through you all the families of the world are going to be blessed. Through this family, I am going to bring all families back together.
Abraham had sons, father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you, so let’s all praise the lord. (That was a Sunday school song we used to sing growing up, never mind).
Abraham’s grandson Jacob had 12 sons and from them came the nation of Israel, and that was the next step in try to restore the family of God. Hundreds of years later, this nation, Israel, was enslaved in Egypt, and God led Moses to ransom them out of Egypt to be their own nation, bringing them into the promise land. This small, insignificant nation of former slaves, he tells Israel, “I regard you as my first born. You are going to be a kingdom of priests.” That’s interesting language. It gives you a clue to what the church is.
In this recovery mission of the family of God, who does God choose to model this new family with? God chooses the insignificant, the powerless, the marginalized, the family-less, the screw-ups. If God treats these folks like family, we know God is on the side of everyone.
Any firstborn children in the room? Do you feel you parents were stricter with you or less strict with you? So, you were the rule to set the example then? Okay. Any ignored middle children in the room? Ya, I know how you feel. Any youngest’s in the room that know deep down they you could have gotten away with murder? Ya.
Israel was declared the firstborn (even though it has none of the qualities of being the first born, whether power, size, etc.) of the restored family of the nations, the other nations as siblings. How God treated Israel, how Israel related to God, would set a witness to all the other nations. So much so, God calls them priests. A priest is someone consecrated so that others can encounter God through that person. God is going to restore his human family, and he is going to use this one family, Israel, as the example. Other peoples are going to look at Israel and encounter who God is through them. That is what God’s people is intended to do. That is what God intends to do with people.
Sadly, Israel was not particularly faithful to this calling. More often than not, Israel has interpreted their call as divine entitlement (and we Christians can do the same): God obviously loves us more than others; we are obviously better; we will obviously be blessed regardless of whether or not we do what is just and merciful.
Just like any family, family can go wrong. We can turn this gift of love and care into places where we compete with one another, put each other down, manipulated and control one another, be dishonest and even cruel. And so, you have the prophets come and keep telling them, “No this is not what God had in mind. God envisions his family encompassing all nations.”
Paul in Ephesians: Jews and Gentiles, One Family
So, what does God do about it? Well, here is one way to put it: Do you have someone that is the “glue” of the family, the person that keeps people together? When we come to what Paul has written to the congregation in Ephesus, Paul describes how God has acted decisively to bring his family back together: God has sent Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s unique son, perfectly one with God and one with us to bring the human family back together.
And Jesus has come and he has, it says, “destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”What is this dividing wall? What is causing the hostility? Well, it seems that for this congregation and several others that Paul has to deal with, Jewish Christians are insisting to Gentile or non-Jewish Christians that if you want to be a part of God’s family, the people of God, the nation of Israel, what you need to do is basically become Jewish: You need to get circumcised, you need to commit to obeying all 613 laws of the Torah, you need to adopt the dietary restrictions, and so on and so forth.
In some way you might say, they are saying something that goes against what true and good families are: true families allow you to be yourself. Toxic families are built on expectations of perfectionism, uniformity, and conditional acceptance. And if anyone has had a parent or sibling treat them that way—the feeling that you are just never good enough, the feeling like you are just not allowed to be you—you know who hurtful that is.
And so, this faction of folks is saying to the others, “Sorry, you don’t belong. You’re not good enough to be in this family.” And the really sad thing is that they are using God’s law, religion, to separate, to divide. They are using God’s laws that were intended to help us become humbler and more merciful, to be an example to other, they use it to be self-righteous and judgmental.
Well, Paul turns to them and says, that is not what God’s family is about. Why because that is not what Jesus is about.
Jesus, the one who was perfect and sinless, the very fulfillment of the law, died as one punished by the law, cursed by the law.
Jesus, the Messiah, died as one executed by the law, the law you folks love so much. If you know Jesus saves you, your whole way of using the law to exclude others does not work.
If that is the case, your whole way of saying who is in and who is out no longer makes sense. Because the one who by his very nature should have been included, died as one excluded. And if he is the one who fulfills the law, that says something about who belongs in God’s family: God includes the excluded.
You see Jesus doing that all through the Gospels: The Samaritan woman, the Syrophoenician woman, the Roman centurion, the tax collectors like Zaccheus, folks with diseases—folks that God’s people at the time kept saying, sorry you don’t belong—Jesus turns to them and says, “Actually, yes, you do belong. God’s family is for you. You are a true son or daughter of Abraham, even those you are not a biologically descendant of Abraham.”
Jesus has destroyed the thing that keeps us from being a family together. The division we have, the hate, the hostility, God has said, I want my children to be together and the only way this can be the case is if I take that hostility and bear it myself.
This whole way of saying who is in and who is out is done. Paul says God has taken that and nailed it to the cross. It is no more. There is nothing you can do that will stop God from looking at you as God’s child. Because Jesus died on a cross, no one is excluded.
This is what God’s family is about. That is what the church is all about.
God is bringing people who would normally be unrelated, maybe even at odds with each other, and he is teaching them how to be one family, a family through Jesus Christ.
Living as the Family of God
I had this illustrated to me one time pastoring in Sudbury. One guy, new to the area, called me up, wanting to come to church. They guy faced a lot of problems, mental health and poverty. But he had a strong sense of commitment to faith, and so, I would pick him up on my way in to prepare for church service.
People were not quite sure what to do with him for a bit, but then two of the older women took it upon themselves to start to get to know him.
I distinctly remember one Sunday, he was walking in to sit down and they were walking behind him. These two older women turned to him and said, “Young man pull your pants up.”
I was at the church computer. I heard this and thought, “That’s not appropriate. That’s how you offend someone.” I need to say that the one lady was like 90 years old and did not have much of a filter.
Sure enough, the guy fired back, “Don’t tell me how to dress. You do you think you are, my mother?”
To which the one ladysaid, “I sure am. Don’t you know I think everyone in this church is my child? And I try to look after every one of them.” The other piped up, “I am your mother too. You know I am going to tell you what’s best.”
Now, before I tell you that this story has a happy ending, I need you to understand that just because it does have a happy ending that this does not mean we should go around tell people what we think of their fashion choices. Good families have boundaries—I’m just saying.
Nevertheless, these women had taken upon themselves to cook food for this guy and help him out on several occasion. They were bantering but they really did mean that.
The person stopped, and then brightened up: “Wow, this is great. I don’t even know who my mother is, and now in this church I have two mothers.”
I remember just sitting there realizing I had just witnessed something of a holy moment. God was making God’s family here, this unlikely family.
This is what the church is: people who would not normally have anything in common. People who are not biologically related. Yet through what Jesus has done, have begun to regard each other as family.
Now, it needs to be said: If the church is like a family, it is important to say that it is not going to be perfect.
We are not going to think all the same, whether it is politics, theology, or what colour the church carpet should be. Families will argue. Good families will argue passionately, but also, hopefully, respectfully.
I say this with full disclosure: It seems that God has a sense of humour or at least a twisted sense of irony: of all Sundays, one the Sunday I have to preach on family, my older kids go to the Challenge youth rally this week. They came back tired, and they woke up super grumpy. We did some arguing this morning.
Anyways, some of the most difficult challenges Paul faced was people in the church, members of God’s family were not treating other people truly as family.
Some are tempted to say family is just not worth the headache. I was talking to one person that said, “I don’t want to be a part of a church. I just can’t stand dealing with people. My religion is found in watching a sunset or taking a nature walk.”
Perhaps you have heard similar sentiments: I so badly want to say to them that it is really easy to encounter God in a sunset. If you did not encounter God in the beauty of nature, I would be concerned for you. If you can’t deal with people, you need to realize, however, you are one of those people too.
The church exists because we fundamentally cannot encounter God fully on our own.
Why? I don’t know the full sense of how I am forgiven of sin until I forgive others.
I don’t know the full sense of how God has cared for me until I care for another.
I don’t know the full sense of how God has refused to give up hope on me until I refuse to give up hope on another.
I don’t know the full sense of how God has claimed me as God’s family until I am ready to extend that to another.
That is what the church is. Not all families are biologically related. Some come together simply because individuals have chosen to love each other and to care for one another. That is what God is doing for us. That is what God wants us to do for each other.
Church like family is not easy, but when we try to live this out, with love, albeit imperfectly, hat is how we encounter God in a deeper way.
Paul says at the end of this passage: “in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives.”
Brothers and sisters, does God live here? Are we allowing God to dwell in this space? Are we allowing God to dwell in us? We know this when we love each other.
Let’s pray…
The Courage to Keep Going: The Journey of Faith
Sermon preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday September 28, 2025.
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 11:1-40 (NRSV).
Faith is like a journey toward God’s destination, a journey we don’t see the end of, but we trust, knowing who God is, that God will bring us there.
Out of curiosity this week, I looked up the longest unbroken walk on record.
The longest unbroken walk on record was done between 1976 and 1983 by a man named George Meegan.
Meegan was born in England. He grew up in a disadvantaged home. His father left him after his mother died of cancer. He was raised by his uncle, and when he was old enough, he ran away to the Navy. He served in the British Merchant Navy until his early 20s and then retired from it with the idea that he would hike the furthest hike on foot anyone has ever done.
He started at the very bottom of South America, walked north, up along the mountain range that runs along the coast (up Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, into Colombia). He went up through Panama, Mexico, into the United States, turned East, and hiked up the Atlantic coast all the way to Canada. From there, he hiked across the Trans-Canada to the West Coast, then went north as far as he could go, ending his hike at the very top of Alaska.
In doing so, Meegan set the world record for longest unbroken walk, walking a total of 19,019 miles. That is roughly 41 million steps.
It took him six years and 12 and a half pairs of hiking shoes.
In crossing into Panama, he hiked through one of the most dangerous areas in the world at the time, the gap between Panama and Colombia, an area controlled by gangs, where he was shot at and someone tried to kill him with a knife. Yet he kept going.
Why did he do what he did? What inspires—or possesses, it depends on who you look at it—what drives a person to spend 6 years of their lives hiking non-stop?
Meegan gave a simple answer: He believed, as a person growing up disadvantaged, he needed to tell the world that “No journey is impossible, especially not if you have the courage to take the first step.”
Meegan went on to be an award-winning educator, inspiring kids in poverty to rise above their circumstances.
Meegan wanted to live his life as if his life was a message to inspire other people: nothing is impossible. Have Courage. You can do it. Take the first step in your life’s journey.
Faith is like a Journey
Faith is kind of like a journey. It can feel impossible, but with God it is possible. Take courage. Keep walking.
One Baptist theologian from about a century ago named William Newton Clarke once put it this way: “Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”
This chapter in Hebrews is really a climactic moment for the book of Hebrews. And for the writers of Hebrews, faith is about continuing on the journey with God.
The author of the book of Hebrews is trying to encourage Jewish Christians who are being ostracized for their faith in Christ to continue and not renounce Jesus and go back to Judaism, even if that lands them in prison.
And so, if you read through the book of Hebrews, a book that some Christian scholars have called one of the most sophisticated books of the New Testament it is rich reading of the Old Testament and its careful presentation of faith in Christ—the book of Hebrews is building this case over 13 chapters that Jesus is worth preserving on with in the journey of faith.
Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word, says Chapter 1.
Jesus is superior to any angel and the law.
Jesus is superior to Moses and the promised land.
Jesus is superior to priests or even the mysterious figure Melchizedek.
Jesus is superior to any sacrifice or covenant in the Old Testament.
Jesus is worth staying on the journey of faith for. And the writer just keeps driving home this message: don’t fall away, keep going, Jesus is greater. The journey of faith in Jesus is worth it.
That brings us to chapter 11, where the writer gives the climax of their argument. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
By faith, we know the world was made.
By faith, Abel offered an acceptable sacrifice over his brother Cain.
By faith Enoch was carried up to heaven.
By faith, Noah built the ark.
By faith, Abraham journeyed for God and became the father of a great nation.
By faith, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and to the promised land.
Example after example. By faith, great people of the Bible went on the journey with God; they endured difficult things, they did great things for God, and they persevered on the journey. You can do.
God can do amazing things in your life and through your life. Have faith.
Faith as Seeing
Now, I need to say this: Faith involves trust, but that does not mean it is utterly blind faith, nor is it irrational, nor is it foolish, properly understood.
You can only imagine that someone like George Meegan did a lot of planning. He didn’t just crack his knuckles and decide he was going to walk 19,000 miles on sheer willpower.
He had support. He had friends. He had encouragement.
He apparently had good shoes. The record is keen to tell us that they were Italian hiking shoes—fancy—so not just some pair you bought at Walmart for a few bucks in September for a new school year for your kids, since your kids’ feet grow like crazy, then they, in turn, wear out those by November, not like those shoes, thank-you very much. They were good shoes. Just saying.
He had help, but that did not make the task any less daunting.
He still had to start somewhere, and it began with him saying to himself: I want to do this. I believe I can do this. I believe in doing this in order to make myself a better person, to make the world a better place. This, I believe, is something worth doing.
In order to press on in the journey of faith, you need to believe certain things and keep reaffirming that belief. The writer of Hebrews suggests something similar:
And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
This seems like one of those “Duh” moments. If you want to go on a journey with God, you need to believe in God. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
It seems simple, but it is true.
If you want to go on a journey with God, you need to trust that God is there. God is always there, but if you don’t trust that, you don’t know it, and you won’t see it.
One scripture says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
Faith is like a form of seeing. It is how we walk. It’s how we know where we are going. It’s how we know who we are walking with.
What We Believe in Changes How We Walk
Sometimes it is important to state the simple things because we forget the simple things: What we believe about God matters.
If we want to have a sense that we know where we are going and how to get there, we need to grow in our understanding of faith. We need to think about our convictions and work them out in reading our Bibles, studying the advice of saints who have walked before us, praying, and serving. That doesn’t mean we all have to be academics and go on and do courses at ADC (although you can, and that is my shameless plug to convince you to come and study with us there), but we all need to attend to what our convictions are. Why do I believe in Jesus? What does Jesus mean for my life? Why is Jesus’ way the best way?
Hebrews puts a fine point on it as the writer is encouraging Jewish Christians not to go back to Judaism. Why not? Don’t Jews and Christians believe a lot of the same things? In many ways, yes. We share three-quarters of the same Bible.
You can say the same thing about other religions like Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. I am not of the view that we should be putting other religions down. There is much wisdom in these religious traditions, not that all religions are the same. I have read reflections by Islamic theologians that, in many ways, are far more kind and gracious than what some Christians believe.
But I don’t have a problem with this because I don’t believe Christianity teaches that we Christians are superior to others or that we always get things right, far from it. That’s essential advice for the journey.
However, with the author of Hebrews, I can’t get around the fact that Jesus is greater. Jesus is God revealed. Jesus is the perfect embodiment of the law—the perfect way to follow God, the perfect sacrifice—the perfect display of God’s forgiveness and mercy. There is no one else like him.
Jesus, his incarnation, cross, and resurrection show God drawing near to us, dying for us, and giving us hope in a way I just don’t see anywhere else.
