Jeremiah 13:1-11
Thus said the Lord to me, ‘Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.’ So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, ‘Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.’ So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, ‘Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.’ Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.
Welcome to perhaps the strangest man in the Bible. That’s saying a lot because Jeremiah has to contend with other strange people like John the Baptist, who was a fairly strange man himself. But Jeremiah stands out as one of the strangest. What made him strange were his characteristics. He not only preached God’s message, but he did weird things to get his point across. Jeremiah was so odd, and so unique, that we’ve even coined a term in English to describe any kind of speech that resembles Jeremiah. We call it a “jeremiad.” A jeremiad is a speech combining criticism and lamentation.
The book of Jeremiah resembles the man himself. It is confusing and disorganized. It starts with the story of Jeremiah as a child. He begins to preach. Then suddenly we are shifted forty years into the future. Then we’re taken back to his young adulthood. Toward the end of the book we are suddenly taken back to the middle of his life. Jeremiah is a confusing book to read because it doesn’t necessarily follow a logical sequence.
This morning I want to introduce you to the prophet Jeremiah in all his oddities, so that you can gain an appreciation for how this prophet of old still resonates with us today. At the outset I’ll say that it is hard to capture the depth of Jeremiah’s life and ministry because it spanned forty years, and so much happened during those forty years that capturing it all in twenty minutes is near impossible.
Jeremiah began his prophesying very early in his life. We are told that when he was a teen or child God spoke to him and told him to go out and speak God’s word. Jeremiah protests, saying that he is just a boy and that no one would take him seriously. God responds by telling him that this doesn’t matter. Jeremiah further protests, saying that people will attack him if he says the things God wants him to say. God tells him that he has two choices. He can decide not to do God’s will, in which case people will attack him anyway and God will not help him; or he can do God’s will and be attacked, but God will be there to help him no matter what happens. Jeremiah agrees to be God’s prophet.
God often speaks to Jeremiah through objects. More specifically, God shows Jeremiah certain objects and Jeremiah learns metaphorical lessons from them about God’s will. For instance, at the outset of his prophetic ministry, God gave him two visions. One was the branch of an almond tree. The other was a boiling pot in the north, tilting toward Judea (as an aside, hundreds of years before the nation of Israel had been split in two—into Israel in the north and Judea in the south, which is where Jerusalem was—and sixty years earlier Israel was conquered by the Assyrians and the population was basically dispersed so that now it was not really Jewish anymore). What do you think God was saying to Jeremiah through the almond branch? To understand we’d really have to see how people of the Middle East view almond trees in the spring. Throughout the winter people would keep a watch on the almond trees because they were always the first trees to bloom. When it bloomed, they knew it was time to prepare to plant. God was saying to Jeremiah that just as people watch the almond tree for signs of spring, God was watching the people for signs of their return to God. Also, God was telling Jeremiah through the boiling pot that trouble was boiling in the north, and if people didn’t turn back to God, it would eventually pour out on the people, leading to their destruction.
As Jeremiah began his ministry, major changes were taking place in Judea. King Manasseh had died, and his son Josiah was now king. Manasseh had been a corrupt king who had managed to keep Judea intact in face of the Assyrians by paying a ransom for their independence. As part of the agreement with the Assyrians, the Jews had to worship the Assyrian gods as well as God (or Yahweh, as the Jews called God). In addition, they had been worshiping the Canaanite god Ba’al along with Jahweh. Many prophets had criticized Manasseh for this, but to no avail. After he died, Josiah eventually began a reform in Judea, outlawing the worship of gods other than Yahweh.
At first, Jeremiah’s message was encouraged the people to quit worshiping other gods, and to devote themselves completely to Yahweh. He told the people that they had been like adulterers and prostitutes, giving themselves over to other spouses, only to return when they were in need. He said that God refused to be a wronged spouse, and that they had to make their decision whether to be committed to God or not. In keeping with this message Jeremiah was led to do what we are told in our passage for this morning. God tells him to take a linen belt to a place near a great river and to bury it. Our passage says he took it to the Euphrates, but I doubt very much that this was the river, since it was over 700 miles away. I think that it is more likely that he did this near the Jordan River. The actual name of the river in Hebrew is not the Euphrates, but simply “the great river.” Anyway, who cares about that? Jeremiah then returns several days later and pulls it out of the dirt. It is ragged and decayed. The point God was making to Jeremiah was that the chosen people had been given a wonderful gift (linen belts were a sign of wealth), and in their dalliance with other religions they had wasted and corrupted God’s love and grace.
Jeremiah also used another metaphor to teach this same lesson. He went to a potter’s house to watch the potter make a pot. Potters were important craftsmen in the ancient world, and watching the potter work would have been a delightful event for families, and especially children. Potters smash the wet clay to get all the air bubbles out, and, placing the clay on their wheels, they form and shape the pots. At times the clay isn’t centered on the wheel, and the forming pot wobbles. It then must be smashed down and recentered, and a new pot formed. This is the metaphor God gives to Jeremiah, saying that because the people have gone over to worshiping other gods, they must now be recentered and reshaped, which will be a painful process.
Under Josiah’s reign, the people quit worshiping other gods and return to a devotion of Yahweh, but then Jeremiah notices a new problem. They are now confusing their faith with a nationalistic fervor, assuming that because they are centered in a worship of Yahweh, anything the nation does must be God’s will. Jeremiah now preaches a message that is even more unpopular than his original message. He tells the people, and the king, that God is displeased because they are confusing the nation of Judea with God, and that nationalism and their alliances with the Egyptians are displeasing to God, especially because they are saying that whatever they do is God’s will. Before they complained that Jeremiah was a pest. Now they call him a traitor and unpatriotic. This is what happens when people speak against nations that confuse nationalism and religion.
Eventually Josiah died, and his sons became kings. They encouraged the worship of other gods, and again Jeremiah preached that God was angry. He told the people that they had become like “Shiloh.” Now I’m pretty sure you don’t know what that means because I didn’t either. It took me a long time to research it and discover the meaning. We don’t get what it means, but the people of Jeremiah’s time knew exactly what he was saying, and they hated him for saying it. Shiloh was the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept in ancient Israel 500 years prior to Jeremiah. The Philistines had defeated the Israelites in a battle that they had been warned that God was against. When they were defeated, they ran back to Shiloh and grabbed the Ark of the Covenant, assured that it would lead them to victory. It didn’t, and the Ark was taken by the Philistines and held for seven months. It was a travesty. For Jeremiah to say that the people were like Shiloh was him saying that they had taken what is of God for their own purposes, and that they were going to lose it all. Not a message designed to make people happy.
