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Ephesians 1:15-23

Many of you may have memories of years past when on Ascension Sunday children would come from their Sunday School class, of which there were myriads, with a white Styrofoam cup turned upside down with cotton balls glued all over it.  There would be a paper cut-out of Jesus dangling from a string out the bottom of it.  When you pulled up on the string, Jesus would disappear into the cup as if to ascend into heaven amidst clouds of glory.  So cool.  The whole scenario just begs that be a spaceship involved.

Ascension Sunday.  Ascension is such a big word.  I wonder what it would be like to be a child and ponder this thing of Jesus ascending into heaven.  I think they would have a lot less trouble dealing with it than adults do.  We adults, we want scientific proof and stuff like that and tend to dismiss as preposterous a bodily resurrected from the dead human being ascending bodily to somewhere else.  But hey, try this on for size.  We like to imagine ourselves as living in a four-dimensional reality.  We can measure length, height, depth, and time, but that’s not it.  Since the discovery of the subatomic world, it’s pretty much an established fact that there are at least 11 dimensions to our universe or our four dimensions don’t add up.  There are seven more dimensions of reality that we can’t conceive of, but they are there.  If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.  Here's another one about things we can't see.  The electrons in the atoms we each are made of are at this very moment jumping in and out of existence.  “Where do they come from and do they go, nobody knows but Cotton-eyed Joe”.  If our electrons are popping in and out of our reality and presumably into another, how are we able even to physically exist.

When I consider reality at the sub-atomic level, well, Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead and bodily ascended to someplace called heaven does not seem all that impossible.  Rather, it is as possible and probable as the mathematical singularity we call the Black Hole which we now have pictures of to prove their existence.  Over a hundred years ago, black holes were only theoretical possibilities swirling around in Albert Einstein's nearly god-like brain and now we have pictures of them...and...it's theoretically possible that there are wee-teenie black holes just about everywhere blipping in and out of existence...like the one that just happened in my brain!

But anyway, I think children have simpler thoughts and questions about Jesus' Ascension that we would feel more comfortable pondering.  I can think of at least three obvious questions that deserve some time: Where did he go?  Does he still have a body?  And, what’s he doing there wherever it was he went?  I put on our child-like minds for a bit and ponder these.

To answer the first question Ephesians tells us that God has “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).”  He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of being God the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does the Father’s wishes.   To a child’s mind, that’s an informative enough answer and they would be ready to move on to question number two.  But some older children may want to ask where is and what is heaven or the heavenly places as Paul calls them.  

Well, briefly, I don't like to think of heaven as being up and far away.  Rather, I think of it as overlapping our reality and as being at the center of everything and hidden behind everything.  If you could somehow open a hole in reality right in front of you and stick your head in and look around, you would be looking into heaven.  And like the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation, you would see God’s throne and on the throne would be a super fantabulous display of lights of every colour because we can’t see what God the Father looks like.  “Tis only the splendour of light hideth Thee”.  Seated to the right of God would be the best friend and brother you will ever have, Jesus.  You would see angels and choirs of angels and lots and lots of people from all times and all places and some of them you would know and they would all be singing, worshipping and praying, and you would have a feeling of being so loved and so special wash over you  - that’s the Holy Spirit - and you would want to just step right on through except it’s not your time.  When its your time, then you’ll go.

Question number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly place, then what’s his body like?  Is he a ghost? is another way of putting it.  The answer is that he still has a fully human body, resurrected all be it, and he has some scars.  Now try this on for size; Jesus’s ascension back into heaven is every bit as important as Christmas.  

At Christmas, we celebrate that God the Son became a human being just like us in every way.   We call that the Incarnation or the infleshment of God.  God the Son came from the heavenly places here to earth and became a human person with a real body just like ours.  He thinks and feels just like we do.  With the Ascension, the reverse happens.  Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary took humanity, human flesh, back through into heaven.  As a result, God the Father from sends the Holy Spirit to come and live in us to glue us to Jesus.  It’s like life-glue.  There’s Elmer’s glue and Gorilla glue.  So also, there’s life-glue, the Holy Spirit, who glues us to Jesus so that we share in Jesus' new, resurrected life, and slowly we become more like him until when our time comes, because of that life-glue we go straight on to be with Jesus and we get resurrected.  But also and until then, while we are on this side of things we are God’s beloved children just like Jesus is because we are life-glued to Jesus with the Holy Spirit.  And as I said, this life-glue makes us to become more living, more loving like Jesus and helps us to do here on earth what Jesus is doing there in heaven.

And that takes us to our third question: if we participate in Jesus’s life because we are life-glued to him and doing what he is doing, then what is he doing?  For part of the answer to this question we have to go to the Book of Hebrews where we find that Jesus is our great High Priest who while in continual worship of the Father prays like all get out for each of us.  He says, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18) protect them, provide for them, let them know you love them just as much as you love me.”  He constantly prays for us and our needs before the Father who in his love for his Son and his children is more than willing to listen (Heb. 4:14-5:10).  This also is why it’s important for us to think of heaven as being behind everything rather than way far away, up there somewhere.  If God is right here behind everything, he is with us and hears our prayers real good.

In and with Jesus we pray all the time for the needs of the world as Jesus does.  As Jesus is always praying for us so also we should to strive to pray without ceasing.  I like to try to pray The Lord's Prayer as often as I can think to.  We pray in and with Jesus because we are life-glued to him, but sometimes we don't know what to pray and sometimes we are hurting so bad we can't pray.  Guess what?  When we don’t know what to pray, Romans 8:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit is still praying in us always for what we need.  It should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of God even God is praying for us.  Sit on that one for a while.

The other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy Spirit.  We’ve talked about this already.  This life-glue is the power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side and that the same power is at work in us by the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit not only life-glues us to Jesus so that we share in the love that Jesus and the God the Father have for each other but the Holy Spirit also life-glues us to each other so that we can love each other and other people and even those we might call enemies like God loves us, like family.

As I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit.  Jesus is always praying for us so we should be always praying.  Another thing Jesus is doing is worshipping.  In Jesus, life-glued to him and to each other we find our true worship, which is rooted in God the Son’s love of God the Father coupled with thankfulness and praise of the Father for what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us into God’s very being through the Holy Spirit.  We don’t just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn how to be better Christians.  We attend worship to worship the Father through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.  In and with Jesus, we worship, we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own and pours his love on us.  

So, we worship and we pray.  One other thing, as the Father sent the Son into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son sends us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission.  He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the suffering Servant who came to restore us to fellowship with God in such a way as to make us to participate in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the life-glue of the Holy Spirit living in us.  This means we are to let ourselves be moulded by that love into a fellowship that proclaims and invites all people.  Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit into us we are life-glued to God in him, we worship in him, we pray in him, and in him we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving communion of the Triune God of grace.  That’s what Jesus is doing and so that’s what we do and so there you have it. Amen.

 

Believing in Jesus

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John 20:19-29

What do we mean when we say “I believe in Jesus”?  First, what does it sound like to other people?  I know for a large segment of the population, when they hear somebody say “I believe in Jesus” they will think you are out of touch with Modernity and science and that you also believe the earth is flat.  They also don’t appreciate when Christians go around saying you can’t go to heaven when you die unless you believe in Jesus.  The coercive nature of doing that is counterproductive.  They will also expect that you’re going to play moral policeman and go judgemental on them.  People think those things because a large portion of the people in the last couple of centuries who have said, “I believe in Jesus”, have been just like that – anti-scientific, anti-questioning, coercive, and power hungry – rather than behaving as if they actually know and abide in Jesus.