Jesus shows us what God is truly like, and that changes things.
And this gives me a different way of seeing myself, others, and our world on this journey.
If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, in his incarnation, I believe that God is on the side of every person. That changes how we walk the journey.
If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who died at the cross, I believe that God is on the side of every person, no matter what they have done, myself included, my worst enemy included. I believe that renouncing the quest for status and power and taking up a way of self-giving love for others reflects the very heart of God. That changes how we walk the journey.
If I believe that God is revealed in Jesus, who rose from the grave, I believe that death does not have the final say, there is no evil in this world that ultimately has victory, there is no sin that cannot be forgiven, no tragedy that cannot be righted, no pain that cannot be mended into joy. That changes how we walk the journey.
You can say it another way, by trusting Jesus, I know God is with us on this journey.
I know his cross is the best and only way to walk this journey—loving others, sacrificing for God’s kingdom, his justice and truth.
I know because of Jesus’ resurrection that nothing is going to stop us on this journey to God: not sin, not death, not anything.
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Knowing those kinds of things, trusting those kinds of things, sustains us for the journey.
Faith Means Taking the Next Step
But here is the thing: You can have all the right food for the hike. You can have the right shoes, walking stick, everything packed. But it still comes down to whether you are going to choose to take those first steps.
It still comes down to wherever you are, you’ve got to keep on walking: One foot in front of the other.
Some of us are taking our first steps. Some of us are down the road a bit. Some of us —how shall I put this?—may be on their 12th pair of Italian hiking shoes.
God is with us on this journey, but as the author knows, the journey is still tough. It will have rough spots. There will be wandering. You will feel lost at times. You might fall down, trip, and feel like quitting. Or you will have moments where you are walking, but the joy is gone, and you are just dragging your heels.
I can only imagine that after being shot at in Panama, Meegan was probably thinking, “What did I get myself into. I hiked across one continent. Maybe this is far enough.” He probably had a moment where he had to muster up the motivation and conviction to keep going, knowing it would be worth it.
Faith is a journey. There will be obstacles. Keep going.
“Faith is the daring of the soul to go further than it can see.”
In recounting all the stories of people’s faith, the writer of Hebrews says knowing his audience is facing their obstacle of persecution: Some “were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking, flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— of whom the world was not worthy.”
We are not facing the same obstacles that the Jewish Christians of this time were facing. Ours is different. Ours are not the same, but we will have obstacles. If we somehow think that the walk of faith shouldn’t have obstacles in it, we are doing it wrong.
In our day, we could have our own list of modern-day saints, faith-trailblazers.
By faith, Billy Graham presented the Gospel to millions,
By faith, Mother Theresa served the destitute.
By faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed tyranny.
By faith, Martin Luther King fought racism.
By faith, Jimmy Carter worked for peace.
By faith, believers today give witness to Jesus’ coming kingdom in big ways and small.
By faith, God is still working. God is still walking with us. Keep going.
By faith, daily sins are forgiven,
By faith, despair is overcome with hope,
By faith, hate is healed with love,
By faith, injustice is confronted with truth
By faith, lives are transformed by God’s grace.
By faith, God is still working in people’s lives. God is still walking with us. Do you see it? Can you trust this?
By faith, what do you trust God can do with your life?
No matter where you are in your journey, can you, by faith, trust God enough to take the next step?
Whether that is a step into baptism, a step into deeper discipleship and learning, a step into a new way of serving, a step into a new way of giving, a step into a new path for your life or career: big or small.
Can you trust that God is leading us into better things on this journey?
There is an old poem called Footprints about a person walking with God along the beach in life, and the person turns back and notices that during the toughest times of life, there was only one set of footprints. Angry, they turned to God and said, “Where were you in those difficult times?” And God replies, “That is when I carried you.”
My friend has an addendum to this poem: He looked back at some of the best times of life, and instead of footprints, he sees thrashing, claw marks. What happened there, God? God replies: My son, that was when I had to drag you!
Some of us know both of those moments in our journey with God. Hopefully that helps us to be a bit more aware that God is there in the dark times and a bit more ready to step forward in faith into better times God has prepared for us.
May you trust this so that you can take your next step.
And may you trust that wherever we go, God goes with us, leading us deeper into a relationship with him.
Let’s pray,
Faithful and loving God,
God, who is with us in the journey of life.
God, you have never left us or forsaken us.
God help us remember all the moments of our lives, good and bad, and see you there, with us, working goodness, leading us into better.
God, give us your grace so that we can keep walking forward.
God help us to know by trusting you, you are leading us ever deeper into eternal life.
God forgive us for how we stumble. Some of us may be feeling very lost on this journey. Remind us that your grace has no limits. Remind us that you are always with us.
God help us to take that next step.
God, we long to step out courageously as a church, to reach our community, to be witnesses of our kingdom. God give us the eyes of faith to see the opportunities around us.
God, for where you have been with us and where you are leading us, we are thankful.
Amen.
A Difficult Joy
Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
you who seek the Lord.
Look to the rock from which you were hewn
and to the quarry from which you were dug.
Look to Abraham your father
and to Sarah, who bore you,
for he was but one when I called him,
but I blessed him and made him many.
For the Lord will comfort Zion;
he will comfort all her waste places
and will make her wilderness like Eden,
her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isa. 51:1-3 NRSV)
Hope to the Exiles
One of my favorite Christmas songs is O Come O Come Emmanuel. It is probably one of the oldest songs we sing in church, being written in 800 AD (1200 years ago). This old hymn was sung by monks as part of their Christmas vespers or prayers.
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel;
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
One thing I love about it is its slow and lamentful tone, as well as its proclamation of hope and joy.
This verse speaks to what this passage in Isaiah is really talking about: the difficult joy of God’s hope. The people are in exile and ruin. Their capital city, Jerusalem, Zion, with its temple, the centerpiece to how the people relate to God, how they know God is present to them, has been leveled to the ground and burned, reducing the countryside, as the prophet describes here, to a waste.
They have experienced the loss of their homes. Many of their family members were killed, and the people were divided. Poor peasants were left to the broken countryside of a now vassal state for an oppressive empire. If you were educated or useful in some way, you were taken captive in Babylon to serve the imperial house in some way. Many of these people were innocent people. These were not sinners being punished, but people who sought righteousness, the text says, yet endured the trauma of seeing Jerusalem fall and the hardship of exile. This is what Daniel and others faced, and they wondered where God was in all this. Why wasn’t God coming to their rescue? Why did it seem like they were getting punished with the rest of Israel that went the ways of idolatry and corruption? It did not make sense.
Captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here.
And while the people of God were able to come back to their homeland after the exile, they still faced the oppression of being ruled by tyrannical foreign powers till the time of Jesus. One empire after another oppressed God’s people in history: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and, finally, at the time of Jesus, the Romans.
Year in and year out, the people had to live with a sense that things were not right; things are not as joyful as they were promised to be.
Difficult Christmas
I think many of us can feel the same way about Christmas approaching, that it is not as joyful as it should. I don’t know what it is about this year, but I feel like I have heard a lot more about people having a hard time finding joy at Christmas. I don’t know why.
I spoke to one lady. We talked about favorite Christmas traditions. I had just put up my tree with my kids, which I love doing because we have so many ornaments on our tree that represent different memories and milestones for our family (I also have a sweet set of Star Wars ornaments).
She turned to me to confess that she really could not get into the Christmas spirit because of how bad her relationship was with her father, who was particularly mean around the holidays.
Another told me that they don’t really do much for the holidays since they don’t have family in the area. They were probably just going to treat Christmas Day as a day off and watch TV; otherwise, remembering it was Christmas just made them feel really alone.
I spoke to another person who just said that the expectations of Christmas, whether the food or the gifts, or the winter heating bill, were always so expensive, and it was always hard to get into the Christmas spirit amidst all the worries about money. For some, the Christmas holidays are often just one day off, packed with more busyness than one is expected to do, all before having to go back to the grind of working a difficult, stressful job.
Another person voiced to me that this year, the state of the world has impacted them so severely: the wars that are happening, the political turmoil, and climate change. It makes any privilege we do have to feel bittersweet, even joyless. It is hard to celebrate and be merry when it feels like the rest of the world is burning.
This week, we light the Joy candle, but sometimes, we have to recognize how difficult joy can be in our world. It does not come easy. Have you felt that? Have you had a Christmas that just did not feel joyful? Perhaps you are having that season now?
The holiday season does something: it often amplifies whatever you are feeling. What do I mean by that? If you are having a pretty fortunate year, if you have lots of family and food around you, Christmas can just magnify those feelings of gratitude and fulfillment. However, if your year just isn’t going well, you are feeling down on your luck, feeling a bit alone, Christmas can intensify those feelings also, not to mention you can feel guilty for not feeling happier.
Can we be honest about those feelings? Because if I am honest, I sometimes feel those things too. I often feel them around this year, but especially this year.
Tuesday, Dec. 17th, will mark the 15th year since my mother died. That has been really weighing on me. Let me tell you the story. Forgive me for dumping my emotions on you this morning, but here it goes…
My mother died of breast cancer that went to her liver. Meagan and I had gotten married in May of that year. She looked well at our wedding like she had beaten the cancer. That is what we all thought. She had been battling it since I was in high school.
Then, the cancer returned according to a diagnosis in the early fall. It was everywhere. My mother was obsessed with new-age alternative medical treatments, thinking they would do something, but they didn’t work. I got a text from my brother, “Spencer, the doctors say she only has a few more months to live.” She was in denial at first, but we all knew it was true. She did not want to go to the hospital, so my sister, who lived at home, cared for her for the most part. Meagan and I came on the weekends. Her physical condition got worse and worse.
It finally came to the point where she had to go into hospice care. It was approaching Christmas time. There was no snow on the ground in Hamilton, but it was bitterly cold with strong winds off the lake. My brother, who lived down in the US, flew in to be at her bedside. We all took shifts, but we more or less all lived at the hospital for the next week. We survived on cafeteria food and coffee.
A lot of relatives and friends came by to visit my mother at this time.
Her state worsened over the next day or so. I just sat with her. She was awake less and less. In the moments then, I just kept telling her that I loved her and I would pray. Her breathing took on a rattle. Someone remarked that it sounded almost like coffee percolating—thanks to whoever said that—because for almost a year after, I could not be in the room while a loud coffee machine was brewing (and if you know me, you know that I love coffee, so that was awful).
The time had come, the nurse informed us. The family was all there by her bed. Someone invited me to pray. I prayed, thanking God for her and inviting her to go and be with Jesus. My mother took her last breath, and that was it.
We sat there for a few minutes in sober silence. The nurses came in and took her body away.
We slowly turned to practical matters like planning the funeral. We had the funeral the day before Christmas Eve. I don’t remember a lot of the service, but I do recall a friend of the family playing “In Christ Alone” for the service.
That Christmas, my family was all assembled at my mother’s home: my brother, sister, Meagan, and I.
On Christmas Day, we all sat together around the tree. There were no gifts because none of us really thought about buying anything in all the chaos.
I used to hear that some people did not like Christmas, and I thought those people must be some sort of mean, Grinch-like, Ebenezer Scrooge-like, Baw hum-bug grumps. Now I understood it. The next Christmas just was not all that enjoyable. Everything reminded me of my mom when I heard Christmas music, like my mom’s favorite Christmas song, Feliz Navidad. The lights, the food, the sounds, the ornaments—the expectation of being merry did the opposite.
Finding joy was difficult.
The Shepherds
It is in this context, this place, this space, this situation of joy being difficult, that we find the Christmas story. Or better stated, the Christmas story finds us. The reasons it was for them back then is different from us today, but we see a promise that applies to both.
There are many folks in the Christmas story that we could describe as in a place of difficulty.
I think of Mary, the poor young girl who agrees to bear Jesus. Joseph, who now had to navigate this strange new relationship and responsibility, how this will look with his family and his reputation in the community, how he had to flee political threats now from Herod.
But I am drawn to the shepherds in the Christmas story, in Luke chapter 2.
Shepherding was one of the poorest jobs one could have in that society (and not to mention dangerous, out in the wilderness with the elements, wild animals, and bandits). It was a job for outcasts. It is a job for people who were down on their luck.
Remember that King David was once a shepherd. He wasn’t one because the job was prestigious. He was the youngest of a large family, and so his father gave him the least desirable job in the household, tending flocks out in the wilderness. It was a job for the unwanted.
What would be the equivalent of their job today? Overnight Gas station attendant, perhaps. People who work at call centers are forced to do telemarketing because they need the money. People who have to drive taxis for a living. These are, according to reports, some of the least desirable jobs in our communities. Shepherds were marginalized folk, folk that did not have a lot to be joyful about in their lives.
Yet, this is who the Gospel is announced to. The angel announced, “Do not be afraid, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy for all people.”
Sometimes we can hear “good news for everyone,” but it can sound like “good news for people except me,” or “except for them.”
Isn’t it interesting that while the glad tidings are good news for all people, the angels did not appear to everyone? They appeared to the shepherds as if to say, if this is good news for you, for the least fortunate of society, then people can understand that this is good news for everyone.
The shepherds go and find Jesus, and the angels say that you will find your messiah wrapped in ragged cloth and lying in an animal feeding trough, a manger, and these things will be a sign to you of God’s good news for everyone. Most commentators of this passage say that this sign is just how to find the messiah, sort of like if you meet a person you have never seen, and they text you saying I’m the one wearing a red shirt.
However, I think it is more than that. These things are a sign to you. You will find the messiah born into poverty, lying in a dirty feeding trough, wrapped in rags, not expensive clothes, not in a golden crib. This messiah is a messiah for those in difficult circumstances. He is your king.
This is a sign that God understands us. God understands what we are going through. God is with us.
Since God is with these folks, we know God is with everyone.
If this event were to happen here, what would be the equivalent of the manager? We have such a whitewashed notion of the manger scene, so clean and regal. It is not a dirty alleyway stable; it is in so many nativity scenes.
It was this kind of space that Jesus was born in, wrapped in someone’s tattered second-hand coat. Who might come to see him? The poor, the drug addicts, the folks that work night shift struggling to get by realize if this baby is going to be our leader, things are going to get better, but he’s one of us.
Today in Kentville, you could imagine Jesus being born by the dumpers in a parking lot at Center Square.
A messiah born into poverty rather than power and privilege: This messiah is good news. He gets us. He is on our side because if God is on the side of the least of us, God is for everyone.
These are glad tidings of great joy that will be for all people.
You don’t have to love all the running around, all the expenses, or all the expectations of Christmas. You don’t have to love eggnog fruit cake or turkey (although I don’t know how anyone could not like those things). You don’t have to love movies with Macaulay Culkin or Chevy Chase in them (again, I don’t know how, but everyone is different). There is a lot about Christmas that can be exhausting and difficult, with or without carrying heavy emotional burdens. We can admit that.
However, we can still have joy, joy for the least of this world, joy for all.
How do we live joy?
How do we live joy when it does not come easy? It got easier over the years, and here are the things that worked for me. Let me give you a few things I learned over the years.
