tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66122222035539738872024-03-08T07:02:56.117-08:00Grace Chicago Homily RecapThis blog consists of my recap of the homilies I deliver at Grace Chicago Church (www.gracechicago.com). Because the Holy Spirit moves in the worship service I have discovered that the homily recap offers a helpful complement to the homily preached, as I have time to reflect on what I learned from God in the midst of our community's worship. Having been taught by God's spirit, I have more to say after the homily than I did when I gave it.Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.comBlogger138125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-40038658570920359452012-10-08T11:43:00.000-07:002012-10-08T11:43:16.335-07:00musings on suffering and redemption, part 1When many of us think about suffering and God in the same breath we look for explanations that can make some sense of why God permits suffering to exist in the world he made. However, there really isn’t one that satisfies our intellectual appetite for rational answers and puzzle solving. Scripture tells us in Genesis that evil intruded into the goodness of God’s creation through the free cooperation of our first parents, Adam and Eve, with the evil one. But that story begs the question, why couldn’t God have created in such a way as to preclude the possibility of a Lucifer bent on destroying what God made; so, we come back to mystery.<br />
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Notwithstanding the intellectual frustration and skepticism that sometimes makes us want to avert our eyes from the mythic portrayal of humanity’s fall from grace, Genesis 3 does give us a story with which we resonate as human beings. Whether its Yo Yo Ma playing Ennio Morricone, U2 singing Where The Streets Have No Name, the feeling you have when you hold a newborn baby, or that joyful feeling when everything comes together just right at your dinner party - there are moments when we taste a bit of God’s beauty and imagine that there can be more of it, that there should be more of it! Moreover, we feel deep in our bones that it is wrong that there is not more of it. But we also all know in our more honest and humble moments that none of us has clean hands when it comes to our own participation in acts that find their root in that first evil temptation that came to Eve that caused her to doubt God’s goodness and love for her. We all know that we have hurt others and done our part to turn towards selfishness and away from God and what makes for human flourishing.<br />
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Since the beginning of Christian theology this acknowledgment that we all have participated in acts that resemble Adam’s and Eve’s fall from grace has been referred to as original sin. Rowan WIlliams’ little summary of what we mean by original sin is really quite helpful: “this is a tangle that goes back to the very roots of humanity.... In humanity's history, the ingrained habit of turning inwards, turning in upon ourselves, is passed on. We learn what we want.... by watching someone else wanting it and competing for it. Before we begin to make choices, our options have been silently reduced in this way.... Something needs to reverse the flow, to break the cycle..... Only a human word, a human act will heal the process of human history; it isn't ideas and ideals that will do this, but some moment in history when relations are changed for good and all, when new things concretely become possible.” <br />
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The tangle, as Williams calls it, a painful cycle of suffering and longing for redemption, is just what Paul is talking about in Romans 8:18-30. In vs. 19-23, Paul picks up on the theme of the tragedy of the fall (Genesis 3:16-19), as he evokes the metaphors of that story in a new way that transposes them from local events in the distant past to the universal experience of everyone everywhere. The images of Adam’s and Eve’s suffering (frustration with the soil, pain in childbirth, human to human strife) are transposed into language that describes the universal experience of all of humanity and the whole of creation; the creation itself is in labor pains, and it, along with all of humanity, experiences a painful desire for redemption. However, in this retelling of Genesis 3, the theme of hope that is only hinted at in Genesis 3:15, takes on flesh and blood in Romans 8. Creation’s longing is answered by God, as he remakes the human family after the image of the new Adam and Eve, his son. Jesus is the new character on the stage of re-creation, the firstborn in a large family (Romans 8:29). Jesus is the “human word, <the> human act <that> will heal the process of human history.” This must be, in part, what the author of Hebrews had in mind when he wrote: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”<br />
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So, God’s answer to the problem of evil is a historical one, an existential one. Jesus has come in history to set the human race in a new context, a context of redemption, a large family. In the next of this three part series we will consider what redemptive difference Jesus makes in the here and now.<br />
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Questions for reflection:<br />
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1.If someone were to ask you how you could possibly believe in the existence of a good God when the world is so messed up how would you respond?<br />
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2. Do you resonate with Williams' description of original sin above? Do you think this is a helpful way to talk about the presence of evil and sin in the world?<br />
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3. What do we mean when we say that God's response to evil is historical and existential?<br />
Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-38943770318238623932012-05-22T10:48:00.001-07:002012-05-22T10:48:34.827-07:00Freedom in Philippi Acts 16Review and Introduction to This Sunday’s Text: Acts 16:16-34<br />
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In the history of the liturgy of the church there is a prominent tradition of lingering in the book of Acts for the two months or so of Sundays that separate Easter from Pentecost (Pentecost is next week, by the way). We have talked together a bit about the reasons for our lingering in Acts but maybe we should remind ourselves again. The book of Acts, as many of you know, is a historical account of the growth of the early church. Importantly, among other things, as observed early on in Acts, it is an account of Jesus’ followers growth - their growth from those who deserted him to those who will give their lives preaching about God’s love for all of humankind, the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, in many important ways the book of Acts is a deep reminder to us that God worked through human frailty to build his church, that the growth of the early church is always a matter, to borrow words from Saint Paul in his letter to church in Corinth, a matter of God’s strength working through human weakness and frailty. But there is another important ongoing theme in Luke’s Acts and it is this- Luke wants us to know that God’s love is truly meant to reach all people and all sorts and kinds of people. The gospel is not a message for one religious or ethnic group - it is not meant to be a private religious experience but is supposed to be for the redemption of the entire world and to touch all of humanity. We hear this foreshadowed in Jesus’ words that Luke gives us at the beginning of Acts: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Luke is very eager for us to understand the growth and development of the early church as a missional movement of God - - as God, through his people, makes his love for all of humankind known to all of the peoples of the world, regardless of who they are ethnically, socio-economically, etc.<br />
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Homily Recap:<br />
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However, in the passage before us this morning we are reminded that not everyone wants to hear the good news about Jesus. The ones in the story who really don’t want to hear about it are the men who have been trafficking this young girl. What a tragic picture, a girl whose life was completely out of her control and under the control of dark forces out to exploit her, whether the forces be supernatural or the flesh and blood men who owned her. When she is healed and her life is given back to her her owners retaliate against Paul and his cohort, bringing them before the authorities and charging them with “disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” What is truly disturbing, however, is the fact that this girl’s life is given back to her from the powers of darkness and her owners don’t even stop for one moment to ask themselves whether they ought not to be happy for her? And they certainly don’t pause and ask themselves whether or not exploiting her had been a wicked thing all along! Far from stopping for reflection, they move to retaliate against Paul and Silas. <br />
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Remarkable and chilling is the behavior of these men; this is very sobering for those who have ears to hear!!! <br />
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Luke gives us a provocative literary clue as to why her owners are unable to see her new freedom as an occasion for their own repentance, In verses 18 and 19 Luke uses the same Greek word, “to leave”, to describe the evil spirit’s leaving the girl and the owners’ hope of money leaving them. He says quite literally, the spirit left or departed and the money left and departed. And so in this little word play we are soberly reminded that one of the most common causes for spiritual blindness is greed. But that is not all that is chilling in this vignette. Next in this little scene we see what we often see in our own day. Those whose motives are to exploit others for their own profit hide their agendas behind any subterfuge available. In this passage the men who own the girl, of course, do not haul Paul and Silas before the magistrate and say, “hey we were making money off of the misfortune of this girl and they healed her and took away our ability to do that!”. No, they appeal to the fear of foreigners and suspicion of Jews. The crowd does the rest of the work for them and very quickly Paul and Silas end up flogged and in jail. It is a commonplace for Luke in his gospel and in the book of Acts, in the words of NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, to.... “connect spiritual dispositions to the disposition of possessions.” <br />
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And so all of what has happened so far in this story reminds us that the message of God’s love for the world will often be met with opposition, especially by those who are unwilling to see their spiritual blindness. We are also reminded again of the tragedy that comes from confusing illicit carnal pleasures with human flourishing. The owners’ slave is freed but those men chose to remain slaves to the bondage of their greed. How about you and me this morning? Do we have an attitude or disposition towards money, sex, or power (those are usually the three big idol factories) that keeps us from seeing God’s grace for us? Have we confused illicit carnal pleasures for human flourishing? Sobering thoughts but Luke reminds us here that the gospel is sometimes going to be felt as confrontation, especially when we are suffering from spiritual blindness <br />
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And yet God can move us in an instant from blindness to sight as we see in the rest of our story which is saturated with hope.<br />
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But paradoxically, our narrative this morning takes a turn towards hope only when Paul and Silas are put into prison. So, we are reminded here that the mission of God goes forward with its greatest power when the servants of God are in situations of powerlessness, following the cruciform God in mission. What is illustrated here in the cruciform pattern of Paul and Silas is put in lovely prose in Paul’s letter to the church which forms in Philippi from this very visit: <br />
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2:5 Let the same mind be in you that was* in Christ Jesus, <br />
6 who, though he was in the form of God,<br />
did not regard equality with God<br />
as something to be exploited, <br />
7 but emptied himself,<br />
taking the form of a slave,<br />
being born in human likeness.<br />
And being found in human form, <br />
8 he humbled himself<br />
and became obedient to the point of death—<br />
even death on a cross. <br />
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9 Therefore God also highly exalted him<br />
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It is in his cruciformity that Jesus is exalted and so we expect to see the same pattern in Jesus’ followers. Here are Paul and Silas prisoners in the form of the slave, in stocks and in jail in Philippi - - all because they freed a slave girl from an evil spirit and a life of exploitation. But as I just mentioned, this is where our story takes a turn towards hope. There is an earthquake and all of the prisoners are presented with an opportunity to escape but they don’t take the opportunity!! Somehow, Paul manages to keep everyone from leaving, knowing that the escape would result in the jailer losing his life, either by preemptive suicide, which he is apparently ready to do, or as a result of the capital punishment that would be dealt to him for letting the prisoners escape. <br />
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Now, understand, earthquakes were often seen in antiquity as the work of angry deities and that is about all we should take from the jailer’s question: “how can I be saved?” He is frightened by the earthquake and sees Paul and Silas as the ones who are able to tell him how to be saved from the punishment of the gods. The jailer, unlike the human traffickers responsible for putting Paul and Silas in jail, actually sees Paul and Silas as people who can tell him something he needs to know about the supernatural world. Paul sees this as an opportunity to tell the man about the one true God and how salvation is to be found in Jesus. <br />
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And so we meet salvation in a prison where those who are freed from their shackles remain in jail in order to save the life of a man who was essentially their enemy. Sounds like the gospel. The cruciform pattern of discipleship comes into clear view. I wonder if the Philippian jailer was in church at Philippi some few years later when Paul wrote that Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be used for his advantage, but took the form of a slave. I wonder if he thought about that night when Paul and Silas did not see their freedom from their shackles as an opportunity to take for their own advantage but remained, so to speak, in chains so that they might speak the truth of salvation to this poor man. And so in all of this we are given the clarion reminder that true freedom comes from following Jesus, not in the avoidance of suffering. <br />
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In commenting on this narrative, Dr William Willimon, preacher and scholar, remarks: “in this story everyone who at first appeared to be free, the girl’s owners, the judges, the jailer, is a slave. And everyone who first appeared to be a slave - the poor girl, Paul and Silas is free.”<br />
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What makes for true freedom? Luke reminds us in the way he tells these stories that there are many ways to deceive oneself into thinking that one is flourishing as a human being, but only in following the cruciform Christ in mission can we be truly free.<br />
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Questions for discussion:<br />
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1. Do you have practices in your life that help you detect when you may be suffering from the onset of spiritual blindness?<br />
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2. Do you think of yourself as someone who is capable of hiding under subterfuge in order to not name or ignore your real reason for doing something? Why is acting in this way so sinister and life-destroying? Given the fact that people in leadership (e.g. political leaders, captains of industry) do this all of the time, how should the church respond in a non-partisan, yet prophetic way?<br />
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3. Can you think of a time when you made a profound sacrifice (cruciform-like) for someone in order to bear witness in words or deeds to the gospel?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-64825820210435041482012-05-15T15:04:00.000-07:002012-05-15T15:04:17.416-07:00After Easter - Cornelius and PeterIn the passage before us today we meet a fellow named Cornelius. He lives in an important city called Caesarea and he is an official in the Roman army. He is also, like the Ethiopian Eunuch we met last week, drawn to the God of Israel. And so we are reminded this week, as were last week, that Luke is very eager for us to understand the growth and development of the early church as a missional movement of God - - as God, through his people, makes his love for all of humanity known to all of the peoples of the world, regardless of who they are ethnically, socio-economically, etc. Cornelius is an example of that growth and development. While not being fully converted to Judaism he has become a practitioner of the Jewish religion; his worship of Yahweh is replete with daily prayer and the life-giving discipline of the giving of alms to the poor. Luke, the author of the gospel in his name and this book of Acts, thinks that this latter aspect of Cornelius’ worship is very important, for he calls special attention to it using the motif of Old Testament sacrifices (e.g. the alms are a memorial before God as Cornelius will later talk about them when Peter comes to visit him).<br />
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The reason why Cornelius’ giving of alms is so important to Luke is because the giving of alms to the poor is a sign that God is at work in the depths of the human heart. <br />
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Talented authors often use intertextual echoes to bring points home to their readers. In a novel, for instance, something may happen early on in the story, the importance of which is seen in its fullness only later in the story when something else happens that connects back to the earlier scene.<br />
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Here in this story of Cornelius we encounter just such an echo, an echo that comes to us from another story Luke tells us in his gospel, another story that talks about alms and the human heart.<br />
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In the gospel of Luke we meet Jesus talking about the importance of giving alms to the poor; this happens in the midst of a confrontation with the corrupt religious leadership of his day Luke (11:33-34). Invited to dinner at the home of one of those leaders, Jesus deliberately skips an important religious rite; he does not ceremoniously wash before the meal. When confronted, he says in so many words, you foolish people; you are dirty on the inside as evidenced by your greed and your obsession over your social status. This is made painfully obvious by your lack of support of the poor people in your midst. Deal with the inside of your heart. Repent of your selfishness and greed and this repentance will be reinforced by your giving alms to the poor. <br />
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Jesus is teaching in this passage, as in the whole of the gospel, that it is the cleanness of the heart that counts with God, and the evidence that God is at work in the heart will be in the way people treat the vulnerable in their midst. Fast forward from that encounter, through the cross and the resurrection and into the growth of the gospel in the early church and here in the text before us we have our echo of the importance of alms for the poor in relationship to ritual cleanliness. But this time someone gets it right and the someone is one who is by definition ritually impure - he is a gentile. The one who is counted by the Judaism of that day as unclean and unwashed gives evidence that God is at work in his heart by how he treats the poor.<br />
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We will meet Cornelius again in the homily that follows communion and he will teach us a lot about God’s love for all people but as we get ready to receive the sacrament of communion let us remember that at this table each week we are invited to come close to God’s heart; we confess our sins and we are cleansed so that we may love as Jesus loves, and care for others as Jesus cares for us. It is not what is on the outside that counts but that which is on the inside - it is what is on the inside, twisted and broken that we bring to Jesus to be straightened and made whole.<br />
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Part Two:<br />
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In the time we have remaining this morning I want us to come back to Cornelius. We have already noted that Cornelius is a signpost of what God desires to do with the whole of humanity - to change us from the inside out so that we might participate in Christ’s self giving love. The evidence of God’s work in Cornelius is seen clearly, perhaps most clearly, in the way he treated the vulnerable in his midst, by giving alms to the poor. But Cornelius is a signpost in another important way too. His response, as one outside of Israel to the God of Israel is a signpost (like the Ethiopian Eunuch of last week) that the mission of God is to bring his redemptive love in Christ to the whole of humanity - to every sort and kind of people.<br />
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In a conversation this week with a friend who is a New Testament professor, I learned something that I was not aware of: I quote Aaron Kuecker here almost verbatim: “Every time the Spirit speaks directly to a person in Acts, <the Spirit >sends them toward a gospelled relationship that crosses a significant social barrier”.<br />
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And so last week the Holy Spirit tells Philip to go and talk to the Ethiopian Eunuch and this week, Peter, is told by the Holy Spirit to go to with Cornelius’ people.<br />
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We have remarked before that part of following Jesus is learning to see people as God sees them and nowhere is this drilled home more clearly than in what the Spirit teaches Peter in this mysterious vision; but, it is the way Peter applies what he learns in the vision that is most remarkable. Look at the two passages below - one is about food and one is about people.<br />
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Acts 10:14 But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.’ 15The voice said to him again, a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ 16This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.<br />
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Acts 10:28 You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. <br />
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In the vision Peter is told to regard foods that he regarded unclean as clean; and yet when he comes into Cornelius’ home he says that God has shown him that he should regard no person as unclean or profane. What is going on here? In the vision, there is pork and shellfish and the like, but in Cornelius’ home there is no mention of food but only of people - ONLY OF PEOPLE.<br />
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Well, something very important is going on. In the religious and socio-cultural context in which Peter lived what a person ate and how they were to be regarded as a human being were inseparable..... but here Peter says I have been taught by God to pull those things apart and to see all people as precious and dear to God.... it is what is going on in the inside that counts!!!!<br />
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Church, friends, brothers and sisters: we have no right to expect that we can follow the Spirit at work in the world when we regard the other, the one who is different from us as unclean, profane and not loved by God. To put it positively, we follow the Spirit and Jesus in mission when we take as a starting point that all people are loved by God and precious to him even though we struggle to see people that way because of our sinful fear and judgment of the other.<br />
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Questions for discussion:<br />
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1. I suggested above that the giving of alms, or our modern day equivalent, reinforces the work of God in our hearts? Do you agree with this? If not, explain why not. If you agree, why do you think God works that way?<br />
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2. On what grounds does Peter state his desire to baptize Cornelius’ people? Why does he ask if anyone wants to withhold baptism? Is that a rhetorical question? <br />