Moreover, belief or faith in this age of science and psychology is a rough row to hoe.  Belief in something or someone you can’t see is thought to be ridiculous, delusional even.  If it can’t be seen, touched, measured, or proven by math, then it’s not real and your belief therefore is really just your fantasy or delusion.  But then there’s always that politically correct tag on, “if that’s what helps you keep your world together, then who am I to judge.”  Your truth is your truth and mine is mine. 

Oddly, looking here at John’s Gospel, this relationship between belief and having evidence to prove it seems to be what’s behind Jesus’ conversation with Thomas.  Thomas believed in Jesus.  He followed Jesus around and participated in Jesus’ ministry.  His belief in Jesus as the Messiah and what Jesus was about in initiating the Kingdom of God or in John’s Gospel “Eternal life” was likely shattered by Jesus’ death.  But then the others tell him that Jesus has been raised from the dead.  Being the type who needs evidence, Thomas is not going to believe it, until he sees it, until he can touch the wounds that killed Jesus in a Jesus who now lives.  

Thomas’ response is reflective of what Greeks and Romans thought to be true about this world.  They believed that bodily resurrection is impossible.  People don’t rise from the dead.  Indeed, why would you want to?  Why would you want a second go at this sick, twisted world?  They believed that physical matter, especially bodies, is bad, evil, and gross.  Things change, rot, and stink and hurt.  Spirit and spiritual, as are the gods, is the true good.  Becoming an immortal spirit should have been Jesus’ destiny to the Greeks.  If Jesus was God or the Son of God, he certainly would have gone to the spiritual realm after death, not come back to the physical. 

Informed by that Greek sort of mindset, Thomas exclaims, “I won’t believe God raised Jesus from the dead unless I see the evidence, i.e. touch the wounds on the physical body of the crucified yet now living Jesus.”  Jesus gave him the proof in what is probably the most humorous moment in John’s Gospel.  “Put your hand here in my side, Tom.  You’ll know I’m for real when you touch my guts.”  

In response to Thomas’ Greekness, Jesus’ response to him is quite Hebrew.  The Jews believed God created the world and that it was very good.  It’s just diseased by sin, a disease which culminates in death.  If Jesus is bodily raised from the dead, the disease is cured, sin forgiven, and death defeated.  Moreover, if it was God who raised Jesus from the dead, then Jesus is the Truth because God has validated him.  What God was doing in, through, and as Jesus is as sure and as real as the rocks that are the very foundation of the very good earth, as sure and as real as life itself and more powerful than death even.  

So, to believe in Jesus the Resurrected One, is to say I believe he is the heart and root of Creation and of life.  Participating in his ministry is what everything is all about, what life is all about.  To not participate in Jesus’ ministry, to not be his disciple, is to perish.  Jesus and his ministry are the root of purpose in God’s very good creation.  John started his Gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”  That’s the way he started it and pretty much how he ended it.  Jesus is the root of reality, the source of life around whom we must orient our lives if we want to have true life.  Believing in Jesus is orienting your life around him and his life.

Well, now that you’re all thoroughly philosophized and looking like a deer in the headlights, let me tell you something more about what it is to believe.  In New Testament Greek, the word we translate as believe, “pisteuw” and the noun form, “pistis”, belief, is also the same word we translate as faith and being faithful.  It is a complicated word family because we really don’t have a good word in English to translate the concept the word family carried in the first century.  Being loyal is probably the most accurate way to translate it.  Believing in Jesus is being loyal to Jesus.

A few years ago, I spent a chunk of money on a thick book that I actually read that is probably the most comprehensive analysis of the “pist-” word family.  Something I find really cool, but realize you might not and that’s okay, is that pretty much every book, letter, engraving, sales receipt, and scribbling of a note that is in the Greek language from the several centuries before and after Jesus are now typed into a computer database word by word.  You can do a word search that’s pretty incredible with it.  You can type in the word “cup” and give it a couple days and it will provide you with a report of pretty much every known use of the word “cup” in the Greek world way back then.  The author of this book did that with the faith word in Greek and found some interesting stuff.  

One thing I found really interesting is that this word that we associate most readily with faith in God, with a religious religious context, was actually quite secular in its use.  Our dear word for faith, for belief, is the word they used to describe the relationship between crime lords and their thugs.  The very loyal thug in essence believed in their crime lord much the same way as Christians believed in Jesus.  It was a relationship rooted in owed loyalty and reward.  The crime lord gained the thug’s loyalty usually by saving their lives, and in an odd sort of way he included them in his family, he continued to provide for them and their families, and did them favours in response to their acts of loyalty.  Betrayal of this benevolence was punishable by death or something worse.  I bet you have never thought of God the Father as being God the Godfather?  Heh. Heh.

Back then a Christian saying “I believe in Jesus” meant more or less the same thing as a thug saying “I believe in Corrupticus Maximus”, his crime boss.  Believing, having faith, meant way more than simply believing in the existence of something you can’t see or touch.  Believing means being loyal with the totality of your life.  The thug wouldn’t have said “I believe in Corrupticus Maximus even though I can’t see or touch him”.  He would have said, “I am loyal to Corrupticus Maximus even unto death.”

But in all seriousness, God acts in our lives much like a crime lord would have to gain our loyalty but truly for our good.  God answers prayers.  God heals.  God is there with a still, small voice when we need to know what to do.  God acts to deliver us in the real muck of our broken lives.  Yet there’s more.  In, through, and as Jesus and by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit God has done something infinitely more.  We know and abide in Jesus.  We have a real and living connection with him.  We know ourselves to be the beloved children of the Father just as Jesus knows himself to be.  A crime Lord didn’t love his thugs.  Yet, God loves us as his own beloved children and we know it and feel it because of God’s faithfulness to us and because of the love we find in the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and in the way we love each other.  In Christ, God is way more loyal to us than we can ever be to him.  God doesn’t hold it over our heads that we owe him our lives and threaten us with death if we don’t do what he wants.  Rather, God works graciously in our lives until we have the love for him that Jesus has so that we live to please God simply because we love him and those he calls us to love and serve.  

To believe in Jesus is to be loyal to him with our lives because we know and love him because he knows and loves us so much more than we could ever love him.  Even when we prove ourselves disloyal to him, he doesn’t “get us” like a crime lord would.  Instead, he continues to be loyal to us and works to heal us of what caused the disloyalty.  Quite often that can be a painful thing to grow through but it’s always for our healing and for drawing us closer to himself so that we know and love him more.  

In closing, we truly are blessed because we don’t see him.  We love him and are loyal to him because of his saving and gracious work and presence in our lives and in our very selves.  He lives in us!  By gift of the Holy Spirit, he is in us working to reveal who he is to us.  We get to know him through and through and that is more than just touching some scars for proof of his existence.  Amen.

 

Abiding in Jesus

 John 15:1-17

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You folks know I play the fiddle and you know the type of fiddling I do ain’t from around here.  It’s that Hillbilly stuff called Old Time Mountain Music.  The Traditional music particularly of Eastern and Central West Virginia is my first love.  I got into it when I lived down there 20 some years ago.  I learned it because I wanted to learn the people and in a place like that – a land that time forgot – learning the uniqueness of the music is a broad avenue into the heart of the people.  When you start playing down there, people will start talking, sharing stories.  They’ll dance.  They’ll laugh.  Get a little weepy and not even know why.  That type of music is a big part of what “home” is in West Virginia; of what it is to “abide” in West Virginia. 