First is to rest in Jesus, rest in the joy of Christ: the truth that God understands us, God has drawn near to us; God is with us; God is for us.
Take time in all the business for prayer, reading scripture, sitting in silence, or perhaps just listening to the words of some Christmas carols and reflecting on their words. It might not be immediate as healing takes time, but doing these things keep our hearts prepared for better things. And better things will come.
The second is to cherish the simple good things that remind you of the good around us.
I remember when my mother died, and we all sat around the tree with no presents under us; I remember thinking that the gift we had that year was simply each other.
There is something about the pain we feel, when it reminds us about the fragile nature of life, it can also remind us of the preciousness of life.
Third, it will be different for everyone, but for me, have our kids made Christmas enjoyable again, whether it was watching Home Alone with them or decorating Christmas cookies. Seeing their joy at Christmas became a source of joy for me.
Perhaps that was one of the most significant ways I learned to have joy at Christmastime, when I realized bringing another joy deepened my own. Bringing joy to another helps us to have joy ourselves
Enjoying another’s joy. It reminds me that the year after my mother died, I worked as the coordinator of a soup kitchen in downtown Toronto. It was a rough job as I worked with homeless people, people facing really difficult circumstances. Many of the people I worked with had been abused by churches and pastors. They had been abandoned by Christians.
Yet, I remember doing our Christmas meal at the soup kitchen, and afterward, we sang Christmas carols. Suppose you can imagine a whole gym full of folks singing Joy to the World. I was struck by seeing people whose lives were so much more difficult than my own, people whose stories involved so much more hurt than my own, singing Christmas carols with joy. It changes your perspective. It permits you to have joy again.
Fourth, being in a space like that reminds you also that there is a responsibility to joy. As I sat with people who were homeless or in severe poverty, I often felt challenged. Many folks in poverty were not the lazy people who were draining my hard-earned tax money, a notion I was taught growing up. These were people often with mental health or physical disabilities, people who faced terrible abuse when they were young, or people who faced tragedy.
The terrible fact was that I could have just as easily been one of those people. We do not choose the family we are born into or the circumstances of privilege we are given. We don’t choose our brains or our bodies, nor do we choose what tragedies we will experience.
That means there is a sort of responsibility to joy. If we have been blessed, if we have been fortunate, Jesus’ way implores us to look for others to help, to bring joy to, to help those in need in our communities.
I feel like we have not been doing a good job here. So many of us have been so concerned with our financial hardships, we have forgotten others that are in more need than us.
Do you know a man was found frozen to death in one of those tents down by Miner’s Marsh? A 52-year-old man named Bobby Hiltz, a man that struggled his whole life with addiction and mental health. He was forced out of his home because his landlord spiked their rent. I wonder: What would have been a sign of glad tidings for Bobby Hiltz?
I believe our community has failed to address the poverty and care for the marginalized around us. We have failed to bring joy to those who need it.
We have glad tidings of great joy for all people. Will we live that this Christmas for everyone?
Will we be that sign?
The Christmas message is that God is bringing about God’s kingdom, where the first will be last, and the last will be raised up first. If you have experienced God raising you up, will you turn and do that for another?
Luke, two chapters later, says, it is the message of good news to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free. I am reminded of the verse in Joy to the world that says
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as far as the curse is found.
Christmas is the sign that God keeps his promises. God’s blessings flow as far as the curse is found. God will undo and restore all that has ever gone wrong in this world, making it new.
As Isaiah says, he will comfort Zion and he will turn her wastelands into Eden again.
Are we preparing ourselves to let that reality into our lives this season?
Are we prepared to live that reality for others?
That is, as I have learned, a difficult but also beautiful joy.
Let’s pray.
God of all hope and comfort, God of all goodness and joy.
God who has come in our lord Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us.
God, we bring our struggles to you, our burdens, our worries, and maybe perhaps our frustrations and hurts.
God, remind us that you know us; you are closer to us than even we are to ourselves. You know what we have gone through, and you have seen our lives with perfect mercy and grace.
God, remind us of all the good things around us, the small graces we sometimes forget. God, give special gifts of your comfort and joy to those who especially need it this season.
God, also give us the eyes to see and ears to hear the needs for comfort and joy around us. Give us opportunities to be your hands and feet this Christmas.
God, our joy is your gift of hope, that you are a God of love and grace, that you have come to redeem us from our sins, to heal this broken world, to set right all that has gone wrong, to restore all things.
God, you give us so much. Give us the joy of thankful hearts in you in these coming days.
These things we pray in your name, amen.
Defending Jesus: The Olympic Games, Depicting the Last Supper, and Learning How to React in a Post-Christendom Culture
The Olympic Games opening ceremony featured what seemed to have been a parody of the painting from Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper; only the members of the supper were represented by drag performers. And, in case you live under a rock or are one of those blissful souls who are not on any social media, the reaction to this has not been positive. The organizers gave a somewhat half-hearted apology, but again the reaction to that has also not been positive.
There is something about all this that feels like the internet just being the internet. Did you know that the Christmas Starbucks Cup is now only green and red? Did you know there is an ice cream store called “Sweet Jesus”? Did you know someone somewhere changed the words to a Christmas song? Excuse me while I yawn and keep scrolling. However, there is something about reacting this way to things in the name of faith that is a whole lot more disconcerting to me.
To put it one way, I think the offense at the offense is worse than the original offense. I remember seeing the display of the Last Supper and thinking, “That’s odd and a bit in poor taste, but if they want to do that, oh well,” and then I pulled up that day’s Wordle to crack (I admit, yes, I still play Wordle). Then I watched post after post of people losing their minds over this, shaming everything from the entire Olympics to the whole country of France to pronouncing God’s judgment over every non-Christian everywhere that wasn’t offended at this. To that, I don’t know what to say to that. In internet-speak: Insert meme where Jean Luc-Picard face palms here.
Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, I just believe there are so many more important things to be upset about. Perhaps, in my old age, I have grown desensitized to internet hoopla. Perhaps, I am the one that isn’t normal. Perhaps, I am okay with that. But if you are reading this thinking, “Yes, Spencer, there is something wrong with you; you as a Christian need to be upset about this,” let me suggest that, perhaps, getting upset makes its own unintended offenses.
Speaking of being upset, I want to take this time to point out an irony that I so often see. I watch right-wing folk complain about how “woke” the left is, how it is always offended at things, and how this portrays a lack of emotional stability or something like that. Well, sometimes, the thing we hate in another is what we embody ourselves, and we just can’t see it. Pause and reflect on that one.
Now, indulge me for a second if you are a Christian. We live in a secular culture. We live in a culture where Christianity has taken on layers of negative connotations based on its past, a past typified by exclusion and violence against various minor groups. Polls suggest that in the minds of the average Westerner, Christianity is associated with words like “homophobic” and “anti-science” more often than “love” or even “Jesus.” Now, you see a display where drag queens replace the figures of a Di Vinci painting of the Last Supper (if that is what is going on here—that is debated), and your first impulse is to say to yourself, “What will further Christianity in a world that no longer sees the value of faith anymore? I know—I have an ace up my sleeve—I’ll rant about it on Facebook!” Let’s pause and reflect on that one.
Is that really a strategy to defend the Christian faith? The organizers gave a half-hearted apology, but even if they somehow convincing gave some sort of “we are really, sincerely, sorry” routine, trying to close the proverbial barn door after all the animals ran out, I really don’t believe this would be a win for the Christian faith. Crying offense often only works when there is a loud outcry, and that means that attempts to shame the culture into respecting the Christian faith can still very much be a Constantinian strategy of power and privilege.
While we are at it, let’s think about who might be on your social media. Are there gay people on your social media? Trans folk? Queer folk? Perhaps not. Perhaps they don’t share that information. Ask yourself why? Can you ask yourself: What do you think they saw? They probably saw the fact that there are numerous other portrays of Jesus in our culture—the blasphemous portrays of Jesus by evangelical leaders in order to support Donald Trump, the rhetoric of “blessing Israel” invoked by some to justify the genocidal actions of the Israeli army in Gaza or just the myriad of other portrayals of the Last Supper in popular art—literally by almost every major TV series—that for some reason does not get people of faith worked up. Yet, Christians got upset over the one that had sexual minorities in it. What does that say? It says, implicitly, that it is not alternative depictions of Jesus that offend me; those people do. Let’s again pause and think about that.
Why did the artistic director of the Olympic ceremony do this? By his own intention, the director did not think he was trying to directly offend Christians. He says he was not even alluded to the Last Supper at all (which may just be an attempt to save face). It does seem that he was trying to portray something of the Greek mythic backgrounds of the Olympic, as well as what current French art is about: its capacity to be over the top, parody previous art pieces, making statements about inclusivity, etc. To that, I would say that if you designed a public portrayal of any religious figure in an unconventional way and did not think it would offend people (or if you really thought arranging the table that way with a centre figure like that would not be taken as an allusion to the Last Supper), you clearly did not think that through. If that is the case, as I said, I thought the display was in poor taste: Surely there could have been better—smarter—ways to celebrate French art and inclusion in a venue like the Olympics.
However, there is something profoundly indicative of our cultural situation where a classic Christian work of art is portrayed with members of a community Christians have often excluded as an act that says, as a culture, “we value inclusivity.” There is also something profoundly ironic about Christians getting angry at an art piece as an “attack” on their faith that fuels the very secularizing impulse that protects these displays in the name of inclusion and free speech. Let’s remember that the very reason, historically, that Europe started secularizing was because, after brutal religious wars, faith was no longer trusted as a discourse to build public flourishing upon. Again, let’s pause and think about this.
How should we defend the Christian faith? Let me suggest that it does not need “defending” at all. Such language implies Jesus needs to be defended, that the ones doing this are our “enemy,” etc. Is that kind of militancy the path forward? I have to ask: How did that go for Peter? What did Jesus do to the very person Peter tried to defend him from? If someone feels that there is a group of people that are the enemies of Christianity, the Christ-like response is to find a way to do good to them. Perhaps, in the name of defending Jesus we have inflicted our own wounds on others Jesus wants us to heal. That should be our reaction. If we are offended at someone representing drag queens at the Last Supper, perhaps the best “defense” is to ask ourselves, “What would it take for these people to feel safe enough, loved enough, understood enough, to be at our table?” Maybe then we will see what the Last Supper was actually trying to depict.
One with the Father: A Trinitarian Meditation for Father’s Day
Preached at Valley Gate Vineyard, June 16, 2024 (Father’s Day)
20 “I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. 25 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made your name known to them, and I will make it known so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.” (John 17:20-26, NRSV)
In this passage, Jesus prays for the church, and in this prayer, he speaks about his relationship with his Father, how they are mysteriously one: the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. This is the mystery of the Trinity that the Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, and also the Spirit is fully God, each showing that they are distinct persons and yet, they are one, one relationship in each other and through each other.
Now, I am a theology professor. I get to teach folk about this stuff, and sometimes, let’s just say, students are less than thrilled to dive into the tough stuff. Most grant that there is something about doctrine that is important. This thing called truth; we are all big fans, and so, the Trinity is worth a nod to being fundamental. Now, that can all sound well and good, but it is also quite mysterious and abstract, and who has time to understand all that stuff? Sure, the Trinity is important; sure, it’s fundamental but it is also kind of fuzzy.
That Father and the Son are one, the Son in the Father, the Father in the Son—what does it mean to be at one? What is the Trinity trying to teach us (especially today on Father’s Day)? Isn’t all this oneness talk just impractical abstract mysticism? Are we right to ask, as modern people, is all this really useful?
And while we are at it, isn’t talking about God as a father a bit sexist, a bit patriarchal? Again, we, as modern people, are we right to ask: why should I look to this ancient book called the Bible, a book that has caused wars, sanctioned slavery, suppressed science, and supported sexism? What could we learn from looking at this old language of God as a Father? What can it possibly say to our experience of our fathers and, for some of us, our experiences as fathers and how this relates to God?
One time, I was camping on the shore of Lake Erie with a group of friends for our friend’s bachelor party. Of the group of guys, most were from our Bible college, all except one, who Craig knew from his work. Upon realizing this, my Bible college mates inquired about whether he was a Christian or not. The guy merely said that he “just wasn’t all that religious.” Another guy in the group saw this as an evangelistic opportunity. The conversation frustrated the non-Christian guy. He left and went over to where I was sitting. He was visibly annoyed, and I cracked a few jokes to lighten the mood. We chatted there under the stars, glistening off the gentle waves of the lake. I was smoking a nice Cuban cigar. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me: “So, I am curious; what do you believe about God?”
“Well, I don’t know. My father brought us to church, and he was an alcoholic jerk. The stuff he did to my mother and me…” It went on something like this, and I had to interject.
“I asked you about God, and all you have said to me this whole time was about your Father.” The guy paused. He had not realized what he was doing.
I don’t recall the rest of the conversation, but it illustrated to me just how important it is to think about how we talk about God. How we talk about God is always bound up with our relationships with other people. You can’t do one without the other.
I asked about God, and he immediately associated that question with his father. Why did he do that? Why did he connect them subconsciously?
This association between God and our fathers is something perennial in the history of religion and it is deep in the Western cultural psyche.
Almost everywhere that people started thinking about God, they started associating with God the qualities of their parents, particularly their fathers, and for obvious reasons. Our parents are the source of our bodily existence, the ones who care for us when we are the most vulnerable, and so, their example forms some of our earliest feelings of safety, security, and provision. They form our earliest thoughts on what is ultimate in life, what is right and wrong, desirable or undesirable.
And so you have these analogies that appear both in the Bible and other religions: God is like a mother because God creates us like a mother birthing her child or sustains us like how a mother nurses her child. God is like a father in that since usually men are the physically taller and stronger members of the household, God is powerful and protective like a father. Because of this perception of power, the leader god in most pantheons in most ancient religions is usually a father-god, not a mother-goddess.
Now, if that is all that is, surely with changing times where both parents work, and gender stereotypes are frowned upon, then yes, referring to God as a Father is out of date. After all, women can be strong, and men can be nurturing, and so on and so forth. But is that really what is going on in the Bible? (I would point out to you that there are actually a number of references to God as female and motherly in the Bible as well if you look for them). But the bigger question is this: Is God really just a projection of what human relationships are like? Or is God ultimately beyond all that? If we think of God as a father, how does God show us what he means by that?
And on the other hand are we so different from ancient people? Our culture still experiences something that ancient times experienced: conditional love, absent love, broken love.
According to Statistica Canada, in 2020, there were 1,700 single dads under the age of 24. Also, in 2020, however, there were nearly 42 000 single moms under the age of 24. There were 21,000 single dads between the ages of 25 and 34 in Canada in 2020 where there were 215 000 single moms. Now, there might be lots of reasons and qualifications for these statistics (there are lots of single-parent households that are healthy and happy, don’t take this the wrong way), but it is safe to say that we still, culturally, are much more likely to be missing the love our of fathers on a daily basis than the love of our mothers. And, of course, that says nothing about the many double-parent families where the children have strained relationships with the parents they know.