Jeremiah continued to speak out, and especially to the king. Under Jehioakim, he dictated his sayings to his secretary Baruch, and had Baruch read them to Jehoiakim’s counselors and generals. When they heard all that was written, they were afraid and told Baruch to take Jeremiah and hide because they would surely be killed. They gave the scroll to the king, who read each part, cut it up with a knife, and threw it into the fire. After it was all burned, he sought to imprison and kill Jeremiah. So what did Jeremiah do? He dictated another scroll, and put even more negative stuff in it, and read it before the king. Eventually he was imprisoned. Several times after that he was imprisoned and released, and under Jehoiachin, Jehioakim’s brother and successor, Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern to die. A cistern is a large tank or cave that holds water, and when it is low there is not much else in it but deep, deep mud. Jeremiah was thrown in the cistern to waste away, trapped in the mud. People sent by God eventually rescued him.
Eventually, Jeremiah’s prophesies came true. Under Zedekiah, Jehoiachin’s successor, the Babylonians attacked the city. Jeremiah told Zedekiah that this was God’s punishment, and that if Zedekiah surrendered he would be safe, and the people would be treated well. Zedekiah was cocky and believed that he was strong enough to withstand the Babylonians, especially since he assumed the Egyptians would come to his aid. They never did. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, laid siege to Jerusalem for seven months, and when he finally took the city he destroyed it. He took all the artisans, craftsmen, and intellectuals back to Babylon to serve as slaves in what has come to be known as the Babylonian Exile. He captured Zedekiah, put his eyes out, marched him back to Babylon, and had him publicly executed.
Along with thousands of others, Jeremiah was placed in chains to be marched to Babylon, but along the way he was spotted by a Babylonian general who knew that Jeremiah had prophesied for the king to surrender. Jeremiah was released and told that he could go anywhere in the world a free man, including Babylon. Jeremiah said he was called by God to become a prophet to the Jews living in Egypt. And that’s what he did. Of course, you know what his message was to those Jews. He told them that they were like adulterers and prostitutes who had committed affairs with the gods of Egypt. Again, he gave God’s message to those who didn’t appreciate it. Eventually, Jeremiah disappears and we don’t know what happened to him.
When I look at the prophet Jeremiah, I recognize that what he said 2600 years ago is still relevant for today. Specifically I see three messages that still speak to us today.
First, we must be really careful about mixing Christian faith and patriotism. So many Christians today have done just that, not only when it came to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but to other things such as school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I have to tell you that, following Jeremiah’s example, I don’t get hot and bothered over these issues. Why? Because I think that when people get up in arms about them they start to confuse the nation and devotion to God. I feel the same way when people argue about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I believe that calling us a Christian nation means confusing our national interests with God’s interests. So many who proclaim us to be a Christian nation use that designation to justify anything the U.S. does. Much of what we do is not what God is calling us to do, but we can’t tell if we confuse ourselves with God’s chosen people.
Again, I don’t get hot and bothered about school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses because they distract us. Like Jeremiah I care much more about the quality of our devotion to God than I do about where that devotion takes place. I believe that if Jeremiah were here today he would tell us to quit worrying about those things, and to start worrying about the extent to which we are grounded in God, and we are letting that grounding lead us to acts of love, charity, compassion for the poor, and devotion to God’s ways. I’m not against school prayer or the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I just don’t think the issue is big enough to cause us to become so angry that, ironically, we act in un-Christian ways in order to promote this supposedly Christian cause. The point is not to confuse our nation with our religion. That’s straight out of Jeremiah.
A second message for today from Jeremiah is that life is always better when we are grounded fully in God. It’s so easy in this age to become grounded in everything but God. We just have too many other options. But Jeremiah’s point is that if we become grounded in God, our lives actually become easier and more blessed. I think you can look at your own lives and discover this. I’m reminded of this all the time from people who appear in and disappear from church. No matter what church I’ve been in, there has always been a portion of the church whom I only see when their lives are going poorly. They start to come to church, and over time their lives get better. Something about church makes people feel better about their lives. Then they disappear again, only to reappear when life gets worse. They are living testimony to what Jeremiah taught, which is that when we’re grounded in God, life gets better and easier, when we’re not it gets worse.
Finally, I think Jeremiah teaches us to have the courage to keep our faith in the face of all opposition. He is living proof that if you care passionately about God, people will question you, diminish you, and possibly even attack you. All of us have been with people, at times, who criticize or ridicule us for our faith. They will tell us that there is no God, and that religion is a bad thing. Have the courage to stand up in the face of them. We will always face these kinds of people, but Jeremiah reminds us that we can’t let their doubts and criticisms rule our lives.
The whole point is that Jeremiah not only spoke 2600 years ago, but he is still speaking today. The question is whether we are still listening.
Amen.
What the Heck Is That?
Luke 9:28-36
February 14, 2010
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
I was reading this passage this past week, and clip from my memory suddenly shot out. I remembered a clip from Saturday Night Live from back in 1979. You can see the clip if you go to
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50236871
That’s a lot of stuff to type into your browser, but it’s worth it. In the skit, the comedian Steve Martin walks out on stage dressed like a tourist with high black socks, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, while goofy piano music plays in the background. He stands in front of the camera looking beyond it at something we can’t see. He stares a bit and then yells out, “What the heck is that?” (although he doesn’t use the word “heck”) SHe yells out again, “What the heck IS that?... What’s that dang thing doing here? How’d that get here? What the heck IS that? What the HECK IS that? How did that dang thing deal get here?” Then, looking offstage to his right he yells to someone, “Hey! Come over here and look at this deal!”
At that point Bill Murray, looking much like the goofy groundskeeper from the movie Caddyshack walks over and says, “What the heck is that?” The dialogue ensues:
SM: “I don’t know what the HECK that is!”
BM: “What in the heck is THAT?”
SM: “Hey you kids! Get away from there!”
BM: “Uh,... I would not mess with that thing.”
SM: “Don’t put your lips on it!”
BM: “What the heck IS that?”
SM: (handing a camera to Bill Murray) “Well, get a photo of me with it anyway.”
BM: (bringing the camera to position) “Careful of that thing… (clicking the camera and then handing the it back to Steve Martin) Oh, I know what that thing is.”
SM: “Well what the HECK IS IT?”
BM: “What the heck is that thing?”
SM: “I don’t even care WHAT it is,… WHAT THE HECK IS IT?”
BM: “I don’t know what the heck that thing is.”
SM: “Oh, I know what it is.”
BM: “Oh yeah…” (and they both start walking off camera and there’s a pause)
SM: (both leaning back into the camera view) “What the HECK was that?!”
I’m reminded of this skit when I read our passage for this morning because I’m convinced that Peter, James, and John must have had a similar reaction. I can imagine the three of them standing together, rubbing sleepy eyes, looking at Jesus, and saying, “What the HECK is that? What the HECK IS THAT?” They were looking at Jesus, and suddenly his face is shining, and he is standing next to Moses and Elijah. Then a mist surrounds them and they hear a voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” What were they supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to make of this?