You know, you can live somewhere and not really abide there; not really feel at home, not really belong.  When I moved to Canada, I didn’t realize how musically lonely it was going to be for me.  There was next to no one who played what I play.  At my first Canadian church down in Caledon, we hosted a fiddle jam once a month.  And there were some good fiddlers who played the music that’s “home” to people in southern Ontario.  I affectionately call it “Messered up” because it’s heavily influenced by that beloved and iconic Canadian fiddler, Don Messer who had a Canadian-wide presence on radio and TV from 1940-60’s.  I tried to get into it, but it didn’t become my home like West Virginia music is.  

Fiddle jams can be quite lonely for me.  When I play, it’s a novelty and it is rare to find accompanists that get that the rhythm is different for what I play from it is in Canadian fiddling and East Coast Fiddling.  I eventually found a couple of people I could play with and we did some playing around.  It was nice.  Even in the Great White North I could still have a sense of still abiding in West Virginia.    

When I moved up here to Owen Sound, even that little bit of home got left behind, but I knew how to carry on.  I knew how to “abide”.  West Virginia Mountain Music continued to be all I listened to.  I fiddled at least once a day.  I would routinely go on a binge of learning new songs.  I kept inspired.  I got myself on a regular schedule with some of the nursing homes to play for the residents monthly.  I tried some of the fiddle jams and made a few friends.  I did my best to continue to “abide” in West Virginia and to share my musical home with the locals up here.  I found it got people to start talking, sharing stories.  Some would dance and laugh and remember how there used to be fiddle music and dancing every weekend up here.  

But then, COVID hit.  With those lockdowns people couldn’t get together.  I couldn’t play in the nursing homes.  Weeks would go by that I didn’t even touch the fiddle or even care to.  I stopped listening to the music.  Today, I haven’t really gotten it back.  I do Country Lane in Chatsworth every now and then, but I just ain’t got it anymore.  To be honest, there’s too much not so happy stuff going on with me and I need to really go home and abide, but I can’t and so abiding in my musical home kind of makes me sadder. I find myself just wanting to abide with God the Father Son and Holy Spirit these days and that’s just where I’m at.  How about you folks? 

Anyway, I broached that subject of my “abiding” in my musical home of West Virginia music in order to try to talk about what it is to “abide” in Jesus.  In John’s Gospel three key words John has for our relationship to Jesus “knowing” him (that was last week) and abiding in him.  Next week, we’ll look at believing in him.  

So, what is it to abide in a person?  Well, obviously that’s a relational kind of thing.  Spouses abide together in each other.  That two becoming one flesh thing we find in Genesis.  Add children to the mix and there’s abiding together in and as a family.  The sense of abiding can at times be quite deep and joyfully content and other times it’s distant and even painful, but it’s our home and that’s where we abide.  Good friendships are also places in which we abide.  Abiding, for good or for bad, requires relationship.

Applying that to our relationship with Jesus, the question arises how do we abide with a person who’s not physically present the way our family and friends are?  Well, as a starter, Jesus calls us his friends.  This means the obvious – Jesus is our friend, a faithful friend whom we find him among his friends.  His presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit, can be felt among his friends, among us.  

Some of the Biblical ways of describing this Presence is as light that can’t be seen, a weightiness but there’s nothing there.  It’s “good” to be in it.  It moves us.  It lifts our burdens.  It enlightens.  It heals.  It helps us to hear the truth about ourselves and gives us the strength to accept it.  It speaks to us.  Though I was raised in the church, so to speak, it wasn’t until I was about nineteen that I felt the need to get to know Jesus.  It was a painful time in my life then, transitioning into adulthood while limping from a painful childhood.  A girlfriend took me to her church, a hand-waiving-praising-God Nazarene congregation that met in a school cafeteria.  They were 30-40 people strong.  As soon as I stepped in the door I felt the Presence.  And I kept going back Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night because I wanted to know Jesus and abide in his Presence.

The personal devotional life is a profoundly appropriate response to Jesus abiding in and with us.  We abide with him here in his home and we want to take him home and abide with him in our homes.  In fact, it enriches our fellowship together when we each practice the daily reading of and meditating upon Scripture, when we take the time to sit and listen for him, when we take time to pray at home.  

Jesus said, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.”  To be a gathering of people in his name is to say that for all of us each he has left an abiding mark in us, the Holy Spirit, a sense of his presence, and a sense of his being active in our lives, a sense of his having been faithful in love towards us.  What I mean is that Jesus, by the presence of the Holy Spirit, has touched us and proved himself faithful throughout our lives and especially when we have walked through our darkest places, our most painful times.  

When those who are his friends get together it is different than a party at somebody’s house or going to a hockey game.  It’s different because he is in and among us and his Presence can be felt.  This abiding mark of his presence in us becomes outwardly visible as we love and are faithful to each other and to others outside our fellowship in the way that he has been to us.  Jesus gave one commandment to us, his friends, that we love one another as he has loved us.  That means we love unconditionally and sacrificially.  

Love for one another is what I appreciate most about small churches.  The abiding in Christ is really evident.  The love, the loyalty to one another is so profoundly deep and rich.  Larger churches have to work real hard to foster what happens naturally in smaller congregations as we simply go about being in Christ.  Our love and commitment to him is mirrored in our love and commitment to one another.

Well, I think this profoundly deep fellowship that we have by abiding in Jesus is what he means when he says “I am the true vine.”  In the Greek it’s worded, “I am the vine, the real (true) vine.”  By this he means if we want real life, true life, then abiding in him is what we must do both as individuals and as congregations.  Fostering our personal devotional lives and bringing that richness of his Presence that we find in abiding in him at home with us here to where we are gathered together in his name as friends, his friends, makes our fellowship a place on earth where the true vine is growing.  The true vine, the real vine is growing here with real, true life – life filled with his Presence, life he gives, life in which he leads, life with purpose.

When I was nineteen, my first experience of having a sense of God speaking to me through a passage of Scripture happened one day as I was reading chapter 15 of John’s Gospel.  It was verse 16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit.”  It was that moment, that moment for the very first time in my life that I felt like I mattered.  Jesus chose me.  Jesus chose me to come to him and live in the real, true life.  For 39 years he has proved himself my faithful friend for no other reason than he just loves me.  Come and abide in him.  Amen. 

  

 

Knowing Jesus

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John 10:11-18

What is it to know another person?  Can we really know someone?  In all honesty, we can’t even know ourselves all that well.  I mean, how many times in our lives do we surprise ourselves by doing or saying things we never thought we would do or say.  To give you an example, when I was a child, I always thought of myself as not the bullying type.  But then one day, I was maybe in the 5^th grade. I found myself with one of my best friends chasing another one of my best friends with sticks in hand aiming to beat the kid because we thought it would be fun.  I never thought I was the type to do that but apparently, I have it in me.  As adults, how many times have we done things we felt questionable or flat out wrong just to position ourselves better.  But then there are those times when the feathers hit the fan and like heroes we rise to the occasion and shock ourselves and everybody around us with courage and excellence that we didn’t know we had in us.  Really, we truly don’t know ourselves.  