We still face the same things as the ancient world, just in different ways. In ancient Greece, in cities like Sparta, if a child was not acceptable to the father, it was quite common, even expected, for the father to expose and kill that child. The father’s acceptance was conditional on whether the child was good enough and strong enough. For folks in this culture, they thought it was necessary: men need to be strong to fight wars. Weakness could not be tolerated.
And this struggle to demonstrate one’s strength appears in Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, there are two primordial Gods: the mother earth goddess, Gaia, and the father-sky God, Uranus.
They give birth to powerful monster gods called the Titans, the most powerful of which is Cronos, who resents his father’s rule and kills his father, becoming king-god. However, Cronos then becomes fearful that his children will usurp him, so he gobbles them up one by one after each one is born (Greek mythology is strange that way, I know).
However, one of his children, Zeus, is hidden from him and raised in secret, and it is Zeus who grows up to slay his malevolent father, assuming power to reign justly, at least for the most part. Zeus, however, in turn, fathers many illegitimate demi-god children, like Hercules and about 16 others in Greek lore, who grow up not knowing who their father is, often trying to do heroic quests to win Zeus’ approval.
Zeus slays his father, but he can never become a true father, it seems, in turn.
Deep in the religious consciousness of Greek religion is this conflict, this worry: If power is what makes a man, what makes a father, what makes a god, how can any son measure up? (But on the other hand, how can a father ever truly be a father either, if all he is obsessed about is power?) Or if the son is stronger, what is stopping them from replacing or usurping their weaker father, taking what their father has by force? And if that is the case, is Zeus all that different from Cronos? If power is what it means to be man, a father, or a god, then the more Father is like Son and Son like the Father, the more estranged they will be, the more they will fight, whether it is humanity to God or humans to one another. They cannot be at one.
I had this illustrated to me in one of the most profound movies on the effect of absent fathers I have ever seen. It is in the movie The Place Beyond the Pines. Ryan Gosling plays Luke, a motorbike stunt performer for a circus. He is a lone wolf, rough around the edges, a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. However, he learns that his ex-girlfriend had a baby, and it is his. He tells her that he loves her and wants to be for their child what his father never was: a provider that will come through for them. However, he admits that working for a circus does not pay well. He can’t afford the things he believes a father should be able to afford for his child. His girlfriend, however, just assures him that being there is enough. But Luke is afraid that he will be inadequate, just like his father was to him. So, his buddy tells him that if he wants to be a real man and provide for his family, he has to use whatever skills he’s got to do it. For him, it is his exceptional skills on a motorbike that could be used for something else: robbing banks and alluding to cops. Luke, in desperation, agrees. He robs the bank and speeds away from the cops on his bike almost effortlessly, and he is able to take that money and buy a crib and clothes and baby food and even take his family out on a dinner date. However, he realizes he will need more, so, he tries a double robbery, but it goes south, and in the mess of trying to allude to the cops, one cop, Avery, played by Bradley Cooper, shoots him and kills him, even though Luke is unarmed.
At this point, the movie shifts the main character from Luke to Avery. Avery, we learn, is a workaholic cop, being a cop is everything to him, despite him having a young family. For Avery, being a man means being a good cop. However, Avery is stricken with guilt over killing an unarmed man, something a good cop would never do. but Avery’s fellow cops cover up his fatal error, but this does not make him feel better as he learns just how corrupt some of his fellow cops are.
Moreover, he learns that Luke had a son about his son’s age and that the reason why Luke turned to crime was to provide for him so that his own son would be proud of him, the same reason Avery joined the police force, to make his dad proud of him. Because of the guilt, Avery can no longer stand to be around his own son, unable to be a father to his own son, knowing how he took some other boy’s father, punishing himself by denying himself a relationship with his own son.
The movie concludes years later. Avery is running for office, a workaholic relentlessly working for government reform, but doing this deep down to make hopeless amends for killing Luke. However, along the way, his son and Luke’s son, both teenagers now, both wayward and troubled from not having a father figure, meet and realize that while initially hate each other, Luke’s son sees the possibility of enacting revenge—they realize that they are the same: one had their father taken by the other, but the other never had his father to begin with, despite them living in the same house. And yet, ironically, sadly, the two of them show signs of becoming just like their fathers, one a reckless wonderer, the other a perfectionist.
The more Luke resented his father, the more he became like him, and this conflict, this estrangement continued from his father to him, but now from him to his son, who, just as ironically, ends up just like him. If our value as men, sons, and fathers is equated with our performance, we will not be at one with each other.
Think about that yourself. For many of us, we had good relationships with our fathers, but perhaps you did not. How has that affected you? Will we choose to see how our fathers are in us, whether this is good or bad?
Well, again, we like to think that we are better than all this ancient barbarism and mythology, but we are not all that different. The same human nature is within us, and there is the same realization: with so many of our relationships, especially ones as important as the ones between parent and child, we are not at one.
And there is an irony to all this with religion: We as a secular society believe that now that we are smarter, more educated, more technologically advanced, more politically organized…more powerful, we don’t need God. Isn’t secular society just one more attempt to kill Cronos all to end up just like him.
“God is dead, and we have killed him,” said the philosopher Nietzsche, declaring that to live in the modern world was to live with a rejection of God as an idea that was useful and meaningful to life. To live in a secular world is to live in a world that has pushed out God, religion, and even objective morality, all in the name of our own will to power. But even Nietzsche worried whether humans were indeed able to live without God.
We live, as George Steiner once said, with a “nostalgia for the absolute.” We live with an awareness that something is missing, something is absent, and for many of us, we live our lives trying to fill that void with something else, whether it is work, achievements, money, sex, or just mindless consumption and entertainment, whether it the socially expectable kind like Netflix or video games or ones less so like drugs.
I had this connection between God the Father and our fathers in a secular world illustrated to me in one of my favorite novels of my young adult: Fight Club.
Fight Club, for those who don’t know this cult classic, is a story about a man who works a meaningless job for a greedy company. His life has no purpose, so he finds himself unable to sleep, passing the time by ordering useless products from shopping channels. However, he meets a man named Tyler Durden, who convinces him to punch him one night after a few beers in order to make him feel better. The man does, and the two start sparing, punching each other. It feels therapeutic for them, so they start up a fight club in the basement of that bar.
Tyler Durden and the main character talk about their past and about God, and both realize that they had fathers walk out on them, and they feel like this is a reflection of what God is like, too. Other men join this fight club, fighting others as a way of expressing their rage over their meaningless lives. Tyler names their struggle in one monologue he makes:
“Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering…an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy [stuff…he says something else here] we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man: No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day, we’d all be millionaires, movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
Other chapters of these fight clubs start opening across the nation, and Tyler Durden starts manipulating them into cult-like cell groups, sending the men out on missions to vandalize corporations, with the grand scheme of blowing up the main buildings of VISA and other credit cards and banks, effectively resetting civilization. Tyler believes that he is some kind of messiah figure for himself. The narrator explains Tyler’s motives this way:
“How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe God’s hate is better than His indifference. If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Maybe if we’re caught and punished, we can be saved.”
Do you know people that say they don’t care about God but are living like they are desperately trying to get God’s attention?
And in a secular world, where we live either ignoring God or feeling God’s absence, as well as living in a world where masculinity, our worth as fathers, is so often defined by power as well as the money we make and the stuff we own or achieve, relationships like the ones between child and parent will be marked with conditions and expectations, caught in this vortex of conflict, competition, and estrangement.
If God is not love, no matter whether we run for God, ignore him, disbelieve him, or hate him—if God is not love, we will end up just like him: unloving ourselves.
I say all this to say that there is a longing deep in the heart of humanity, a longing for meaning and purpose, for acceptance and love, and this longing is symbolized in God the Father so often because of the role our fathers play, whether for good or ill, and it is a longing for oneness.
We have to ask a question fundamental to our future as humans: who is this God that we so often look to as a father? Does God care more about ruling unquestioned than loving his children for who they are? Is God the kind of God that will reject us if we don’t measure up? Will God ignore us if we ignore him? Is love conditional? Is oneness possible? Oneness between God and humanity and humanity with each other?
Well, the story of Scripture tells a different story of God as Father. To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator of all that is chooses to create people in God’s image and likeness. Image and likeness was a way of talking about one’s children. A child is in the parent’s image and likeness and so, God makes all people to be his children, making them with dignity, designing them to reflect his character of love as the way they can most authentically be themselves.
This God reveals himself in history, calling Abraham out of his father’s household, out of idolatry, and into redemption, promising to bless and protect him.
This God led the Israelites out of Egypt, a people oppressed and enslaved under idolatrous tyranny, and God told them that out of all the human family, Israel is to be his firstborn, a nation that has a unique purpose in reflecting God to the nations around it.
This God says God is One, the I am who I am, the living God, and this One God longs to be one with us.
This God says that he is like a father. However, even more than that, God is the perfect father, and God, as this perfect father, beckons us home when we have rebelled against him.
And so when we look at the narrative of the Bible, we see this One God revealing who God is in this pursuit of being at one with us in a way that mysteriously takes on—for lack of a better word—different dimensions to God’s self: the God who is beyond all things, infinite, transcendent, and almighty, but is also the root of all existence, the breath of life, the presence of beauty, one in whom we live and move and have our being, the movements of love, known as Spirit.
As the narrative shows, these dimensions relate to one another. God sends his messiah, the king, but a king that is more than another human king; he is God’s only begotten Son, one with the Father. There is no conflict between Jesus and God because they are fully one with each other to the point that when you look at Jesus, you see the visible image of the invisible God. God is not a distant God. He is with us.
The Father sends the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness, this reconciling oneness with all things Israel was called to, and Jesus does so through sending the Spirit.
This story clashes with human sin, however, and it comes to a particular intensity when people reject Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God. John says at the beginning of his Gospel: “The world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” We know how this story goes.
Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution seeking to preserve its own power, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with, his own disciples and his friends. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our tendencies to refuse to be at one with God and others, even when literally God is staring at us face to face.
But it is in these dark moments that God showed us who God is.
For Jesus to die one with sinners, yet one with the Father, reveals God’s loving solidarity with the human form—our plight, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see God’s self in us and with us, never without us. God chooses to bind himself to our fate to say, “I am not letting you go.”
To be a part of the family of God is to trust in Jesus Christ; it is to remember that in these moments of condemnation, we have been encountered by the presence of the Spirit, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son. The same love that God has for God in the Trinity, God has for sinners, for you, and for me. God is not going to give up on us.
Paul says it this way, “If we are faithless, God remains faithful.” Why? “Because he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).
That is the truth of the Trinity. Trust this. God has made a way for him and us to be one as he is one.
And if God is like this, this suggests ways our relationships can be healed and improved.
Can this propel us to love our fathers more, not merely for all that they have done for us (or have not done for us), but to love them for who they are, to love them as God loves them, to see ourselves in them and reckon with that, with thankfulness, with forgiveness, with gratitude and grace?
Can this change how we think about our own children? If God sees himself in us, can we empathize more with them, seeing ourselves in them, rather than just making sure they shape up to what we expect? To be there for them, love them for who they are, and the journey God has them on.
And God says, “May they be one as we are one.”
Let’s pray…
Longing to be One (Or Alternatively Entitled: Why God is Not an Egg)
Preached at ADC Chapel, January 24, 2024 (some will recognize earlier versions of this sermon from earlier posts on this blog).
In the Gospel of John, John records Jesus on the night of his betrayal, instructing the disciples about many things. He tells them about things like his new command of love and about the coming of the comforter, and here he does something particularly remarkable. Jesus prays for the church.
20 “I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. 25 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made your name known to them, and I will make it known so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.” (John 17:20-26, NRSV)
Here, John uses this language that within God there are two identities (and a third he mentions a few chapters earlier): Father, Son, and the Comforter, Holy Spirit, and these three identities, these persons, these three somethings are one, a mystery the church has puzzled over ever since, speculating on the meaning of person, being, substance, relations, and a whole lot more terminology. Sadly, the Trinity is nothing but terminology for many.
Dorothy Sayers, a Christian novelist and a friend of C. S. Lewis, once joked that she felt like the doctrine of the Trinity was something theologians thought up one day to make life harder for the rest of us. Ya, caught me, Dorothy! While that was a joke, we have to admit that probably most of us at one point have sympathized with Sayer’s feelings on the matter, and for some, that may have been around week 12 of Christian Theology Part One last semester (I don’t know, just a guess). Rest assured; this is not a sermon about why you need to know the historical context of terms like homo-ousia or hypostases, as important as those are. For surely, the Trinity is more than concepts and vocabulary.
Too often, the Trinity is relegated to the equivalent of the appendix: an unnecessary fixture next to our large intestine that some will just eventually have removed. Or worse: Too often, the Trinity is the club to bludgeon the dissenter with rather than a bandage to nurse the sick soul. Most often, when the Trinity is mentioned in some churches, it is to point out just how wrong some people are and how right we are. (And if that is what we think doctrine is meant for, we have missed the point).
Or we try to over-explain. If you grew up in the church, you might have been subjected to quite possibly the most overused theological explanation of all time: “The Trinity is like an _____ (egg!). There is the shell, the yoke, and the white part. Or God is like water because it can be a solid, liquid, or gas.” There you go. Solved it. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t find the idea that God is like an egg all that comforting. And we wonder why Christian beliefs don’t connect with people.
I mean, at least we could have chosen a better food. The Trinity is like waffles: the waffle, the butter, and the syrup poured out like the Holy Spirit. Look, see, there are three, and they are delicious!
The Trinity is like bacon. I can’t think of three aspects of bacon, but if God is like bacon, I want it!
Well, analogies have limits, especially when it comes to mysteries. Dorothy Sayers followed up her joke about the Trinity with a really good piece of advice: if you want to understand the doctrine, you need to look at the drama. If you want to understand our Triune God, look at the story of Scripture. It is here that we encounter the character of God.
To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator of all that is reveals Godself in the history of a people, the Israelites, a people oppressed and enslaved under idolatrous tyranny. This God says God is One, the I am who I am, the living God and this God rescues the Israelites out of bondage to be a chosen people, a nation of priests, to reflect God’s character to the rest of the world, and this One God longs to be one with us.
If you want to know that doctrine, you need to know the drama. And so when we look at the narrative of the Bible, we see this One God revealing who God is in this pursuit of being at one with us in a way that mysteriously takes on—for lack of a better word—different dimensions to God’s self: the God who is beyond all things, infinite, transcendent, and almighty, is also the root of all existence, the breath of life, the presence of beauty, one in whom we live and move and have our being, the movements of love, known as Spirit.
As the narrative shows, these dimensions relate to one another. God sends his messiah, the king, but a king that is more than another human king; he is God’s only begotten Son, yet one with the Father. The Father sends the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness, this reconciling oneness with all things Israel was called to, and Jesus does so through sending the Spirit.
This is probably where it gets confusing for people (and we do not like confusing). What does it mean to be at one? Isn’t all this oneness talk just impractical abstract mystical stuff? Are we right to ask, as modern people, is all this really useful?