Today we’re just as mystified by the transfiguration as they were in Jesus’ day. One of the things that I like about the Bible is that often it describes experiences without explaining them, which, to me, gives it authenticity. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned to respect about the Bible is how it offers things without explanation, including putting contradictory stories together without saying which one is true. For instance, did you know that there are two creation stories in the Bible? There’s the story of the 1st chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world in six days, and then rests on the seventh. Then in the second chapter we learn about the creation of the world in a completely different order. For example, humans are created on the 6th day in the Chapter 1 after everything else is created. In Chapter 2 God creates humans before creating plants and animals. The Bible doesn’t explain the discrepancy. It just puts both stories there. Also, if you look at the Noah story you find the well-known story in Genesis 6 of Noah taking the animals into the ark two-by-two. Yet in chapter 7 it is retold with Noah taking in seven pairs of every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal. The Bible doesn’t try to explain the discrepancy. It just puts the stories there side-by-side.
Because we Presbyterians aren’t listeralists, we accept the discrepancy and recognize that the Bible isn’t just trying to tell us history. It’s trying to tell us about who and how God is. To me, the discrepancies lend a sense of authenticity because everything isn’t wrapped into a nice, neat package. Literalists are always trying smush everything together to make it all fit. The Bible doesn’t do that, and it doesn’t do that with our story for this morning. The transfiguration takes place, but there’s no real explanation about what was really happening, or what it really means. It leaves us a bit confused, wondering, what message are we supposed to get from it?
I believe that one the messages (there are always many messages to any biblical passage) of the transfiguration is that it gave the disciples and us a glimpse—just a glimpse—of eternal life. It gave a glimpse of what happens when we open to eternity and the divine, a glimpse of both the afterlife and eternity in this life. Jesus’ face shone with a light that radiated out from within him. I believe that this passage is saying that when we are truly open to God, to the divine, our lives can shine with this kind of light. The eternal life is filled not only with light, but also with love and joy. And in this moment Peter, James, and John fully see Jesus as he really is, not as they’ve been seeing him.
Of course, being human like us, they also do what most humans do when they are faced with things they don’t understand. They couldn’t just stand in awe. They had to do something. They looked at Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and say to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This is the common human affliction: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Yet in the face of the transfiguration they were really being called to a different message: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They were called to simply be with Christ, Moses, and Elijah and stand in awe. There was nothing else for them to do.
This is really great guidance for us. There are times in life where we are simply called to be open to God’s grace and to be willing to look for light and joy in the world.
I believe that the real spiritual life isn’t always so much a life of doing all the right Christian things. It’s not always about having to be perfectly moral or morally perfect. I believe the real spiritual life is about finding joy and light in life, especially in the small things. As many of the spiritual masters of Christianity have taught, God is found in the mundane, not the spectacular.
Unfortunately, a lot of us get caught up in the problems of life, and we can’t see the joy and the light that is already always there. And there is joy and light. If we are willing to look for joy and light, we can catch glimpses of the eternal and see life transfigured. But we have to be willing to be open to life in awe and joy.
Let me close by asking you to go to a computer and watch an internet video, which to me is a very spiritual video even though there’s no mention of God in it. It’s a video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user. Or you can go to the original website, which is http://www.wherethehellismatt.com. I’m not going to explain the video, other than to say that it’s a video of taking joy in simple things. And in that it is very profound. So go now and look at the video….
We are called to live transfigured lives—lives that live not only here on earth, but also in eternity.
Amen.
February 14, 2010
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
I was reading this passage this past week, and clip from my memory suddenly shot out. I remembered a clip from Saturday Night Live from back in 1979. You can see the clip if you go to
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50236871
That’s a lot of stuff to type into your browser, but it’s worth it. In the skit, the comedian Steve Martin walks out on stage dressed like a tourist with high black socks, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, while goofy piano music plays in the background. He stands in front of the camera looking beyond it at something we can’t see. He stares a bit and then yells out, “What the heck is that?” (although he doesn’t use the word “heck”) SHe yells out again, “What the heck IS that?... What’s that dang thing doing here? How’d that get here? What the heck IS that? What the HECK IS that? How did that dang thing deal get here?” Then, looking offstage to his right he yells to someone, “Hey! Come over here and look at this deal!”
At that point Bill Murray, looking much like the goofy groundskeeper from the movie Caddyshack walks over and says, “What the heck is that?” The dialogue ensues:
SM: “I don’t know what the HECK that is!”
BM: “What in the heck is THAT?”
SM: “Hey you kids! Get away from there!”
BM: “Uh,... I would not mess with that thing.”
SM: “Don’t put your lips on it!”
BM: “What the heck IS that?”
SM: (handing a camera to Bill Murray) “Well, get a photo of me with it anyway.”
BM: (bringing the camera to position) “Careful of that thing… (clicking the camera and then handing the it back to Steve Martin) Oh, I know what that thing is.”
SM: “Well what the HECK IS IT?”
BM: “What the heck is that thing?”
SM: “I don’t even care WHAT it is,… WHAT THE HECK IS IT?”
BM: “I don’t know what the heck that thing is.”
SM: “Oh, I know what it is.”
BM: “Oh yeah…” (and they both start walking off camera and there’s a pause)
SM: (both leaning back into the camera view) “What the HECK was that?!”
I’m reminded of this skit when I read our passage for this morning because I’m convinced that Peter, James, and John must have had a similar reaction. I can imagine the three of them standing together, rubbing sleepy eyes, looking at Jesus, and saying, “What the HECK is that? What the HECK IS THAT?” They were looking at Jesus, and suddenly his face is shining, and he is standing next to Moses and Elijah. Then a mist surrounds them and they hear a voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” What were they supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to make of this?
Today we’re just as mystified by the transfiguration as they were in Jesus’ day. One of the things that I like about the Bible is that often it describes experiences without explaining them, which, to me, gives it authenticity. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned to respect about the Bible is how it offers things without explanation, including putting contradictory stories together without saying which one is true. For instance, did you know that there are two creation stories in the Bible? There’s the story of the 1st chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world in six days, and then rests on the seventh. Then in the second chapter we learn about the creation of the world in a completely different order. For example, humans are created on the 6th day in the Chapter 1 after everything else is created. In Chapter 2 God creates humans before creating plants and animals. The Bible doesn’t explain the discrepancy. It just puts both stories there. Also, if you look at the Noah story you find the well-known story in Genesis 6 of Noah taking the animals into the ark two-by-two. Yet in chapter 7 it is retold with Noah taking in seven pairs of every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal. The Bible doesn’t try to explain the discrepancy. It just puts the stories there side-by-side.
Because we Presbyterians aren’t listeralists, we accept the discrepancy and recognize that the Bible isn’t just trying to tell us history. It’s trying to tell us about who and how God is. To me, the discrepancies lend a sense of authenticity because everything isn’t wrapped into a nice, neat package. Literalists are always trying smush everything together to make it all fit. The Bible doesn’t do that, and it doesn’t do that with our story for this morning. The transfiguration takes place, but there’s no real explanation about what was really happening, or what it really means. It leaves us a bit confused, wondering, what message are we supposed to get from it?