So, if we cannot really know ourselves then how can we think we could ever really know another person?  What is it to know another person anyway? I would say part of knowing someone else is learning their patterns so that we can somewhat predict their actions, reactions, and maybe their feelings.  Moreover, knowing another involves learning their personal boundaries; what we can and cannot do around them.  To get to know another involves communication; especially listening as they tell us what is going on inside of them but even then, all we can do is imagine what it must be like to be them.  We simply can never ever know what is really going on inside another person; what it’s like to be them.  

Martin Buber, a much-respected Jewish Bible scholar and philosopher summed up very well what it is we know when we think we know someone.  He said we know only the change that another person has brought about in us.  If someone makes me angry, all I can say about them is that what they have done or are doing has made me angry.  It takes a long time and a lot of interactions before I can make the assumption that there is something intrinsically about them that they will always p*#s me off.  

Not being able to really know someone makes us wonder what we mean when we say those three magic words, “I love you”.  If I can’t really know you, how can I love you? If that’s the case, then that means my feelings of love for you are nothing more than infatuation, which is being in love with my imaginations of you.  Unless what we mean by “I love you” is a much richer form of love that sounds like “You can trust me to lay myself aside for you so that I will enjoy, tolerate, even suffer the impact you have on me with the result that I will change for your good and the good of this relationship.”  Love is more than a feeling I have.  Love is a promise to be faithfully for someone.

Now having said all that, what does Jesus mean when he says “I know my own and my own know me just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.  Indeed, I lay aside my life for the sheep”?  First off, the Bible indicates to us that God the Father Son and Holy Spirit knows us better than we know ourselves and, you know, that should be comforting.  God knows us better than we know ourselves because God made us, but more so as Christ Jesus, God the Son laid himself aside and became one of us to personally know what it is like to be us in all our sin-sickened glory.  He even came to know what death is.  Just as we die, he died.  This act of love, of laying himself aside and allowing himself to be changed for us was to make us fully to be who God created us to be.  

Hearing about Jesus and what he did we get some insight into who God is and what love is.   But there’s more.  God the Holy Spirit comes to live in us so that we feel God and the love God has for us and this power of love begins to change us to be who God created us to be.  That the person God wants me to become happens as a result of what God is doing in me more so than me having to figure out who God wants me to be and then fail miserably at trying to become that person is totally reassuring.  Our primary task in life is to try to get to know this God (Father Son Holy Spirit) who loves us, loves us each.  As we struggle to get to know Jesus through prayer, and study, and worship, and fellowship, and trying to be faithful, we change to be more like him because the Holy Spirit with a still small voice and a peaceful sometimes convicting presence is in us teaching us and making us able to become the person God wants us to be.

  Let’s talk a little more on what it is to know Jesus.  Well, language lesson time.  There are two words in Greek for knowing.  The first is oida and it is the word that is typically used when speaking of knowing another person.  It means you have observed who they are and have learned a bit of what they are about in life and therefore you go along with them or not.  Therefore, to know Jesus in this sense is to have knowledge of his kingdom mission and it further means we subject ourselves to him and serve that mission.  When Peter denied knowing Jesus (Lk 22) on the night Jesus was arrested, he told the woman who recognized him, “Woman, I do not know him.”  The word for “know” that he used was “oida so that he was saying “I do not know him.  I am not part of what that Jesus guy was up to.”  Oida acknowledges that we cannot know the inner workings of another person, only their externals, only what they choose to reveal.

The second word is gynosko and it is the Apostle John’s favourite term for describing our relationship to Jesus.  It suggests having a personal fellowship with him that is more than externals.  It is to have union with Jesus in the Holy Spirit so that we know him from the inside-out rather than from the outside-in.  It is to know him in such a deep, inwardly way that we share in Jesus the Son’s relationship with God the Father.  He knows the Father as the steadfastly loving and faithful one whom he adores and obeys.  And so for us, that is all we know of the Father and how we also respond to him.  To know Jesus is to know ourselves as a beloved child of a steadfastly faithful, loving Father whom we come to feel love for and want to do as God asks.  

Jesus also shows us that the proper response to the Father’s love and faithfulness is for us to love as Jesus first loved us.  We lay ourselves aside for others so that their lives may also become complete in him.  The Jesus we know is the Jesus who lays aside his entire person for us so that we can know him as the one who lays himself aside for us that we might have life.  

To say this another way, when we know ourselves to be a beloved child of God, then we know Jesus.  When we know the Father’s faithfulness to us, we know Jesus. When we want nothing more in life than to simply be and do what God wants, then we know Jesus.  When we feel the peaceful presence, guidance, and strengthening of the Holy Spirit, we know Jesus.  These are all things he felt.  This is what it felt like to be him.  I’ll not go into how it was when he felt denial, betrayal, and abandonment.  We can only know people by their externals, but what the Trinity reveals to us of himself is his internals, his very, very self.  

Our knowing of Jesus becomes complete in faithfulness and obedience; when we become those who love others.  To know someone is to do as they do.  Back to Peter’s denial – fear overcame him and led him to deny knowing Jesus.  Yet, in the end, Peter died by being crucified upside down because he said he was not worthy to die in the same way his Lord had died.  How did this change from denying Jesus to knowing him happen?  Peter went from simply knowing the externals of Jesus to being brought into knowing the internals of God the Trinity through union with Jesus in the Holy Spirit and sharing Jesus’ relationship with the Father. That change in the way of knowing Jesus led to Peter’s serving Jesus even unto an excruciating death.  Peter could no longer deny the one whom he knew and the one who knew him so deeply.  The more we know of his love, of him, the more we change and do as he did.

I don’t know about you folks but pondering this passage of Scripture makes me hungry spiritually.  It is a rare person who does not hunger for this sort of knowing another and being known by another.  Intimacy is the word for it. We want to be known from the inside out.  We want another to share in who we ourselves are, to share our burdens and our joys.  In Jesus is the only relationship in which this can happen.  So, open up devotional time in our lives for prayer, Bible reading and study, and Christian fellowship.  Let there be an empty chair next to you for God to sit in.  I think that makes it easier to be open to God’s Presence.  Prayerfully pour your heart out to him.  Pray for the people and the situations that concern you.  You will also find that God will place people and situations on your heart that you will feel compelled to pray for a period of time.  Make a daily practice of reading the Bible itself, not just a devotional.  We learn God’s voice when we read Scripture.  The time we spend with the Father Son and Holy Spirit mysteriously changes and equips us to lay ourselves aside so that we can truly love spouses, family, friends, neighbours, and even strangers.  Amen.

A Lecture on Forgiveness, Sorry

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John 20:19-23; Mark 2:1-12

Forgiveness is a common word in our Christian vocabulary much like the words grace, faith, truth, love, and even the word God.  These words reflect foundational elements in our faith, yet, I think we readily use them without really knowing about what they mean.  This morning I want to look at what we mean by forgiveness because I think what we think forgiveness means isn't exactly what we find in the Bible.  It’s important we understand forgiveness rightly because it is central to the ministry Jesus has entrusted to us and empowered us for by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Presence of God, in and among us.  

If people were to ask a congregation, “Why the church?  What are you here for?”, well Jesus gave us an answer to those questions when he appeared to his disciples on the evening of the day of his resurrection.  As per last week’s message, he appeared and spoke a creating word upon his disciples to make their fellowship the place on Earth where peace/Shalom exists.  He gave them the ministry of healing reconciliation that God the Father sent him to carry out saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  Being the place on Earth where there is peace requires we be about the work of forgiveness.  So, with that weight on our shoulders, what is forgiveness?  