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3. Do you think, as a church, we receive outsiders as enthusiastically as does the early church as exemplified by how eagerly and quickly they assimilate the gentiles?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-88086647082537692792012-05-08T09:18:00.001-07:002012-05-08T09:18:53.406-07:00after easter again - the Ethiopian eunuchThe book of Acts, as many of you know, is a historical account of the growth of the early church. Importantly, it is among other things, as we have been observing recently, an account of Jesus’ followers growth - their growth from those who deserted him to those who will give their lives preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ: God’s love for all of humankind through Jesus. So, in many important ways the book of Acts is a deep reminder to us that God worked through human frailty to build his church, that the growth of the early church is always a matter, to borrow words from Saint Paul in his letter to church in Corinth, a matter of God’s strength working through human weakness and frailty. But there is another important movement in Luke’s symphony, and this is the movement - that God’s love is truly meant to reach all people and all sorts and kinds of people. The gospel is not a message for one religious or ethnic group - it is not meant to be a private religious experience but is supposed to be for the redemption of the entire world and to touch all of humanity. We hear this foreshadowed in Jesus’ words that Luke gives us at the beginning of Acts: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." <br />
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Now, earlier in Acts Luke has shown us the power of the gospel at work in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and in our text this morning we come to this truly amazing encounter that Philip has with the man from Ethiopia. The thing to note here, in light of Jesus’ words about God’s love coming to the ends of the earth, is that Ethiopians were regarded as living pretty much at the end of the earth. In fact historians note that Homer, in the Odyssey, mentions Ethiopians as those who live on the “Southern edge of the earth”. So, for Luke, in the way that he organizes and emphasizes the preaching of the early church leaders he clearly wants us to understand that a big Ethiopian flag is being raised here on this road from Jerusalem; and God is saying, I love these people as much as my beloved Israel, as much as their half-sisters and brothers in Samaria - go find me some people further away from Ethiopia and guess what, put another flag in the ground because I love those people too. There is always enough of the love of God to go around; human beings are the ones that are stingy with it and that should give us pause to reflect and be sure that we are not stingy with God’s love.<br />
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Back to the text: there is something about our Ethiopian man here that is just as important to Luke than where he is from. It is that he is a eunuch. Luke tells us five times that he is a eunuch; five times in a very short story. Luke thinks this is important to know about him. Now, a quick reminder about eunuchs in the ancient world. They were often taken from their families and castrated before puberty - they were people whose bodies were butchered in order to make them a unique kind of slave to the powerful master or mistress they served, for the eunuch had no family and no chance of having a family to get in the way of his singular devotion to the one who had power over him. Also, many times the eunuch-slave was entrusted to be around royal females or harems because he had been castrated. A eunuchs life was cruelly crafted to belong to no one but his master or mistress.<br />
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This particular eunuch had, apparently, come into contact with the God of Israel through Jews living in Ethiopia and his interest in the God of Abraham had drawn him to Jerusalem on what seems to have beeem a pilgrimage of sorts. He was apparently interested in becoming a follower of Yahweh and because of his position as treasurer to the Queen of Ethiopia, he actually has the means to make this trip.<br />
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Now, the first thing that comes to my mind about a long trip like that is that the one who takes it is being a bit, or maybe a lot, vulnerable. The Ethiopian was coming into Jerusalem to the temple as an extreme and exotic foreigner, a curiosity even among the Romans and Greeks, not to mention the people of Israel. The eunuch may have felt the same way some of you have felt when you have extended yourself to go to church for the first time or a first time in a long time; or maybe it is how you have felt when you have decided to draw closer to people within the church community - it feels risky - you can feel vulnerable and a bit nervous. What if my good faith efforts are rejected? Well, the thing you need to know about what would have happened to the eunuch in Jerusalem is that by and large his good faith efforts would have been in a very real sense rejected. The thing to know about what would have happened to him when he reached the temple is this: he would have been denied entrance. This is because according to Levitical law, no eunuchs (regarded as ritually impure due to their castration) were allowed in the temple. Their worship would always be, at best, at the margins of the community. After being reminded - and reminded when he is already in a vulnerable spot - of the multi-faceted scars that come with being a eunuch he gets in his chariot to head home. <br />
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Whatever happened in Jerusalem, however, was not enough to deter this man’s interest in Yahweh, for we meet him reading from the prophet Isaiah. And the text he is reading, well, let’s say that it is really catching his interest - <br />
NRSV:<br />
“ In his humiliation justice was denied him.<br />
Who can describe his generation?<br />
For his life is taken away from the earth.’”<br />
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NIV: <br />
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.<br />
Who can speak of his descendants?<br />
For his life was taken from the earth.<br />
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Who is this about, the prophet or someone else, the eunuch asks? This was not a casual question for the eunuch, for like so many who have suffered under the powerful, the eunuch knew about people who had been humiliated, who had justice denied to them. Like millions of others who suffer injustices on this earth the eunuch knew that the person he was reading about in this messianic Psalm was someone with whom he could identify. There is something else about this passage that is especially poignant and another translation really brings it home.... the NIV renders the phrase about his generation, “who can speak of his descendants”.<br />
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The eunuch knew also of those whose lives were taken away from the earth, and whose descendants would never be spoken of, namely, eunuchs, namely him.<br />
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Who is being spoken of in this passage?! Who is the prophet talking about?! These were not casual or abstract questions. There was something about this Holy Book that spoke to his story, to his life. The answer that Philip gave no doubt invited the eunuch to see the story of Jesus’ suffering and humiliation in redemptive solidarity with his own (Philip begins preaching the gospel at that very passage from Isaiah). The eunuch in that moment came to know that God, in Christ, shares in our suffering so that he might claim our scars as his own, so that he might give us newness of life beyond the scars. There is a very important principle here in this and please don’t miss it: the story of God’s love in Scripture is always about you and Christ’s sharing in your suffering and pain to draw you into his redemptive love.<br />
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The eunuch was one who was forced to be without a family, but in this picture before us he is brought into the family of God. Philip’ solidarity with the eunuch is a picture of Christ’s solidarity with him and of the enfolding love of a new family, the family of God consisting of all of Christ’s younger brothers and sisters. Remarkably there is a passage that comes later in that scroll of Isaiah - just three chapters later in our version of the OT.<br />
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Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,<br />
‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’;<br />
and do not let the eunuch say,<br />
‘I am just a dry tree.’ <br />
4 For thus says the Lord:<br />
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,<br />
who choose the things that please me<br />
and hold fast my covenant, <br />
5 I will give, in my house and within my walls,<br />
a monument and a name<br />
better than sons and daughters;<br />
I will give them an everlasting name<br />
that shall not be cut off. <br />
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I wonder if Philip showed this to him? I bet he did.<br />
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A New Testament professor friend of mine reminded me the other day that eunuchs were really segregated in a cruel way in the ancient world: “eunuchs are a stock figure in antiquity for the 'grotesque other' - neither male nor female (A. Kuecker)”. Grace Chicago Church, we know we are following Jesus when we are known to be a community that boldly embraces those who society has put at the margins and declared to be outsiders, those who are made to be the butt of jokes. May God pour out his love on us so that we may pour it out on everyone else. <br />
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Questions for discussion:<br />
1. As mentioned above, Philip began with the text the eunuch was reading and used it as the door through which to walk to tell the rest of the story of the gospel. Does this approach stimulate your thinking about how you might talk about the gospel to those who have not heard or understood it? If so, how so?<br />
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2. Can you give two or three examples of kinds of people who are contemporary equivalents to eunuchs in the ancient world (stock figures of the grotesque other). <br />
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3. How do you think our church is doing at welcoming the examples you offered in answer to the above question?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-4431129694763184642012-05-01T08:56:00.001-07:002012-05-08T08:33:40.581-07:00After Easter 3In the text before us this morning we have before us another passage of scripture that is familiar to many of us (Acts 4: 5-12). The passage often comes up this time of year, as the lectionary reminds us that we need to take time to ponder together the remarkable events that follow quite closely on the heels of the resurrection of the Son of God. The rhythm of the lectionary, so to speak, is inviting us to linger for a while on the impact of Easter. And so for the past few Sundays we have been taking note of several of Jesus’ post-Easter visits with his disciples. DON’T FORGET that the one common theme to all of these visits was Jesus’ desire to help his followers face their failures and weaknesses and restore them them to their vocation of following him in mission. As someone has put it, “On the far side of the resurrection, vocation and forgiveness occur together....”.<br />
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In the passage before us this morning we meet Peter, recently forgiven and restored by Jesus, now proclaiming boldly the gospel of Jesus Christ in the very city where Jesus was crucified, in the very city where Peter had denied him three times. Stop there for just a moment. Isn’t it amazing how powerful a hold geography can have on us?! I think all of us can relate to being back in familiar surroundings - even literally geographical surroundings (for Peter, Jerusalem) - where our past actions in those surroundings confronts us with our failure. In those moments it can at first feel like nothing has changed. You look up and you see a park bench or a cafe and you think unpleasant thoughts. Yet because of God’s forgiveness and acceptance in Christ the landscape of our pasts can become places of hope instead of a reminder of our failures. I am not suggesting that this happens lightly or automatically but if we learn to practice seeing ourselves as those who have been forgiven by God in Christ slowly but surely even the most haunting of landscapes can become vistas of God’s grace and love for us. It is because this stuff doesn’t come easily or automatically that some spiritual traditions with our faith have emphasized joining confession and acceptance of God’s love with physical practices like breathing, praying with icons in hand, getting on one’s knees, coming forward to receive communion each week, etc. This is because leaving the difficult practice of accepting God’s love and forgiveness simply to a cerebral exercise is too tall an order for our feeble minds.<br />
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Back to the Scripture text at hand: so, here is Peter proclaiming the gospel to the very religious leadership who had conspired to have Jesus murdered by the Roman government. Specifically, Peter and John are being detained and threatened for preaching and healing in Jesus’ name and so Peter takes the opportunity to appeal to the religious leadership to recognize the horror of what they have done. He says to them, in so many words, the one whom you crucified is now the one in whom you need to find salvation. Your victim has been raised from the dead; your victim is your judge; your judge forgives you. Repent and accept his forgiveness because there will be no other way of dealing with your sin if you refuse God’s love for you in the very one you crucified.<br />
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The language that Peter uses here to confront the authorities is strong and courageous, to be sure. But what is easy for us to miss is how much this tells us about the persistence that God has with regard to his passion to forgive people - even specifically those who conspired to murder the innocent Son of God. The proclamation to them from the OT, a text with which they would have familiarity, the stone the builders have rejected has become the chief cornerstone, is said to them to jar them out of their blindness and to beckon them to see that it is in Jesus that God is at work in the world to bring forgiveness, healing, and newness of life. He does not say to them, you had your chance - now you may as well go hang yourselves because God is never going to accept you. No, just the opposite: and one thinks here of the powerful words of the theologian, M Volf: "If God does not find what is pleasing in an object - if human beings have become ungodly - God does not abandon the object in disgust until it changes its character. Instead, God seeks to re-create it to become lovable again... God is not just generous even to the unrighteous; God also forgives their unrighteousness so as to lead them through repentance back to the good they have abandoned." <Note: horrifyingly, this confrontation with the religious leadership wherein Peter calls them to repentance has often been ripped from its context and used in anti-semitic campaigns. We should be aware of this so we can counter such twisted approaches whenever we have a chance.)<br />
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Sadly, in today’s religious climate, there are a great many Christian people (and to my dismay it seems like theirs are the voices most often heard in the media) who talk as if God somehow delights at the prospect of condemning the unbeliever. In this sort of climate it becomes even more important that we take great care in how we present the uniqueness of Jesus that is portrayed in this passage. When we talk about “salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved”, we must make sure that people don’t imagine us to be saying that we know the end game between God and any individual person. What we are saying positively is that we, as followers of Jesus, believe that we have found our life in God to be in Jesus Christ and that the forgiveness, newness of life, wisdom, and life-giving community we have found in him can be found in no one else. This approach to dealing with the uniqueness of Jesus - this positive approach (which I think is the approach taken even in this bracing mini-sermon of Peter’s when you really think of it in its context) - is really very important. It is important because in this approach to the teaching in this text we are reminded of something very important that we need to come to terms with: God wants us to experience forgiveness and life in Jesus in such a genuine and palpable way that we are always at the ready to say to anyone and everyone that what we experience of human flourishing comes to us by no other name than Jesus. We should live our lives so that we are able to say to anyone and everyone that it is by no other name than Jesus that we have been drawn out of our selfishness in order to love others with the same love that God has loved us; that it is by no other name than Jesus that I have found the humility and impetus to ask my spouse to forgive me for the way I spoke to her. We should be able to confess that it is by no other name than Jesus that I am put in a space where I remember how much I am loved by God, in turn giving me a proper love of self that can enable me to turn from self-destructive patterns of sin that are appealing only in moments when I forget how much I am loved by God. It is by no other name than Jesus that the landscapes of my life become transformed from fields of despair and selfish wandering into places of hope where I can find my life in Christ and in loving my neighbor as myself. You get the picture.<br />
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Questions for discussion:<br />
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1. If someone who is not a Christian were to ask you to explain what Peter means when he says there is salvation in no one else what would you say? Would you draw a distinction between uniqueness and finality on the one hand and narrowness on the other?<br />
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2. As we noted above, Peter confronts the religious leadership with their sin and says to them, in so many words, there is no way out of the trap you have made for yourself regarding Jesus other than repenting and being reconciled to him. This is shocking in at least two way: (a) his appeal to them is to be forgiven when he is probably angry with them and afraid of them (b) they are given only one route to move forward and it is through the risen Jesus. Does this part of the passage make you think of people from whom you need forgiveness?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-19918848658688011542012-04-25T14:34:00.001-07:002012-04-25T14:34:07.983-07:00After Easter (John 21)The text before us this morning is another text about forgiveness and reconciliation. That is a common, if not predominant, theme in Jesus’ post-resurrection, post-Easter visits with his disciples. We have already called attention to this in last week’s homily where we noted that Jesus’ restoration of the disciples after they had deserted and denied him would assure that the church in its formative years, in the power of the Holy Spirit, would be formed into a community that, when it is true to its calling, will be easily recognizable as a place where people know by experience the radical importance of God’s forgiveness. The church, when it is true to its formative moment, is easily recognizable as a community that cherishes and lives by the truth that “God does not forgive us because we are good but makes us good by forgiving us”.
And again this morning, here in this text (John 21), everything has to do with Jesus’ desire to help Peter face himself, his shame over his denial of Jesus, and his fears and uncertainty that led him to desert and deny. Peter had denied Jesus three times by a charcoal fire, as John has recorded it for us earlier in this gospel. Here, Jesus, also with a charcoal fire nearby, a literary nuance that John would not want us to miss, creates three exchanges with Peter that allows Peter to affirm three times his commitment to follow Jesus in mission, to care for God’s flock as a young leader in what will become Christ’s church - three affirmations, one for each of his earlier denials.
I want to note two things about all of this that I hope will help us get our heads and hearts around what this passage might be saying to us this morning. First, Jesus suggests that Peter’s way forward to flourishing will be by taking responsibility to serve others in the way that Jesus has served him. Three times Peter says I love you, and three times Jesus says in so many words: “then love and care for my flock”. This is Jesus, in other words, reminding Peter of what he said to the disciples as he turned to face Jerusalem and the cross: “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”.
What will hold Peter’s confession of love for Jesus in the future is not his will-power or his inherent goodness. What will hold Peter fast is his experience of Jesus’ restoration of him, reinforced and made solid through the discipline of pouring that same love into the lives of others. Peter, waking up each morning with a concern for the well being of God’s people and his neighbors, whoever they may be, will create the foundation from which he will not fall.
So many times people will say to me, I don’t know how to deal with my doubts about my faith. I just feel like I can’t really commit to my faith because of all of these doubts I have. While it is important to face doubts genuinely and not feel ashamed or weak for having them, it is also important to not allow doubts to paralyze us from living in the flow of God’s love. In other words, what I think Jesus is saying to us, through Peter, is something like this: if you want to experience the authenticity of God’s love for you, then take responsibility for loving others as God has loved the world in Christ.
Or, as the Carmelite Nun, Ruth Burrows puts it in an interview about her book, Love Unknown,
“Many people think they have no faith because they feel they haven't. They do not realize that they must make a choice to believe, take the risk of believing, of committing themselves and setting themselves to live out the commitment. Never mind that they continue to feel that they do not believe. Under cover of being "authentic" we can spend our lives waiting for the kind of certainty we cannot have.”
One thinks here of John’s words in 1 John 3:18:
“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”
It would do us well as a church community, as we ponder this deep truth together, to note that there is very little in our socio-cultural setting to reinforce the truth that an authentic experience of God comes in a life of serving and loving others. There is so much in our advertising, in our consumerist mentalities, and in the spirit of free-wheeling hedonism that tempt us to think that a life well lived is a life where the bucket list is checked off - and the bucket list doesn’t seem to include a great deal of occasions of sacrifice for others. Contrary to our zeitgeist, the gospel says that a life well lived will conform to Jesus’ pattern of self-giving love.
Interestingly, speaking of bucket lists, there is also here in this passage a remarkable reference to Peter’s death. Jesus says to him:
“Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”
The tradition of the early church, going back to the early church historian, Eusebius, tells us that Peter was martyred (as also was Paul) in the persecution of the church at the hands of the Roman emperor, Nero, in about 62 AD. There is also a tradition of the early church going back to Origen that Peter insisted on being crucified upside, declaring that he was not worthy of being crucified in the same manner as Jesus.
What is most significant, though, about Peter’s death is not that he was a heroic martyr but that the life that took him to martyrdom was a life poured out in love for others. The Peter who denied Jesus three times became the leader of the early church who, Luke tells us in Acts, when the governing authorities forbade him from preaching the gospel said to them: ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.*
Finally, Peter tells us in his own words in the first of two epistles bearing his name what sort of life he found to be worth living. It was not a life of religious self-confidence, or intellectual certainty but a life marked by living in the flow of God’s love for people. For Peter, the purification of the soul came through obedience to Jesus’ self-giving love and produces a community known by that love. In Peter’s own words: “Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth* so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply* from the heart.” (1 Peter 1:22)
May God enlarge our faith and expand our imaginations so that we might understand how to order our lives so that we might live for the sake of our brothers and sisters in Christ and for the neighbor.
1. Do you find that sometimes you are guilty of the condition Burrows speaks to above? (i.e. “under cover of being authentic”, spending our lives waiting for a kind of certainty we cannot have.
2. What do you do when you struggle with doubt? Have you ever considered facing your doubts with action (e.g. taking responsibility to pour God’s love into others)? Assuming that most of us could be doing better with all manner of disciplines, what it would like for you to take a greater responsibility for pouring God’s love into others?