Or does it name something we long for? On December 31, 1989, Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, aired the band’s dirty laundry in a radio interview. The band was on tour with an album some regarded as evidence that the band was over the hill. The reality was the band was burning out. Bono had had his first child, and being away from his family was emotionally draining. Another member’s marriage was crumbling. The band was on the verge of breaking up. Meanwhile, members of the band were becoming interested in activism but struggling to make a difference. They were navigating how they could express their religious convictions in music while wrestling with the religious hypocrisy of much of Christianity. When the band got together to write music a few months later, the song “One” came out of a space of brutal honesty about where their lives were and what they longed for. Let me read you a few stanzas of it:
Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you, now
You got someone to blame?
You say one love, one life
When it’s one need in the night
One love, we get to share it
Leaves you, baby, if you don’t care for it…
Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?
Did I ask too much? More than a lot
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got
We’re one, but we’re not the same
Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again
You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on to what you got
When all you got is hurt
One love, one blood
One life, you got to do what you should
One life with each other
Sisters, brothers
One life, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
Some of you noticed the interconnected themes of love, marriage, justice, religion, responsibility, hurt, blame, differences, and division, all tied to that word Bono keeps singing over and over: “one,” oneness.
Some of you started singing that in your head. Others just sat there wondering why Spencer is quoting old people music. Some might be thinking, “Spencer, isn’t there any recent good music out there you could have quoted to connect with the younger generation?” And the answer is, “No, there isn’t.”
You can fight me on that later, but I hope you all noticed the theme: Oneness. U2, struggling with their marriages and what it means to be one life together, feels like that is one instance of a larger struggle all humanity participates in together. They use the notion in a very similar way to how Jesus uses it in John. In a similar way, my life is bound up with my spouse, how we are one flesh, how we are partners in life, and how we affect each other; God pushes us to see others that way.
“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.” It is a clue into the very heart and essence of God, just as much as it is an insight into the very essence and longing of our humanity. We are creatures that are connected to each other.
The past few years have continually illustrated the fact that we are connected. I have been thinking about the wildfires we had last year. It was being talked about on the news the other day.
Hundreds of homes were destroyed by a 25,000-hectare fire caused by such dryness that is unheard of for a province that literally has ocean on all sides of it. The weather is getting more and more severe because we are dealing with the effects of climate change that can turn a spark and a few embers into a wildfire the size of a city.
We are realizing that how we treat the environment affects one another. And at the end of the day, all it took was one person to burn some leaves in their backyard, and hundreds of families lost their homes.
We all longed for rain back in June, and then, you know what happened? We got rain, so much rain there was flooding all over the province. Then, a hurricane happened. Now, we are experiencing a strange winter, which is more severe than usual, while the rest of the continent is hit with Arctic winds. Our world is out of balance, and we are disconnected from it and each other.
It is things like a forest fire and flooding that remind us that a city of a million people like Halifax still needs to be a community, depending on one another, needing one another, affected by the choices of one another; that our providences and nation, just like individuals are not self-enclosed, independent, self-reliant units, able to carry one without help or helping others.
We are dependent on the earth and the seas, the fish and the animals, for the very processes of life that sustain us. We are dependent on each other. We are learning the hard way that we are all connected. Where one acts irresponsibly, all are affected, and also, where one suffers, all suffer.
We have been reminded again and again vividly over the last few years that we are all connected.
We are feeling how industrial practices on one side of the world affect farming on the other.
Health practices on one side of the world affect the health of communities on the other.
Wars on one side of the world affect life on the other.
We can’t get away from it. We are profoundly connected, but we continue to ignore this fact, retreating into our little empires of autonomy (some of us even use our Christian convictions to do so).
And yet, our lives are marred with reminders that we are living alienated from nature and each other. We are divided against the very things we need most. We are killing ourselves because we are constantly failing to see ourselves, our fate, and our identity as dependent on others.
We know we need to be one; we long to be at one with each other; we long for unity and harmony where we can all be ourselves, and others can be themselves in peace with the earth, and yet, we are not at one. We have given in to greed and selfishness or just slipped into an easy thoughtlessness, too concerned with the rat race of life.
We find ourselves reliving this story of humanity again and again, which comes to a particular intensity when people rejected Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God. John says at the beginning of his Gospel: “The world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” We know how this story goes.
Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution seeking to preserve its own power, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with, his own disciples his friends. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our tendencies to refuse to be at one with God and others, even when literally God is staring at us face to face.
But it is in these dark moments that God showed us who God is.
For Jesus to die one with sinners, yet one with the Father, reveals God’s loving solidarity with the human form—our plight, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see God’s self in us and with us, never without us. God chooses to bind himself to our fate to say I am not letting you go.
John records Jesus putting it this way: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And he counts the ones in front of him, the ones who he knew would betray him the worst—he counts them as his friends.
So often, we are tempted to lose heart, to recoil and collapse under the weight of our guilt and shame, when we think about the state of our world, our complicity in things like racism, war, climate change, consumerism, all the toxic squabbles we see on social media, or just our individual apathy to the needs of others we encounter on a daily basis— there is so much that might cause us to shrink back and say we don’t deserve a better world. We deserve what is coming to us.
To be a part of the people of God is to trust in Jesus Christ; it is to remember that in these moments of condemnation, we have been encountered by the presence of the Spirit, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son. The same love that God has for God in the Trinity, God has for sinners, for you, and for me. God is not going to give up on us. Trust this. Trust this.
God is the God who, throughout history, stands with the undeserving, the least of us, the oppressed, the god-forsaken, the outcasts, the sinners—all humanity—announcing as Jesus did to the unfaithful disciples: “peace to you,” announcing God’s will for us is and has always been eternal life.
When we are suffering and scared, our cross becomes his cross.
When we are lost and hopeless, his resurrection becomes our resurrection.
This God who is God above has come and walked with us in Christ as God beside us and has redeemed us with the Spirit, leading us forward as God within us and through us, a love so undivided and unlimited, it is making all things one.
As John says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.”
And so, John challenges us to be at one with each other in a similar way to how the Father is at one with the Son: “May they be one as we are one.”
He prays for his disciples. He is praying for the church, which means he is praying for us today. In a world that is broken and divided, be at one with each other. Model the kind of empathy, acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness, and encouragement that says, “I need you; I can’t be me without you; I cannot succeed unless you succeed; If you are hurting, I am hurting; We are one.”
“One life, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, carry each other.”
That is Jesus’ prayer. God knows I could use some prayer on this. I had my family call me from Ontario, wondering if I was safe through all the fires and floods. I tried to explain to them that not all people in Nova Scotia live in Halifax (a point that is routinely lost on them), but I also caught myself saying, “I am okay. This does not affect me.”
I caught myself doing something we all too easily do: since hardship or oppression does not touch my immediate experience, my job, and my family, I conclude I am not affected.
We can do that with so many things. Injustice does not affect me. Poverty does not affect me. Illness does not affect me. War does not affect me. That person’s financial troubles, that person’s health risk, that person’s views: not my problem. It’s theirs, not mine. And so, we choose to forsake the invitation into oneness of love again and again.
One reason the Trinity feels abstract is that we so often use it as just one more way to honor God with our lips (and perhaps our cognitive minds), but the reality is our hearts are far from God.
Two days ago, I was driving into work, and CBC radio mentioned police charged a guy with accidentally starting the fires, as I mentioned before. A 22-year-old decided to burn some dead leaves in his backyard. I remember uttering things to myself about what I hope that guy gets for being so stupid and thoughtless. But then the radio had an interview with a man who had lost his house, his farm, and even his cottage on the other side of the forest fire. The man was asked how he felt about the person charged, and all he could say was, “I can’t blame him. I’ve done a lot of thoughtless stuff over the years. Mine, thankfully, just didn’t have as severe of consequences as his. His mistake could have just as easily been mine.” I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot, just having a moment to take those words and that profound lesson in humility I just experienced. To the one who had caused all this destruction, this man who had every possession of his destroyed in those fires chose to see himself in the other. He chose empathy and mercy. He chose oneness.
Again, folks are so often tempted to see the Trinity as some abstract idea (and we theologians can admit some part in that), but the Trinity flows from our relationship with God and each other. It is an invitation into the movements of worship and prayer, service and sacrifice, solidarity and forgiveness that speaks to the essence of who God is and who we are and the only way we can move forward as people: We are connected; we belong to one another, and in God’s choice to be bound to us, to refuse to let us go, we are awakened to our responsibility to others—more than this: our privilege, our witness, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
May we, daily in choices, grand or small, step into the oneness of God as a college, a community, a church, awaiting the day when God is all in all.
A Surprising Holiness
Preached at Valleygate Vineyard, Sunday, June 9, 2024.
Well, I am so glad to be with you again. It has been a busy week for me. It was my birthday on Friday. Last weekend, I flew out to Denver, and I presented a paper at a conference there (that is what we theology nerds do when we are not teaching classes, by the way, among other things). I presented at a society that is mostly a Catholic theology society, with a few of us who were Baptists. So, that means around this time last week, I was attending a Catholic mass that the organizers of the society put on, trying rather hopelessly to flip through the booklet of what prayers to recite and things like that. Now I am here, at a vineyard church. So, I feel like I have experienced the spectrum of worship styles in Christianity this week, from high church to charismatic.
The weekend was a good time connecting with colleagues and friends in Denver, but I must admit that I don’t like traveling. Specifically, I don’t like airports. This time, yet again, proved my point. The only time Meagan would be off and be able to come get me involved in a long layover in the middle of the night in Toronto for me. So, I tried to sit there in the concourse and rest. I ended up reading all the books I had purchased at the book vendors at the conference, which was not so bad, but when my flight finally arrived, I felt completely done and tired. Then, of course, they announce that there is something wrong with the airplane and we have to switch flights; the next available plane will be here in a few hours. After spending some 24 hours in transit, I was picked up by Meagan in Halifax, and I was a vegetable—a hungry, smelly, tired, incoherent vegetable.
On the plane, while I was wired awake from too much coffee, I thought about what I wanted to speak with you about, and one passage kept coming to me. It is one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, and I have never had the chance to preach on just this text. So, I am excited to share it with you today. It comes from the Prophet Hosea.
Hosea is part of 12 books at the end of the Old Testament called the “Minor Prophets,” 12 short books, although calling them “minor” feels like that does not do them justice.
Hosea was a prophet who started his ministry of preaching around the mid-700s BC, so 700 years before Christ.
Hosea is also one of the most fascinating prophets because he had possibly the most bizarre calling. Hosea was called by God to marry a prostitute named Gomer, have children with her, and then when she left him to be with another man, God called Hosea to pursue her. God did this to use his life as an illustration for how God’s people had acted unfaithfully to him and that Hosea could now understand the hurt in God over Israel’s infidelity because he felt it with his wife. But also, despite all the unfaithfulness, God continued to pursue Israel out of God’s rich love, and so also, Hosea had to do this, learning and exemplifying what this striving kind of love is like.
Now, there is a whole sermon on just that right there—there are so many truths there that are as bewildering as they are beautiful—but what I really want to talk to you today about is in a passage 11 chapters into the book. You see in this travail of the people being unfaithful to God, and God warning that if the people go their own way, they will face the consequences, there is an astonishing passage. After the prophet blasts the people for their sins, God, quite surprisingly, tells Hosea to say this to the people:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
and offering incense to idols.Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
I took them up in my arms,
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.They shall return to the land of Egypt,
and Assyria shall be their king,
because they have refused to return to me.
The sword rages in their cities;
it consumes their oracle priests
and devours because of their schemes.
My people are bent on turning away from me.
To the Most High they call,
but he does not raise them up at all.How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim,
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.Hosea 11:1-9, (NRSV)
I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.
What is Holiness?
What is holiness? Any bible scholar or even a Google search will give you the standard definition of holy, which comes from the Hebrew word, “kodesh,” which means to be “set apart.” When we look at some of the early foundational stories of the Bible where God is talked about as holy, we get a sense that the holiness of God is potentially quite frightening. God is so perfect and pure and transcendent that to come in contact with this is as beautiful as it is terrifying.
The Prophet Isaiah had a vision of God in his heavenly temple, where he saw the angelic Seraphim flying around chanting, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and Isaiah describes this experience as ruining him. Seeing the holiness of God makes him feel unclean as all the goodness in him, the righteousness he thought he had compared to the people that he spends several chapters chastising, pales in comparison to the pure holiness of God. Isaiah exclaims, “Woe is me, for I am ruined.”
Even more severe, there are stories that speak about people coming into contact with something holy, whether it is the temple, touching the ark of the covenant, or stepping onto the foot of Mount Sinai; if they did this unprepared or even if they did this unintentionally, there are narratives that speak about how they risked death. The holiness of God is so pure it’s dangerous.
Growing up, I often felt like the holiness of God was portrayed as something like radioactive plutonium or something. Moses came down from the mountain, and he was always pulsating in all the children’s bibles. I admit, I may have had an overactive imagination.
Well, there is something certainly important about these stories. The holiness of an infinite God is an awesome thing. These stories help us see that God’s holiness has to be taken seriously. Things that are holy—the temple, the ark, the Sabbath—in the ancient mindset are the things that have been set apart, that possess the power and presence of purity and thus orient life properly, and so, must be respected. To violate these things is to invite defilement, disorder, and destruction.
In a way, the plutonium analogy is not too far off: plutonium can be used to produce awesome energy to power whole cities but is also not something you would want to fool around with. You have to handle it with care, knowing what it is capable of.
Well, all of this is true, but to just say that is to miss quite a lot. In fact, you have actually profoundly missed the point with its own dangerous consequences if holiness only means this.
What are those consequences?: A few years ago, I met for coffee with a person who faced addictions. I remember one particular morning we sat there for coffee and this person shared her story of going through some really dark times, some rock bottoms that I just cannot even fathom.
Out of my pastoral training, I felt obliged to ask her after she gave her story, “Where do you think God was in all of this?” I was hoping for some obvious Sunday School answer: “I know that Jesus was with me and that he loves me”—something like that.
My heart sank as she confessed that she did not know where God was in all this in her life. In fact, she insisted God could not have been with her. She had rebelled against God and was unfaithful. God is not with people like that. She had sinned again and again, and there is one thing she knew from growing up in church is that God cannot stand the presence of sin. God is holy.
God is holy, and that is why she was certain God could not have been with her, a sinner. Is that what that means? God can’t be with us because of who he is?
How many of us have heard messages like that?
You see if your notion of holiness is about being morally perfect and how God cannot stand the presence of anything that cannot measure up to this kind of moral perfection, you, like many Christians, probably have an idea of God in your head where God actually is not with sinners at all. God really just tolerates us.
Now, to say it like that, many of us would immediately know that to be untrue. However, as I had illustrated to me on that day, in the ups and downs of life, certain convictions we are taught growing up have a way of staying deep in us, lying dormant, festering, waiting to come out one day when life has you down: You mess up, people desert you, the ones you love hurt you, or you hurt them, you get caught in sin’s vortex of lies and bad choices and more lies—whatever those dark moments could be, and all of a sudden it occurs to you, that if God is holy, God probably wants nothing to do with a sinner like you.