First, before we get into what the Bible says forgiveness is, let’s trace our culture’s understanding of it back more than a few centuries because the meaning of words tends to change over the years.  In the last 30 or so years something called forgiveness has made its way into the world of emotional therapy and healthy lifestyles.  Several studies were done that demonstrated that forgiving can contribute to our being happier and healthier whereas not forgiving and bearing a grudge can do quite the opposite.  So, it seems that there is something cathartic or soul cleansing about forgiving.  This is why if you look the word up in a more recent dictionary you will find that the subject of feelings comes up.  They tend to define forgiveness as a process one goes through in order to stop feeling anger or resentment towards another or to stop feeling like you need some sort of retribution for a wrong done to you.  You've heard people say, "Just let it go."

When looking up what it means to forgive in older dictionaries you often find the topic of pardon, to grant pardon to one who has wronged you, to let them go without exacting punishment.  There's also the financial side of things too by ceasing to require the repayment of debt.  There's also the idea of granting permission or allowing things to go forward.  

If you go way back to the Old English roots of the word "forgive", we come across the word "forgiefan" which means "to give in marriage".  Thus, it goes without saying that forgiveness and marriage go hand in hand.  In Old English, the word essentially meant "to give completely".  It is the act of giving with a huge sense of finality to it.  You can apply that to wrongdoings, to debts, and so on.  It is to relinquish a rightful claim to something forever, to utterly give it up.  

If I were to philosophize on this a bit, I would say that forgiveness and trust go hand in hand.  When a father gave his daughter's hand in marriage it wasn't just an exchange of property as some want to see it.  He was letting go of any claim he had to rightfully be the one who provided for and protected his daughter and in turn completely trusting another man and his family with that task.  “Forgeifan” was the act of giving total trust to another.  When somebody wronged another, they in essence broke trust with that person and with the clan.  Therefore, to forgive was to give your trust back to the one who broke it.  As doing something that breaks trust with someone involves breaking the trust of a community of people, forgiveness meant not only reconciliation or restoring trust with the one offended but also with the whole clan.

Summing this up, our modern idea of forgiveness has to do with the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment.  The Old English roots of the word, which go back to just before the 1100's have to do with maintaining trust in communities of people.  If you don’t see it, there has been a bit of a narcissistic flip between yesterday and today in the definition of forgiveness.  Today, forgiveness deals with me and how I feel.  Back then, forgiveness dealt with us and how we keep trust among ourselves.  Keep this in mind and let's move on to the Bible.

Looking at the Bible, when the concept of forgiveness comes up it is usually associated with how we deal with sins which are offenses in our relationship with God and with one another.  When we sin against one another, or rather break trust with and hurt one another, the Bible reveals that it also affects our relationship with God.  God is aggrieved.  God feels it when we hurt others and others hurt us and thus, our relationship with God is negatively affected by sins.   The biblical work of forgiveness also emphasizes not only our need to forgive but also our responsibility to seek it.  And on top of it all, we mysteriously find God in the midst of forgiving and seeking forgiveness.

To get our English translations of the Bible we have to find words in our language that carry the same or similar meaning as the words in Greek or Hebrew.  This is rarely an exact science and it quite often happens that essential meaning gets lost or corrupted as the meanings of words change over time.  As I demonstrated moments ago, forgiveness does not mean today what it meant in Old English.  How we came to use the word forgive to translate the Bible’s conceptual world of how to deal with our sins against God and one another is a rabbit hole to Wonderland worth going down. 

A long time ago the church began to use the Old English word "forgiefan" which meant “to give completely” to translate into English a Latin not a Greek version of the Bible.  Thus, there was already a conceptual jump from Greek to Latin.  The Latin word they were trying to translate was perdonare, which means to pardon.  This had the unfortunate side effect of getting the church to think of sins being a ledger of offences for which we are guilty that needs to be wiped clean rather than as a disease in our humanity that causes a breakdown of trust in our relationships with God and one another and that destroys our God-given dignity as persons by making us feel ashamed. 

The Greek word Jesus used which we translate as forgiven does not mean a cathartic process of doing away with anger and resentment nor does it mean pardoning a person of a ledger of offences.  The word is "aphiemi" and it simply means "to send away" and sometimes “to pick up and carry”.  He used that word because it accurately reflected how the ancient Israelites dealt with sin in their once a year day of fasting and sacrificing, which they called Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement.  On that day they sacrificed a bull and two goats.  One of the goats was called the scapegoat.  It was called this because the priest would lay his hand upon its head and whisper the sins of the people into its ear so that it would then carry them in and upon himself.  Then, it was led away into the wilderness where it was then sent away where it could be destroyed by whatever.  In our Mark reading when Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven, he meant carried off, sent away as in scapegoated out of existence.  This is of course pointing to Jesus' death on the cross when he would be the Scapegoat for humanity’s sin.

That Greek word "aphiemi" (to send away or to pick up and carry) is the word that the Jews in Jesus' day were using to translate a particular Hebrew word, which we also translate as forgive.  The Hebrew word is nasah and it means to lift up and carry.  Think scapegoat as well.  The scapegoat carries away the sin of the people.  Our sin is born away.  I like to think NASA and the space shuttle.  

The Psalmist also uses a word, “kophar”, which means covered, for forgiveness.  This refers also to the Day of Atonement.  A bull and a goat were killed and their blood, which represented their life, was taken.  The blood now represented life that had passed through death.  The high priest sprinkled it all over the temple and the priests and even the ark of the covenant to do two things: to cover over or cleanse the stain which sin leaves on the people and the temple and also to unite God and his people in the blood, this life that had passed through death.  This is why the Psalmist says blessed is the one whose sin is covered over.  This sprinkling of blood of course points us to Jesus’ death and resurrection and also our union with him in the Holy Spirit.

So, with all that in mind, what was Jesus telling this paralytic when he said, "Son, your sins are forgiven".  Was he saying that God had gone through some cathartic process to let go of his anger at that man so that God now trusts him again?  I don't think so.  Jesus pronounced the man’s sins forgiven when he saw the faith or faithfulness or loyalty of the four men.  They had lifted him up and were carrying the paralytic on his mat to bring him to Jesus.  Jesus saw that they were nasah-ing this man and, moreover, along the way they were removing every obstacle (the roof) in order to bring him to Jesus where they knew he could be healed.

This act of faithful love by loyal friends of carrying or nasah-ing this paralytic to Jesus is why Jesus says to the man that his sins were sent away.  That love, that fidelity bore his sin away or covered it over or cleansed it away.  These friends through their hands-on bond of fellowship with the paralytic showed him unconditional love and acceptance by lifting him up and carrying him, bringing him to Jesus to be healed and removing every obstacle on the way.  Jesus pronounced him forgiven and healed him and thus restored him to “normal” community.

Remember paralytics were viewed in the same way as lepers and blind people back then and much like addicts are today.  They were called unclean and cast out of the community because people believed them to be cursed by God for some horrible hidden sin that he or his parents had committed.  People would even refuse to touch them for fear of becoming unclean themselves.  

But these four men forgave this paralytic by carrying him on the mat of his disease to Jesus and willingly taking his uncleanness upon themselves because they knew Jesus could and would heal the man.  Jesus saw their unconditional love in action and that's why he said, "Son (meaning you're one of my people), your sins are forgiven."  Whatever was keeping this man cut off from loving community was obviously gone, sent away by these four men lifting him up and carrying him.  He was forgiven.