I believe that one the messages (there are always many messages to any biblical passage) of the transfiguration is that it gave the disciples and us a glimpse—just a glimpse—of eternal life. It gave a glimpse of what happens when we open to eternity and the divine, a glimpse of both the afterlife and eternity in this life. Jesus’ face shone with a light that radiated out from within him. I believe that this passage is saying that when we are truly open to God, to the divine, our lives can shine with this kind of light. The eternal life is filled not only with light, but also with love and joy. And in this moment Peter, James, and John fully see Jesus as he really is, not as they’ve been seeing him.
Of course, being human like us, they also do what most humans do when they are faced with things they don’t understand. They couldn’t just stand in awe. They had to do something. They looked at Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and say to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This is the common human affliction: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Yet in the face of the transfiguration they were really being called to a different message: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They were called to simply be with Christ, Moses, and Elijah and stand in awe. There was nothing else for them to do.
This is really great guidance for us. There are times in life where we are simply called to be open to God’s grace and to be willing to look for light and joy in the world.
I believe that the real spiritual life isn’t always so much a life of doing all the right Christian things. It’s not always about having to be perfectly moral or morally perfect. I believe the real spiritual life is about finding joy and light in life, especially in the small things. As many of the spiritual masters of Christianity have taught, God is found in the mundane, not the spectacular.
Unfortunately, a lot of us get caught up in the problems of life, and we can’t see the joy and the light that is already always there. And there is joy and light. If we are willing to look for joy and light, we can catch glimpses of the eternal and see life transfigured. But we have to be willing to be open to life in awe and joy.
Let me close by asking you to go to a computer and watch an internet video, which to me is a very spiritual video even though there’s no mention of God in it. It’s a video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user. Or you can go to the original website, which is http://www.wherethehellismatt.com. I’m not going to explain the video, other than to say that it’s a video of taking joy in simple things. And in that it is very profound. So go now and look at the video….
We are called to live transfigured lives—lives that live not only here on earth, but also in eternity.
Amen.
The Power of Belief
Luke 5:1-11
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
Who Are the True Prophets?
Dr. Standish
Luke 4:14-24
January 24, 2010
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town.
Do you have a favorite heirloom? I have one in my office that is one of my prized possessions. You may not be surprised to know that it is a book, but what book may seem kind of odd in light of the values of our modern age, where only new ideas, new products, and new fads seem to have credibility. This book is a collection of writings by an obscure, 6th-Century monk named Dorotheos of Gaza.
Dorotheos lived outside the city of Gaza, which today is the main city of the Gaza Strip. Back then the area he was in was a desert. Before becoming a monk, Dorotheos lived a privileged life. He came from a wealthy Christian family who taught him to read and write at an early age. This was a rarity in those times when only 20% of the population could read or write. He eventually became a professor of rhetoric at a school in Gaza, and became a man of great prestige. It was in the midst of this that he made the decision to become a monk. No one is sure why, but it seems that it may have happened after his parents were killed in a great earthquake. Dorotheos was wealthy himself, but gave away his wealth so that he could become an impoverished monk. As a monk, he quickly distinguished himself as a deeply spiritual and faithful man, a man whom others—both lay people and monks—sought out because of his wisdom. After his death, his writings were collected, copied repeatedly by hand, and passed on for a thousand years because of their wisdom. For the past 500 years his writings have been printed and passed around. His writings have touched millions of people for over 1500 years.
During his lifetime he was considered a sage by many, but not so much by the monks in his own monastery. He was a prophet unknown in his own hometown. The monastery he lived in was not like those of today. Back then monks often lived in a large, makeshift dormitory where they slept, ate, and prayed. They had little food, and all were devoted to eking out an existence. They were in the desert, so during the summer they lived in extreme heat, and in the winter extreme cold. When a particular monk was considered to be more spiritually adept, he would be given a small hermitage to live in. These were very small, one-room huts with little more than a mat inside to sleep on. The elements were barely kept out. Often they shared their huts with snakes and scorpions that made their way inside.
The attention Dorotheos garnered caused some of this other monks to become jealous. They criticized him for talking to so many people, rather than praying all the time. They criticized him for being popular or sought out. There was a period of time when the monks treated Dorotheos very poorly because of his popularity. They tormented him by spreading their garbage around his hut and shaking their mats out before his doorway. So what? What’s the big deal about that? The big deal is that in the desert the small pieces of food attracted all sorts of insects, many of which were stinging insects. For a number of years, Dorotheos woke up every morning covered with bumps and welts from all the insects that had shared his hut. It was how he reacted that makes him so special. You see, Dorotheos believed in being radically humble, and it’s these ideas that really impacted me.
Let me share with you what Dorotheos taught about humility. First, he taught that humility begins with recognizing that neither you nor I are great. It begins with recognizing that we are not the center of the universe. As we become more humble, we recognize that God is the canter. And so we are able to dedicate ourselves more and more to living how God wants us to live, not as we want. Through this we begin to bear God’s fruit and share blessings.
He used a metaphor for humility, saying that in the Middle East there are a certain kinds of trees that when they grow naturally bear little or no fruit as long as their branches remain upright. In order to bear fruit, they must have stones tied to their branches so that they hang low to the ground. He says that the lower the branches go, the more fruit they bear. We are similar. The lower we are, and the more humble, the more fruit we bear in our lives, and this fruit nourishes others.
He also used to say that the nearer a person is to God, the more he or she sees himself or herself a sinner. That’s not the way we think it should be. We think that the more we grow spiritually, the more we should escape sin. But Dorotheos says that it’s the opposite that happens. Once, when he taught this, a prominent citizen of Gaza challenged him. Dorotheos responded with some questions of his own. He asked the man how he sees himself in relationship to others in Gaza. “Why, as a master of the first rank,” the man responded. Then Dorotheos asked him how he would see himself in Caesarea, which was a major port for the region. The man responded, “Well, certainly as one of the more important citizens.” And if he was visiting Antioch, one of the most important cities in the Roman Empire? “I would see myself as one of the common folk.” Finally, Dorothoes asked him how he would see himself if he went before the emperor in Rome. The man said, “I would see myself as one of the poor.” Dorotheos then said, “This is what I mean when I said that the nearer a man gets to God the more he sees himself a sinner.” When we come close to God, we see our faults and our flaws in God’s light. We see ourselves as we really are, and it causes us to ask God to lead and transform us even more. This is what humility is all about. Dorotheos was an amazing Christian thinker, but he wasn’t always appreciated in his own home.
Dorotheos easily could have said what Jesus said in our passage for today, which was, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” It’s amazing that a man whose words were copied by hand for over 1000 years, and were sold for the past 500 was dismissed in his time. But that’s often the way it is with the great ones—with prophets.
What’s funny about prophets is that pretty much as a rule they had a small following in some circles, but were ignored by the world. In fact, most of the prophets we know of in the Old Testament would have been considered failures in their times. Often they were ignored, persecuted, and every once in a while, killed. We have a misconception about prophets. We tend to think of them as people who see the future. They really didn’t see or foretell the future. In fact, the few passages from the prophets that speak about the future are very sketchy. What prophets did was to tell about the present. They always spoke to people about their present situation, and how it reflected their relationship with God. The prophets tell people what God is saying now. Because they told the truth, the powerful of the day often hated the prophets.