3. Does the exercise Jesus went through with Peter (three opportunities to affirm, one for each of the denials) make you think more deeply and imaginatively about the practice of confession of sin and affirmation/absolution? What comes to mind?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-14835429902407528472012-04-10T13:57:00.002-07:002012-04-10T14:01:15.154-07:00Easter 2012: Creation and New Creationthe recap below is in two parts, marked accordingly - the texts for Easter were Revelation 21:1-4; Romans 8:18-26; John 20:1-18<br /><br />Part One: Before Communion<br /><br />Our text before us from Romans 8 is a resurrection text that pictures the hope of the entire cosmos bound up in what God has promised to do for a new humanity destined to be raised in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.<br /><br />Romans 8:19: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God”<br />pairs with verse 23, “and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”<br /><br />Also, the same rich theology is found in the passage which serves as our regular assurance of forgiveness during preparation for communion: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new (2 Cor. 5:17”).<br /><br />We explored this passage at greater depth during the homily but before we received communion we took note that Paul gives us some important teaching regarding what one of our postures should be towards this great hope of cosmic redemption and our resurrection. The posture? Patience! This may seem a little counter-intuitive. After all, didn’t we just read that “the whole creation”, as one translation renders it, “stands on tiptoes” awaiting the resurrection of human beings? And what are we supposed to be in response to that mind-blowing news!? Patient?!<br /><br />Why would Paul stop at that point to exhort us to patience? Because he wants Christians to be real about what it is like to experience the promise of redemption in the midst of the messiness of a world that is not yet fully redeemed; he wants us to be real about what it is like for us to experience God’s grace and then fall back into faithlessness; and there is a certain way that he wants us to wear this realism - and the way is patience.<br /><br />I recently saw at a local coffee shop an ad for a math tutor In addition to listing his credentials as a mathematician and math educator he also included this line: I am patient. I thought that was genius marketing, for everyone who struggles with math anxiety needs a patient tutor.<br /><br />What Paul is saying here is that we are to have a big-picture patience towards our fellow human beings, with a fallen world, and with ourselves. We need to have patience while we await in faith and hope the promise of the resurrection. <br /><br />When you sin; when you become furiously frustrated with the seeming futility of your endeavors; or, when you feel paralyzed by doubt - St Paul exhorts you to be patient. He does not say pretend everything is OK or better than it actually is; he does not say become a hedonist or nihilist in the face of your angst; he does not say ignore your sins or your frustration. Instead, he says, in so many words, “be patient with them and with all else”. The question is begged at this point. Why should you be patient? Our answer is in two parts. (1) God is patient with us (2) you have an anchor that holds you to the promise of the world to come - the resurrected Jesus. So, in the meanwhile you can be patient with yourself and others, even if it is a restless patience - and it often is. <br /><br />But you say you don’t my failure - how can God be patient with me? How can I be patient with myself in light of what I know about myself? Well, here is where it is important to remember that Good Friday and Easter are joined inextricably together. So, when we take a glance back at Good Friday we remember that it is precisely in what is perceived by human judgment to be failure that God heals the world. Jesus went to the cross a failure, a human failure; he disappointed all of the human expectations of who Messiah should be and what Messiah should don. So, he died alone! He was in the minds of even his followers, a failed Messiah.<br /><br />Even though Jesus’ perceived human failure on the cross is not due to any defect on his part, it is vitally important that we comprehend the ramifications of the fact that he willingly put himself in the place of human shame and failure in order to identify with our shame so that we might be embraced by the Father’s love. In that moment of separation from God the Father, when Jesus had all of the evil and sin of the world taken into himself, that is the same moment that he claimed our failures, in order to take them through the purging fires of death and into the promise of resurrection. As St. Paul puts it in the 6th chapter of Romans, “if you have been united with him in a death like his you shall surely be united in a resurrection like his.”<br /><br />Discussion Questions:<br /><br />1. Can you think of occasions when you should have been more patient with the frailties and failures of those around you? What was going on in your mind and heart when you did not exercise patience?<br /><br />2. Read the part of George Herbert’s poem and Ben Myers’ comment on it below. Then discuss the question that comes at the end of that.<br /><br /><br />Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,<br /> Guilty of dust and sin.<br />But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack<br /> From my first entrance in,<br />Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning<br /> If I lack'd any thing.<br /><br />"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";<br /> Love said, "You shall be he."<br />"I, the unkind, ungrateful? ah my dear,<br /> I cannot look on thee."<br />Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,<br /> "Who made the eyes but I?"<br /><br />"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame<br /> Go where it doth deserve."<br />"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"<br /> "My dear, then I will serve."<br />"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."<br /> So I did sit and eat.<br /><br />Commenting on this poem, New Testament Prof Ben Myers wrote on his blog recently:<br /><br />“The opposite of love is not hatred, but shame. "Love bade me welcome yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin" (George Herbert). Divine love is the abolition of shame. It is hospitality, welcome, the healing of the wounded gaze. "Love took my hand and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?" Shame stoops over, looking inward on the self. Quick-eyed love stands up straight, face to face with the beloved.” Ben Myers<br /><br />In light of what Myers says above, do you think you should ever feel ashamed before God? What should it sound like to preach the gospel to yourself if and when you do feel ashamed before God?<br /><br />3. In light of what we have talked about above, do you think some of these insights (e.g. Jesus’ deliberately taking a place of shame) might help you tell the gospel story a bit more robustly than you might have some time ago? Explain what you mean with examples.<br /><br /><br /><br />Part Two: After Communion<br /><br />When the tomb was discovered to be empty this was a mind-blowing experience for the early disciples; no one expected that Jesus would be raised from the dead. It is not as if his disciples went away from the events surrounding his crucifixion and said, as one theologian has put it: “that’s OK -God will raise him from the dead. No, emphatically no! No one expected a resurrection from the dead in this way (devout Jews expected a resurrection at the end of history but not one person, namely the Messiah, in the middle of history). But very early in the life of the church (and we saw it in our Romans text this morning), within not too many years of the disciples’ first experience of the resurrected Lord, they begin to incorporate the reality of the resurrection into their devotional theology; their theological imaginations are taken over by this staggering event and the resurrection of Jesus becomes another crucial lens through which to understand God’s love for this world. <br /><br />It is this lens that makes it possible for Paul to say what he does in Romans 8, where he spells out the promises of individual salvation in the broader context of God’s creation and new creation. I submit to you that not enough importance is put on the importance of seeing our salvation as individual people within this broader story of what the creator God has always intended for his fallen creation. <br /><br />Warp and woof is a lovely phrase that not many people use anymore; it is comes to us from the world of weaving. The warp threads, in a piece of woven fabric, run lengthwise while the woof threads run crosswise. I like to use this phrase when talking about creation and new-creation/redemption because creation and redemption taken together are the warp and the woof of God’s intentions for this world. He who created did not have to be coaxed to redeem; it was the same love that drove him to create a world - a world that would one day be in dire need of redemption - that drew Jesus to the cross to die on our behalf. Jesus Christ holds the weaving of creation and new creation together. The fall of humankind had cosmic ramifications and so the resurrection of humankind in Christ does as well. The same love that drew forth a world of divine image bearers is the same love that redeems the failures of divine image bearers<br /><br />The English poet, John Donne, captures the important connections between creation, new creation, and resurrection in these lovely verses taken from his poem entitled, Hymn To God, My God, in My Sickness:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />We think that Paradise and Calvary,<br /> Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;<br />Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;<br /> As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,<br /> May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.<br /><br />So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;<br /> By these his thorns, give me his other crown;<br />And as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,<br /> Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:<br />"Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down."<br /><br /><br /><br />What Donne expresses in this beautiful verse is what Paul implies in Romans 8: God’s intention in creation and redemption springs from the same love. Moreover, when we remember that creation and new creation are the warp and the woof of God’s creation-project, we are also provided with one of the reasons why we can trust the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For, God, unlike us, has no other motive than love when he creates and when he redeems. The only motivation for creation was to make something beautiful; God did not need beauty. His desire to make beauty is sheerly gratuitous. Likewise, in his new creation, our redemption and resurrection, we recognize that he is also motivated by sheer generosity. Redemption and creation are gratuitous, free of charge, and both flow from the fount of God’s love.<br /><br /><br />Expanding on this idea - Rowan Williams in his book Tokens of Trust, in reflecting on the warp and the woof of creation and new creation puts it to us that we can trust God because his only motive is love; he has no private or hidden agenda. His agenda is for the sake of humankind, whom he created in his own image and in whose image, now known to us as the face of Jesus Christ, we are being redeemed. To illustrate his point, he offers this example from the healing of the man born blind in John 9. <br /><br />“Jesus asks the blind man he’s just cured whether he believes in the Son of Man. He’s certainly not asking whether the man is of the opinion that the Son of Man exists; he wants to know whether the former blind man is ready to trust the Son of Man - that is Jesus in his role as representative of the human race before God. The man - naturally - wants to know who the ‘Son of Man’ is, and Jesus says that it is him; the man responds with the words, ‘I believe’.<br /><br />He believes; he has confidence. That is, he doesn’t go off wondering whether the Son of Man is out to further his own ends and deceive him. He trusts Jesus to be working for him, not for any selfish goals and he believes that what he sees and hears when Jesus is around is the truth (Williams from Tokens of Trust, p.5)”.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Rowan Williams, in the book mentioned above, observes that a great many people nowadays have a profound distrust of authority. Many, many people simply don’t trust that the authorities and institutions that they have dealings with are really are working for them. Do you agree with his suggestion? Give some examples based on whether you agree or disagree. <br /><br />2. Can you put into your own words why it is important to see creation and new creation as the warp and the woof of God’s “creation-project”? <br /><br />3. If someone were to ask you why they should believe in God or trust him, would you feel comfortable using the ideas put forward above, especially the thoughts of Williams around the healing of the blind man?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-46034163078433799552012-04-03T11:56:00.003-07:002012-04-03T12:12:38.182-07:00Palm Sunday 2012 - Missional HumilityIt is a sobering thing to think that we might be guilty of making God in our image and acting as if we know our needs better than he does. This is of course what many of Jesus’ first century contemporaries had done with regard to the image they had drawn of what messiah should be for them.<br /><br />Many of Jesus’ contemporaries wanted their messiah to come on a war horse and mount a successful revolt against the Romans. Before we think that too incredulous we must admit that such a sentiment would be an understandable desire for any group of people who were under the foot of Roman imperial power. However - and this is what we note each year on Palm Sunday, Jesus did not come on a war horse. He came on a humble beast of burden.<br /><br />Ben Witherington (some of you have heard this before but it is worth repeating) has a nice summary of what many in the crowds of passover wanted:<br /><br />“The cry Hosanna (see Ps. 118.25) seems to in fact be a plea in Hebrew meaning “Save Now!”. The crowds were crying out for a particular kind of political liberation it would appear on the spot, but Jesus had another idea in mind entirely of what made for peace, what made for pacification of our warring madness, what made for liberation and redemption. The real enemy was not Romans or Greeks, or foreigners in general. The real enemy lurked within the hearts of every fallen person—it is called sin.”<br /><br />It should be arresting to realize that each of us is capable of making God in our own image and refusing to recognize him when he comes to us on his terms. It is a temptation that all of us deal with whether we are first century Israel of old wishing for the blood of Roman oppressors to run through the streets, or a nice upper middle class person who refuses to recognize his own sin but desires for God to exact some sort of vengeance on his work colleagues who slighted him at the last team building meeting.<br /><br />Again, Witherington about Jesus on Palm Sunday: “Jesus did not come to meet either his earliest followers expectations or ours. He came to meet our needs.”<br /><br />Jesus wants to deal with the deep needs of our heart in spite of our desire to hide them away from him. As we prepared to come to the communion table this past Sunday we encouraged one another to ask God to reveal to each of us the deep needs in our hearts, needs we must ask him to speak to through the Spirit. I remarked that perhaps there is something for which you and I need to ask God’s forgiveness but we have been too preoccupied by everything else to have the spiritual focus to repent. I suggested that perhaps you or I are so deeply angry with a friend or loved one that we have forgotten the basic call to love, forgive and seek to be the agent of reconciliation. We concluded the communion meditation with these words: whatever it is that you bring to God this morning you can rest assured of one thing - the one who came to his throne on a beast of burden comes to you in order to take your burdens and make them his own.<br /><br /><br />It is a commonplace to talk about Jesus’ humility on Palm Sunday and we have many times at Grace. But for many of us - when we think of humility we just tend to think of it as the opposite of pride. So far so good. Arrogance, self-importance, egoism and pride all come up as antonyms for humility and who wouldn’t rather be with someone who is the opposite of all those things? However, Jesus’ humility is much more than the opposite of pride, arrogance, self-importance and egoism. For Jesus, his humility was joined to his mission of giving his life away for the sake of others (Philippians 2:1-11). So, I submit that this is what is truly important to know about Jesus’ humility: it is not the sort of humility that is simply polite and good manners. You know what I mean - you are at a dinner party and someone compliments you on your accomplishments etc. and you respond by saying that you really can’t take credit for it because you have such good help and a wonderful team and what not. Funny enough..... many people may be impressed by that sort of humility and so impressed that they might tempt you to take pride in it - tricky business talking about humility, right?<br /><br />Perhaps the best way to talk about Jesus’ humility is to recognize is as a <span style="font-style:italic;">missional humility</span>. God is on a mission to reach all of humanity with his life changing love. Jesus came into the world to live a life of perfect self-giving love for the purpose of helping all people become alive to God’s way of being human. And all of this is so that we may begin to live now in the same way that we will live in God’s new world, the world to come. God’s new world is already alive in this world and becomes transparent to us whenever we respond to God’s love. When we respond to God’s love in Christ we pull back the veil and the world to come is alive in our presence. This is what theologians often refer to as the <span style="font-style:italic;">already and the not yet</span>. In Jesus, human beings can <span style="font-style:italic;">already</span> live by faith and repentance the life that will come in perfection when this world is joined to the world to come. Living like this is sort of like a leaning forward AND into the promises of God. Living like this is about having our life now framed<span style="font-weight:bold;"> not </span>by the forces and pressures of this world but, instead, framed by the reality of God’s future. <span style="font-weight:bold;">To reiterate, it is so that we may begin to live this way that Jesus came; it is his missional humility, the mission of his self-giving love.<br /></span><br />So, if Jesus’ humility is a missional humility as we have just talked about it, then it follows pretty quickly that we need to figure out what it looks like to join him on mission.<br /><br />For Jesus, so much of his mission seemed to boil down to treating people a certain kind of way and about telling them the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love. To build on that thought and what we said just a moment ago let me put it this way: God’s mission in Jesus is about opening people up to God’s future, about teaching people to see their present life circumstances in light of God’s promised world to come - a place where, as the 14th century English Christian mystic Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”. <br /><br />In order to think with you a moment or two about following Jesus in mission with regard to treating people a certain kind of way and telling people the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love I read an account from the gospel of Luke, familiar to many of us but perhaps not from the angle I am presently proposing as a vantage point (Luke 7:36-50).<br /><br />Let’s talk about treating people a certain way. When Jesus came across people who the religious power brokers of his day did not want near them (or him for that matter), Jesus treated them with dignity and respect - he honored them. For instance. the woman who barged in on the dinner party and began to wash Jesus’ feet with ointment - the important people around the room wanted her gone. Jesus honored her and made her act of hospitality an example to be emulated by them.<br /><br />One way of testing ourselves to see if we are treating people the way Jesus would have us to is to ask ourselves the question: do we see people at the margins of society as people with whom we have a great deal in common? Here, of course, is what we have in common: a radical need for God to love us and supply all of our needs. However, the way the powers of society are set up, we are perpetually tempted to imagine that what is most important to our lives, material possessions, social position etc., gives us nothing of importance in common with the poor. Hence, we don’t see our connection to those at the margins and so we allow ourselves to be blocked from being able to treat them the way Jesus would have us to treat them. We, like the others at the dinner party in the gospel story, do not want the woman there showing her neediness. She makes them feel uncomfortable; she makes us feel uncomfortable.<br /><br />I love one of the recent Allstate commercials.... a teenage driver driving an old beater rear ends one of his suburbanite neighbors who is older, established, and driving a late model luxury car. The teenager whips out his Allstate card and the older more established authority figure is dumbfounded: and I paraphrase from memory - “I thought you would have one of those cheap discount insurance plans but you have Allstate and we have the same agent” The teenager says, “yeah, we’re connected.” "No we’re not", says the older gentleman.” “Yes we are”, says the smiling teen....”yes we are”.<br /><br />Well, that is a silly illustration I am leaning on to get you to wrap your imaginations around a very serious aspect of the gospel. I submit that we must see how much we have in common with the poor and those at the margins in order to treat people in the way that Jesus would have us. I would go so far as to say that our capacity to love all people and treat people as Jesus would have us is directly proportional to the degree to which we see how much we have in common with the poor and those at the margins, our mutual and radical need for God’s mercy and love. <br /><br />So, as we said earlier, following Jesus in mission boils down not just to treating people a certain kind of way but also about telling people the truth about God’s forgiveness and his love. This is, of course, what Jesus does in this story from Luke, as he goes on to tell the woman in the presence of all that her sins are forgiven. What a gift to this woman and to anyone else who had ears to hear and eyes to see. Jesus framed the woman’s life in light of the gospel and the veil between this world and the world come was pulled back. God forgives those who come to him wanting a relationship and it matters not what others may think of them; all that matters is what God thinks of them.<br /><br />Now, we are not Jesus and we are not about the business of directly announcing to people the forgiveness of their sins in the way Jesus did, For us sinners it is more about finding unique and imaginative ways to tell people the truth of our lives, which is that we depend on God’s forgiveness to keep us moving in the right direction in this fallen world. Much more can be said about that but if we simply ask God to give us the integrity to be honest with people about our need for God’s forgiveness and love so much of the rest just takes care of itself. May God give us the grace to treat people in a certain kind of way and to tell people the truth about our experience of God’s forgiveness in Christ. <br /><br />Questions:<br /><br />1. When you think about “making God in your image” what comes to mind? <br /><br />2. Do you find that you sometimes are preoccupied with wishing that God would punish people who have wronged you rather than praying for them, as “your enemies”?<br /><br />3. Do you think that simply being a Christian with some means in the United States offers unique temptations to distort the image of God portrayed in Jesus? If not, why not? If so, how so?<br /><br />4. Do you think that you should do a better job at seeing that you have a great deal in common with the poor and those who are at the margins of our society? Do you agree with the substance of the argument above? (Maybe think about this question in relationship to this specific teaching: Matthew 25:31-36.)<br /><br />5. Do you think you share your story of experiencing God’s forgiveness as truly and often with others as you ought to? If not, how might you embark, for the sake of others, on a path of pulling the veil back on your experience of God’s forgiveness, and communicating to more people the story of your life in light of the gospel.Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-68281067803830792442012-03-29T09:01:00.000-07:002012-03-29T09:02:50.034-07:00Road To Emmaus: Guest Preacher, Tim BowyerHomily Recap: <br />Isaiah 42, Psalm 42 and 43, Luke 24:13-35 <br /> <br />We opened with a question: What story are we telling when we worship on Sundays and when we <br />celebrate the Eucharist? We remembered that at the table, we tell a story. We all read a creed and <br />confession, we hear the words of institution and we get up together, share bread and wine, sit down, and <br />pass the peace. These acts tell a certain story - a story of a God of love who is reconciling the whole <br />world to himself through Christ - who has given us new life so that we might live in love with each other <br />and the world. But we reflected on what stories often race through our heads as we perform these actions <br />together. Depending on the day, and what has happened that week, or that morning, we may be speaking <br />the words and moving through the performance telling one story, while our minds are racing telling a <br />completely different one. Which one do we listen to? <br /> <br /> <br />The two psalms we read, Psalm 42 and 43, demonstrate a practice of telling a greater story over a lesser <br />story in the form of prayer. The Psalmist composed what we now call Psalm 42 and 43 originally as one <br />song with a beautiful refrain: “Why are you downcast, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? <br />Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” We see this three times in the two <br />psalms. Throughout a prayer naming to God the depths of his longing from exile, and his deepest desires, <br />we find the refrain that reincorporates his forsaken despair into hope, into praise, and into a greater truth - <br />that God, though seemingly far away and indifferent, is yet God and a present help to the psalmist. This <br />kind of movement is all through the psalms - awful experiences that would otherwise crush the psalmist <br />do not, because he wraps them up in the praise and hope of God and God’s promise. We find this is <br />rather hard to practice. How do we allow that greater story to so wrap ours up, that in the midst of the <br />immediate circumstances, we might see and feel and trust in God promise? <br /> <br />The Director of Swiss Labri, Greg Laughery, comments on this matter in a recent reflection: “Feelings and <br />experience can often attempt to be our sole sources and criteria for assessing who we are and what the <br />world is like. Someone says, “I feel like I have to accomplish something in order to be liked.” Why? <br />“Because this has been my experience.” Another says, “I feel ashamed.” Why? “Because I have to hide <br />my real self from others and I experience this as my fault.” Both confirm, “This is the way the world <br />works.” While feelings and experience are valid dimensions of being human, the question of whether or <br />not we should trust or be suspicious of them cannot be solely based on feelings and experience. Why? In <br />themselves they offer no valid way to discern if the perceptions of ourselves and the world are accurate. <br />Unless we’re willing . . . to raise the difficult question of what is true, we will spin around in circles of the <br />same, never having adequate criteria for being able to evaluate which feelings and experience can be <br />considered trustworthy and which suspicious. Once we begin to focus on this explosive question and start <br />to answer it, trust and suspicion will function in better ways that will in turn lead to truer view of ourselves <br />and the world.” <br /> <br />Most of us have mixed opinions about truth. While we still have ties to Modernist assumptions about truth <br />- that it can only be discerned by the scientific method or by historical criticism or by objective analysis, <br />we also are inundated by postmodern voices - that what matters most is what we experience. And being <br />“true” to that experience is how we find meaning. The modernist arrogance is something that needed to <br />be called to question. We understand now that stories constitute meaning and truth far more than the <br />brute facts of life, the raw data. We know that stories are what make up our identity and meaning. But we <br />get a bit lost, wondering whether to let our experience and our emotion take control of our destiny or to <br />hold on rigidly to the supposed facts as if they are the lifeline to meaning or salvation. <br /> <br />The Psalmist names the history of God’s promise, his faithfulness, his love and the present-future of his <br />Kingdom as the story and Truth that frames his otherwise suffocating reality. That great and greater story <br />of God cannot be reduced into mere historical data, nor will it be itself as a meaningful story for some, <br />some of the time. It takes the whole of our lives into it, all people are held together in it, any and every <br />experience gets wrapped up into it, all emotion finds its end in that greater context – of forgiveness, of <br />hope, and of new life. The practice of faith is one that tells that greater story as a refrain, so that whatever <br />we are experiencing, be it poverty, injustice, suffering, rejection, failure, confusion, boredom, or struggle in <br />sin, though it be valid and true, finds itself wrapped up in the greater story of God reconciling the world to <br />himself through Christ. <br /> <br /> <br />For the homily, we reflected on Luke together, having seen and heard it read to us dramatically. We noted <br />that Luke has a great appreciation for history and for narrative, weaving themes of travel, conversion, <br />Eucharist, and the fulfillment of scripture into his gospel and the book of Acts. The experience of the <br />disciples and their sense of disappointment are slowly wrapped up in a greater story that Christ reveals to <br />them. Luke tells it in this way to reassure his audience that all the promises of God made to his ancient <br />people - read in Moses, the prophets, and the psalms - about saving the world through them - had come <br />to fulfillment, but in an unexpected way. It was not through the fury of insurrection, but in the humble life, <br />in the suffering and death, and now in the resurrection of Jesus. The story of despair the two disciples are <br />agonizing over is laid down for the shining truth of a larger story they yet had no imagination for. <br /> <br />This is what often happens when we meet Jesus. We have too many expectations to name and most of <br />them are let down. We are frustrated, tired, and disappointed. Our experiences in this life have <br />devastated us and on our emotions, whether we show that openly or whether we push it down, retreating <br />into ourselves. But we meet Jesus because he comes to us on the road. He joins us, lets us hash out our <br />own stories, gives us time. But he invites us into a greater story and a different way of imagining him, the <br />world, and ourselves. He is no failed prophet or a stranger, who is out of touch with reality. The world is <br />not a only a place of splintered stories without meaning. We are not absolutely forsaken. Rather, he is the <br />one who has gone before us into death and risen before us into life. All stories find their end and center int <br />that one. We find our experiences and emotions wrapped up in that greater truth. We need not close <br />ourselves off from others or from God in the story of our own experience or emotion. Our story can be <br />taken up into his as we participate in following after him. In this, as the disciples along the road too <br />discover, our hearts may just start to warm, and we may start to live in greater courage. <br /> <br />To help us imagine what this might entail for us, we told two stories: the story of my friend and the story of <br />the seed. My friend was raising her young children and her husband was suffering in severe depression <br />and without work. She would sit by herself after dark on the back porch, and through tears name the <br />things that she was thankful for - a roof, food enough, and friends. In a small way, she was telling a <br />greater story than her immediate severe pain. She said at this time that she couldnʼt believe in the gospel, <br />but she continued to be in a church. The people there would say to her, “Thatʼs just fine. Weʼll keep on <br />telling the story and weʼll stand next to you.” She did not dismiss her story and neither did the church, but <br />they TOGETHER, slowly, wrapped it up in a larger one. Planting, like theses stories, reminds us that the <br />veil of the immediate emotion or experience is not the end of the story. The dark soil, at first, would tell a <br />story of death, of wrapping all that falls to the ground in its arms, engulfing the seeds in a cloak they <br />cannot see past. Yet water and sun call them upward. By forces unknown to them, they are being drawn <br />into air and into new being. <br /> <br />Lent is a journey on the way to the passion of Christ. Since it entails self-discipline and identifying with the <br />suffering messiah, we may feel like we’ve been on a journey that is designed only to wear us down. Or <br />maybe life is enough to wear down on us and we didnʼt need Lent to remind us. We may have lost a <br />sense of the greater story. But the end is not suffering, not the cross, but the resurrection. That is why we <br />speak of resurrection on the 5th Sunday of Lent. We were never meant to journey without the memory and <br />hope of that future. Jesus is already walking beside. His story goes before us and after. His story <br />envelops our in grace. <br /> <br /> Questions: <br /> <br />1. Where do we look for and find meaning in our lives? Are experience and emotion valid ways of <br />determining meaning? <br /> <br />2. If you can share, what are the stories that interrupt, combat, or threaten to overshadow the story of the <br />gospel? <br /> <br />3. Do you have a practice, like that of the Psalmist, which weaves any and every experience and emotion <br />into a greater story through refrain? What might this look like for you? <br /> <br />4. How is the church to practice this kind of reincorporation of the lesser story into the greater? Can you <br />think of examples where this has been done well or poorly?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-35682511009857703842012-03-20T09:34:00.000-07:002012-03-20T09:35:16.138-07:00good news for those trapped in slaveryIt is common during the season of Lent to read and meditate on the passage before us this morning, of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Clearly, the 40 days in the wilderness is meant to evoke the image of God’s ancient people, Israel, wandering for 40 years in the wilderness - you may remember that those four decades come, remarkably, on the heels of their dramatic exodus from the chains of slavery. Tragically, having been set free from slavery in Egypt, God’s people of old exhibited the oh-so-human tendency to forget about God’s goodness, faithfulness, and love, about his power to redeem and about his concern that we humans live our lives in a certain kind of way that brings God’s goodness, peace, and justice to bear in this fallen world in a pattern that makes for human flourishing, our own and others. But the wilderness generation was just like the rest of us when they were showing what it looks like to be a broken and sinful people. They were demonstrating that the human condition is universally a broken mess; this mess is sometimes given the label, original sin. However, when we hear language like, original sin, it can be tempting to think of it as some sort of abstract concept like, in the words of one theologian, “a great metaphysical curse hanging over humanity”. But it is probably more helpful to talk about it in this way: Rowan Williams goes on to say, “there is a tangle that goes back to the very roots of humanity.... In humanity's history, the ingrained habit of turning inwards, turning in upon ourselves, is passed on. We learn what we want.... by watching someone else wanting it and competing for it. Before we begin to make choices, our options have been silently reduced in this way.... Our learning how to exist is mixed in with learning what does not make for our life or our joy. And every failure and wrong turn in the history of a person as in the history of our species locks us more and more firmly into ourselves. No wonder we drift further from peace, become less and less free to give. Something needs to reverse the flow, to break the cycle..... Only a human word, a human act will heal the process of human history; it isn't ideas and ideals that will do this, but some moment in history when relations are changed for good and all, when new things concretely become possible.”<br /><br />That human act is Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. His human success in loving God in the wilderness is the beginning of that reversing of the flow that Williams talks about above. Jesus’ mission can be summarized in many ways but one way of talking about it is to say that he came to pioneer a new humanity, to put human beings in proper relationship with God and with each other by being in proper relationship to God and to his fellow human beings. (Ultimately, this mission would entail his death on the cross, which would also accomplish the forgiveness of ou sins. ) But back to the passage at hand: as a human being, his “saying no” to the devil in the wilderness is the first time a human had said an unmitigated yes to God since Adam’s and Eve’s fall from grace. <br /><br />As the new Adam, the first representative of the New Exodus, he enters into the darkness of temptation in the wilderness so that we might know that he is near to us in our darkest moments. In our dark moments, he is there to break our cycles of self-destruction, to help us love others as we are meant to, to enable us to forgive those who hurt us, to be peacemakers in our families and communities. How about you and me this morning? Are you in the midst of a cycle that needs to be broken? If so, and we often are, Jesus is near you in your temptation and he is there to break that cycle for you and with you. Is there something in your life that you need to name and of which you need to repent hat is taking away your freedom to love others as you are meant to love them and want to love them? If so, Jesus is near to you and wants to help; will you ask him? Is temptation to bitterness and envy threatening not only to steal every ounce of joy from your life but ruin your friendships and work relationships? Have pride and self-sufficiency kept you from turning to God to ask him to help you grow into the person he wishes you to be? In all of these dark patterns, Jesus is near to you in any and every moment of your struggle to say yes to God; he is there to help you.<br /><br />When you come to this communion table this morning, remember, “God has heard the cry of his people”. He is drawing near you - not in harsh judgment but in sympathetic love and with the power to redeem.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />There are many different ways to summarize the gospel but one way to talk about it is as the response of God to the cries of those who are trapped in slavery. Slavery can take many forms. We talked about spiritual slavery, so to speak, before communion but the spiritual is never sealed off from the physical in scripture and God cares about what we do (and what others do) to our physical bodies.<br /><br />The form slavery took among God’s ancient people at the time of the great Exodus from Egypt is similar to a great deal of the slavery that still goes on today. As I am sure most of you know, heinously, many millions of people today experience slavery through human trafficking, and various forced labor scenarios. It happens in the United States more than anyone usually wants to talk about; the most terrible and terrifying examples have to do with the trafficking of minors in prostitution - the ads for sex trafficking make media companies wealthy (e.g. lots of classifieds owned by ‘reputable companies’). What an awful situation!<br /><br />When Jesus announced that he is preaching good news to the poor and to those who are <br />enslaved he has in mind people suffering at the margins of society and those who cannot really do much if anything to help themselves. He has in mind the people among us in the world today who are radically poor, enslaved, or at the margins of our world. One of the things that I wanted us to think about - and feel - on the way to communion this morning was that the good news of God’s coming kingdom is MEANT to feel liberating and compassionate to you. But how does that work out for those who are modern day slaves, or trapped in deep, multi-generational poverty. With regard to these people, we who have power and wealth have a large measure of responsibility as to whether or not we have made the gospel to be good to news to the poor or the exploited. Those of us with status and power must realize that the reason we have the resources of the world is to share them with those who do not. It is tempting to try to prescribe how to play this out in details but really I think with most of us we need to acquire or reacquire the discipline to realize moment by moment that we are here on this earth to join with Jesus on mission, to help those who have less than we do and to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.<br /><br /><br />1. As mentioned above, Jesus’ unmitigated yes was the first in human history since “the fall”. What has Jesus’ yes made possible for us who are united in his life, death and resurrection? Maybe framing your answer in response to this passage would be an interesting exercise. Romans 6:1-7.<br /><br />2. If we are free to say yes to God in Christ, why don’t we always say yes? Perhaps you might frame your response to this in light of this passage: 1 John 1: 5-10<br /><br />3. In light of what was drawn out in the two meditations above, why is it important to know that Jesus has given us the power to say yes to God?<br /><br />4. Can you think of something new you can do that will make the gospel to be good news for the poor and exploited?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-30174244401949584592012-03-13T11:09:00.002-07:002012-03-13T11:12:19.424-07:00the blind leading the blindPsalm 100 Call to Worship<br />Romans 12:9-18 Lesson 1<br />Luke 6:37-42 Lesson 2<br /><br /><br />As we mentioned last week, Lent is not so much a season to come up with epiphanies (little liturgical humor there - very little) at least not epiphanies of things we have never thought of before Rather, it is a time to wake up to what we know but what we don’t often apply in our lives. For example, we know that we are meant to be people who are joined to Jesus in his movement to reconcile people to God and to each other but we, ourselves, often prefer to brood over the wrongs we have suffered than desire to be energized to reconcile and see people hopefully. Sometimes we even get addicted to a sort of grinding pathology whereby we only look at peoples faults, rather than the good God is doing in their lives. It is hard to move in the direction to being at peace with people, as our first lesson exhorts us this morning, when you look at people that way. What helps is to remember that if we are to make any progress at all in this regard we must be disciplined to see people the way that God sees them, through the lens of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection - to see them in a new context, the context of his love for them and the future he has promised to them. If you do that you will be more likely to have your default set to desiring to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven you.<br /><br />There may have been a twinkle in Jesus’ eye when he said the proverb about the blind leading the blind, because that little saying, together with the story of the log and the speck, are meant to conjure funny mental images which, in turn, would be easy to remember. The blind leading the blind really is like something out of the British comedy troupe, Monty Python. Think of it like this: a blind person says to the person sitting next to him in the village square, “hey I need to go to my next social appointment, would you guide me?” The fellow says, “yes, certainly”, but the joke is on the first guy - because the guide ends up being blind too and off into the ditch they go. <br /><br />Now, the first thing to note about this little story is that it is meant to be confrontational to a certain way of approaching life. It is not offered as an abstract principle about how to choose good teachers, though it is adaptable in that way; it is rather a warning to Jesus’ followers that if they continue approaching their life with each other and God according to the way the current religious leadership of the day were teaching them, they were going to end up in the ditch. Jesus was saying that those who opposed his message of God’s grace and love for all people were blind and should not be followed. Follow the Pharisees and you end up not being able to get past their blindness which is what is meant by the comment about a student not being able to get past her teacher.<br /><br />What follows in our text from Luke is a description of the way in which many of Jesus’ rival teachers were approaching human relationships and, in turn, their relationships with God. What a depressing image of a community we have here: a group of people who are bent on pointing out the faults of others, presumably in order to feel better about their own lives. <br /><br />(You may remember from last week, the story of the good Samaritan, wherein the religious leader was seeking to justify himself by attempting to gain a definition of who qualified as his neighbor, a definition that would would make being a neighbor manageable, so to speak. However, Jesus disturbs him and his approach by telling the story that makes it plain that the neighbor can be anyone and anywhere. That seems to be a common theme among Jesus’ opponents, a desire to smugly justify themselves through an adherence to a manageable moral code and a manageable approach to ritual purity, all the while ignoring the condition of their hearts. Jesus said elsewhere of that approach that it was like straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel.)<br /><br />Here in our text today Jesus exposes the condition of the human heart by drawing, with his words, a cartoon that describes the way we often are with people. The little picture he draws is potent! I mean it really does look silly, right? Someone is running around with a log jutting out of his eye who, instead of being worried about the log, is more worried about what he perceives to be a bit of sawdust in his neighbors’ eye. What an absurd vision but I bet it describes all of us at one time or another.<br /><br />When we desire to hold power over others based on our perception of their faults, rather than being so aware of our own sins and of God’s love for us in spite of them, we can become addicted to that way of looking at others. Eventually, having only an interest in appearing to be better than others, we lose sight of the darkness in our own hearts and become numb to God’s love - what a mess!<br /><br />What is the cure for this? what keeps us from running amok in that way? Well, a bit later in the gospel, Jesus says that we are to build on a firm foundation. That firm foundation includes a daily confession that Jesus was right when he said, in so many words, over and over again, that God “does not forgive us because we are good but he makes us good by forgiving us (Rowan Williams).” May that gospel truth lead us out of the ditch of self-righteousness and into the hospitable path of God’s love for all people. There is your firm foundation!<br /><br /><br />1. Have there been occasions for you where you realize that you have desired to look at people first and foremost in the context of their faults? What alarm bells go off in your head and heart when you head in that direction? Do you listen to the alarm bells?<br /><br />2. Should you feel free to point out the sin of someone else? If so.....<br />Under what circumstances should you do that? What gives you the justification to do that? What should you say? How should it be done? <br /><br />3. Is it ever right to confront someone else about something they have done wrong without leading off by choosing something appropriate to confess as a weakness or sin of your own?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-46572673412452182372012-03-07T18:20:00.003-08:002012-03-07T18:21:42.771-08:00How Big Is Your Neighborhood?This morning we come to a story that is familiar to many of us and, indeed, we have looked at this story as recently as last year during one of the homilies. However, looking at familiar truths during the time of Lent is a good practice because Lent is not meant to be a time to think about things we have never thought of before; rather, Lent is a time to think of things we have thought about quite a lot - but perhaps that is where it has stopped for many of us with regard to certain familiar truths of the gospel; we have thought quite a lot, but in many instances have not sought to actively apply the truths to our life-settings. Lent invites us in a focused way to ask of God’s spirit to expand our faith and couple our faith with the courage to act in accordance to the familiar truths we know. <br /><br />So, a few things about this familiar story. <br /><br />The lawyer asks the question who is my neighbor, Luke tells us, seeking to justify himself. That might puzzle us at first glance - seeking to justify himself? What is he fishing for here that could help him to justify himself? New Testament scholar GB Caird offers this insight - - and I paraphrase: <br /><br />“many of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day, in a passionate devotion to the OT Law, attempted to make it applicable to every eventuality of daily life - their method? To spell out in detail the exact requirements of the law in such a way as to define the limits of their liability.” <br /><br />In other words, they worked out a schema for all of life that told them exactly what the limit of their responsibility would be in any given situation - they wanted to define life so that they could always see their responsibility to God and others within the category of limited liability - I have done what I am supposed to do and I have acted for whom I am supposed to perform so now I am done here; I am justified. <br /><br />The lawyer was fishing for a definition of neighbor that would help him to justify himself.<br /><br />However, Jesus messes this up by turning the lawyer’s reasoning and question on its head. Iinstead of giving a definition, Jesus tells a story that makes it clear that to represent God’s hospitality in this fallen world we must be preoccupied with a different question: am I a neighbor to whomever needs a neighbor regardless of who this person is and where I find them?<br /><br />So, back to Caird - “The question, 'who is my neighbor', is a request for definition; and the answer of Jesus frustrates the desire of the lawyer to define his liability. Jesus offers a definition of neighbor that asks the lawyer to embrace an ethic of unlimited liability.”