So, seriously, what is forgiveness as far as the Bible is concerned?  It is not the cathartic process of letting go of anger and resentment though I think that happens.  It is not pardoning a person of their ledger of offences though that happens as well.  Forgiveness is what happens when a small group of people unconditionally love and accept a sin-sick person, bearing with him in all his weaknesses, bringing him to Jesus, removing all obstacles on the way so that he may know unconditional love and acceptance in Jesus’ name so that he is no longer outcast (though he may have deserved it for what he had done).  Small groups of Jesus' people unconditionally welcoming and loving others in their brokenness and helping them to find wholeness in Jesus is what forgiveness is.  If there is a cathartic process of letting go of resentments, it is found while being nasah-ed by faithful Jesus people.  If there is such a thing as having the ledger wiped clean, it is found in the unconditional acceptance by faithful Jesus people.  Welcoming people into community where the unconditional love of Jesus rules the day and helping them to find peace in him is true forgiveness.  So let our way be the way of those four unnamed men.  Amen.

  

Thoughts on Peace

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John 20:19-23

This old world is screaming for peace.  I think it’s obvious to say that.  If we simply look at the amount of conflict in the world: there are presently 51 armed conflicts going on today.  That’s outright wars down to things like tribal and drug cartel skirmishes.  If we counted conflicts between neighbours, in work places, or within families, we’re probably talking in the billions.  We could even get into that nebulous realm of this elusive thing of inner peace - “I just don’t feel at peace within myself”.  This old world is screaming for peace.

 But…what is peace?  Have you ever sat down to ponder what peace actually is?  Good luck coming up with a definition for it.  Every culture seems to have its own definition.  Some cultures will say peace is when everything is in its place.  When somebody steps outside their rightful personal bounds and impinges upon someone else’s personal space, there is no longer peace.  Things are out of place.  When I want what is not rightfully mine.  Things are out of place.  If I follow through and act on that inordinate want.  Things get really out of place.  Some Eastern cultures like to define peace as the lack of balance.  When the work/life balance gets out of whack it leads to a diminished sense of peace.  When there’s too much pollution in the air, nature gets out of balance and Mother Nature is quite indiscriminate and brutal in how she strikes back.  

In our culture we tend to look at peace like the ancient Greeks and Romans did, as a lack of conflict.  To me, I don’t think that the lack of conflict is a good definition of peace.  I think conflict in itself is only one among many of symptoms that peace is lacking.  Moreover, constructive conflict can lead to peace.  But, to humour our culture’s understanding of peace, maybe we can get a definition of peace by looking at what causes conflict and once determining that, say that peace is the opposite of it.  If we look at the causes of war throughout the world, well…in my humble opinion, at the root of war we will always find a handful of greedy, power lusty individuals who have charisma such that to get more of what they want they can delude the masses with lies to the extent that the masses will murder en masse for them.  Looking more at the world of conflict in interpersonal relationships, well, I kind of like that definition for peace that involves everything being in its place.  Interpersonal conflict happens when people step out of their rightful place to impose upon others without permission.

Well, blah, blah, blah, are you still awake.  We can beat around the bush and run in circles all day and not come up with a good definition for peace.  Maybe we should just look at the Bible.  What did Jesus mean by saying “peace” when he appeared out of nowhere to his disciples who were cowering in fear behind locked doors afraid of what both the Jewish and Roman authorities might do to them due to their association with that Jesus of Nazareth, that revolutionist crucified dead whose body had gone missing presumed taken by his followers so that they could say he was the son of God and he had been raised from the dead to ascend to heaven to become fully a god; the sort of thing the Romans pretended to happen to their emperors.

Being a Jew steeped in the Old Testament, Jesus likely had the Hebrew word Shalom in mind.  Shalom arises as God’s blessing upon God’s people when we live according to the Ten Commandments.  Shalom involves what we have in rewarding, fulfilling, respectful, honest, love filled interpersonal relationships.  It involves the abundant prosperity that is found when everyone has enough.  It involves balance and rest built into that work/life thing (Sabbath).  There is gratitude and praise of the God who has abundantly provided.  

Shalom flows from living according to the Ten Commandments.  It arises as God’s blessing when we worship and serve the one true God and don’t try to project our images of what a god ought to be onto God.  Shalom arises when we honour the parents who gave us life and raised us, when we respect family ties.  Shalom arises when we don’t murder, steal, lie, and cheat on our spouses, but rather promote and protect personal trust of one another.  Shalom is what occurs when we are satisfied with what God has given us and don’t lust for our neighbour’s stuff, especially our neighbour’s spouse.  Peace therefore is Shalom in each home, neighbourhood, community, province, nation, to the extent of being global.  Shalom leads to justice in legal systems, equity in economics, and more than just a basic respect for individual human rights.  

In Shalom relationship to God is upheld.  Relationship within family is upheld.  Relationship in community is upheld, particularly with one’s immediate neighbours.  Simply put, Shalom is all about relationship and therefore, whatever we are going to call “Peace” must also be about relationship, our relationships with God and one another.  Peace exists among us.

Surprisingly, the Bible has very little to say specifically about inner peace.  To my knowledge, there is no mention in the Bible of “Inner Shalom” outside of Psalm 131 which says “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child together with its mother who is no longer demanding what has been denied him.”  Any other places that kind of refer to inner peace seems to indicate that inner peace is found when we let go of wanting that which we cannot have.  Looking back to what’s been said already, if we were to infer something about inner peace from our talk of Shalom, it would be that there is a sense of well-being, joy, and contentment that arises when one follows the way of the Ten Commandments, respecting the boundaries they establish in our relationship to God, family, and neighbour.  Maintaining rightly ordered relationships leads to inner peace.  There can be no inner peace apart from proper maintenance of our relationships and reconciling relationships when they get broken.

So, that’s sort of the Old Testament take on Peace/Shalom.  Let’s go post-resurrection Jesus here for a minute.  When Jesus appeared to his disciples that night, he didn’t show up and say to them, “Peace be with you” as if it was some sort of greeting.  He wasn’t saying “Hello” with some sort of Hippie-sounding greeting – “Yo, peace man”.  The best I can explain it is that Jesus was speaking a creating word upon the community of those who follow him.  He was creating their fellowship, creating their relationship to be the place on earth where peace/Shalom is.  Their fellowship was to be the place on earth where the ministry of the healing of our broken relationship with God and one another is found.  It is to be the place on earth where God’s Presence is found.

I think the most accurate translation of what Jesus says to his disciples would be “Peace among you”.  By speaking these words he was do the work of creati andng just like when on the first day of creation God said “Let there be light”.  Jesus spoke the word created Shalom/Peace among them, within their relationships, so that it can be found on earth.  He then again says “Peace among you” and speaks his ministry of reconciliation into them.  Then, he breathed the Holy Spirit, God’s presence into them, in such a way that what they forgive, God forgives and what they don’t forgive, God doesn’t either.  The implications of forgiving or not forgiving are implied.  Shalom/Peace will rest in and be maintained in their midst through forgiveness – but not forgiving, which results in bearing a grudge, will take their Shalom away.  Thus, it’s best to do the work of forgiveness.

If I were to put it all together, Shalom/Peace will be in existence present here in this sin-diseased world when the followers of Jesus do the work of forgiveness amongst ourselves, in our families, in our neighbourhoods, and when we lead the world to do the work of forgiveness as well as.  That is what Jesus has sent us into the world to do.  