Why are prophets typically so reviled when they’re alive, and so revered once they die? The answer is that prophets speak truth, and as Anthony de Mello once said, “The truth that sets us free is the truth we’d rather not hear.” If you are powerful, or like the system the way it is, who wants to hear that what we are doing is going against what God wants us to do? Often it’s not until prophets have passed that even the wealthy and powerful are able to recognize how true what the prophets said was.
The problem with prophets is that they tell us what God is really saying to us, and often we’d rather not hear what God has to say. In contrast, false prophets tell us what we want to hear. And the sad truth is that our culture is filled with so many popular false prophets who shout out only what we want to hear. For example, I hear false prophets on the left who whisper to us that religion is a farce, that going to church regularly doesn’t benefit your life at all, and that you can be spiritual on your own. What they are really saying is that you don’t have to listen to God if you don’t want to, you don’t have to serve God if you don’t want to, and that God really isn’t making any demands on your life. God, if God exists, is just a big puppy dog who merely wants us to pet him every once in a while. They are false prophets because they tell us what we want to hear, which is about a faith that requires nothing from us.
Meanwhile, we have false prophets on the right who tell us only that we are sinful, or only that we are bad. Also, there’s a new breed of falseness on the right coming from proponents of the prosperity gospel. I don’t know if you have heard that term, but it is a term applied to many of the megachurch pastors (like Joel Osteen) who preach a message that God only sees good and that God wants to bless us with stuff. Some of these preachers are more subtle, some are more outrageous. Osteen is much more subtle, and his message is appealingly positive, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with. The problem I see comes when they preach a message of God giving, giving, giving to us without any call for us to make sacrifices in our lives to join God in what God is doing.
For example, there are pastors like the Rev. Creflo Dollar (yes, that is his real name), who has churches in Atlanta and New York City, and preaches to members that God wants them to be wealthy and to have stuff or bling in abundance. He often leads his church in chants of “I want my bling! I want my bling!” He teaches that we can measure God’s grace in our lives by the possessions we own.
Interestingly enough there have been articles written recently questioning the role of the prosperity gospel in the recent housing and economic crashes (you can read one of those articles at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel). It seems that members of prosperity gospel churches are overrepresented among those who have defaulted on their loans. For example, one article I read talked about a landscaper, who made only about $35,000 a year, yet had taken out a loan to buy a $250,000 house, all because the pastor of his church told the members that God would provide them with possessions if they were willing to take the risk. It led him to financial ruin and bankruptcy.
Certainly God wants us to take risks, and God does bless us sometimes with material goods, but what these prosperity preaches preach is not what the gospel teaches. What they are missing is the reality of sin, the reality of the need for sacrifice, and the reality that sometimes following God doesn’t lead to gaining stuff and an easy life.
There are real prophets from God speaking all around you, but can you tell the real ones from the false ones? You can tell the difference because the real ones will generally speak about issues that we both do and don’t want to hear. There are three basic things that true prophets will talk about.
First, they will talk about the reality of sin. Real prophets don’t push the idea of sin away. The recognize that sin is a fact, and that we can see it in the violence, greed, warfare, selfishness, and indifference we can see all over the world. As G. K. Chesteron once said, all you have to do to recognize the presence of sin is to look around the world. There’s evidence in abundance.
Second, true prophets will also talk about love. True prophets will teach us that no matter how powerful sin is, love is many times greater. They will teach us that God’s love is all around us, and that it is ready to work through us, and that we are God’s hands and feet. True prophets will tell us that the answer to sin in the world is God’s love in and through us.
Finally, true prophets teach us that the only answer to sin, and the only way to immerse ourselves in God’s love, is to turn our lives over to God. It is in radically giving ourselves to God that we open our hearts, minds, and souls to love.
So, here’s my question for you. Are you able to hear not only the prophets in your midst, but Christ in your midst? Are you willing to listen to the truth you don’t want to hear in order to hear Christ’s truth that God wants you to hear?
Amen.
Are You Using Your Gifts?
by Dr. Graham Standish
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.
Did you watch the Baltimore Ravens/Indianapolis Colts playoff game last night? It was a pretty good game until the fourth quarter. I have to tell you that it took me about the whole first quarter to be able to watch the Ravens’ offense when they had the ball. That had nothing to do with any kind of lingering Steelers/Ravens rivalry. It all had to do with the fact that when the Ravens had the ball I was focused on only one player: number 74, their right offensive tackle. I was fascinated by him.
It’s a strange thing to just watch an offensive lineman when watching football. You miss the whole play and don’t see what really took place until the replays. So why was I watching number 74? Because he is an inspiration to me. Number 74 is an African-American player named Michel Oher. Normally I wouldn’t mention his race, but it has something to do with why I was watching him. You see Michael Oher is the subject of a wonderful film, The Blind Side. The film is about how Oher went from a wandering teen living in the slums of Memphis, Tennessee to become a college All-American offensive tackle and an eventual NFL first-round draft choice.
Oher didn’t start out as a football phenom. His introduction to football came about accidently (although I believe it happened providentially). Oher, almost by accident, became a student at the Briarwood Christian Academy, an elite private school in Memphis. He became a student mainly because the basketball coach saw him fooling around with a basketball shooting baskets. Oher was 6’ 5” and 300 pounds, but he had the agility of a guard. So the coach advocated for the board to admit Oher, not because he was such a great athlete, but because they had a duty to be Christian in reaching out to a poor young man.
When they admitted him, they didn’t realize that Oher didn’t have a home. His mother was a full-time drug addict, part-time drug dealer whom social workers guessed had something like 12 children with 12 different men. Oher had been forcibly removed from her care when we was seven years old, and he had bumped around from foster home to foster home. In the process he gained a reputation as a “runner,” meaning that he would be in the home for a bit, but would eventually run away. At the time he entered Briarwood he was sleeping on the couches of anyone in his neighborhood who would put him up. His possessions were several pairs of shirts, some extra underwear, and socks, all of which he washed in the sinks of Laundromats.
He had been attending Briarwood for a month or so when a white family, the Tuohy family, noticed him. The parents, Leigh Anne and Sean, were at a volleyball game with their son watching their daughter, and noticed Oher sitting in the upper bleachers. Sean Tuohy is somewhat well-known. He owns something like 80 Taco Bells and Kentucky Fried Chickens around Tennessee, and is the color analyst for Memphis Grizzlies basketball games. As Leigh Anne and Sean drove their family away from the volleyball game, they noticed Oher walking in the cold rain wearing nothing but a shirt, shorts, and shoes. They asked him if he needed a ride, and he said he was just going to the gym. As they drove away, Leigh Anne realized something wasn’t right, and went back to Oher and asked him why he was going to the gym, since it was closed. Oher said he was going there because it was warm. She realized Oher had no place to sleep.