Perhaps you were raised with a strong perfectionism like I was, where you may have been taught, “With enough faith, you should be able to stop sinning. If faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, surely a little bit of faith is all you need to stop committing this sin or that sin.”
And so you say, “If God can do miracles, why can’t he take away this sin in my life?” And you are left wondering, “Maybe it is just because I don’t believe enough.”
Perhaps some of you have come to those dark moments—like I did one day, and you said to yourself, “If I am saved by faith, but I don’t have enough faith to stop sinning, maybe I don’t have enough faith to be saved at all. Maybe I’ve committed that unforgivable sin that one scripture talks about. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, I took God for granted one too many times, and I filled up my quota; and that was it; God cut me loose.” After all, as people are fond of saying, God is loving, but he is also holy.
The “but” there suggests love and holiness in most people’s heads is a zero-sum game, one limited by the other.
Many of us have heard messages like that, whether we were taught it growing up or it is just the voice of our inadequacies trying to get the better of us.
Holiness as Surprising Mercy
As I said, while God is perfect and pure and holy, yes, and God wants us to live in the right relationship with God and others, yes, if we leave it there, we shortchange the discussion because effectively this says that God loves us only when we perform best, when we get things right, and when we don’t mess up. And if not, God is done with us. Is that what holiness means?
The people of Hosea’s day were stuck in their sins. They had gone after idols and were unfaithful to God. They had forgotten all that God had done for them, and they had been doing this for hundreds of years.
And so, God sends the Prophet Hosea to warn them. If you keep worshiping idols, you’re going to keep getting hurt. If you keep making dirty political alliances, your luck will run out, and the empire of Assyria is going to come and conquer you. If you keep oppressing the poor, you are going to have more and more problems in your society. Wrongdoing has real consequences, and the Prophet keeps warning them: “Stop acting this way.”
Hosea condemns the people for their apathy and corruption, but then something unexpected happens. The people had not repented, and yet God out of the blue in Chapter 11, confesses God simply cannot bring himself to give up on the people. God looks at the people as God’s precious child and says:
How can I give you up? You are my child. I fed you. I taught you to walk. I led you as you took your first steps. Even though you rebelled against me and ran away, even though you hurt me, I simply can’t go through with punishing you. My heart recoils, and I feel my compassion growing warm and tender. I love you too much.
How can this be? Why is God doing this? God simply says: I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.
The logic of this passage goes in an unexpected direction from all the other passages before it on holiness. Indeed, God is holy—pure, unpolluted, and perfect—but there is something about God, the living God, where God is always surprising us.
When we are tempted to think our worth is found in our own moral performances…
When we are tempted to think God’s grace has limits…
When we are tempted to think that God simply is not there…
God says, I am holy; I am completely different from the god you have expected me to be.
I am holy, and therefore, I am uncontrollable and have unlimited compassion.
I am holy, and therefore, I will not use fierce anger.
I am holy; therefore, I will not punish.
My holiness is my limitless, unimaginable, incomparable love, love unlike anything else out there.
When you run from me, I still choose to be with you. That is who I am.
If you have a child who did something terrible, and yet you simply cannot bring yourself to punish them, you may have a sense of what the Prophet is trying to communicate.
In our very worst moments, God simply looks at us and seeks not the sinner, the screw-up—God does not see all the damage we have caused or all the disappointment—God simply sees you, his child.
God made you, sustained you, and simply is not going to give up on you.
When we look at the story of Scripture, from Genesis to the Gospels, we see a God whose holiness is full of surprises, constantly amazing us with how much deeper his love is.
How Jesus Shows Us Holiness
Indeed, we keep reading, and we learn that God so loved the world that he came in the form of a baby, the Holy One of Israel, God Immanuel, God with us, as Matthew says. And Jesus continued this work of surprising people with the holy-different love of God.
Jesus did things like touch an unclean woman, but in doing so, he healed her.
Jesus did things like invite the riff-raff of society, the folks the religious leaders saw as disgusting and degenerate—Jesus invited these people over for dinner and ate with them.
And while these things got Jesus in a lot of trouble, we have to look at these stories and ask, if Jesus truly is the holy one, God himself, how are these actions showing us the true meaning of holiness? It is a holiness that is radical compassion. It is a holiness that says, “I am not afraid to get my hands dirty to show you that you are loved.”
And in the most surprising act, Jesus goes to the cross. God incarnate, who came as the messiah of God’s people, chose to come and die on an executioner’s cross.
At the cross, we know God is with us because, God became a godforsaken corpse. The holiness of God was found in the place viewed as the very opposite of God. Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree, one scripture says. God chose to be there in order to say that there is no place God is not with us.
God died in the place of a sinner to say nothing separates us from God.
God’s love binds Godself to our fate, saying, “I love you so much that if you are lost in the death of sin, I will be with you there.” What happens to you happens to me, and that is how I will prove to you what love I have for you. Through this I will show you the hope of resurrection.
Why? Because God is a holy God, different from all our expectations of what God should be.
When we are lost in sin, when we expect God to condemn us, when we deserve nothing less, the holiness of God appears.
Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you have heard it before. There once was a woman who said she had visions of Jesus. The bishop of the area heard that one of his older parishioners was claiming to have had visions of Jesus, and so he, quite skeptically, goes to investigate. He tells this woman, “This is how I will know that your visions are authentic: ask Jesus, ‘What were the sins I confessed in my last confession?’” The woman agreed to ask Jesus this.
Sometime later, the woman claimed to have another vision of Jesus, and so the bishop went to investigate. The bishop stepped into her house and said, “Well, did you ask Jesus my question?”
The woman answered, “Oh yes. Come sit.” At this, the bishop grew afraid and sat down trembling. The woman took the bishop’s hand in hers, and said, “I asked Jesus what were your last sins you confessed. And he told me, ‘Tell him that I don’t remember.’”
That is the holiness of Jesus.
In our worst moments, God shows us his best. When we are farthest from God, that is when God chooses to be nearest to us.
Living as a Holy People
And this causes us to ask ourselves: how are we to live out this kind of holiness? God says to be holy as I am holy. How do we do that?
We all know that other version of holiness. Baptists had a rhythm I heard growing up: “We don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and we don’t date girls who do.” That list of no’s was considered what holiness was, and certainly, there is truth to some of that. There are things that are not good for us. Sure, but if that is all holiness means, we have missed the point.
However, holiness in the way that Hosea witnessed and Jesus modeled has a whole lot more to do with what we are willing to do so that others can know that they are loved by God in the way we have seen in our own lives.
A life of holiness says I have encountered a God who is remarkably there for me and so I am free of the obstacles in myself that keep me from being there for you, even if these obstacles come from my religion.
I realized this one day when I was pastoring in Sudbury. Early on, a friend of mine, an Anglican priest, sat me down for coffee, and he gave me the most astute observation about the city I would learn for my ministry there. “Spencer,” he said, “Sudbury is not an unchurched town. It is a de-churched town.” What he meant by that was simply that most of the people I met in Sudbury had grown up in church or had some bad experience with one of the churches in town. However, as I realized, this meant nearly everyone I met knew what Christianity was basically about but had been burned by a judgmental church or cut loose by a pastor who clearly thought it best to go after less time-consuming sheep.
They knew Jesus, but how Jesus was modeled to them said that God was no different than all the other conditional forms of love in their lives.
I remember talking to one pastor who proudly admitted that he took his holiness so seriously he rarely hung out with non-Christians…hmmm…Well you can imagine churches like that have a lot of people fall through the cracks.
I said to myself, you know this whole game churches have been playing for all these years. It is great at attracting people whose lives are relatively put together, but if we are really going to reach people in need, we have to be different.
I adopted two rules that I felt were necessary to pastor in these parts: one was I believed that the love of God convicts people of sin. I don’t need to condemn folks or finger-wave. Enough Christians have already done that to them and a good deal of people I encountered were much harsher on themselves than I could ever be. So, I would be different. I would let the love of God convict people.
Two, if someone needed help in my town, even if it seemed like they never stepped foot in my church at all, I was going to do my best to help them. Believe it or not, I was criticized for this. One pastor I knew thought that was foolish. You aren’t going to grow the church that way, he said.
One day, I took a few guys to the food bank, and afterward, I invited them out for coffee at the local Tim Hortons. One guy remarked beforehand that he was on new medication, and he just did not feel like himself.
Well, over coffee, our conversations took an unexpected turn. They, one guy started going on about he realized that Snoop Dog is probably named Snoop Dog because he actually looks like a real dog. The other guy found that remark offensive and told him that he did not care for what he said. The first guy kept going, “No, no, no, I am not being racist or anything. I am just saying. He looks like a dog; that’s why he’s called Snoop Dog.”
Before I knew it, a chair was flung across the room, and the two guys were up in each other’s faces, yelling. Meanwhile, the third guy just sat there with a dopey grin on his face. Turns out he was sauced the whole time. To all of this the manager yelled, “Get out, all of you, and don’t come back. You’re banned from here.” She motioned at all of us.
We all walked out. I was stunned and a little bit mad. Did I just get banned from the only coffee shop in town? I turned to the two guys and said, you need to go in there and fix this.
So, they tried to go back in and plead with the manager to unban them. A minute or two went by. The manager came out, looked at me, and motioned that she wanted to speak with me. “So, they tell me you are their pastor.”
Sheepishly, I said, “By God’s grace, I supposed I am.” And I promised her that if I could keep them in check, they could keep coming around.
I remember coming out of that Tim Hortons, a bit annoyed, and looking at those guys. It was that look in their eyes, “Is this it for us? Is this where pastor spencer just says this is too much trouble; I’m going to focus my energies on more deserving folk?”
At that moment, I realized that the witness of holiness for them wasn’t really about whether I was a morally perfect person (which, of course, I am not,) nor was it about all the things I don’t do. In a moment where it seemed quite natural to be mad and storm off, holiness was saying, “I am not going to give up on you.”
God says, “I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.”
And so, we who have encountered this love, this holiness, how we will live so that we say with our lives, “I am not perfect, but I have been encountered by a God who sees us all as his children.”
Holiness says I keep messing up, but God is the kind of God that simply does not give up on us.
Holiness says I have ignored God, ran from him, acted like he does not exist, but God is simply the kind of God that chooses to be with us, no matter what.
Holiness says I am here today because God is a God very different than what I expected.
And our message as a holy people is simply this: because God is different, that is why I will not give up on you.
Let’s pray…
We’ve Missed The Point: Ascension and the Meaning of the Bible
Preached at Lawrencetown United Baptist Church, Ascension, 2024
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:44-53, NRSV)
There was a movie that came out a few years ago called The Book of Eli. It starred two great actors, Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. The movie takes place in a time when the world has been destroyed in an apocalyptic event, possibly a nuclear war. The survivors believed that the old ways in some way caused these events, so in anger, they burned all books, particularly religious books.
Many years later, the world is dark and chaotic, made up of brutal tribes. Only a few elderly people know how to read, let alone know about religion and books like the Bible.
A man named Eli (played by Washington) emerges, walking along the road to somewhere with the last Bible in existence. And he believes he is on a mission from God to bring it to a place God has shown him.
As he passes through one town amongst the desolate wastes, a warlord named Carnegie (played by Oldman) learns that he has the last Bible. He, too, is an old survivor. He remembers, as a boy, seeing televangelists on TV and how much power they had by invoking that they were speaking words from God himself. He remembers his own mother, a struggling single mother, desperate, sending money to a televangelist, money she did not have, and telling him that faith is the most powerful force out there.
Carnegie wants this power: the power to control desperate people. He realizes that the power to speak on behalf of God could allow him to rule unquestioned.
So, he sets out to get this last Bible from Eli.
Two Ways of Using the Bible
The movie sets up a stark contrast between Eli and Carnegie. Both want to use the Bible but for two very different purposes.
In fact, there is a scene in the movie where Eli is sitting there reading the Bible in an inn, and a woman comes to him, sent by Carnegie (she is his slave), and she tries to seduce him in order to get this prized possession.
Instead of taking her up on that offer or condemning her, he turns and has compassion. He sees in her despair over life. So, he encourages her to be thankful and to cherish her life as something valuable, a gift. The woman is confused and admits she doesn’t think that her life is worth anything. But she asks, how do I do that?
So Eli takes her hands and folds them and tells her there is this old practice called prayer, which is something you can do to be thankful and have hope. He teaches her to recite these ancient words: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” He tells her about the words of the book he reads, that these words are the words of hope and love.
Instead of condemning her or using her, he uses the Bible to give her hope.
Now, in one of the more entertaining but theologically unsound aspects of the movie, when Carnegie comes after Eli, we realize that Eli has God’s supernatural protection. What kind of divine protection, you ask? Good question: Eli has supernatural gun-fighting skills, slaying a small army’s worth of Carnegie’s men when they come at him. I feel like the writers of this movie may have missed a passage or two from the New Testament.
Or, maybe this is trying to allude back to someone like Samson in the Old Testament. Maybe I may have missed one of the lesser-known spiritual gifts in the New Testament. Or, maybe this is just a movie made by Hollywood, and we all know guns and explosions sell tickets.
Be that as it may, the movie is not perfect, but it draws attention to an aspect of this narrative we read today: The resurrected Jesus, just before he ascends to the Father in victory and vindication, opens the eyes of the disciples and they see how the scriptures are fulfilled in him, in his cross and resurrection, fulfilled in his way.
This is something Luke is trying to impress on us from chapter one of his Gospel: The Bible does not make sense without seeing it through Jesus and his love and hope for the least of this world.
You see, Eli and Carnegie represent two ways of thinking about faith and the Bible. Both want to use the Bible, and both have an idea of the authority of God, but their approaches couldn’t get any more different.
One wants to use the Bible for power, control, to bring himself closer to God over others. There are folks in the Gospel that want to do this, whether it is the Pharisees or even Jesus’ disciples. Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven, and his disciples, James and John, immediately saw Jesus as a pathway to power and status. That is not what Jesus was about. Jesus said, “I came not to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many.” He also said, “If you want to be my disciples, you have to take up your cross and follow me.”
So, there is also the way Eli uses the Bible: to use the Bible to bring others closer to God, bring hope, compassion, and encouragement. You see that happen in Luke’s Gospel: Jesus heals on the Sabbath; Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners; Jesus proclaims justice and liberation.
Again, both want to use the Bible, and so, in the loosest possible sense of the term, both want to be “biblical,” but I think we all know that just because someone can quote the Bible does not actually mean they are using the Bible for what it was meant for.
One uses the Bible in a way that points to who Jesus is and what Jesus was about. The other does not.
This is a part of the epiphany the disciples had to learn on that day all those years ago, and it is what our eyes must be awoken to today if we are going to be faithful Christians of our ascended Lord today.
Ascension and the Lesson Jesus Wanted His Disciples to Know
So, it was Ascension this week. If you don’t know what Ascension is, it is the day of the year that traditionally Christians remember Jesus being taken up to heaven after he was resurrected, celebrated 40 days after Easter.