<br /><br />One of the Lenten actions that some of our families at Grace will be doing with their children this week really drives the message of this parable home in a practical way by asking us to take a look at where our clothes are made. The action simply suggests, look at your stuff and see where it is made - leaves the rest up to you. <br /><br />For the thoughtful person, finding out, or remembering, that one's clothes are made far away (as they are for many of us), is an immediate reminder to us that our neighborhood is bigger than we initially may have thought. And, in light of our theme today, I suggest that it would require an unimaginative, if not insincere, reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan to not see that, in our contemporary setting, we must have a large enough and holy enough imagination to recognize that our neighbor is someone living across the world and making our clothes and other stuff. What are our responsibilities to these neighbors? The answer will be a bit different for each of us but Jesus’ teaching calls all of us to recognize one thing for sure: they are our neighbors. <br /><br />But what about our responsibility in situations such as these? I fear that in the United States we are either too distracted to think about this much - which is a whole problem unto itself - or, if we do think about it very much we are too mired in our political opinions about whether US businesses should be taking advantage of cheap labor overseas to think about what our own response as a follower of Jesus ought to be to the neighbor who made our what-nots and thingamabobs. <br /><br />Some may advocate that our government should do something about all of this - to regulate and legislate in such a way as to end the opportunity for businesses here to make a profit on the backs of those who suffer workplace horrors. Others say, that is not the answer: "do you really want to take away the contribution our economy is making? "Better", these folks say, "for our relationships to continue to allow for slow reform over time, etc." Both of these views can be and are often held by faithful followers of Jesus - neither is un-Chrstian per se - but neither really has much to do with the gospel either. <br /><br />What I want to suggest is that both of these political positions can end up distracting us from having as deep and meaningful a reaction as we ought to be having to the dire situations we have come to know about some workplace horrors overseas, Each of these political positions can keep the problems overseas distant from our hearts because if, on the one hand, we imagine that it is a problem just for policy people to fix we are tempted to limit our liability by transferring it to the halls of congress; on the other hand, if you want the markets to work it out and leave it at that then you are willing to limit your liability by transferring it to the invisible hand of capitalism to eventually help those who are sometimes working in situations that we would never allow to befall a loved one or friend. <br /><br />I am not suggesting an easy, one-size fits all action-plan for every Christian regarding this issue. I am simply suggesting that the circle of people who include our neighbors, according to the gospel-logic of Jesus’ story before us this morning, includes many people we may initially be blind to, including those who make our stuff. <br /><br />At the very least, when we become aware of injustices done to those overseas who are making our stuff (and by the way - I am not suggesting that every company is guilty of this, but some have been) - when we become aware we need to resist the initial impulse to think about the issue as a problem for someone else. We first must realize that it is a problem for us to pray about, and ask God what we are to do. <br /><br />Perhaps the starting point for each of us after prayer would be to think about and formulate what we might want to say about this issue in the public square and start saying it; but when we do, we must do it humbly, for most of you are more like me than not when it comes to being a consumer - this sermon was typed on a computer made overseas and printed on a printer that was probably made overseas so we are all in this together. The first thing that came to my mind when I prayed about this was to write a letter to several companies I do business with and simply say that I care about this issue and from here on forward I will be giving more careful consideration to my consumption based on what I find out about how that company operates with workers in other countries.<br /><br />Whatever we do, as Christians, we must be clear that the purpose of the gospel is to say to empire and power, whatever empire and power looks like when and where the gospel is preached, that Jesus is King and that he holds everyone with power accountable for the well-being of their neighbor who lies bleeding on the other side of the road. Specifically, as Christians, we must stand for an ethic that leads us to those who lie bleeding on the other side of the road, because an ethic of limited liability leads us away from the generous love we ourselves have received from God. May God give us wisdom, imagination and courage to work out what it means to be a neighbor to any and all.<br /><br />1. What do you think God might want you to do differently in the midst of your mundane life in light of you most recent experience (this Sunday past) with this parable in worship?<br /><br /><br />2. An “ethic of unlimited liability” can sound pretty scary in terms of what it asks.... how do you embrace this sort of approach to the needs of others while maintaining the rest of your life and obligations? Examples would probably be helpful here..... for example, is the best approach to work with the idea of percentages of time and resources, by feel, etc.?<br /><br />3. Do you think the church allows partisan politics to gag her voice on issues of social justice?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-12746107626294178882012-02-28T11:31:00.000-08:002012-02-28T11:32:04.490-08:00When a Father Refuses to Be 'Un-Fathered"As we embark on the season of Lent we will be meditating a great deal on the importance of taking in God’s forgiveness, acceptance, and love - hence, the thoughts leading up to communion. Really, when we think about it for a little bit it becomes pretty obvious that the whole of Jesus’ ministry is focused on bringing people into reconciliation with God and with each other. Jesus, by the example of how he lived, by what he taught, and through the power of his atoning death, created and creates the context for people to forgive those who sin against them.<br /><br />So, it is no surprise that we find Jesus’ emphasis on reconciliation amplified in the New Testament writings of the early church. For example, Paul develops this theme as he summarizes what it means to imitate God’s love: to forgive others as we have been forgiven by God. <br /><br />Ephesians 4:31 Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, 32and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. 5:1Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.<br /><br />However, anyone who has seriously tried to live as an imitator of God in this way knows that it is a hard discipline to learn and we will spend our whole lives learning it. <br /><br />Perhaps the most basic reason why this is a hard discipline to learn is because we allow the injustices done to us by others to control us and make us into people who become defined by a wish for revenge. It often the case that we have a passion for those who hurt us to be punished and excluded forever from our lives instead of hoping for them to be forgiven and then given back to us in reconciliation.<br /><br />(Now, a quick parenthesis - there are many instances on this side of the world to come where victims need to not speak with again or even be in proximity to those who violated them; but even then, the desire for the enemy to be reconciled to God and to the one sinned against, even if only in the world to come, is the gospel shaped passion that Jesus’ followers are to pray for and strive for). <br /><br />At the heart of the gospel stands Jesus who refuses to allow his identity to be shaped by those who hate him . All the way through his crucifixion we hear him forgiving those who have persecuted him and sinned against him. So, the question we will consider is how can we become imitators of God in this way? How can we become those who conform our lives to Jesus’ pattern of being an agent of reconciliation? <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Our thesis: the degree to which we feel secure in God’s love for us as his daughters and sons will be the degree to which we are able to absorb his identity as an agent of reconciliation. There is arguably no better story in the scriptures that can form us in this way than the story of the father and the two lost sons. <br /><br />There is so much in this parable for us and every time I come back to it I find something new or I see something a little differently, but what I want to concentrate on in this homily is the father’s work as a forgiver and an agent of reconciliation.<br /><br />The first thing I want to note is that Father refuses to, in the lovely words of the theologian, Miroslav Volf, “construct his own identity in isolation from his sons” (he does not let his identity be shaped by the wrong done to him by either of his sons but remains their loving father). The Father knows who he is - he is a father to both of his sons and he will not respond to either of them as anyone other than their father. The younger son fantasizes that he will be accepted back as a hired hand but the son cannot become anything less than a son because the father will not be anything other than a loving father to him, desirous of full reconciliation.<br /><br />The older son, ironically, betrays his own distance from the father as one who had lived as a hired hand in spite of being a son; but, as the father realizes this he reaffirms his beloved status as son by going out to him - just as he had gone out to the younger son when he was on the edge of the village - and the one who un-brothers his brother is invited to reclaim him as brother. The father takes his bitter words, “this son of yours” and simply pushes them to the side by saying to him, “your brother”.<br /><br />So, in the instance of each son, they are not allowed to un-son themselves. Their identity as sons is based not on their ability to follow the rules or even to rest in the father’s hospitality. The only power that keeps them as sons is the strong identity of the father; he will always be to each of them father, so that they may be to him, as sons, and to each other, as brothers.<br /><br />If we are to be agents of reconciliation in a way that can be recognized as an imitation of God’s love for all of humankind it will be because we have come more fully to understand our identity as daughters and sons of a father who refuses to be un-fathered by our resistance to his love and grace. The more we allow his identity, as the one who is constantly father, to make our own identities more secure as his daughters and sons, the better we will be at returning good for evil and being agents of reconciliation in our families, groups of friends, and all of our life-communities.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Do yo agree that it is hard to desire to forgive those who hurt you? In your own words, how do you feel when you have been a victim of another person’s meanness towards you? <br /><br />1a. Can you describe the steps you would take to get to a point where you desire to forgive the person who has wronged you?<br /><br />2. What might you do differently in your life, in terms of spiritual practices, that would help you be more assured of God’s love for you as his son or daughter?<br /><br />3. Do you identify more with the younger brother or the older brother? What events in your life have made you like that (identification)? <br /><br />4. Why do you think Jesus left this story open-ended with regard to the older brother? (Hint: the older brother probably = the religious leadership of Jesus’ day who opposed his eating with sinners).Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-30248051851401047812012-02-21T12:47:00.001-08:002012-02-21T12:47:49.558-08:00Does Anyone Know a Good Roofer?Most loving Father, whose will it is for us to give thanks for<br />all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all<br />our care on you who care for us: Preserve us from faithless<br />fears and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life<br />may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal,<br />and which you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ<br />our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the<br />Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.<br /><br /><br />Mark 2:1-12<br /><br />Wow, this is the kind of gospel story that will just preach itself if you don’t mess it up too much. <br /><br />The first thing I want to point out to you is the role of the paralyzed man’s community of friends in bringing their friend to Jesus. New Testament scholars point out that the grammar of the passage suggests that the faith Jesus is referring to is the faith of those who brought their friend to Jesus - at the very least, it is all of their faith together that Jesus praises. Now, this should give us pause because we ought to be immediately asking ourselves questions like this one in light of the teaching here: are the needs of those in my community important enough to me? To be able to answer this question in light of this text we need to ask another question: will we rearrange our schedule and lives in such a way as to make time to bring those who are hurting or isolated into the presence of Jesus. If we are willing to do this and actually do it sometimes then we are likely on the right track. If we are not actively pursuing those opportunities then we probably have our priorities out of whack.<br /><br />So, as we approach the season of Lent, I suggest that is a good idea to ask ourselves, “are we passionate about people in such a way that we desire to bring them to the same environment in which we breath the air of God’s love and forgiveness?” Jesus is not physically in a house where we can bring people so we have to think about what it would mean for us to bring people to Jesus. That is why I like to talk about it as the environment where we breath the air of God’s love and forgiveness; we experience Jesus in our community of faith, whether in a church service or in the context of those life-giving relationships in other social settings. Are we comfortable bringing outsiders to the faith to those settings?<br /><br />The second thing I want to note from this passage is related to this notion of bringing the friend into the presence of Jesus. Here it is: faith is about outcomes that only God can achieve with a person as God relates uniquely to that person and as that person relates uniquely to God. This is such an obvious conclusion to draw from this passage that it is sort of easy to miss. Look at it this way. If these guys would have really obsessed over the outcome of this scheme to dig a hole in the roof so that they could lower their friend down to where Jesus was they would not have done it. The dramatic tension of this story reminds us that more things were likely to go wrong in this scenario than would go right. It would be too easy to get stuck on concerns like these: what if this makes Jesus angry? What if we all get in trouble with the authorities over this? What if someone beats the tar out of us before we can even get the roof open?! Faith cannot ask those questions because faith is motivated not by passions and thought processes that are tied to trying to predict or engineer desired outcomes. Faith, at least in this story is seen to be faith when people, out of deep love and compassion for someone else, do their very best to bring their friend into Jesus’ presence so that Jesus can do whatever he will do. To be sure, the hope is for healing but that is an outcome that was beyond their control and we ought to remember that outcomes are beyond our control too. Also, we would do well to remember that we don’t show the proper respect for the person or for God when we fret over, or try to manipulate/control the encounter of someone with God.<br /><br />Last thing for this morning: we need to take note that Jesus uses this opportunity to identify himself as the one who will bring to pass the promises that God had made to Israel regarding the new covenant, that there would come a time when God would bring to pass, with the coming of the Messiah, a forgiveness of sins that would be final and complete. Jesus, in identifying with the Son of Man prophecies of the OT, claims to have the authority to do just that, to bring God’s forgiveness to people in a way that suggests that something of a change of epochs is taking place. Those who knew their Old Testament might have been wondering if the promises of God to the prophet Jeremiah were coming to pass:<br /><br />Jeremiah 31:31-34 “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,* says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”<br /><br />And so in that house on that day God revealed his heart in Jesus. The forgiveness and physical healing promised through the prophets was finally coming to pass in this fallen grace-starved world. So powerful and life-giving is an encounter with this new thing God is doing in Jesus that drastic measures are the order of the day; risks must be taken; outcomes must be left in God’s hands. How about you and me? How often are we at points during the course of our mundane life where we could either, so to speak, dig a hole in the roof to be in Jesus’ presence, or just go back to whatever banal activity we choose to use to distract ourselves from what is really important and life-giving? Good question as we move into the season of Lent. The good news is, of course, that God smiles every time we make the slightest movement in his direction - we don’t even have to dig through a roof. May we move in his direction more and more in the week that comes.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Do you leave enough room in your schedule to respond to the needs of those around you? How would you be able to tell if you do or not? <br /><br />1a. Do you see the work of the gospel as being about helping others in need regardless of their orientation to the gospel?<br /><br />2. Do you actively seek to include those outside of the community of Christ in your communities of Christ followers? Is there a way to do this that makes the non-Christ-follower feel like an object? If so, how do you avoid that?<br /><br />2a. Do you feel like you try to engineer outcomes, even if only subconsciously?<br /><br />3. Related to question #2: what would you say to your non-Christian friend if she/he were to ask you this question: “are you friends with me only in the hopes that I might convert?” Then, how would you answer this likely follow-up question from her/him: “well, do you think I have to be a Christian to love God?”Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-72618100627083550932012-02-14T10:25:00.001-08:002012-02-14T10:25:50.878-08:00Empathy and The GospelTexts:<br /><br />1 Corinthians 1:18-25<br />2 Corinthians 11:29-30<br />Mark 1:40-45<br /><br />Homily Title:<br />Empathy and The Gospel<br /><br /><br />When we were in the midst of our homily series on the meaning and purpose of the church we often came back to this wonderful quote of Luke Timothy Johnson’ on the nature of the church:<br /><br />"The church is, in a real sense, the continuation of the incarnation, the embodied presence of the resurrected Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit... the church is.... the laboratory for communal life before God, the model that the world can see.... as the basis for its own rebirth." <br /><br />So, if this is this is the case we need to pay careful attention to how it is that we represent God’s love to each other within the Christian community because how we are with each other can either show the world a hopeful picture of God’s love at work between people or quite the opposite. <br /><br />What I want to suggest to you this morning is that one of the ways we show the world how God works is by coming to each other through our shared weakness and not in our perceived strength. Far too often when we approach each other we do so in a way that makes it seem that we are desiring to bring another person along to our level of achievement; we assume a spiritual maturity in ourselves that actually gets in the way of another person’s finding the same love of God that we have found. <br /><br />Rowan Williams in his wonderful book on spiritual formation, Where God Happens, puts it this way: “Living Christianly with the neighbor, living in such a way that the neighbor is ‘won’—converted, brought into saving relationship with Jesus Christ—involves my ‘death.’ I must die to myself, a self understood as the solid possessor of virtues and gifts, entitled to pronounce on the neighbor’s spiritual condition. My own awareness of my failure and weakness is indispensable to my communicating the gospel to my neighbor”... “We love to think that we know more of God than others; we find it comfortable and comforting to try to control the access of others to God” …. “To assume the right to judge, or to assume that you have arrived at a settled spiritual maturity that entitles you to prescribe confidently at a distance for another’s sickness, is in fact to leave others without the therapy they need for their souls; it is to cut them off from God, to leave them in their spiritual slavery—while reinforcing your own slavery”<br /><br />“The fundamental need as far as the counselor is concerned is first of all to put oneself on the level of the one who has sinned, to heal by solidarity, not condemnation”....”the plain acknowledgement of your solidarity in need and failure opens a door: it shows that it is possible to live in the truth and to go forward in hope”<br /><br />Is our greatest desire to see someone deepen their experience of God’s love so that they change in God’s time to become more deeply who they are meant to be in relationship to Christ? Or, is our deepest desire to see the person change in the way that we demand for them to change in order for us to approve of them?<br /><br />A good question I suggest for us to ponder on the way to the Lord’s table of love and acceptance.<br /><br />In the passage from Mark’s gospel we have a truly amazing encounter between Jesus and the man with leprosy. The first thing I want to call your attention to is that the leper is breaking the purity laws of Israel in approaching Jesus - he was to remain with the outcast in the leper colony. The second thing I want you to note is that Jesus is inviting this transgression and joins in it himself when he accepts, touches, and blesses the leper. Now, number three: Jesus asks for the leper to step into the process of honoring the ritual laws by doing what is prescribed for a leper who has been healed but the man seems to ignore that as well as ignoring Jesus’ command to keep silent about the healing. As one NewTestament commentator puts it: “Commands and prescriptions seem to have little power in this narrative, rather the humanity and compassion of Jesus and the experience of freedom that the healed man enjoys are the main center of attention.”<br /><br />Now there is much that could be said about this passage but there is only one thing I want you to think about as you get on with your week - and it is this - Jesus does not allow for messy situations, or the opinions of others to keep him from being compassionate and inclusive. What person or people in your life do you keep at a safe distance when you should be including them in your redemptive life and community of love? We all have attitudes towards people that keep us from showing them the love and acceptance we ought to. May God chip away at those defenses and self-protection pathologies that cause us to push people away from our experience of God because we set ourselves up as an authority over people when we should find ways of expressing our solidarity as fellow-sinners. God has not let our messiness keep us from him; let us give others the same blessing.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Does living in solidarity with fellow-sinners (as Williams outlines above) mean that we are agnostic with regard to the sin in our lives? <br /><br />2. When might you be called to speak to someone about a pattern of behavior in the person’s life that you perceive to be sinful? Should you wait for a person to invite that conversation or not? When would you wait? When would you not? <br /><br />3. Do you expect for those close to you to come along in their growth in Christ according to your own designs on them? If so, why do you think you do this?<br /><br />4. Since there are probably no lepers in our lives on a regular basis, can you think of a person who needs to literally of figuratively touched by you? If so, is it appropriate to share that example with the group?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-59721840462764960092012-02-07T13:50:00.000-08:002012-02-07T13:51:54.861-08:00For the Sake of the GospelWe continue in the season of Epiphany this Sunday, a time in the life of the church where we are invited and encouraged to take a fresh look at who Jesus is revealed to be according to the gospel writers. If you are anything like me you need to take fresh looks at Jesus; for, one of the perpetual problems that Jesus’ followers have is that we tend to imagine that we know all we need to know about Jesus. We think, maybe even subconsciously at times, that we have in some sense got the total picture of Jesus’ meaning for us - and so when we come back again and again to the same stories we don’t come in the posture of the life-long learner who expects to learn something new, or expects and desires to have a fresh encounter with Jesus. As we look at some familiar passages from Mark during Epiphany and Lent, may it be that the Holy Spirit will open our hearts and give us fresh experiences with Jesus.<br /><br />In this passage before us this Sunday morning we meet Jesus doing more miracles so I want to think with you a bit about what it is that Mark wants us to notice about Jesus’ miracles. The first observation is the obvious one. One preacher puts it this way - Jesus cannot help but do miracles; everywhere he goes he heals the sick and releases people from the control of the powers of darkness, as he casts out deacons and yet (and we will see this born out more and more in Mark’s gospel as we go along).... and yet it is clear that Jesus sees miracles as subsidiary to his central mission (Mark 1:38). This is because the human condition must be fixed from the inside out in order for God to accomplish his redemptive goals for humankind. So, the central mission of Jesus in the gospels was not to do miracles but to proclaim the coming of God’s kingdom, which mission is accomplished in Jesus’ death on the cross where the cosmic victory is won, where forgiveness of sins is accomplished. The power of the cross and the resurrection, in turn, empowers the new humanity in Christ, to live as a foretaste of the world to come where miracles will not be needed because God’s desires for humanity will no longer be thwarted by evil or sin. So, if we look and listen carefully to the way Jesus approaches miracles in his overall ministry we are reminded that our greatest need(s) is dealt with by Jesus on the cross and cannot be fixed by miracles. <br /><br />This has important implications for our lives not because we should not desire miracles but because we so often forget what is our greatest need. Our greatest needs: to be forgiven, to be able to forgive others, to be able to love as Jesus loved us - all of this comes from the heart of Jesus’ ministry where he changes us from the inside out and prepares us for the world to come. <br /><br />OK, that is all true. Miracles are subsidiary to the central mission of Jesus; however what we often forget is that the whole reason Jesus was always moved with compassion, the whole reason he did miracles, was because the focus of the central mission drove him to alleviate human suffering as often as was possible. If we understand that what drove Jesus to the cross was his passion to reverse the effects of sin and enable human beings to flourish as God intends, then we will not be able to help ourselves when it comes to being moved with compassion to alleviate human suffering. May God give us the grace and wisdom to organize our lives so that we always adorn the central mission of the gospel with compassionate acts of mercy for any and all whose life circumstances are wrought with the suffering that comes from living in a world that is still awaiting final redemption.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. What tends to distract you from recognizing your central needs as Jesus defines them according to his mission. Can you give some examples? <br /><br />2. Can you think of some things you can do on a regular basis that will push these distractions away? <br /><br />3. Is there anything wrong in strongly desiring God to act on your behalf miraculously? Can you want a miracle too much relatively speaking in comparison to the rest of your needs and wants?