They brought him home and let him sleep on the couch for the night. That one night turned into two, then three, then a week, then two weeks, and finally they gave him a room of his own. As they got to know him they realized that he was a special man, a gentle giant, who needed to be loved. They felt is was their calling to give him the home and the love he had never before received. And Oher blossomed. Eventually they adopted him and he became part of their family, causing some of their extended family and friends to question them. The Tuohy’s didn’t care. They knew that caring for and loving Michael was their calling.
As I said, Michael Oher blossomed in their home. He became a great football and basketball player, a good student, and eventually received a full scholarship to play football at the University of Mississippi, after which he became a first-round draft pick of the Ravens. Oher not only inspires me, but so do the Tuohys, who sensed the Holy Spirit moving in their lives, and responded with faith, love, and action.
Who inspires you? Which people, by the example they lived out in their lives, have taught you to live a better life? Gwen and Larry Mellon are another couple who’ve inspired me. Do you know who they are? If you haven’t, you may have heard about their legacy, a legacy that is now crucial in helping the earthquake victims in Haiti. Both Gwen and Larry started out living the lives of the super wealthy. Larry Mellon grew up here in the Pittsburgh area as part of the Mellon family. After graduating from college he joined the family business overseeing investments and their work with Gulf Oil, but after two years he couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted a different life. He ended up getting divorced and moved to Arizona, where he bought a ranch, herding cattle from sunup to sundown. This was around 1937.
Meanwhile, Gwen grew up in New York City, and went to elite eastern private schools and colleges. She married shortly after college, and had three children. But when her husband told her that he was moving to Europe for a business opportunity, leaving his family behind, she decided to divorce him and move to Arizona. It was there, while working on a dude ranch, that she met Larry Mellon. They were soon married and, along with her three sons, they raised cattle. Still, Larry was restless.
One day in 1946, Larry walked into the living room of their home, holding a Life Magazine that had an article on the efforts of Albert Schweitzer to start a hospital in Africa. He told Gwen that he wanted to do something similar. She agreed, so they moved the family to New Orleans so that both could engage in medical studies at Tulane University. Larry became a medical doctor in 1950 at the age of 44, and the two of them moved to Deschapelles, Haiti to create L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer. Deschapelles is about 90 miles northwest of Port au Prince in an area that had no doctors for a population of a about 195,000 people. The people of the region were so poor that they couldn’t pay money, and often paid in rice, chickens, eggs, or pigs (Mellon believed that people should pay for their care, if only a pittance, because they would be more motivated to take better care of themselves if they did).
L’Hopital Albert Schweitzer is more than a hospital. It also teaches people how to farm more effectively, how to ensure their water supply is clean, and how to read. The hospital has had a huge impact on the life of Haitians for half a century. This hospital has been one of the main ones responding to earthquake victims this past week.
What inspires me about the Mellons is that though they were rich, which could have caused them to become self-focused and self-consumed, they were selfless. Their lives ran counter to our culture, which equates happiness with being rich and selfish. Our culture is persistent in thinking that wealth leads to happiness, despite the fact that in studies people today are less content than 50 years ago, and that something like 80% of people who win the big prizes in the lotteries are decidedly less happy than before they won.
What has inspired me about the Tuohy’s and the Mellons si that they are people who understood our passage at deep levels of their lives. Our passage tells us that God gives each of us gifts from the Spirit, gifts that are used to build up the body of Christ. It also reminds us that it is our choice whether we act on our gifts or not. The problem of our culture is that it is such a narcissistic culture that we have a hard time unleashing our gifts. Why? Because the more self-focused we are, the harder it is to want to use these gifts, which are always given to diminish ourselves and lift up others.
Our passage for this morning teaches a whole different mindset from our cultural mindset:. Each and every one of us has been given gifts by God to make the world better. They have been given to us to use in serving God. We were given a great example of how true this is this morning when Kim Sebring spoke to us about Project Hope. Project Hope is a mission she and her family started five years ago after the death of her son, Tyler, at age seven due to a congenital heart condition.
It would have been very easy for Kim, Mark, and their family to turn inward after such a hard tragedy, but they didn’t. They were inspired themselves, during Tyler’s stay at Children’s Hospital when they were given a basket of goods to make their stay easier. The basket had things such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, note cards, snacks, and more.
A few years after Tyler’s death, they decided to turn their inspiration into a mission of creating similar baskets for other families. The list of items in these baskets (actually now they are tote bags) can be found on their website (http://projecthope-zelienople-pa.com). They produce 60 tote bags a month, and have given Children’s Hospital, and thus parents of sick children, 3300 bags over the past five years. Kim, Mark, and their family found their spiritual gifts by tapping into their compassion for people who had struggled like them. By being open to the Spirit, they turned tragedy into love.
Whether you know it or not, you have a gift. Sometimes we aren’t so aware because we just aren’t that open to God, or at least to tapping into God all the time. But the truth is that you have been given a gift. You’ve been given many gifts. And the amazing thing about these spiritual gifts, the more we use them in life the more our basket of gifts from the Spirit overflows. Conversely, the less we use them, the more our basket shrinks. So the question is, what are you doing with your gifts? Are you keeping them for yourself, or using them for God? Are you making the world a better place through them, or are you keeping it the same?
Amen.
Have You Been Baptized in the Spirit?
by Dr. Graham Standish
Acts 8:14-24
January 10, 2010
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give me also this power so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.’ Simon answered, ‘Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me.’
On April 14th, 1906, on a small street in Los Angeles, something significant happened that changed the face of Christianity. A movement was started by someone few would have selected as the leader of a major movement. The man’s name was William Joseph Seymour, and he was a half-blind, self-educated African-American who had only recently moved to Los Angeles.
Seymour was the son of former slaves. His father had escaped slavery at the onset of the Civil War and had joined a Union Army “negro” regiment to fight the South. After the war his parents wandered the country until finally settling in Louisiana. The family was so poor that at one point they listed their family possessions as a chair, a table, and a chest of drawers. Who would have expected a man from this environment to launch the fastest growing Christian movement of the 20th century, and so far of the 21st.
Seymour had studied under the evangelical theologian, Charles Parham, in the late 1890s, and was fascinated by Parham’s emphasis on getting back to the original church by getting back to the experience of Pentecost. Parham taught that the modern church had forgotten about the Holy Spirit, and that it needed to become open and aware of the Spirit. Otherwise the church could do nothing because the Spirit is the engine of life for the church.
So, beginning on April 14th, in 1906, Seymour gathered people in a small house in Los Angeles, and taught them to become radically open to the Holy Spirit. Soon people were manifesting gifts and signs of the Spirit. Many spoke in tongues, which means that they spoke in a language often identified as God’s language (the apostle Paul called it “glossalia”), but which sounds unintelligible to us. Others prophesied. One woman, who swore that she had never taken piano lessons, was suddenly able to play the piano. Over the course of the ensuing months more and more people flocked to Seymour’s gathering, hoping to be touched by the Holy Spirit. Soon they bought a church on Asuza Street in Los Angeles, and thus began the “Asuza Street Revival,” which many see as the birth of the Pentecostal movement.