For some reason, we don’t give gifts. We don’t have a turkey. We don’t even eat chocolate eggs (However, some of us still have chocolate eggs hidden from our kids from Easter, mind you). For some, the day of Ascension comes and goes without us realizing it, usually because it coincides with Mother’s Day (Happy Mother’s Day, by the way). Despite it being the conclusion of the Gospels, the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, it just never seemed to have caught on the way Christmas, the beginning of the Gospels, did. Nevertheless, it is a day in the Christian calendar all the same and it is worth celebrating.
After the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus finally helps them see all that they did not understand but can now know in hindsight. He gives them new eyes to see and new ears to hear what is going on in the Bible.
Ascension is that pivotal point where Jesus brings his earthly ministry to a conclusion before going up to heaven and reigning as our mediator at the right hand of the Father, and it seems that Luke is keen to tell us several times here that Jesus explains how the scriptures are fulfilled in him.
We see this in the passage before, where two of Jesus’ disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus and the resurrected Jesus appears to them and walks with them, and they don’t know it is him. They lament how the prophet Jesus was killed. They were disappointed because they really thought he could have been the Messiah.
They thought that Jesus was going to rise up and kill the Romans, liberate the people, and restore the kingdom of God that way, with violence. So, obviously, the cross, the execution of Jesus at the hands of both the Romans and the religious leaders of Israel kind of kiboshed that.
Or did it?
Luke tells us that Jesus revealed himself to them and explained to them along the road to Emmaus how the whole of the Old Testament scriptures pointed to him, to him going to the cross and rising again.
The cross, its brutality and shame, its lowliness and powerlessness—it did not disprove Jesus as the Messiah; it fulfilled it. To us church folk two thousand years later, we don’t consider just how contradictory this probably sounded: A crucified messiah was an oxymoron, like “jumbo-shrimp.”
The law says that anyone who hangs on a tree is cursed. Surely, God cannot be with a man who dies a death like that. Surely, God would protect a true Son of God from such evil. And surely, no one who claimed equality with God could be anything other than a blasphemer if this happened to them. That was what the assumption was.
But as Jesus went to the cross, as all the Gospel writers tell in different ways, Jesus was speaking the words of the Psalms, embodying the patterns the prophets lived, fulfilling in his very body what the Word of God is truly about.
“Why have you forsaken me?” That is a line from David in Psalm 22, who wondered where God was to protect him and the innocent righteous. And yet, to have Jesus speak these words, who claimed to be at one with God, here was God identifying in solidarity with all those who feel forgotten by God.
The disciples could not get their heads around this. This was not supposed to happen in their minds. He could not be the messiah if this happened.
Yet, when you look at the narratives of the Old Testament, you see the truth of the cross. You see Joseph, whose honestly lands him in prison. You see David, whose anointing as king means he spent his early years hunted and hated. You see Job, who endures pain and tragedy to show that he loves God for no benefit. You see Jeremiah, who is branded a traitor, shoved down a well to die, and exiled, all for speaking God’s words.
You see the truth of the cross in the Old Testament: that the good, the just, and the innocent often suffer in this world and are attacked and scorned by the powers of sin.
This leads so many of us to ask: Is evil winning in this world? Is there anything we can do? Is love and hope in vain?
One writer put it this way: Biblical faith makes us realize that if you have not loved, you have not fully lived, but if you love fully, you will probably end up dying for it.
That is what happened to Jesus. Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, that the first will be last and the last will be first, that God is here for the humble and the humiliated, the pure and the peacemaker, the merciful and those in mourning.
Jesus came preaching that the law is summarized in love, and the powers and the principalities felt threatened and killed him for it. Jesus’ own people, the leaders of his own religion, saw what he was saying as blasphemous. Yet even in the execution of the cross, the worst evil the people could do to God’s messiah, Jesus is shown praying for them: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”
The cross is the moment when the evil in the human heart and society shows its ugly head, and God chooses this moment to show us in Jesus the kind of God he is: A God willing to love us and die for us.
God loves us with his very best, even when we are at our very worst.
Evil did not have the final say over Jesus that day, nor does it have the final say over history, nor does it have the final say over you, your life, your future.
Jesus rose from the grave. Death, the devil, the powers of disobedience and despair, oppression, and bigotry were overthrown by victorious love.
Today is Ascension, and Ascension means who Jesus is and where Jesus is now, which means that love and not hate are in control of this world.
Grace, not domination, is what wins in the end.
Forgiveness, not fear, is what prevails.
That is the point of the Bible.
From creation to covenant, from exodus to exile, from tabernacle to temple, from Moses, the judges, the kings, and the prophets, the whole Old Testament was preparing God’s people for Jesus. All its figures, its imagery, its laws, its longing, all were anticipations of Jesus.
Jesus is who the whole of the scriptures, the law, and the prophets have been longing for.
Putting it this way says something about what the Bible is all about that we need to remember in this age so badly.
It is not merely that some of it points to Jesus. Jesus insists that it all points to him that Jesus’ way fulfills the deepest concerns about what the Bible seeks to teach.
We Have Missed the Point
It is sad to say this, but we Christians have not been particularly good at keeping this in mind. We so often lose the plot of the Bible and use it in ways that do not fit its purpose of pointing to Jesus and Jesus’ way.
Let me give you some examples:
My mom, bless her soul, had a book she read when I was little. I’d say she read it religiously, but that pun might be too on the nose. It was called the Maker’s Diet. Some authors combed through the Bible, arguing that if you want to live a long and healthy life, all you need to do is follow the Bible’s God-given recipe for healthy eating. Now, there is obvious wisdom to the dietary laws of the Old Testament in its own day and age – I am not disputing that – sure, these laws were to aid in maintaining the health of Israel, and certainly, God wants us to be healthy today, but the idea we could sift those laws out of the ancient world and drop them into our own. The purpose of the Bible isn’t a diet book.
When I was in high school, a book called “The Bible Code” came out. Do you remember the Bible Code? Some believed that since the Bible is divine revelation, there are obviously hidden messages and prophecies in it, sort of like how people believed that if you played a rock band’s LP in reverse back in the ’60s, you hear a secret message. Well, the Bible Code took all the letters of the Bible, and lined them up in a long ribbon and searched every other letter or every fifth letter and things like that, and lo and behold, some of the search results came up with things like “JFK, plot” or “Japan, bomb” or things like that. This was a sensation that became a best-seller, but unsurprisingly, when others found similar results from other long books like Moby Dick or War and Peace, the sales kind of tanked. Again, that is kind of a silly example, but I still know people who come to the Bible and treat it more like a crystal ball or, in particular, the Book of Revelation, some kind of mystical code to crack. That isn’t the point of the Bible.
Again, those are silly, more short-lived examples, but Christians throughout church history have come to the Bible to get the fast answers on a lot of subjects rather than discerning difficult matters with the wisdom the whole of the Bible is trying to instill.
People in the 1500s believed you could teach science right out of the Bible, and for them, the Bible clearly taught that the sun revolved around the earth. Then, a guy named Copernicus and his student Galileo came along, and it has been a bit messy between science and faith ever since. However, the point of the Bible is not science; it is an ancient text written before people had science. It does not tell us much about the what or how of nature, but it tells us why and, more importantly, who. Look at the references to Genesis 1 in the New Testament—passages like “In the beginning… was the Word”—and you realize that if you were to ask what the doctrine of creation the Apostles had, they would have answered, “It’s Jesus.”
For centuries, Christians believed that you could build a system of government using the Bible and that, of course, it was a monarchy or possibly a holy empire where the leader had unquestioned divine-ordained authority. But then religious dissenters came around, like Baptists and others, and said maybe a wise way to do government is to have leaders accountable to the vote of the people. Maybe if Jesus is king, we need to be a bit suspicious of giving anyone god-like authority.
Of course, the examples can get a whole lot darker from there.
Some folks came to the Bible thinking they found a timeless way to run their households, and the result was centuries of slavery and subservience of women, completely ignoring the context of a lot of these passages. If you have ever wrestled with those passages, you have to ask yourself: if the point of the Bible is Jesus giving up his power to liberate others from sin and injustice, it just does not make a lot of sense that we could use this passages today to control and limit others. That is not the point of the Bible.
When settlers came to this land centuries ago, they saw themselves as just as the Israelites entering a new promised land; the only problem with that is that this allowed them to treat the indigenous peoples of this land similar to how the Israelites responded to the Canaanites. In the name of saving people’s souls, Christians oppressed indigenous bodies. In the name of getting people to heaven, Christians did the opposite of the ways of the kingdom of heaven.
And if you read the reasons why people did these things, as I have studied, you will surely find passages quoted with pious intentions. That is a scary thing. It is a frightening reminder that the best of us is capable of terrible things when we lose sight of the center of Scripture.
They did these things because they failed to ask themselves that if the Bible is God’s word, how would Jesus, the word of God in the flesh, want these words to be spoken? How did Jesus live these words for us to follow?
Whether it is the smooth manipulative messages of televangelists, the crazy conjectures of conspiracy theorists, the justifications of war and corruption by world leaders, or the bigotry of some bible thumpers, we know that we are terribly prone to using the Bible in ways that don’t point to Jesus.
In fact, Jesus warns about this in his own day. When he speaks with Pharisees in John’s Gospel, in chapter 5, he says this: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
Jesus is talking to some religious people who know their Bibles really well, but they don’t seem all that gracious and loving with it, and since they are refusing to read the scriptures through Jesus, culminating in Jesus, they have failed to grasp its most important message: the message of true life.
Paul does something similar in 2 Cor. 4: “We have renounced the shameful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.”
Notice what Paul is saying there. He is saying that there are folks who, by the very way, are using the scriptures, using the message of the Gospel, using it for personal gain and power and manipulation; Paul says they have falsified God’s word. Sure, they might be able to quote the Bible, but if they aren’t doing it in the way Jesus would say it, then it is not the words of Jesus. Simple as that.
Perhaps you have had a discussion like this with someone. Somehow, the conversation turns to talking about a serious topic, and instead of listening and appreciating how complicated a problem can be, the person just turns and says, “The Bible clearly says,” end of story. Thoughtfulness need not apply.
Sometimes, I have literally heard people say, “I’d love to be more loving or gracious on this matter, but the Bible won’t let me.” Yet, the law of love is the rule Jesus tells us to measure what law applies and which ones do not. Every Gospel, as well as Paul and James, all report this. I have news for you. If the Bible is preventing you from being more loving, you are reading it wrong.
Usually, when I have those discussions, I end up saying to myself, “Why didn’t we just keep talking about the weather or how our local sports team was doing? Why did I have to open my give mouth?”
We, Disciples, Must Be Different
And yet, I so deeply believe that if we want to follow Jesus, if we care about the Bible, we must study it with the care that it deserves. This does not mean we all have to be academics, although that is what I have been called to, and I try to serve in teaching as best I can. For many of us, it simply means we have to take the time to wrestle and contemplate who Jesus is and what his will is with all the wisdom we have available to us.
That might sound like a tall order, but the consequence of failing to live Scripture out in a way that points to Jesus is one tragic display all around us.
I have realized that if you want to justify pride and power, privilege and prejudice, if you want to condone violence and hatred or reinforce apathy and inaction, you can go to the Bible and cobble together proof texts here and there until you have a surprising case for whatever you want.
C. S. Lewis, the great Christian thinker and novelist, wrote this in a letter:
“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.”
Today, in terrible ways, we are seeing the Bible used as a weapon. Make no mistake: hundreds of thousands of people have died this year because people have justified their violence with Bible verses.
And rather than give up on the Bible, on faith, or the church, we who are Jesus’ disciples, his students, must show the world otherwise.
You see these scriptures, these documents that Christians in time collected into 66 books, two testaments, bound and printed. These scriptures are a remarkable tool for the church to stay on the right path and understand who Jesus is. These scriptures are, as Paul says in 2 Timothy, “God-breathed,” animated with the Spirit of life who is seeking to transform every soul into the fullness of life with God.
But never forget that these words, these pages, don’t make sense and, in fact, can do profound damage when we stop reading them for how they point to a God that loves humanity, every human being, with a love that forgives every sin, knows every pain, a love that is willing to die sin’s death and yet heal every wound, a love that refuses to stop until God is all in all.
If we don’t listen for that voice speaking, that love breathing through the pages of the Scriptures, we have missed the point.
And so, Lawrencetown Baptist Church, on this Ascension Sunday, may you know that in Jesus Christ, his cross, and resurrection, the scriptures have been fulfilled.
May your eyes be opened, and may you hear afresh how in Jesus Christ we have forgiveness of sins, the fullness of love and truth and grace.
May we be witnesses of this good news, the Gospel that is for all people: comfort for the discouraged, liberation for the oppressed, hope for this broken world.
May we, by God’s help, have the faith to take up our crosses and the courage to live these words out this week.
Let’s pray,
Almighty and everlasting God
you raised our Lord Jesus Christ
to your right hand on high.
As we rejoice in the culmination of Jesus’ earthly ministry,
Imprint your word upon our hearts and minds so that we more every day be conformed to the image of your Son Jesus Christ.
Teach us to love like him. Teach us to be truthful like him.
Teach God, even though we so often forget.
Ready us for Pentecost and fill us with his Spirit,
that we may go into all the world
and faithfully proclaim the Gospel and welcome your coming kingdom.
We ask through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever. Amen.
The More Lost, The More Loved
Are you the kind of person who loses their car keys all the time? Full confession: I am. My wife is giving me that look like, “Oh yes, he is, and it drives me nuts.”
“Honey, where are the car keys?” She has asked.
To which I respond, “Well, they are either on the key hook, or on my dresser, or on my desk, or in my coat pocket, or in my pants pocket from the previous day. It’s a simple list of options, Meagan.” To which she looks at me like that.
It is amazing how important a set of keys can be at the right moment. The other day, I was doing work on our vehicle, and I went into the house. I was in there for a bit, and I realized I had to go somewhere. Where are my keys? Where did I leave them? When I came back out, thinking I might have left them in the vehicle, there they were. I could see them through the glass, but—and you know where I am going with this—the door—I realized out of habit, I locked the door and closed it.
This was a holiday, and so I figured CAA would either not be around or charge an arm and a leg to come or take forever to come. So, I tried to get in the car with a coat hanger and something I was using to wedge the door forward a bit. I came so close to getting the hook on the door handle to open it. So close. I have never wanted to get those keys so bad in my life.
In the end we called CAA. They came pretty quickly. They had a special tool that got the door open in about three seconds.
Anyways, you don’t realize just how important something is until it is lost.