<br /><br />4. Are you accustomed to thinking of Jesus’ passion to miracles as flowing from the same passion that drove him to the cross? Do you accept this theological view? If not, why not? If so, can you think of some ways that this insight might help you talk about the mission of Jesus with those who have not yet joined Jesus’ mission?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-1610172064209674782011-12-07T09:06:00.000-08:002011-12-07T09:18:01.425-08:00Advent Two: Trust the Man With the AxeMerciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to<br />preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation:<br />Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins,<br />that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our<br />Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy<br />Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.<br /><br />When we were looking at the apocalyptic language of our gospel reading last week, we asked ourselves the question: why in the world does the church calendar ask us to enter into the jolting and somewhat disturbing imagery of the apocalyptic on our way to cozy Christmas and the baby in the manger? We noted a couple of things last week. 1. The church has always wanted us to think about the fact that we live in between Christ’s two advents. In the in-between-time we must learn to read our present in light of God’s promised future. 2. The vivid and startling imagery of the apocalyptic genre in Scripture is meant to jar us, to wake us up to God’s promises, encouraging us to take hold of them.<br /><br />Our readings this morning on the 2nd Sunday of Advent invite us to think of our great hope again. In the reading from Romans, Paul explains that all of Scripture is given that we might have hope (15:4). But what sort of hope and hope for what? I fear that we like to hope for the future in ways that don’t get in the way too much with our agenda for the present. We like to hear that our suffering is temporary and so when the preacher talks about hope for redemption we take heart. But the Apostle Paul thinks that gospel shaped hope should get in the way of our agendas if our agenda is getting in the way of God’s. In our reading from Romans today Paul looks into the future and he sees one humanity singing with one voice. (“May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” But he looks at the church at Rome and he sees Gentiles snubbing Jews. (If you look carefully at his words to the Gentiles in Romans 11 it is not hard to imagine that Paul is seeing the seeds of Christian anti-semitism at work even in this early period of Christian history (e.g. 11:18).<br /><br />So, he says, in so many words, to the church: “make room at the table for everyone. Gentiles, recognize that your table is not the Lord’s table unless there is room for the Jew; Jews, see in God’s grace to the Gentiles the progress of God’s promise to redeem all people and don’t resent them for being grafted onto your tree. <br /><br />But how about you and me? Is our hope in the future a private hope that we pull out of our pockets to make ourselves feel better when we are suffering, or is it the public hope of the gospel that shapes our agenda of how we spend our time and money and teaches us to whom we are to be hospitable? Have we allowed our own feelings of superiority to cause us to remove chairs from our tables? No room for you! You offended me once and did not ask for forgiveness. No room for you. I am this sort of person and you are that sort of person; no room for you at my table, for you are not my kind. Or, perhaps we have just allowed laziness and apathy to keep us from allowing gospel shaped hope to empower us to offer hospitality to those in great need. Whatever the case, I suspect that each of us could use reminding that our hoped for future as Christians is a future prepared for our enemies as well as our friends and that it is that hope which should shape our way of being in the world right now in the present. But as with every reminder of the need to repent there is a promise that God’s grace is sufficient to forgive and empower us to live more faithfully tomorrow. The Lord’s table which embraces us each week at communion represents the future: one humanity singing in one voice. Come now and be filled with that hope!<br /><br />PART 2<br /><br />Well, if it was not unsettling enough to have apocalyptic imagery last week, the first Sunday of Advent, and then to be reminded just a few minutes ago that we get terribly stingy and self-centered about what and whom we hope for, now we meet John in the desert. He is a disturbing figure who looks and smells funny. He is deliberately calling forth in his dress, his message, and his style, an image that reminds God’s people of the warnings of the OT prophets - the kinds of prophetic warnings to God’s people to not take God for granted but to repent and ask for refreshing. So, even though during Advent we want to get to the coziness of Christmas, God is always messing with us (messing with us in a good way), because he knows that left to our own devices we will not want what is best for us or what is best for our neighbor. So God says, so to speak, all roads to the manger pass through the desert (phrase borrowed from Fred Craddock). (Remember, Israel was in the desert for 40 years; that tidbit would not be lost on Matthew’s readers and hearers. The desert is the place where God wants you to get know him in a deep and life-giving way. In the desert we meet John and hear his preaching.<br /><br />There is much that can and should be said of this text but in the time that remains I want to look at just one idea with you and here it is: the image of Jesus with an axe and a winnowing fork is meant to give you hope. These images of Jesus are sobering <span style="font-style:italic;">but hopeful.</span> What John the Baptist is saying, in so many words, is that his call for repentance will come to fruition only after the work of Jesus’ relentless and purging love. Talk about relentless - his love is pictured in these powerful agricultural images that are quite vivid and fast moving, images of a farmer who means business! Jesus’ refining and relentless love is like a farmer that goes through his orchard and chops down the dying trees in order to have more room for healthy growth; Jesus’ relentless love is like the farmer who vigorously throw the wheat up in the air over and over again until the good wheat is separated from the chaff. This is how John the Baptist previews the work of Christ. Jesus’ mission is this: he is ready to go to work in the depths of our hearts - but are you and I desiring that this morning? God wants you to know that he longs for your heart to be laid bare before him. He wants your heart that loves, your heart that hates, your heart that is afraid, your heart that manipulates and desires to manipulate even more. He wants us to put everything before him and ask him to work in our lives to make us more like Jesus in the way we live in this world. For us, this will always involve repentance. But in order to repent like we need to we must put away our fear of the future and our fear of future failure, for we can only be faithful in the present moment. We must eave the future to God. We must put away our desire to be in charge of our lives and actively ask Jesus to lay us bare before him. In order to repent like we need to we need to<span style="font-style:italic;"> desire to repent like we need to</span> and this comes only through our cooperation with the work of God’s spirit. We must actively call upon God’s spirit to open us up to the one who “is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until he divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow..... the one who is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart, before whom no creature is hidden, before whom all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account (paraphrase of Hebrews 4:12)<br /><br />The imagery of the passage from Matthew - the purging of the orchard and the separation of the wheat from the chaff - is a picture that is meant to jar us into realizing that God is seriously at work in Christ to bring about his kingdom. Everything that does not make for human flourishing in the kingdom will be purged away. The images are meant to sober us and call us to repentance because the man with the axe love us very much.<br /><br />1. Do you ever feel like your hope for the future, based on the promises of God’s redemption, is too self-centered? Can you give an example? What can you do in practical every-day ways to resist/avoid that temptation?<br /><br />2. Do you feel that God’s love is what motivates him to lay us bare before him? Can you think of an example from the Scriptures, Old or New Testaments, where God says that his discipline of us is a sure mark of his love for us? <br /><br />3. Do you treat others with love and embrace when you encounter them in what you consider to be sinful behavior on their part? If not, why not? Do you sometimes need boundaries in order to love someone with Christian love? How do you know when you need boundaries and/or when you may be hiding behind boundaries when you really need to embrace and just be patient with a person’s growth?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-26535405550366187362011-11-30T11:46:00.001-08:002011-11-30T11:51:38.593-08:00Advent One: Seeing the Present in Light of the FutureAlmighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.<br /><br />This morning we embark upon the season of advent. It is sometimes asked, why the church calendar begins a season as cozy as Christmas with disturbing apocalyptic imagery (Luke 21:25-36). <span style="font-style:italic;">Well, the answer is that the church has always recognized that we live in between Christ’s two advents </span>- his first advent and his promised return from the future where he will join the world to come to this world, and bring all things and all people under his rule of peace, justice, and love.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">But to live in between two advents is to need reminding of how to read the present in light of the future. The bible often invokes the apocalyptic genre in order to jolt us into recognizing that the present must be read in light of the future for us to be faithful to Christ’s mission in this world, to flourish as human beings</span>. This is true for all of us regardless of what time in history we live or what pressures we are under. However, Biblical scholars remind us that apocalyptic language is most often generated by people who are being oppressed and persecuted by tyrants, feeling and living as if the end of the world was really upon them.<br /><br />Reverend Scott Johnston of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan makes these insightful remarks:<br />“Those who have endured (or still endure) oppressive situations understand apocalyptic literature better than most of us. Allan Boesak, renowned South African preacher, once remarked that it made sense for him to preach on apocalyptic themes during the years of apartheid, for apocalyptic images spoke to and adequately described the lives of his listeners. Boesak's parishioners knew what it was like to live each day as if it were the end of the world. Their community had experienced appalling calamity and had witnessed evil dragons prowling in the land. When the trucks would come to surround their townships with razor wire, Boesak described them as great beasts which vomited an obscene, barbed cargo calculated to cut people off from each other and from hope. The preacher's imagery wasn't over-the-top grim for these folks, it was perhaps the only way for them to make sense of their plight in the world.”<br /><br />So, for Israel living under the oppressive rule of Babylon, the prophet Daniel crafted an apocalypse to remind God’s people that the future belongs to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and not the Babylonian tyrants that ruled Israel during the exile. For Christians living under the persecution of Rome, John writes the book of Revelation to remind the churches that the alliance between the beasts of this world, the whore of Babylon, and Satan will be destroyed by God; and that the new heavens and new earth will be for those who have suffered trials and tribulations in this life a place where God himself will wipe away every tear; evil will be arrested, eradicated and justice will reign with love.<br /><br />One implication for us is that we must allow the apocalyptic language of Scripture to call us to solidarity with those who have been pushed to the side while the powerful and successful of the world look upon them simply as the casualties of history....<br /><br />…... As Richard Bauckham reminds us, “if the future belongs to Jesus Christ, then we can see the future, Jesus Christ's future, in those whom this world treats worst: those whose lives are mostly pain or grinding poverty, those whose lives are destroyed by disease or violence or abuse, the millions who die young before scarcely living at all. These are the people the myths of human progress have never had anything to offer; human progress can only leave such people behind, the casualties of history. Jesus Christ does not leave them behind. He will raise them into his future. It is their future, in which God himself (as the book of Revelation tells us) will wipe away every tear from every eye. And should we tempted not to believe in the future of Jesus Christ, it is those people we should remember. People who feel that this life is good enough and we need not hope for another are always affluent people leading comfortable, fulfilling lives. They may feel this life is enough for them, but they have no right to think it is good enough for the millions whose lives have been misery. It is those people for<br />whom Jesus Christ will be revealed in the end - and for the rest of us if we care about<br />them.”<br /><br />Now, let’s come back to the Luke text in front of us:<br /><br />For Jesus’ audience who first heard these words, their generation would not pass away before they would see the destruction of the temple, truly an apocalyptic event. They would also experience oppression for living out Jesus’ mission in a world that remained hostile to his message and mission.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">But what about us? </span>What does this language have to say to you and to me? Well, we have already noted that it challenges us to declare our solidarity with the poor, the oppressed and marginalized. But the passage before us speaks to all of us whether we are physically poor, oppressed or whatever, because all of us human beings live under the weight of a world that can be beastly to us.<br /><br />For all of us this passage reminds us that the evil we suffer will not have the last word because the future belongs to God. Whether you suffer the horrors of physical or emotional abuse, the suffering of illness, the despair that accompanies mental illness, the terrible nightmares that accompany your fears of the future, you must know that your future is held in God’s hand. Jesus has come to be near you in your suffering, to hold you tightly to himself, and to keep you close to his heart. And one day he will bring you into the new heavens and the new earth where you will know and walk in the fullness of human joy. We need that message of comfort don’t we? We need that when we are suffering from the throes of living in a fallen world; we need it else we will give into despair and turn from God’s love to the life-destroying forces of apathy or some sort of self-destructive behavior. The temptation is always there for us to try to escape the pain of suffering in this fallen world though numbing ourselves; it is no coincidence that Jesus warns in this very passage against a life-style of drunkenness, dissipation and narcissistic worry. The gospel reminds us that if or when we fall into these patterns of behavior, or similar ones, that we are running away from our dignity as God’s people; for,<span style="font-weight:bold;"> to give ourselves without repentance to sinful escapes puts us in a place where we it becomes either difficult or impossible to be Christ’s presence of love and help for our loved ones and our neighbors.</span> <span style="font-weight:bold;">So, the gospel calls us in the midst of even terrifying circumstances to pray for God’s help to be kept near to the love of Christ so that we might represent his love, especially in the midst of great tribulation.<br /></span><br />Signs of the apocalypse abound in the New Testament but the Son of Man breaking into this world to reclaim it and us in the strong grip of his love is the one sign that stands above all others.... when I think of this sign (the Son of Man riding on the clouds) I think of the words of Bono in his great song, Window in the Skies....<br /><br />“Oh can't you see what love has done<br />To every broken heart<br />Oh can't you see what love has done<br />For every heart that cries<br /><br />Love left a window in the skies”<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. What aspect of your life do you struggle with the most when it comes to seeing your present circumstances in light of God’s promised and revealed future?<br /><br />2. Can you point to times in your life where life-crushing worry or the overwhelming desire to numb yourself has kept you from your responsibility to be the love of Christ to those around you? Can you think of life-giving ways to address the worry and suffering in your life? What helps you move towards these and away from life-killing patterns of dealing with worry and suffering?<br /><br />3. Do you agree with Bauckham here in what follows? “And should we tempted not to believe in the future of Jesus Christ, it is those people we should remember. People who feel that this life is good enough and we need not hope for another are always affluent people leading comfortable, fulfilling lives. They may feel this life is enough for them, but they have no right to think it is good enough for the millions whose lives have been misery. It is those people for<br />whom Jesus Christ will be revealed in the end - and for the rest of us if we care about<br />them.” Do you think this thought of his has value as an apologetic? Do you think Richard Bauckham gets invited more than once to cocktail parties where frivolous conversation abounds?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-90052664758009023822011-11-16T08:37:00.000-08:002011-11-16T08:38:14.215-08:00The Church is Catholic Part 3This Sunday we talked about catholicity one more time. We reviewed the first two homilies for a bit before moving into new territory. By way of review, we noted that catholicity has some overlap with oneness (the church is one). However, we also noted that being committed to catholicity means that you are welcoming the very people with whom unity will not be automatic, but challenging. The challenge comes because of our sinfulness and brokenness that leads us to be fearful and insensitive to the other. We saw that last week when we considered the case of the Greek speaking widows in Acts 6 who were being overlooked by the Jews in leadership in the synagogue at Jerusalem. This week we encountered another rift between Jews and Gentiles in Paul’s letter to the Romans; however, this time the Gentiles have the power over the Jews. <br /><br />In 49 AD, Jews were expelled from Rome by Claudius. Five years later, when Claudius died, they are allowed to return. At the point of their return, however, Gentiles were in charge of the home churches and they apparently did not have the best attitude towards Jewish Christians or the Jewish people as a whole. In fact, some number of Gentiles Christians were, apparently, unloving and smugly self-righteous towards the Jews in Rome (11:18,25). <br /><br />What does this have to do with catholicity? Everything! For the church to grow in catholicity, we must be a place where ethnic barriers (and similar barriers) that keep people apart normally are torn down by the gospel; in their place must grow mutual love. If we can’t make catholicity work in the church, “the laboratory for communal life before God, the model that the world can see.... as the basis for its own rebirth (Luke Timothy Johnson)”, then we have a puny message to offer the world. <br /><br />Application:<br /><br />Paul’s challenge to Gentiles regarding their attitudes and actions towards Christian Jews and non-Christian Jews is that they are to be humble (Romans 11:20) regarding their place in God’s redemptive plan <span style="font-weight:bold;">and</span> to be hopeful about the final outcome of God’s redemptive promises for Israel and the world (Romans 11: 30-32). But what about us? We are not in house churches in 1st century Rome. How does this challenge of humility and hopefulness translate into our situation? <br /><br />With regard to humility, I suggested that we consider again the words of Richard Bauckham regarding the posture we are to have to what we regard as the the truth of God in Christ: “It is the very nature of Christian truth that it cannot be enforced. Coerce belief and you destroy belief and turn the truth believed into a lie. Truth must be claimed in a way appropriate to the content of the truth.... The image the Bible itself often suggests is that of witness..... Witness is non-coercive. It has no power but the convincingness of the truth to which it witnesses. Witnesses are not expected, like lawyers, to persuade by the rhetorical power of their speeches, but simply to testify to the truth for which they are qualified to give evidence.”<br /><br />With regard to hopefulness, I suggested that we need to flavor our gospel message with a deep hope for God’s salvation to extend to all people. I say this because this seems to be where Paul ends up in his lament over the promises of God to Israel. Like the laments of the Old Testament prophetic figures, Paul is frustrated with the unbelief of the people but also wonders why God would allow his promises to remain unfulfilled. Also like Old Testament lament, Paul ends on a note of remarkable hope regarding not only Israel but also the whole world (Romans 11:11-12; 25-32) - the Gentiles have been grafted in to make Israel jealous; God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he might show mercy to all. In turn, this note of hope, leads Paul to doxology: “O, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.... who has given a gift to him to receive a gift in return?!” God is the one who knows the first from the last, God is one who gives gifts to us - his actions are not controlled by our “gifts” to him, God is in control of the world and desires for all people to be redeemed. <br /><br />So, when it comes to accompanying our gospel message with a sense of urgency, we must leave people with the impression that the reason there is a sense of urgency to follow Jesus is based on his desire to move them into a place of redemption where they may flourish as human beings - not based on our presumed knowledge of what God will do with them if they don’t. <br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Do you agree that we should flavor our gospel appeal with a deep hope for God’s salvation to extend to all people? If, saturating our gospel message with this kind of hope is a solid approach, how ought we to go about conveying a sense of urgency around following Jesus? What words and grammar are we to use?<br /><br />2. Rev. Dr. John Stott used to say something to this effect when he pondered the destiny of the world and the human race: salvation in Christ must be bigger than death in Adam in order to be consistent with the contours of God’s promises of a big redemption. Do you agree with this logic? Why, or why not?<br /><br />3. If someone were to say to you: “I know you are a Christian and I know Christians believe everyone else is going to hell, do you think I am going to hell?”... how would you answer?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-2540233134586571202011-11-08T11:29:00.000-08:002011-11-08T11:30:09.527-08:00The Church is Catholic Part 2We come back this morning to theme of the catholicity of the church. We noted last week that the Greek word that is translated, catholic, means the whole, or throughout the whole. When the leaders of the early church used that word in the creeds what they were confessing was that the love of God expressed most fully and comprehensively in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection was never meant to be for a few people, one group of people, or one sort of people, but for the entire human race (to take the language from the New Testament, God’s love is for every tribe and the gospel is recognized as accomplishing the healing of the nations - this is how the book of Revelation talks about it). Moreover, we find the catholicity of the church promised in the covenant made with Abraham: in you all of the families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12).<br /><br />Another way of saying all of this in an earthier way - there is no sort or kind of person anywhere in the world that God does not claim as his divine image bearer (albeit, in need of restoration). As such, God desires for all to experience Christ’s redeeming and life-giving love. Now, It is one thing to confess these words and to say, “hear, hear.... that is the sort of God I want to worship - one whose love is limitless.” However, it is another thing to want catholicity to come to pass in our midst - and to celebrate it when it does - when the kinds and sorts of people that are God’s own make us uncomfortable, uneasy, or afraid. For each of us there are some people who follow Jesus who make us suspicious, simply because of their ethnicity, their political views, their social/class status, or because they have come to conclusions about how to apply the gospel to their lives that differ sharply from the sorts of applications we might make. This suspicion, at best, and hatred at worse, that is brought about by the fear of the other is itself, of course, a consequence of living in a fallen world. For the kind of healing to come that God desires for the world, the church must grow in its passion for catholicity. Christians all over the world must long for catholicity to be a robust reality in our own lives and our churches. Another way of saying this is that for the universal to come we must all care very much about the particulars of our own church communities; for it is upon the upon the fabric of our relationships with people in our local churches, Grace Chicago in this instance - it is upon the fabric of our relationships in our church that God desires to sew a message of hope for a world where fear of the others results in daily violence and misery.<br /><br />I put it this way because I think it is too easy to keep things in the abstract when we simply say, “God loves everybody”. Part of our spiritual formation must include a longing for God to enable us to love, serve, and pray for people who we would find it difficult to be involved with apart from the gospel at work in our midst, through us, and in our church community.