The Pentecostal movement has grown at an amazing pace in the U.S. In the early parts of the 21st century it was growing at a rate of 250% per year in the U.S., and 500% world-wide. There is something about becoming open to the Holy Spirit that tangibly touches people.
I’m not a Pentecostal by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I anywhere close to suggesting that we become Pentecostals here. Still, I think that the Pentecostals recovered an idea that many of us other Christians ignore, an idea mentioned in our passage. Did you hear the part in the passage where they mentioned being baptized in the Holy Spirit? It says, “Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” What do you think it means to receive the Holy Spirit?
In the Pentecostal tradition, receiving the Holy Spirit (being baptized in the Holy Spirit) means both receiving the power of the Spirit within us, and manifesting the Spirit through gifts such as speaking in tongues, holy laughter, prophesy, healing, and more.
Again, I’m not ready to suggest that we become Pentecostals, but I do believe that there’s something to their experience. But let me give you a little context to what I mean. As you already know, I’m a bit of an odd duck. I don’t think the way many, or even most, Christians think. I tend to think more in terms of how to bring things together rather than determining what’s right and what’s wrong. I believe that we live in a day-and-age in which people are stuck looking for the exact “right” answer to everything. We live in an “either-or” age in which people believe the answers to all questions, situations, problems, and crises has to be either this or that. I don’t agree. I believe that often the best answers are “both-and,” which means that sometimes the truth encompasses many different belief perspectives. For example, I’m not a Roman Catholic, nor will I ever become one, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that some of what they do is right. I believe in sharing the sacrament of communion weekly, as do the Roman Catholics, because I recognize that weekly communion has an amazing power to connect people with God. As a result we have communion every Sunday during our first service. Like the evangelicals, I believe in a personal relationship with Christ, and as a result I preach about experiencing Christ in our lives. And like the Pentecostals I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit.
One reason we have such an extensive healing ministry is due to my belief in the legitimacy of something the Pentecostals recovered, which is that prayer can heal. I may not believe in the idea that when faith and prayer connect with healing, it should be evidently miraculous the way we see on television with televangelists. I don’t go quite that far. Still, I believe God that God heals, and that God responds to prayer. But unlike many Pentecostals, I believe that healing can come just as much through the hands of doctors and nurses as it can come miraculously. God can heal through both. I don’t believe in either prayer or medicine. I believe in both prayer and medicine.
What all of this means is that I believe that we should work in our faith to become more intentionally open to the Holy Spirit. I don’t believe we should do this to become more Pentecostal. I believe we should do it in order to become more authentically Christian. At the same time, my understanding of what it means to receive and be baptized in the Holy Spirit is different from the Pentecostals. I believe that the sacrament of baptism we do is an important baptism because it connects all of us with God’s grace, a grace that cleanses all of us. At the same time, I believe that there comes a point at which we also need to make a radical decision: am I willing to become open to the Spirit, let it enter my life, and help me to live in God’s way? When we do this, life changes in amazing ways.
So what happens when we are baptized in the Holy Spirit—when we receive the Spirit? I believe that four basic experiences grow in our lives.
First, we begin having a sense of connection with something beyond. We begin to experience the Divine, the Holy, God, in a tangible way that leads us to know God exists. We don’t need objective proof of God’s existence because we have tangible experiences of God. Just as when we fall in love we don’t need someone to prove to us objectively that love is real, when we are open to the Spirit we don’t need proof that God is real. We develop a tangible connection with God that moves beyond objective proof.
Second, we begin having an intuitive sense of what God wants in each moment of life. We develop more than a connection. We gain a sense of God’s will. This is more than just knowing what is right or wrong in life. It’s a sense of simply knowing in each moment what God wants. I don’t want to make it sound as though this sense of God’s will makes each of us an ultimate authority on what God wants. I’m not talking about having a grand sense of what kind of healthcare system God wants for our country. Our sense of God’s will is humbler than that. It’s simply a sense of knowing what God wants for our lives.
Third, we develop a sense of knowing where we fit in life. I believe that one of the primary problems of modern culture is that too many people don’t know where they fit. They wander, wondering what the purpose is for their lives. The Spirit helps us come to know where we fit. That fit may be in something very small, recognizing that where we fit is in simply serving God in simple ways. Whatever our place of fit is, the Spirit leads us to know where that place is, and to accept it.
Finally, we experience coincidences. I believe that experiencing holy coincidences, or providences, is the hallmark of receiving the Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes things happen. Most of these providences are small, and act just as reminders that God is with us in joyful ways. For example, one coincidence has happened as I preached this sermon. The choir sang a song, “I See the Light,” which was an early 20th century gospel song that was a favorite among the early Pentecostals (this is a different song from the Hank Williams song of the same name). What was coincidental about them singing this song was that this hymn was a favorite among the early Pentecostals. And our choir chose the song almost by accident. They had to pick a song for this past Sunday that would work for the members who would be in worship. Because so many would be missing, they had a difficult time finding the right song. They went through six others before finally settling on “I See the Light.” The amazing thing is that by seeming accident they chose this song on the Sunday that I was preaching about Pentecostals. Out of all the Sundays to sing it, why this past Sunday? But this is the kind of thing that happens when we are open to the Spirit. We get joyful coincidences.
I don’t know how many of you actually believe in the ability to be baptized in the Spirit, but if you do and want to receive the Spirit, I have some suggestions. First, ask God to give you the Spirit. Do it simply and sincerely. Just ask God to let the Spirit enter your life. If you are sincere about it, you’ll receive the Spirit. And don’t worry about having some sort of “slain in the Spirit” experience. What I’ve learned over the years about God is that God is merciful, generous, loving, powerful, and polite. In other words, God’s not going to force something on you. You’ll experience the Spirit in a way that fits with your openness and personality.
Second, make a decision to be open to the Spirit in more moments of your life. Don’t just become open in one part. Bring the Spirit into every part. This is not as easy as it sounds. We compartmentalize. We make Sunday morning the time for God. Sunday afternoon is the time for football. Sunday evening? More football. Monday morning we go to work. In the evenings we watch television. Saturday is to play. Sunday is back to God. That’s not the way God wants it to work. God wants us to bring God into every moment of life by becoming open to the Spirit in every moment. God can be there to guide us and help us at church, at home, at work, and everywhere else, but only if we are open to the Spirit in each moment.
Finally, trust the Spirit to flow throughout your life. Trust that if you are open, wonderful things will happen. Learn to look for them. Learn to be open to them. Learn to expect them. If you do, you’ll discover the Spirit everywhere.
We’re called to receive the Spirit in our lives. Faith isn’t just supposed to be an intellectual activity. It’s meant to be a life activity. The question I want you to reflect on is this: how open you are to the Spirit?
Amen.
God's Presence in Our Midst
by Dr. Graham Standish
1:1-18
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and 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. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
I became very familiar with this passage when I was in seminary. Why? Because I had to spend three months translating it from Greek to English. All Presbyterian pastors have to take two years of a biblical languages during seminary, which means that we have to learn to read both Greek and Hebrew. So, during my first year in seminary I took Greek, learning it through the “inductive method.”