So, as I said last week, Pastor Chris slotted me in for two weeks during his vacation way back when. It was when he was going through his series on the parable of the Prodigal Son, and my thought was to go into some of the parables, particularly the two that occur before the Prodigal Son in Luke chapter 15: the Parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. These are two parables that I keep coming back to, reflecting on. They go like this:
15 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3 So he told them this parable: 4 “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 8 “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10 Just so I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Gospel of Luke 15:1-10, NRSV
I have been enjoying reading a collection of sermons on the parables as I reflect on these passages. It is a book by Howard Thurman. Thurman was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and his books have been as beautiful as they are challenging for my faith. In his sermon on these parables, he suggests something profound: Sometimes, we take the parables as stories merely about how to get saved, which is an important topic, of course. But let me suggest to you that if you read these parables asking, “What do I do?” You have fundamentally misunderstood it. Thurman pointed out to me that these parables are whole accounts of God’s character in miniature. They are here to tell us what God is like and what God does.
So, the parable asks this question: What is God like? In these parables, Jesus gives us two surprising metaphors that answer this question.
What is God like? God is like a Shepherd
The first might seem obvious or old hat to some of us who have been around the church for a while, but it is surprising because it is loaded with implications. If you look at certain passages in the Old Testament, God is the shepherd of Israel.
But notice something: Jesus is scolded by religious teachers because he is the one eating with the riff-raff of the town. Sinners and tax collectors are coming to him, finding the grace they have never experienced, and religious folk are indignant. To this, Jesus says that God is like a shepherd who goes out and rescues a lost sheep and that heaven rejoices each time one lost sheep is brought home. Who is this heavenly shepherd in this parable, then? Its Jesus. Jesus just gave us a clue about who he is here. Jesus is God Immanuel, God with us.
But notice something further: What is God like if God is like Jesus? Is God the kind of God that loves only his flock? Does God only love the ones that stay in the flock, who are smart enough and competent enough and loyal enough to keep themselves out of trouble? Is that what God is like? Is that what Jesus is like? Hold that thought for a moment.
What is God like? God is like a Poor Woman
The second metaphor is even more surprising. God is a woman who has lost a coin.
I know what you must be thinking: “You mean God isn’t an old white guy with a long white beard up in heaven?” Believe it or not, while Jesus certainly uses the analogy that God is like a Father for very important reasons, there are other passages that say God is like a mother who comforts her children, or God is Lady Wisdom who guides Israel, or God is a mother bird protecting her young. Look them up. They are worth a Google. The Bible speaks about God in a number of ways to communicate God’s love, and here, Jesus uses the analogy that God is like a woman searching for a coin.
Now, who is this woman? We are given some clues: She has ten coins. A silver coin was a day’s wage. Angela suggested last week that ten silver coins could have been her dowry (the money her father set aside to pay for a wedding); sometimes, the ten coins were laced together onto a headdress for unmarried women to wear. Either that or it could be her life savings. Whatever the case, it suggests she is very poor. If it is her dowry, in a culture where women had very little, marriage was the means of provision and stability. This coin was her future. Or, if it was her life savings, as you can imagine, having only ten days’ worth of savings is not much, and losing even a little would cause panic and desperation. This could be money for her next meal.
It also says she lives in a home that apparently does not have windows (she needs to light a lamp in order to see). In other words, her home is not large and not that nice. This is a person that lives on the brink of destitution.
Desperate and destitute—let’s just let this sink in for a second: God is like a poor, desperate peasant woman looking for the money that she desperately needs to sustain her well-being. If you did not know it was Jesus telling this parable, you might feel like this is an irreverent idea. God is like a woman? God is like a poor woman? God needs the lost desperately?
It begs the question: Do we matter to God? Do the lost matter to God? If so, how much? Is God the kind of God that is unaffected by whether we are saved or not? Or is God like a poor woman desperately trying to find her lost coin?
I was raised with a certain belief about God that said God is the kind of God that chooses some to be saved, some to be God’s elect, and the others, God in his sovereignty, chooses to leave them in the judgment of their sin that they rightly deserve. Perhaps you were raised with that belief, or perhaps you are looking at me thinking, “What! There are Christians that believe that?” Yes, a lot of them, actually (particularly in the United States for some reason), and they find lots of interesting verses in the Bible to support this idea. But then again, you can cobble together a verse here or there in the Bible to justify almost anything.
Now, if you were raised with an idea like that, you probably were also taught that this was a very good and biblical idea because no one deserves to be saved (which is true), but God, in his grace, has chosen certain ones to be saved, and thank goodness, you are one of them.
Many Christians get by immensely comforted by this notion, but to me, as a young man, it caused profound distress. How could God love some with a saving love and not others? How could God love anything with a less-than-perfect and powerful love?
This became particularly disturbing when a person started coming to the church I attended with my family. He came to faith from a completely non-religious background. I remember him being so passionate about God, and, of course, the church rejoiced. He was the evidence that we were reaching the lost. In fact, I remember, right around that time, a sermon on this very parable, praising how this church was seeing the lost sheep come home.
However, as I learned, this young man had a lot of difficult stuff in his life, and one Sunday, I noticed he just stopped coming to church. When contacted, the guy just said he wasn’t interested in all this religious stuff anymore. It wasn’t helping him with whatever he was going through (which, to this day, I don’t know what that was).
This created a dilemma for me because I was raised with the notion that God chooses some for salvation, and for those he does choose, we would say the phrase, “once saved, always saved.” And so, I had to ask my pastor: Is this person still saved? And if so, how could he just walk away from his faith like that? My pastor thought about this and said, with a bit of ire in his voice, “Obviously, he just wasn’t saved to begin with then.” He thought this was a satisfactory answer to my question.
I did not think so. You see, if a person that at one point confesses Jesus is passionate for him as this person clearly was, but then gives up their faith—if this person was never saved, to begin with, how can anyone really know whether they are saved? If eternal security works like that, how can anyone feel, well, secure? I didn’t.
I can tell you that many times in my younger years, I worried whether or not I was saved. Because if God is the kind of God that has only chosen some people to be saved and others not, and there is a whole bunch that think they are saved but actually aren’t, I needed to know for certain that I am one of those chosen, and the only way I could know, I reasoned, is that I believe the right things, I do the right things, or I feel close to God, all of which confirm in some way that God chose me.
The problem with that is that if we believe we know God chose us for salvation because we have the right doctrine, anytime we question our beliefs, we end up feeling uncertain about our salvation. Or if we believe we are saved because we have done something right or keep doing what is right, then anytime we fail, we can feel our salvation is in jeopardy. Or if we think we are saved because of how we feel, there will be times of grief, dryness or loneliness that might make us feel God is far away. Now, all of these things have their place in the Christian life—beliefs, actions, and feelings (a deeper relationship with God involves believing what is true, doing what is right, and being sincere, sensing God’s presence)—but anytime they are used as the sole indicator for whether God loves us, they get distorted. They get used to something they were not meant for. I talked a bit last week about how we can do that.
The reality is the only way we know whether we are saved is not in anything we are or do or have. It simply comes down to this question: Who is God when we realize we are lost?
What is God like? That is what these parables tell us.
God is the God who loves the lost.
God is the God who sees the lost as essential to God’s self.
God is desperate for us, frantic for us, persistent for us.
God is the God who seeks out and finds the lost.
God is the kind of God that brings the lost home when we don’t know how to get home.
God is the kind of God whose deepest joy is seeing the lost realize they are found.
Why? Why is God like that? The only answer possible at the end of the day is simply that is who God is.
What does God Do? God Finds the Lost
Now, there is another question here: What does God do?
God is like a shepherd that goes out and finds and brings home lost sheep. God is like a poor woman who lights a lamp and searches till her coin is found. God is the active agent here. This once again confronts a distortion we so often have in our faith about God.
Sometimes, I think we conceive of God as the person on the other end of a help phone line, which is to say, is not super helpful usually.
My wife and I tried to apply for a grant to get our house off of oil and onto heat pumps. There is an initiative by the government to help homes become more energy efficient that we learned about and decided to go for. I don’t know if you noticed, but the price of oil has increased a wee bit lately.
Now, what seems like a simple thing—install heat pumps and get a grant—is not so simple. You have to have an inspection on the heat usage of the home. You have to send in that report. You have to use government-certified products and certain government-certified companies to install the heat pumps. They have to do a report to the government; you have to submit papers; you have to have another heat usage inspection; you need to submit papers from the bank, etc.
At some point, we had to call the government helpline. I am sure you all know how delightful this can be. You call, and you get that automated voice that gives you a list of options, which really none of them fits what you want, so you kind of guess. It keeps giving you prompts to enter information on the number pad, but in the back of your head, you keep saying, “Please, I just want to talk to a human.” Finally, the automated secretary sends you to a representative.
Somehow, if the stars align, if you are able to provide every piece of meticulous paperwork, you are put on hold listening to that terrible elevator music for what seems like an eternity, and then finally, the representative presses the magic button they must have on their desk to do what you were hoping they would do.
Like I said, I think some people think God is like that. If you come to God, and you have your proverbial paperwork together, then God is helpful.
I knew someone very dear to me who loved to recite the folk saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Have you ever heard that? If that is the case (and there is truth to that saying, don’t get me wrong), what about those who can’t help themselves? What about those who are beyond help?
Notice what these parables don’t say. It doesn’t say the shepherd went out to get his lost sheep, searched for a bit, it got dark, and so the shepherd called it a night and cut his losses. It doesn’t say that.
It doesn’t say the shepherd found the sheep, but the sheep was caught in a thicket so dense the shepherd just couldn’t get the sheep out. It does not say that.
It doesn’t say the woman searched but, in the end, gave up. It doesn’t say that.
It doesn’t say she looked high and low, but realized 9 out of 10 coins is still pretty good. It just does not say that.
It says God goes out actively and persistently, and God finds the lost.
Sadly, I think we often think about God like sin does stop; it stops God from finding he lost. Yet, when we look at Jesus, who bore all sin at the cross and rose from the grave to new life, we see that God has overcome sin, all sin. The very power of death itself does not stop God’s grace.
I once knew a man named Alexander, who started attending the church I pastored. He started attending the church because of the community garden we organized, which was kind of a surprise to me because the community garden was a project we did just as a service to the community. I did not expect folks to start attending the church over it. But he liked what the church was about and started coming.
He shared his story with me. Alexander was an older man, but when he was a boy growing up, he told me that at a Catholic school, a priest tried to sexually assault him. Thankfully, he kicked the man off of him and ran away, but he said from that day on, he hated God, and he hated all things having to do with religion, and his life became a big mess for years.
Years later, he had an accident. He was in a coma, and he said he woke up from that coma, and he described to me that it was like God turned his heart back on. He woke up with a powerful sense that God loved him, and he did not have hate in his heart anymore about the things that had happened to him.
Yes, God can do that. God can turn back years of hurt and hate. God is the God that finds the lost. God can break through the walls of rebellion and resentment. Why? Because that is what God does.
I could tell other stories like that, but these experiences have impressed upon me that I simply do not believe there is anything that can ultimately prevent God’s grace from finding those that are lost. Nothing limits God’s grace.
This is where things get complicated: God wants a daily relationship with us, where we live God’s grace, showing it to others. We know that our choices matter and that God’s love desires us to choose him. Yet, I can only surmise that any choice that rejects God’s love and life, embracing darkness and destruction, is no real choice at all. It is a delusion. It is enslavement.
And when we make bad choices, when we get ourselves lost, is God done with us? Is there ever a point where God says, “Okay, fine, you and I are through”? Is that what God does?
One time, I was asked to go visit an older lady, one of those beloved saints of the church, who lived in a retirement home. Her husband had passed away a few years earlier, but recently, her son passed away, and someone suggested to me that I should go visit. So, I went, and I sat down with her at her apartment.
She shared with me that she spoke with her son just before he died in hospital. She pleaded with him about whether he believed in Jesus anymore, and his answer was, “I just don’t believe in religion anymore.” That was the last response she had on the matter before he died. When she told that to one of her Christian friends, that friend gave a blunt response: “Well, then it is obvious where he is.”
This broke her. She told me that she had prayed for her son every day for decades, trusting that God hears and answers prayer, that God is mighty to save, and that God’s will is to save sinners. How could this happen? How could God not answer her prayers for her son? How could God not change his heart?
At the thought of it, she began to weep and wail with a bitterness I could not even begin to describe to you. I did not know a human being could cry like that. I remember getting in my car after and shaking; it was so disturbing.
In the moment, sitting with her, fighting back tears myself, all I could manage to choke out of me was to say that I didn’t know where her son was, but I do trust that God is merciful.
I have thought about those moments many times since that day. It makes you ask what do I fundamentally trust about God?
I trust in the God who finds and saves the lost; I cannot believe otherwise.
I can’t believe in a God that lets our sin win.
I can’t believe in a God whose grace loses to human ignorance.
I can’t believe in a God that is obstructed by death.
I believe in a God that conquers death.
I believe in a God that loves so much, so ardently, so fiercely that God willing dies the death we deserve in order to give us his life.
I believe in a God that does not give up on us.
God is the kind of God that finds and saves the lost.
While there are dire warnings in Scripture about rejecting God and we can never presume a future that is only up to God, nevertheless, the whole sweep of Scripture impresses on us that God’s mercy simply cannot be limited, and when humanity shows God our very worse, and God even says he is in his right to punish, God surprises us with just how much greater his mercy is.
It does not make sense, but that is who God is, and that is what God does.
I think that is what these parables are trying to tell us. One writer suggests that when we look at the parables, there is always something that does not make sense about them. For instance, why does the shepherd leave the ninety-nine —in the “wilderness,” it says, by the way—to go look for that one sheep? No smart shepherd would risk that. It is like the shepherd loves the lost sheep too much. And don’t you think it is a bit odd for a woman in severe poverty to throw a party just because she found a coin—remember that her ten coins were very likely the dowry that would pay for a wedding celebration, and yet she throws a celebration because she found one of the coins. That does not seem particularly frugal. That does not seem to make a lot of sense, does it? It almost seems gratuitous, even wasteful, so much so that it makes certain religious folk upset.
But it seems that Jesus weaves these details in to try to drive home the truth about God that does not conform to our reasoning. We so often assume that because we are limited beings, God’s grace has limits too.
For us, when we or others get in trouble, we eventually hit that point that says, “We’re done. It’s over.” And yet, God is the shepherd that goes out and finds the lost sheep, leaving the 99. God is that poor woman who so desperately needs her lost coin that she lights a lamp, tracks it down and finds it.
These parables tell us the other-worldly truth that the more lost we are, the more loved we are. The more hopeless we feel, in reality, the more God is pursuing us with a love more powerful than death itself.
This he invites us to trust now, to step into and live now, to be changed and healed by it now and to bring this hope to others right now.
Because it also says that the greatest joy in heaven is seeing the lost get found.
That is who God is and what he does. Let’s pray.
Loving and gracious God, you are the shepherd who seeks, the poor woman who searches; you are the one who finds the lost.
God rebuke in us any pretension that leads us to believe we earned your grace.
You are the God that saves sinners.
So, God, we pray that you would save all sinners just like us.
Reassure us that no one is out of your reach. Comfort us that we are all in your grasp.
God, we long for all people to know you, to know your love.
And so, teach us how to be witnesses of your good news so that we can see the joy of salvation in others and more deeply in ourselves as well.
Strengthen us with your Spirit for this good work.
Amen.
Spencer Boersma 