In this Sin-diseased world there is an integral relationship between Shalom/Peace and the work of forgiveness.  Shalom/Peace can and will be found on planet earth, indeed the presence and workings of God can and will be found on planet earth, where and when the followers of Jesus do the work of forgiveness.  If we don’t do this work, Shalom/Peace will prove elusive.

Just a small example.  The Right Reverend Desmond Tutu now deceased was an Anglican Bishop in South Africa at the end of Apartheid.  He used to get up every morning around three o’clock to pray for peace in South Africa.  As Apartheid ended, he was integral in developing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which provided a vehicle to help victims of human rights crimes in South Africa confront and forgive those who sinned against them.  It’s fairly indisputable that Desmond Tutu was single-handedly responsible for averting mass-bloodshed in South Africa when Apartheid ended.  The followers of Jesus led the way to a taste of peace in South Africa by prayerfully and actively focusing on the work of forgiveness. 

Looking at our lives; how would our lives, communities, nations be different if we, the followers of Jesus, earnestly focused on the work of forgiveness.  How would it change our relationships with our First Nations neighbours, with individuals oppressed by addictions, in hurting marriages, in the area of Mental Health?  I believe there is a profound lack of Shalom in our communities that could be remedied if we the followers of Jesus in our own personal lives, in our families, in our church fellowship, in our neighbourhoods, at our jobs, in our communities, and on up focused on the work of forgiveness.  Amen.  (I guess I have necessitated a follow-up sermon on what forgiveness is.)

 

Seeing Clearly

John 20:1-18

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There is a song I get in my head around Easter time.  It’s Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now”.  It’s about that moment of “I’m going to be all right” that eventually comes after your life has been utterly turned upside down with a loss.  Sorry, I’m just going to have to sing it.  If you know the words, join me.

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)

Sun shiny day

 

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone

All of the bad feelings have disappeared

Here is the rainbow I've been prayin' for

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)

Sun shiny day

 

Look all around, there's nothin' but blue skies

Look straight ahead, nothin' but blue skies

 

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)

Sun shiny day

I like that song at Easter.  Because it does what a worship service on Easter is supposed do – be a moment of seeing clearly; seeing that nothing is greater, nothing is more powerful than our living, loving, life-giving God who raised Jesus from the dead and started a New Creation that will one day blossom to be the whole creation filled to the brim with his glory.  And just as God raised Jesus from the dead so will he raise us from the dead to live in the New Creation that is no longer diseased with Sin; and Evil will be no more; no more Death; no more futility; no more grief; no more sickness.  Just everything healed and filled with the glory of our life-giving God.

I got a taste of seeing clearly one warm December Sunday morning in 1999.  At about 4:30 that morning my brother called to tell me our Dad had finally gone to be with our Lord after a bought with cancer.  With it being Sunday and kind of late in the game I didn’t want to have to back out of the church services I had to conduct in my charge down in West Virginia.  Truth is I just wanted to be with God’s people that morning and worship.  I did the main service in Marlinton and then had to head up Elk Mountain to one of my little churches, Mary’s Chapel.  

With it being so warm that morning a fog had settled down in the bottom there in Marlinton.  The road up Elk was a main road but it climbs pretty fast and has a lot of turns.  I didn’t know what to expect with the fog going up the mountain.  Would it be thick as pea soup or would I be able to see the road a little bit? Fortunately, it was the latter.  About two-thirds up the mountain I drove out of the fog and the sun was bright and the sky was cloudless.  There happened to be a fortuitously placed overlook there so I stopped and got out and had a look.  It was absolutely beautiful.  The leafless trees were glistening silver in the bright sunshine.  The fog was now a cloud below me that stretched out like a blanket as far as I could see.  I could see it clearly.  My Dad was my best friend.  He had died but at that moment looking out over glory, I knew everything would be all right.  God had set that moment up for me just to tell me that.

Mary Magdalene, probably Jesus’ closest friend, went to Jesus’ tomb looking to be with him, to anoint his body, say “Good bye”, to cling to him.  He wasn’t there.  Instead, there are two angels and they ask, “Woman, why are you weeping?  What are you looking for?”, as if she should have been expecting to find the tomb empty.  I can’t imagine her shock.  Then there’s a man standing behind her.  She’s too shocked to see that he’s Jesus.  “Where has he been taken?”  She demands.  “Mary!” the man says and she realizes this is Jesus.  They have a moment meant for her alone.  She goes back to the others and says, “I have seen the Lord.”

Occasionally, like Mary, we have moments with Jesus; moments in which we know he lives and so we will truly live; moments that he’s orchestrated just for us just to let us know that all things are in the hands of our loving Father in heaven and nothing, not even Death can separate us from that love.  In these moments we sense that Jesus comes to us as he did with Mary.  He calls us by name; he gets our attention in ways particular to us each…and we see clearly.

So also, in this moment now we see our Lord.  Gathered here around this table.  He is with us.  His body given for us.  His blood shed for us.  His presence with us.  We can see clearly now.   God raised Jesus from the dead.  We’ve nothing to fear.

This morning we gather for worship.  It’s Easter morning and God with the help of Bob Marley has a message for us: 

Don't worry about a thing,

'Cause every little thing gonna be alright.

Singin': "Don't worry about a thing,

'Cause every little thing gonna be alright!"

 

Rise up this mornin',

Smiled with the risin' sun,

Three little birds

Pitch by my doorstep 

Singin' sweet songs

Of melodies pure and true,

Sayin', "This is my message to you-ou-ou:"

 

Singin': "Don't worry 'bout a thing,

'Cause every little thing gonna be alright."

Singin': "Don't worry (don't worry) 'bout a thing,

'Cause every little thing gonna be alright!"

 

So, as those who see clearly now, we must live as those who have hope; real hope.  As Paul said, “…be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.”  In this world that is ate up with the futility of selfish ventures, we who see clearly of all people must conduct our lives in such ways as to give other people hope.  It is very easy for us just to do our thing hoping the Lord will take care of us and bless us and those we love.  But, Jesus doesn’t call us by name and give us clear sight for our own sake.  As those who see clearly we must live our lives in such a way as to create a hope-filled vision of God’s New Creation Day coming for everyone to see.  Amen.

  

Something Happened

Psalm 22

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Though this sermon is supposed to be about Psalm 22, I would like to tell you about an experience I had with Psalm 42 (and 43).  It’s the “As the Deer Pants” or “As Pants the Hart” Psalm, the thirsting for God Psalm.  It is a Psalm of Lament wherein the Psalmist is experiencing the profound emotions that come with unjust, undeserved loss.  He is longing for God and feels cut off from God, forgotten by God.  Someone or somebodies have deceitfully and unjustly wronged him and, moreover, are taunting him for having faith in a God that seems to them to have abdicated.  “Where is your God?” they mock.  The Psalmist wants vindication, justice, but all he’s got to hold onto is a wisp of the sense of the steadfast love of God and remembering how God was faithful to him in the past, and also, how good it was to gather with God’s people to go to worship.  Though there’s reason to be hopeless, he’s not entirely hopeless.  For one, he still knows that God is his only reliable help and that crying out to God is not in vain and so he does.  