<br /><br />In the time we have remaining I want to look at some clues about what this looks like in the texts before us this morning. In Acts 6 we have ethnically Hebrew Christians in charge of the temple of Jerusalem. Because of a language and cultural barrier the Greek speaking Jewish widows in the temple were being overlooked in the distribution of food for the poor. The apostles’ response is to share their authority by quickly pulling together some more leaders, all Greek speaking, in order to successfully administer that aspect of the ministry of the church. The applications to take from this: when the Holy Spirit comes to work in opening up local churches to catholicity, the dominant and the powerful in the church will become sensitive to the needs of the weaker and less powerful in their midst; everyone in the church will turn away from their self-interests and look for ways to help others; and people in the church, without renouncing their identity and histories, will see their unifying identity in Christ as more important.<br /><br />Note well! The result of all of this is that many priests in the temple began to follow Jesus. Talk about a tough crowd. When catholicity is at work in a church community even the most skeptical onlookers can’t help but take notice and begin to question who and what is at work to produce such a strong and loving community. So, it is of the utmost importance that we come to understand that our repentance over our lack of catholicity is a crucial component to living out the gospel for the sake of the world who looks on. For example: the leaders who allowed the Greek speaking widows to be overlooked had to repent and change course in order to meet their needs, reminding us that the world is not looking for perfection from the church but for authenticity, and a model for how reconciliation and wholeness can come to pass. Stephen Fowl puts it this way: "we are reminded that.... compassion and mercy are necessary if Christians are to exercise forbearance and forgiveness/ For Christians, this is crucial because the quality of common life in Christ is not simply judged by the holiness of believers' lives (though that is certainly to be encouraged). Rather, Christian community is more definitively judged by the forgiveness that enables and calls Christians to be reconciled and reconciling people. Indeed, it is the quality that is most attractive to a broken and alienated world (Fowl)."<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Can you offer an example from your life or from a situation you know of that demonstrates growth in catholicity? <br /><br />2. What fears might the apostles have felt at the prospect of sharing leadership with the Hellenists? Do these fears remind you of any of your own fears that might be holding you back in your growth towards being more catholic? Examples?<br /><br />3. Do you feel that you represent the life of the church to your friends outside of the church as a dynamic life-giving community that desires to be more catholic and repents of its lack of catholicity? How would you say that sort of thing in your own words?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-52618504568557899832011-11-01T10:51:00.000-07:002011-11-01T11:02:30.485-07:00The Church is Catholic Part 1When we confess in the creed that the church is catholic what we are confessing is that the gospel is for all people and for the whole person. The word translated catholic means literally, throughout the whole, and when the early church leaders used that Greek word that is translated “throughout the whole” what they were confessing was that the love of God expressed most fully and comprehensively in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection was never meant to be for a few people or one group of people but for the entire human race (to take the language from the New Testament, God’s love is for every tribe and the gospel is recognized as accomplishing the healing of the nations - from the book of Revelation). Moreover, we find the catholicity of the church promised in the covenant made with Abraham, in you all of the families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12).<br /><br />Side note: so, obviously, the confession that the church is catholic, at the time the creed was written, was not meant to refer to a belief in an institutional church but was meant to refer to the scope of the mission of the church - universal in scope and for the whole person, bringing God’s healing to the whole person: addressing all brokenness - physical, emotional, and spiritual.<br /><br />So, as with the unity of the church (the church is one) and the holiness of the church (the church is holy) when we confess that the church is catholic we are talking about an aspect of what Jesus has done and is doing in us and the world. And as we did with the first two marks of the church, oneness and holiness, we will look to the teaching of the NT in order to flesh out what we mean by saying that the church is catholic.<br /><br />Another side note: Perhaps it might be helpful to pause for a moment here and draw a distinction between what we are saying when we say that the church is one and what we mean when we say that the church is catholic. Oneness stresses our need to work towards unity as Christ’s followers; catholicity reminds us that we are never to be at rest with whatever version of unity we enjoy inside the church - not even for a few minutes - <span style="font-style:italic;">because the scope of God’s desire to reconcile human beings to himself and to each other is universal</span>. The gospel is for the whole of humanity and for the whole person; that is what we mean when we talk about catholicity.<br /><br />The most powerful example in the New Testament of catholicity (the love of God moving forward in the world for the salvation of all) is witnessed in the initial mission of Jesus’ followers, who, remember, were Jewish. And it is obvious from the very start that, as Jews, they were meant to bring the good news of God’s love in Christ to another people group, the Gentiles. So very early on we have the New Testament church bearing witness to the love of God spilling over from the original group in order to bring people who had never known anything of the promises of Abraham into that stream of God’s promises that point forward to the healing of the nations, the salvation of the world, when Christ will be all in all.<br /><br />When Jews and Gentiles came together through the ministry of the apostles we witness a union that would have not naturally occurred in common life. And it is clear that the leaders in the early church saw this union of Jew and Gentile as a powerful witness and anticipation of what God desires to do throughout the whole of humanity - ethnic groups whose histories taught them to hate each other are brought together through a common love for Jesus; men who had used their power to subjugate women are called to be servants to their newly constituted relationships with their sisters in Christ, etc.<br /><br /><br />So far so good. But we have to ask ourselves what does this confession that we believe in the catholicity of the church mean to us in our formation as a church today, and as individual Christians today. Well, maybe an analogy might help - an analogy from just last week as we considered our confession that the church is holy. When we confess that the church is holy we are certainly not confessing that we have arrived at holiness as God is holy; we are confessing a hoped for future grounded in the resurrection of Jesus and secured by his death on the cross. This future we live into hopefully, in such a way as it provides a certain reference point for us in the the midst of our troubled and imperfect lives. When we confess holiness we confess that we belong to this holiness in faith and repentance and we are reminded to repent and to return to our journeys, to get out of ourselves and get closer to Jesus, as we name each of our unholy patterns of behavior and thought - naming them in confession, even as we receive the boldness to renew our journeys through forgiveness. And so, confessing holiness is <span style="font-style:italic;">a reminder of how things will be</span> according to God’s promise and <span style="font-style:italic;">a call to action</span> in the present in light of what God has promised. Similarly, with catholicity - we look around and see the degree to which God’s love in Christ is yet to reach the breadth of humanity. As soon as we celebrate what has happened already, we mourn what is still not yet. What is needed in that moment, I suggest, is a pattern for how to respond to the “not yet”. For this pattern I turn to the same people groups, Jews and Gentiles, and the same time frame we mentioned before, the time of the New Testament church.<br /><br />The already of catholicity (the gospel is for all people) that was coming to pass in the New Testament had another side to it, a sorrowful side. Here it is: for all of the wonderful reconciliation that was going on between Jews and Gentiles in the early church there remained a great deal of misunderstanding and animosity between Jews and Gentiles on the one hand, and, on the other, between the majority of the Jewish people and their kindred who were Jesus’ followers.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">How St. Paul responded to this tragedy I suggest offers us a pattern for how we are to address our own longing for the love of God in Christ to touch all the families of the earth whether in Chicago Lakeview, Logan Square, Lawndale, or far away.</span><br /><br />In the 11th chapter of Romans Paul takes up the sorrow that he feels for his kindred who have not yet heard and responded favorably to the gospel of Jesus as the good news of God’s making good on his covenant with Abraham to bless all of the families of the earth in Israel’s blessing. Interestingly, some of his thoughts about his sorrow are directed towards Gentile converts as he explains that one purpose of his ministry with them is to make his Jewish kindred jealous! “Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them (Romans 11:13vv.).” <span style="font-weight:bold;">So confident is Paul of the gospel to make life beautiful for Jew and Gentile alike that he can say that his ministry, as Apostle to the Gentiles, will give birth to communities of people that will be so lovely that even the most skeptical will want to join in.</span><br /><br />(homily cut short on account of time... to be continued next week)<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. How is Paul using the word jealousy? Can you put in your own words what he means by it?<br /><br />2.. Can you think of an example when you observed the gospel at work in such a way that you thought it made life look so attractive that even the most skeptical might take notice and want her life to have a part in the Christian community?<br /><br />3. When you ponder the degree to which the love of God in Christ has not reached as far as it ought how do you feel about that? Does the universal scope of God’s love in Christ mean that in the gospel is the only place true insights into God's character may be found?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-49299312861696191332011-10-18T09:30:00.000-07:002011-10-18T09:44:54.221-07:00The Church is OneAlmighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.<br /><br />This next four Sundays we will be considering together what it means to confess what are often referred to as the four marks of the church. In the Nicene Creed we confess: the church is one, the church is holy, the church is catholic and the church is apostolic. This homily series builds on the homily I preached a couple of weeks ago entitled, Why Go To Church? That homily was born out of a conviction that we don’t talk enough in the church about the meaning and purpose of the church itself. We’re not the only ones - as I speak with friends and colleagues in ministry it seems that none of us feel that we are doing as good a job as we should be with regard to equipping God’s people to know the basics of eccelesiology, the doctrine of the church.<br /><br />We talk about the love of God; we talk about our relationships with each other and with God, we talk about the programs of the church but we don’t talk often enough about the nature of the church itself. However, when Jesus talks about the church and when the New Testament church leaders talk about the church they have in their minds tangible communities that shared universal characteristics. They were public, in the sense that all were welcome. The common denominator was not - at least not in a fundamentally important way - a common affinity for anything or anyone except that each person coming was coming because of their response to the gospel, because of an interest in or love for Jesus.<br /><br />As these assemblies were maturing, the New Testament leaders, who we refer to as apostles, helped these young churches understand their unique purpose in the world. Just as God dwelt with his people in the OT and desired to demonstrate his love for humankind through Israel, the church was to embrace the continuation of this mission, albeit in an amped up form. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, the church embodies the very presence of Jesus for the world, In the church we drink and eat of God’s love and forgiveness so that we might show the world what it is like to be <span style="font-style:italic;">being made new</span>. As Luke Timothy Johnson puts it in what is becoming a banner quote for this new homily series: "The church is, in a real sense, the continuation of the incarnation, the embodied presence of the resurrected Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit... the church is.... the laboratory for communal life before God, the model that the world can see.... as the basis for its own rebirth."<br /><br />To start thinking of the church in this way brings us very quickly right up against some of the most powerful trends of living and being in our culture wherein we are encouraged to be consumers first and givers second. What is in it for me? What can I get out of this or that experience, etc. This approach to church and life in general is taught more by example than ideology, so it kind of sneaks up on us. But powerfully by example after example we are taught that what enables us to be fulfilled as individuals is found in groups of people who we have a lot in common with. We look for affinity groups where we like the same food; we like the same sports; we have similar political views, we love the same sorts of things and same sorts of people.<br /><br />However, when we come upon the church of the New Testament, the church for whom Christ died and lives, we meet a group of people who grew to realize that beyond the common loves of social friendships there is a more important common love that is meant to unite people across race and class, a common love that is meant to reconcile enemies, a common love that revolutionizes the use of power in the world as those with power learn that they are to become servants in the same way that Jesus was a servant. This is the way St. Augustine characterized the common love shared in the church:<br /><br />“Saint Augustine argued in the City of God that a "people" - - any “people” is a group that shares a common love. The better the thing that is loved, the better the people. <span style="font-weight:bold;">The church, then, exists as a people to show the world that there is something worthy of love - Jesus Christ.</span>” - paraphrase of a remark made by Dr. Mark Husbands, Professor of Theology, Hope College.<br /><br />And so, we take up the oneness of the church:<br /><br />The unity or oneness of the church is probably meant to be taken in two different but related ways. First, that oneness with Jesus means oneness with the divine life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Secondly, Jesus continues to bring people to this oneness through the oneness, or unity, that is at once <span style="font-style:italic;">an attribute and task of the church</span>, the body of Christ.<br /><br />When we read these words on oneness in John 17 we are stepping into a strong and important theme in John’s gospel, which we are introduced to at the very beginning of the gospel. In the first chapter of the gospel, John tells us that no one has seen God, but that Jesus, who is one with the Father, close to the Father’s heart, makes him known. And so, in John 17 we meet the continuation and expansion of that theme as Jesus expresses in prayer how he will continue to make known the love of God to the world. His means for continuation point to the second dimension of the church’s oneness, because the means is through the corporate (community) life of the church. (Aside: the fact that so many of us can read this portion of John 17 and miss, or underestimate, the community or corporate dimension of what Jesus is talking about is a reminder to us that we don’t think enough about the nature and purpose of the church). And so we meet again another stark reminder that we consume not for ourselves but we consume God’s love <span style="font-style:italic;">so that we may continue its flow to others</span>, “that the world may believe that you have sent me....”<br /><br />Perhaps it makes you anxious to think of yourself as one of the ones through whom God desires to love others. However, when we consider this weighty thought in the context of John 17 and in the context of the purpose of the church in general, we come to understand that the emphasis is not on the ability of any one individual to convince someone that God loves them through the testimony of any one individual life. Rather, the life we live in community with others is the <span style="font-style:italic;">basic</span> means God uses to paint a picture of his redemptive love at work in redeeming the world. What I mean by this is that your life in community with your brothers and sisters in Christ will be more and more shaped according to the self-giving love of Jesus, so that your life in Christian community bears witness to the unity and the oneness that God desires for all human beings, oneness with the divine life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and oneness with each other.<br /><br /><br />This means, among other things, that we ought to see caring about unity - not uniformity - but unity around the gospel of Jesus Christ as <span style="font-style:italic;">an aspect of the church’s holiness</span>, a vital characteristic of the people of God and a principle to which we are deeply committed. It is our common relationship to Jesus that unites us across differences of theology and different applications of God’s word to our life in the world. There are some people in our community who are pacifists because of their faith; there are others who disagree with that reading of the gospel but each person can make their case from the same Bible. I am sure you can think of other examples of people in our community who apply the Bible in ways that are different from each other. When people disagree on application but are working out their salvation with the same Lord, they belong in community with each other because both are called by the same Lord and are loved by the same Lord. And when we care deeply about our unity in Christ, the church signals to the world that a genuine unity among very different sorts of people is possible, if only people would respond to God’s love in Christ.<br /><br />For example, if Christians in the Republican party en masse, and Christians in the Democratic party en masse, would find imaginative ways to let the world know that they care more about what unites them in Christ rather than what divides them politically and morally - wow, this would be quite a statement to the world.<br /><br />Another example: what would it look like if your neighbors who don’t know of God’s love for them in Christ could see in your life in your church community a way to be united across differences,<span style="font-style:italic;"> a model for uniting around life-giving truth</span>, while allowing for diversity - if they could see in your life in your church community a commitment by default to working out differences for the sake of unity....? I think this would make a great impression on behalf of the gospel.<br /><br />You may say our lack of unity, our lack of ability to achieve the ideal of unity set forth in the New Testament and the Creed is so discouraging that you are tempted to simply withdraw into the comfort of a homogeneous community and say: “well all of this unity in the midst of diversity is just too hard and it is not really achievable anyway”. But this is where it is important to remember that when we confess a commitment to an ideal (and it is important to remember that each of the four marks of the church are ideals, completed in Jesus but imperfectly experienced through us)- when we confess that the church is one in Christ, and strive towards that ideal over and over again, we are making <span style="font-style:italic;">an important signpost of God’s grace in the world</span>. Really friends, what we strive for and are known for striving for is really important; in a fallen world, striving for oneness is an important ideal to work towards because it leads us in the direction of what matters deeply to God and what is most basic to our redemption and the redemption of the world, a share in the divine life.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. If you were asked by someone who is an outsider to the life of the church to explain what you think Jesus meant when he prayed for oneness in John 17, what would you say? What part of the fallen human condition does Jesus’ prayer for unity address?<br /><br />2. Do you think of your life in the church community as a reality that should be in some way publicly available to others? If so, how? If not, why not?<br /><br />3. Do you agree that the ideal of oneness is an important ideal to continually strive towards? Can you talk in your own words about what life looks like when that ideal is set aside?<br /><br />4. In the lead up to communion I remarked that the first person to think of when we experience a rupture in our relationship with someone is not oneself or even the other person, but Jesus. Jesus is the most important love that Christians share. How do you think you are doing when it comes to thinking of Jesus in this way? How can we help each other make sure that that thought is to us more than a cliche?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-15456695709263461462011-10-04T09:28:00.000-07:002011-10-04T09:43:12.352-07:00Why Go To Church?This past Sunday we began a mini-series of homilies on the doctrine of the church. Why Go To Church? This was the title of the first one. Here is a recap:<br /><br />Today we are taking up the question: why go to church? There are many ways to answer this question but I think one way of getting at the heart of the matter is to consider an example of what sort of thing God intends to happen in the body of Christ and because of the body of Christ. I say, <span style="font-style:italic;">in </span>the body of Christ because it is the church community, referred to as the body of Christ in the New Testament and in other literature of the early church, that is God’s normative means and instrument, through which he shows the world how to be reconciled to God and to one another. I say <span style="font-style:italic;">because</span> of the body of Christ because it is only through the grace of God at work in the community through the Holy Spirit that true reconciliation can occur.<br /><br />The example I want to consider with you can be a particularly difficult one to get our heads and hearts around because it is the story of a runaway slave named Onesimus and how Paul urges his master, Philemon, to be reconciled to him. As modern Westerners we, of course, would prefer Paul to have commanded Philemon to free Onesimus. I have included below an addendum that is a brief summary of why the New Testament authors did not take this kind of head-on approach when confronting the social relationships common to the pagan Roman world. However, in this recap, I want our main focus to be on how God uses the church as a theater of redemption for the world to watch.<br /><br />Luke Timothy Johnson has this to say about the church: "The church is, in a real sense, the continuation of the incarnation, the embodied presence of the resurrected Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit... the church is.... the laboratory for communal life before God, the model that the world can see.... as the basis for its own rebirth."<br /><br />I can think of no better example of this principle at work than in what Paul prescribes for Philemon, Onesimus and the church that met in Philemon’s home.<br /><br />Here is a brief summary of what Paul urges but first a little background on this letter:<br /><br />Background:<br />Philemon was a Christian leader in the churches that met in around Colossae. We can deduce that he came to follow Jesus through Paul's church planting efforts in this region. He and Paul had become friends, Philemon probably had helped financially with Paul's ministry, and now one of the regional churches met in Philemon's home. Onesimus, one of Philemon's household slaves had run away, perhaps stealing money on the way out the door. Somehow Onesimus ends up coming to Paul who is under house arrest - perhaps in Rome? He becomes converted and Paul desires to see Philemon and Onesimus reconciled. Most likely, Onesimus carried this letter to Philemon, asking for reconciliation, along with the epistle to the Colossians when he returned from being with Paul to home.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />The gospel at work!</span><br />What is so remarkable about this letter is how Paul goes about leading these two brothers into reconciliation with one another. He does it through a bold series of representational identifications putting into action his words in 2 Corinthians 5:18 where he challenges us to a ministry of reconciliation. First, Paul identifies himself and Philemon as brothers in Christ (v7). Secondly, he identifies himself as Onesimus' father ( v.10). Lastly he urges Philemon to accept Onesimus and be reconciled to him as no longer a slave, but as a dear brother (v.16). Later in the letter he identifies himself with Onesimus yet again when he tells Philemon to charge whatever Onesimus owes him to his (Paul's) account. This whirlwind of identifications all suggest one thing: Paul is boldly representing Christ to Philemon and to Onesimus. As one theologian has put it, Paul is standing in the middle of them with one arm on each of them and drawing them together, mirroring Christ's role as mediator between us and our father. Luther saw in Paul's logic a great picture of the gospel. Paul is taking Onesimus' debt to himself and appealing to Philemon not based on his feelings for Onesimus but on Philemon's feelings for him (Paul). Basically Paul is saying this: reconcile with Onesimus because of your love for me, because of my love for Onesimus, and charge his debt to me. This is rhetorical drama at its best. Paul has painted a picture with words where he plays the role of Christ, thus subtly yet surely drawing Philemon into the presence of Christ and his reconciling love for him, Paul, and Onesimus. Paul has truly appealed to Philemon based on love (v.9) and not law, knowing that only love can produce true transformation and reconciliation.