What does that mean? It’s a bit different than the way you would have learned languages in school, where you memorize vocabulary and are taught sentence structures. Inductive learning teaches the language by immersing students in it through translation of a text. Our text was first chapter of John, the very passage you read above. For almost three months we translated the passage, little by little each day, all the while learning the sentence structure and vocabulary. The result was that I became very familiar with it, especially with the first five verses, which you can see below in the original Greek.
1Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. 2οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. 3πάντα δι' αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν 4ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων: 5καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.
I realize that when you look at this passage,… well, it looks like Greek to you. It does so also to me now that I’m twenty years away from having translated anything from Greek. Still, when you spend three months intensively translating a chapter of the Bible you become very familiar with it. In those three month I became very aware that these five verses may be among the most profound in the Bible. Perhaps that’s why they get ignored so often. They are so profound that people don’t pay attention in their pursuit of something simpler.
I have a theory about religious belief, which is that we want so much for faith to be simple and easy to understand that we intentionally miss or ignore the deeper things of faith. I find this to be true not only among Christians, but among non-Christians. For instance, one reason atheists are attracted to the belief that there is no God is the simplicity of it. When God is cut out of life, then life, at least intellectually, becomes simpler. When you deny the existence of God you don’t have to read the Bible, understand complex theologies, or worry about a relationship with God. Agnostics also have similar benefit to deciding to make no decision on God’s existence. New Agers make religion much simpler by believing whatever they want to believe. They can believe in crystals, the goddess, God, nature, or whatever else they want. Also, you see this kind of oversimplification of faith in radical Islam, where Muslims oversimplify their beliefs to make it allow for the mass murder of innocents in the name of Allah. That is not what Islam teaches, but that doesn’t matter to extremists.
Ironically, this tendency to oversimplify religious belief allows Christians to denigrate Islam as a violent religion, suggesting that just because an incredibly small minority believes in mass murder in the name of Allah, then all 1.2 billion Muslims must believe that. That’s much like suggesting that because White Supremacist Christians believe in the killing of African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, and all non-Christians, that must be what all of us Christians believe.
The point of all this is that it is a chronic human tendency to ignore the more complex and profound points of religious belief in order to find clarity through oversimplification. Thus many Christians miss the depths of our passage for today, which has wonderful things to teach us, if we are willing to learn.
What I find so profound about our passage is that it teaches an understanding about Jesus that you find in only one other place in the Bible, which was the passage last week from Colossians 1:15-17: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Our passage, especially verses 1 through 5, have a similarly profound message. Let’s take a look at the three main points of the five versus in depth, and you’ll see what I mean.
1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
Does this passage strike you as profound? The first hundred times I read it I noticed very little. Then, slowly, I became aware of the ramifications of this passage. It presents a different picture from what we normally think about Jesus. We normally think of him as a historical figure who lived 2000 years ago, or as a messiah who sits on the right hand of God. This passage says that Jesus was and is much more than this.
To give you some context, it helps to give you a quick lesson on the gospels and Jesus. Do you know where each one begins its story of Jesus? Mark begins by telling us about Jesus’ baptism. So Mark basically starts the story of Jesus when Jesus begins his ministry. Matthew goes back a little further and starts with Jesus’ birth. Luke goes back even further and begins telling the story of Jesus with his conception. Look above at where John begins the story. He starts it at the beginning of creation. He is saying that Jesus wasn’t just a man born in 4 B.C. who lived to 30 A.D. John is telling us that the man, Jesus, was the incarnation of God who was at the beginning. There was no time without Christ, since Christ was both with God and was God at the beginning.
Also, John gives Jesus a new name, calling him the “Logos,” which we translate as “Word.” I’m not sure that this is the best translation. “Logos” means much more than just “Word.” It is the root of the word “logic,” which means “reason.” But those words don’t capture the fullness of the word logos. In the ancient Greek world the word logos also referred to something called the “Golden Ratio,” which was a ratio that many in the ancient world thought was perfection. The actual formula for the ratio is this:
I can honestly tell you that I have no idea what this means, but it is a ratio found in mathematics, architecture, and all of nature. It is a ratio that exists in most physical things, such as a right angle of a door, the Parthenon, the pyramids of Egypt, the construction of the chambers in a nautilus shell, and the stem and veins of a leaf. It was a number applied to creation, and it was believed to manifest perfection.
When Jesus is called the Logos, John is saying that he was manifesting the perfection of God in creation. It is saying that in Christ you find the perfection of God—a perfection also found throughout creation.
2. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
Look at what the passage says. It says that in the beginning Jesus existed, he was with God, and he was God, and that all things were created through him. In other words, Christ is the ongoing power of creation. We can say that the Father is the Creator, the Source, but Christ is the power of ongoing creation.
Think of the ramifications of this. It isn’t just saying that Jesus was the power of creation at the beginning. It was saying that Jesus was and is the power of creation now and in the future. Whenever you look at the growth of a plant, you are seeing the power of creation in Christ at work. Whenever you see stars in a night sky, you are seeing the power of creation in Christ. And when we look at each other, we are seeing the manifestation of Christ in us. Christ isn’t just God incarnate in this one human being 2000 years ago. Christ is the life and power of God in all of life today, although unlike the rest of creation we are given the power to deny that life. What is significant about the man Jesus is that we believe he was the full manifestation of God in that his humanity didn’t strive with his divinity. In him divinity and humanity were one. In us, we are always at war internally, as our humanity and spirituality duke it out, but that wasn’t the case with Jesus. And through the life, death, and resurrection of that one man, we’ve seen the way God is. But we can also experience something of God in nature and each other, too.
3. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
This is a continuation of the idea presented in the first few sentences. It tells us the Christ wasn’t just the power of creation, but that he was and is life. In other words, Christ is the life-force in all of us. He is the power of what makes us alive. He is the power of life that God gives to the universe, and he is that ongoing life. It’s for this reason that we can say as Christians that when we are open to God in Christ, we become more alive. Our lives take on a greater substance. In contrast, when we give into the darkness of life and give ourselves over to addictions, attitudes, and actions that are toxic, life diminishes in us because we become cut off from God. The more open we are to God in Christ, the more God’s life fills us and we come alive in wonderful ways.
Do you have any idea of what this passage says to us about our faith? It’s because of this passage that I often talk about the life of Christ within us during communion. I don’t say it as a platitude. I believe that when we take part in the sacrament, we create an opening for this life of Christ allowing the ongoing power of creation, the Logos, to come alive in us. The sacraments allow God’s life to grow in us.
It’s also because of this passage that I often talk about us being little christs. It suggests that the more we are truly open to Christ, the more we are able to incarnate Christ in our thoughts, our actions, and our love.
It’s because of this passage that I believe in more than just the historical Jesus and Jesus on the cross. This passage has led me to believe in Christ who is everywhere, in everyone, and continually leading us to a greater way of living—if we are open to him.
So, with all that said, I want to leave you with a question: How open are you to this Christ? How you answer that question will make all the difference in the world.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)