Now interestingly, there several times in those two Psalms where the psalmist speaks to his self, to his soul, to his inner being because sometimes you just got to tell yourself like it is because you are the only one who can do that because you’re the one who’s got to accept reality.  He says to his self, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me. Hope in God for I shall yet again praise him, my help and my God.”  He had to stop and tell himself to have hope because God will indeed act for him.  Some might call that still festering in denial or deluded thinking…but God loves us, hears us, and will vindicate his faithful ones when we are treated unjustly.  Feathers may hit the fan in unbelievably horrible ways sometimes but God will be with us and will in time bring us beyond the brutal, discordant tones of the tears of lament to where we can worship joyfully again because God has answered us. 

Now let me tell you about my experience with those two Psalms.  My first marriage ended in divorce.  A couple of weeks after we parted, I was having my morning devotional which involved Psalm 42 that day and that verse in which the Psalmist spoke to his self just stuck out to me.  “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me. Hope in God for I shall yet again praise him, my help and my God.”  It caught my eye so I memorized it so that I could recite it to myself throughout the day.  Then, I had a bite to eat and went for a run all the while reciting that verse to myself.  About a mile in something happened.  It just really struck me – “I will yet again praise God, my help and my God.”  “I will yet again praise God.”  “I will.”  Yes, I was hurting.  Yes, I had reason to be worried and scared.  But…God was going to make sure that I came to joy again.  Something happened.

Psychologists, therapists might call that “something” the pivotal point of acceptance and the starting of moving forward.  I see it as more than that.  Something happened not only in me but to me that changed things.  God spoke it into me with those words of that Psalmist.  He spoke hope, real hope, into me; the sure faith that He was going to see me through and I would praise God for it.  Something happened.  God spoke something new.

Now let’s look at Psalm 22.  In a very uncanny way and though this Psalm predates the event by nearly 1,000 years, it could easily be a foreseeing of Jesus dying on the cross from Jesus’ own eyes.  Jesus certainly felt an affinity for this Psalm since he quoted it as he was dying.  “My God.  My God.  Why hast Thou forsaken me?”  We cannot comprehend how Jesus, “God with us”, could feel God-forsaken, but apparently Jesus did feel that way and he expressed it by praying this Psalm as he was dying.  But I’m not willing to leave it at that.  

Just a lesson on Bible reading…whenever a verse is quoted somewhere else in the Bible, it’s a prompt telling you to go back and read the verse in its context.  Quoting one verse usually means go read the whole paragraph or chapter it came from.  If you do that with Psalm 22, you find yourself in the midst of an experience of someone who is dying wrongfully on public display and being mocked for it.  You find description of bodily suffering of the kind that many medical professionals say somebody being crucified would have experienced.  There’s even description of people dividing up the person’s clothes the way the soldiers did with Jesus’ clothes. 

There’s also more going on with Psalm 22 emotionally and theologically than God-forsakenness.  Yes, feeling God-forsaken is where starts but if you pay close attention to the next host of verses, you find that whoever wrote it was a person of profound faith who was calling out to the God he knew would come and save him, the God whom he had known to be with him and who had acted on his behalf time and time and time again to save him.  This person felt God-forsaken because God was not acting the way he wanted God to act right then and there in the midst of the horrible.  But God was just doing what God so often seems to do, hold off until everything that needs to happen for the good and the healing of the many, of the all, happens.

Now, if you keep reading along in Psalm 22 something happens around verse 21.  And just so you know, there is considerable debate as to how to translate verse 21.  I would do it like this: 

“Save me from the mouth of the lion and from the horns of the wild oxen.

(Long dramatic pause.)

You have utterly answered me.

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; 

In the midst of the congregation I will praise you.”

Something happened.  God did something and the rest of the Psalm is no longer from the voice of someone lamenting but rather from the voice of someone praising God because God acted to save them.  Something happened.  God saved.  God delivered and the effect of it wasn’t just for the sole benefit of the person in the Psalm.  It was for the whole people of God, indeed for all people.  All the ends of the earth shall remember this act and turn to the Lord.  Every family will come and worship before him.  Quite frankly, many scholars will say this act really sounds like the death and resurrection of Jesus.  

This is Good Friday and we are here to remember Jesus’ death and try to make some sense of it.  I’ll say up front that Good Friday doesn’t make sense without Easter.  Jesus’ death is pointless without his resurrection.  Without Easter he is just a good and faithful man who, though very innocent, died a horrible death on public display all the while being mocked for his faith.  Yes, for all shapes and purposes he appeared God-forsaken.  But, if Psalm 22 is our script, we know that behind the scenes there’s more to the picture than meets the eye.  If we are familiar with the Scriptures, we know that in Jesus’ death an innocent man was suffering the penalty of death for every human for we all are guilty of sin and deserve condemnation, deserve death.  And it just so happens that this innocent man is God the Son, God himself paying that penalty for us.  Moreover, this is God himself taking Sin and Death into himself to destroy them with His Self.  In another sense, Jesus dying on the cross is humanity’s judgement upon God for letting so much senseless suffering and death happen in his Creation.  In Jesus’ death God put man to death and man put God to death and that is the end of it…the end of death.  “It is finished” (Jn. 19:31).

Something happened.  Something happened with this man Jesus who was “God with us” and his death and resurrection.  I shy away from calling it the pivotal moment of acceptance and the point at which things began to move forward, but I don’t quite know how else to put it other than to say it is real hope coming alive.  A new Creation began with his death and resurrection.  Those who follow Jesus and who have received his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, are part of that New Creation that is indwelt by the presence of God that will be raised from the dead when the Day of Resurrection comes, but who, for now, are being made alive in him by his Spirit and empowered to live the Jesus way of unconditional love which he modeled supremely by living a faithful life expressed through giving hope and healing to others and then dying on a cross for us and in our stead.

Let’s go back to Psalm 22:21 for just a moment.  The Psalmist is pleading with God to save him from the mouth of the lion and the horns of wild oxen.  That is a hopeless situation in which one is certain to die.  Such is life as we know it.  We die.  No matter how many little pills we take to try to avoid it, we die.  But something happened with the Psalmist when he died and I like for there to be a dramatic pause in the reading of the Psalm much like the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter.  He then says, “You have utterly answered me.” And then he goes on to praise God.  Something happened.

The Hebrew language has a way of doing verbs that says the action of the verb is completely completed even if it hasn’t happened yet.  It’s the voice of certain promise.  We don’t have this way of doing verbs in English.  We have a saying that captures it.  We say, “Consider it done”. Even though it hasn’t happened we tell a person “consider it done” because we are certainly going to do it and then we do it and when it’s done, it’s utterly done.  So, consider it utterly done right now.  Get my drift. 

The Psalmist says, “You have utterly answered me.”  He was dead and now he is alive again to praise God and because he lives all peoples will praise God.  The God who was ever faithful to him had to let him undeservedly go through what felt and looked like God-forsakenness, being mocked for his faith, and even a horrible death because what lay on the other side was and will be new life for all.  

So, when we feel God-forsaken and wish God would act and get us or the people we love out a living Hell, well, that’s only the first verse of the Psalm and God-forsaken really isn’t the case.  The rest of the Psalm, the behind the scenes if you may, is that God who has been with us and been faithful to us our whole lives is still with us and will utterly answer us in new, hope-filled, healing, joyful, praise-filled life.  Hold on to faith, hold on to hope, hold on to love even though and seems lost, even if death is the final outcome.  Our God is the God who raises the dead…and he hears you and will utterly answer.  Amen.