<br /><br />To put it another way with a slightly different emphasis, in the exhortation to Philemon we have Paul creating an <span style="font-style:italic;">analogy</span> of the gospel by the way he appeals to Philemon to be reconciled to Onesimus. Philemon is beckoned to be reconciled to Onesimus because of Paul’ love for both of them and, implicitly, because of God’s family love for all of them. Just as God has received all of us because of Christ, Philemon is to receive Onesimus. Philemon is being exhorted to give up his rights as a Roman pater familia, or head of household and recognize his identity as an equal to Onesimus in the family of God. One cannot help but think here of the Christ hymn in Philippians 1 where believers are exhorted to take on the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who did not regard equality with God as something to be used to his advantage but emptied himself and took on the form of the slave. Philemon is to take on the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, that of a slave, emptying himself of his power, and becoming a slave to his servant, Onesimus.<br /><br />Onesimus and Philemon are invited, exhorted, to turn their lives over to the work of gospel - they are to be reconciled through the power of the Holy Spirit. <span style="font-weight:bold;">The main point I want to draw from all of this is that the place ordained of God for this sort of gospel reconciliation to happen is in the church, the laboratory for communal life before God (see above) that the world watches for clues about how to experience the renewal God intends for humanity.</span> Note very well that this letter is a letter not just to Philemon but to the public gathering meeting in his home; this reconciliation is meant to happen in the context of the public church and because of the church, teaching us that the gospel is meant to be performed physically and acted out physically in relationships within the public body of Christ. We are called and graced by God, through our involvement with church, to be the physical representation of God’s salvation in the world, pointing forwards, in hope, to the consummation of God’s redemptive work. It is through the church that God has put on display for all to see the power of his redemption at work.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. It is often said that Christians in our society suffer from a consumer mentality when it comes to thinking through our commitment to the physical body of Christ, the church. Do you agree? Explain it in your own words and offer examples.<br /><br />2. Does it put you in awe to think of the church as a laboratory for the world to learn from? What is the most important sort of thing the world is meant to learn from the church according to the Luke Timothy Johnson quote from above? Based on your conversations with folks from outside the church, what do you think most people have learned from their observation of churches? (I know there are as many answers as people to to this but maybe your own anecdote will be helpful to the group.)<br /><br />3. If you were to say in your own words why you want to be in the habit of going to church, what would you say?<br /><br />Addendum:<br /><br />Let me be the first to say that the letter to Philemon in the New Testament is a difficult letter to deal with, especially in our socio-cultural setting. Apart from simply being so distant from our experience, the letter begs so many questions. Why in this letter and elsewhere does St. Paul not, in the name of God's kingdom, call for an abolition to slavery? Why does he not just tell Philemon outright that he ought not to own slaves instead of begging the two of them to reconcile with each other as equals in Christ. A full answer, whatever a full answer would be, to these questions would take us far afield from what we can do this morning but we can note a couple of things quickly. If Paul had chosen to challenge Rome with an anti-slavery message, the rising Christian movement would have probably been snuffed out like so many other failed slave revolts; indeed, it would have likely been perceived widely as nothing more than a salve revolt, so common and fleeting were they. Instead, Paul in Philemon and elsewhere, sews the seeds of a new society, where social relationships in the church begin to mimic the perfectly egalitarian Kingdom of God where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male and female, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all (conflation of Col.3:11; Gal.3:28). We need to remember that because of this the gospel was the most dangerous - in a good way - sort of challenge to the abuses of power built into Roman law; because, rather than confronting authoritarianism and its abuses in a typically revolutionary way, the gospel created a new community within the old world and rendered Roman law ultimately irrelevant to the relationships of the new humanity in the body of Christ, the church.<br /><br /><br />This is how New Testament Scholar, Gordon Fee talks about the revolutionary power of the gospel with regard to the kind of social relationships in the Roman world where people had power over others: male and female; fathers and children; masters and slaves, etc.:<br /><br /><br />“Such.... <revolutionary language>....was not intended to abolish the structures, which were held in place by Roman law. Rather, it was intended forever to do away with the significance attached to such structural differences, which pitted one group of human beings against another. And the most radical thing of all was that such people - Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women - shared a common meal together, itself a cause for cultural shame, and thus celebrated their Lord’s death until he was to come again—which, as 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 makes clear, created considerable tension for the traditional householder. No wonder the world had such difficulty with these early Christians, and why they were considered to be “haters of humanity,” because they so willingly broke the rules - not by tearing down the structures, but by making them ultimately irrelevant! Such people are greatly to be feared <by those who use their power to put others down> as they are the worst of all possible anarchists.<br />So what in the end is it that makes our present text so radically counter-cultural? What Paul obviously did not do was to demolish the structures and create new ones. What was radical lay in his urging those who are filled with the Spirit and worship Christ as Lord to have totally transformed relationships within the household.”Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-8393170617965382392011-09-27T10:13:00.000-07:002011-09-27T10:14:40.829-07:00Counting The CostLuke 14:25-33<br /><br />This Sunday we came to the end of our summer survey of Jesus’ parables. The parables before us in Luke come up in the context of very sobering challenges to committed discipleship. In the passage as a whole Jesus says things that really set you back on your heels when you take them in. If they don’t set you back on your heels then you are not really hearing them with the force Jesus intended.<br /><br />A disciple of Jesus must:<br /><br /> * hate father and mother<br /> * hate his or her own life<br /> * carry the cross<br /> * give up all of his or her posessions<br /><br /><br /><br />What does Jesus mean by all of this? Does the one who said love your neighbor as yourself really mean that one must embrace an asceticism that is equal to self-loathing in order to be a faithful disciple? Does the one who said that he did not come to contradict the law but fulfill it mean quite literally that one must hate one’s father and mother instead of honoring them? Is every person to take a vow of poverty in order to be Jesus’ disciple?<br /><br />It is in the parables in this passage that we get some clues as to how to read rightly Jesus’ sobering challenges. New Testament scholar, T.E. Schmidt offers this helpful interpretive insight with regard to the parables before us and I paraphrase just a tad: ‘When trying to decide what Jesus means by counting the cost the crux of the issue does not lie in ‘counting the cost’ in order to make sure one has enough resources within oneself... the point is that no matter what calculus one uses, no matter what resources one believes one can bring to bear, those assets will be insufficient to secure one’s status before God. Alternative and decisive action is thus required for everyone....”<br /><br />Schmidt’s insight is very helpful because he offers a framework whereby we can understand at once the seriousness of Jesus’ call to take up the cross and the fact that we cannot fulfill these demands without the grace that comes through “alternative and decisive action” (i.e. repentance). <br /><br />So, when Jesus challenges his followers to renounce family, life itself, and possessions his goal is not so much to scare people away but to challenge people to move into a deeper and more genuine love of God through him. It is like a person who is so in love with another that they keep saying things like this to them: “I love you, I want to be with you forever, but I really wonder sometimes if you love me in the same way? I mean you seem like you love your family more than you love me; it seems like you love your stuff more than you love me; it seems like you want to keep your options open. When a lover says this to their lover, normally it is not to dissuade the beloved from committing. Rather, those hard words are said to them with the hope that they will respond in a deeper love that leaves no questions about the trajectory they want for the relationship.<br /><br />Jesus says what he says here so that we understand what the stakes are in following him. To follow Jesus as a disciple we must learn to renounce idolatrous relationships to the things that this world offers us as identities to be assumed or as security to be clung to. Instead, we must look for our identity to be formed not according to what our culture offers us but according to what Jesus gives us as renewed human beings who belong to a new family and a new humanity.<br /><br />What Jesus is saying is that we can relate ourselves to the resources that this life offers in such a way as to draw us away from a truly life-giving experience with Jesus by enslaving us to patterns of living that are ultimately idolatrous. Our relationships to family, material things, and “life itself” all offer plenty of opportunities for cheap substitutes for the life God wants for us. Let’s look at family first.<br /><br />Jesus says unless you hate your family that you cannot be my disciple... well, what is going on here? In the social setting in which Luke recorded this strong teaching of Jesus, family ties were far more than sentimental connections that drew people together for holidays. Family honor was all important. One’s identity was drawn from one’s family. To walk away from family and to follow Jesus would have often been interpreted by the family and the friends of the family as an act of hating one’s family, particularly if the family did not approve of Jesus. The point is that even when the heart of the disciple has nothing but love for his or her family, the family might declare the disciple to be a hater of family and an embarrassment to the family, particularly if the family disapproved of Jesus.<br /><br />Connections to biological family are still powerful in our socio-cultural setting. Let’s say that in your family growing up that the most important value in the family was to not upset the ‘honor’ of the family, even when the ‘honor’ was propped up at the expense of the truth. The power of this family dynamic may make it hard for you to even hear Jesus and the gospel when the gospel makes it clear that what is truly honorable in life is to confess that you have no honor apart from the honor bestowed on you as a forgiven sinner. In this way your relationship to your family’s honor may keep you from even being able to tell what Jesus is saying because you can’t imagine he would ask for that sort of honesty and humility. For example, the older son in the Story of the Prodigal Son cannot think of honor working in this way but the father points the way to how a true disciple thinks of family honor when he runs out to greet the son who had brought dishonor on the family.... talk about a different calculus at play.... the father in this story says, ‘I don’t care what the village thinks about honor’ - the father knew that true honor is when reconciliation happens no matter how dishonorable were the actions of the son.<br /><br /><br />Those of us who did not learn or see the gospel in our families (none of us did perfectly anyway), may find it very hard to truly and strongly yearn to have our identity reconstructed in Christ’s new family. Until we do, we will find ourselves repeating destructive patterns with our partners, spouses, other family members, children, or closest friends.<br /><br />With regard to material possessions:<br /><br />Jesus wants us to know that an obsession with material possessions, an obsession with keeping what we have or getting more can often become the negative energy that keeps us distant from the riches of his kingdom. This is very tricky because you don’t have to have much to be distracted by material things. Just the obsessive desire to have more can draw our focus away from our need to use the life we have to bless others. Addiction to having more just brings so much static into our lives that we can’t listen to God because our passions are obsessed by wanting to have that handbag we really can’t afford or that car we can’t afford but is something we must have at any cost.... or the extra nights of partying that don’t fit in our budget.... etc. But there are still other, more subtle, ways to allow an inappropriate relationship to money to distract us from faithfully following Jesus. There are some who choose under-employment for all of the right reasons and as a result of a wise process of discernment. There are others who, in the name of a simple life, choose to not work much or choose radical under-employment; in so doing they have become a burden on those around them. For these folks, they have allowed their frustration with the materialism in our culture to lead them into a life-style they have called holy according to their own ethic of personal comfort instead of really asking Jesus how they should live and work.<br /><br />What about lust? Well lust is especially tricky because Jesus makes it clear that the path that leads us to join our sexual desires with the kind of love that Jesus brings into our lives cannot be walked according to simply what we don’t do physically. We all remember his famous words about lust - you have heard it said that you must not commit adultery.... I say not to lust in your hearts. This teaching of Jesus shows us just how how easy it is to objectify others with our sexual passions without ever touching them; and a life consumed by such lusts - not interrupted by repentance - will, of course, lead us away from the life giving love of Jesus. Well, in those moments of life consuming lust, you turn to Jesus and say - give me your clothes - I repent of objectifying this person in my heart - I repent of wanting sex more than I want to be controlled by your life-giving love.<br /><br />When we repent of our sins that relate to our desire for material things, when we repent of not breaking with certain family patterns that lead us away from the gospel, when we repent of the sort of lusts that lead us to a really unsatisfying and destructive life - when we repent in all of these areas we are kept on a journey of discipleship, a journey to wholeness... and a journey to human flourishing. In the end, probably the best way to talk about what Schmidt refers to above as “alternative and decisive action” is a life-style of thoughtful reflection upon the truth of one’s life, followed by regular repentance.<br /><br />Questions for discussion:<br /><br />1. Can you think of a pattern in your family of origin that has made it difficult for you to hear and live the gospel? Can you think of a pattern in your family of origin that has made it easier to hear and live the gospel?<br /><br />2. Can you think of times when the desire for some experience that cost money kept you from something you should have been doing? For example, one thinks of Miroslav Volf’s simple observation that it requires effort for parents to make the time and resources to play with their kids and otherwise be good parents, given the plethora of adult distractions on offer in our culture.<br /><br />3. If you had to put in a couple of non-prudish sentences why God cares about what people do sexually, what would you say? How would you inform your thoughts with the gospel - in other words, how would you say something about sex that could not be said simply according to the Old Testament?Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6612222203553973887.post-32416654056424987682011-09-13T09:18:00.000-07:002011-09-13T09:19:44.974-07:00When Self-Righteousness Goes UncheckedLuke 18:9-14<br />Jesus’ parables sometimes paint a picture of what sorts of practices will be welcomed and what sorts are not allowed in Jesus’ kingdom. In the parable at hand we meet a practice that has no place in Jesus’ kingdom: the practice of self-justification coupled with feelings of superiority and scorn for others. In this same parable Jesus holds up an example of what sort of religious practice is welcome in the kingdom. The practice of humility that comes from those who know they are poor in spirit, those who know they are sinners and admit their sin; those who ask for and receive mercy - this practice is welcome in Jesus’ kingdom because it makes for human flourishing.<br /><br />Some have observed that the two characters in this parable have two different images of God. “The Pharisee’s image presupposed a God who is impressed with pious acts and feelings of superiority towards others.” But the tax collector did not presuppose anything, so truly humble was he. Rather, he hoped for a God who met people with forgiveness when they sincerely asked for mercy.<br /><br />What image of God do we project in our church or our community of friends, colleagues, or neighbors? In the way we approach our relationship to God and to others do we project an image of God that makes people feel as if church is a place where everyone has to have their act together, at least in a certain kind of way, in order to be welcomed and cared for? One commentator has suggested that the modern-day counterpart of the Pharisee would be welcomed into leadership in many churches today because of his outward piety, generosity with his money and reputation for clean living; no one would seriously evaluate whether or not the same person is unrepentantly prideful and scornful.<br /><br />Clearly, the image of God that we should desire to project is the image of a merciful God who welcomes sinners, who exalts the humble, who meets us in the messiness and brokenness of our lives and grants life-giving mercy and forgiveness so that we can begin to be restored from our sin and brokenness and more conformed to the love of Christ.<br /><br />So for you and for me this parable suggests that we should take stock of our approach to God and to others with regard to the sins of pride and scorn. Here are some questions for self-diagnosis:<br /><br /> * Do you find yourself taking a little bit - even if it is just a little bit - of satisfaction when you see someone suffering from the consequences of their bad choices, the consequences of their sin? Perhaps you had warned the same person of the likely consequences of their actions and now they are reaping the consequences.... do you feel compassion or a sense of self-satisfaction? If it is the latter, we must repent of our pride.<br /> * Do you feel like no one has anything to teach you if they don’t know as much as you do about the scriptures or theology as you think you do? If so, we need to take stock and ask God to break us of our spiritual pride.<br /> * Similarly, do you feel like no one has anything to teach you who does not have their life together according to how you define what it means for one to have their life put together? If so then you need to take stock and look at your spiritual pride and ask God to break you of that.<br /> * Does your pursuit of God and the holiness of God lead you to want to push others away from you? Do you need to feel superior to certain sorts of people and distance yourself from a certain sort in order to feel safe and holy? Is so, you need to take stock of your spiritual pride.<br /><br /><br /><br />In the abstract world of ideas perhaps self-justification can exist without the need to put others down. However, this parable and life in general teach us that self-justification needs comparisons to others like fish need water. If your security in your relationship with God depends on your feeling superior to others then your relationship with God is headed in the wrong direction. Our growth towards maturity can only happen in a community where we abandon the temptation to see ourselves as better than others and repent of that sort of pride if and when it rears its ugly head.<br /><br />Now, it would be one thing if Jesus had made his point in the language of abstract theological argument but he did not. Instead, he put human faces on the two practices we have been talking about. Clearly, the forceful teaching of this parable is that one practice is welcomed in the kingdom and the other one not. However, it is important, with this parable and all parables, to read them in light of the entire Gospel message. The whole counsel of the Gospel reminds us that there is a little, or a lot, of the Pharisee in all of us and we realize that it would be wrong to demonize the Pharisee, while thanking God that we are not like him! Instead we should realize that the distance between the Pharisee from the tax collector in the temple is the measure of Christ’s cross; Jesus’ love is for them both and for all of us. May the image of God that we project at Grace Chicago Church be a portrait of a God who is truly welcoming of all people.<br /><br />1. When you feel yourself moving in the direction of self-justification what is usually behind that movement? What prompts that temptation for you?<br /><br />2. Can you think of an occasion where you learned something profound about God’s love or grace from someone who, in your estimation, knew very little about God in comparison to you? Was this humbling for you? Did you learn something good from that experience?<br /><br />3. If you feel compelled to express concern to someone about their behavior because you love them and want them to experience growth and human flourishing what guidelines do you put in place to help you do it in a way that is humble and loving?<br /><br /><br />4. If you distance yourself from someone because of their sinful behavior how can you discern whether your self-distancing is for a good and wise reason or whether it is simply because you feel self-righteous towards that person?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Addendum:<br />In our post 9/11 world we find ourselves thinking a great deal more, perhaps than we used to, about being secure. In some instances when we feel very vulnerable we think we would like to feel secure at almost any cost. The answer to the question how much should we invest in our security for our families or our nation is not an easy one to answer. Just last night, for example, we had an intruder in our backyard; I called 911 and stayed in for a while just to be relatively sure the situation had become safer before I finished my cigar out back. All the while we kept our 4 year old away from the windows in case the intruder was being chased by armed gang members. Now there are padlocks on the gates.....<br /><br />I thought about this theme of security with regard to our parable this week as I considered how many Muslims or people who look like Muslims have suffered various indignities and suffering since 9/11 - all because so many Americans are now afraid of Muslims. Here are some remarks by Miroslav Volf along this theme - good food for thought, in my opinion. The following is excerpted from his opening remarks given at a Yale conference entitled, “Are We Safe Enough?”<br />http://www.yale.edu/divinity/notes/080923/smith.shtml<br /><br />“As we observed these dimensions of the security situation in which we find<br />ourselves today across the broad spectrum of our life, we also, being at a<br />theological school, tried to take a look at religious faith and theological<br />traditions to see what they might have to say about security. And to our<br />surprise, we found very little reflection on such a fundamental issue as is<br />security. It’s not that we didn’t find primary religious statements on security in<br />the tradition and in the Scriptures in which our traditions are based. In the<br />Psalms of the Hebrew Bible (or as we Christians call it, the Old Testament),<br />for instance, the psalmist often prays to God, who is “my refuge.” What is the<br />talk of God as “refuge” other than relating security to God? Or take a look at the<br />very end of the Christian Bible—it ends with the image of the New Jerusalem.<br />And if you read carefully about this New Jerusalem, you find it is a city that is<br />utterly and completely secured that can never be undone.<br /><br />Security is a very important theme in biblical traditions, but theologians have<br />slept through their reading of those portions of the Bible. They haven’t taken<br />up that issue of security, they have not reflected much on how what biblical<br />traditions say about security relates to our contemporary search for security.<br />So we thought it important for us first to reflect on our own about this theme<br />and then to consider what kind of contribution religious reflection might make<br />to the wider debate about security. That’s why security.<br /><br />But why then vulnerability? Well, vulnerability is obviously the reason why we<br />pursue security. If we were not vulnerable, the question of security would never<br />arise. I’m a theologian, and presumably I can say with some degree of<br />confidence that God needs no security force to protect God’s throne. God is by<br />definition inviolable. Human beings are not by definition inviolable. We need to<br />have our existence and our well being secured. That is why those lights flash on<br />the buses when kids get on and off of them; that’s why we lock our homes at<br />night and sometimes also during the day; that’s why we have a police force,<br />and so on.<br /><br />But vulnerability also touches on security in another way: human vulnerability<br />places a limit on the pursuit of security. It determines in part, or at least shapes<br />in part, the nature of what it means to be secure. For vulnerability is<br />fundamental to who we are as human beings. To be inviolable is to be divine; to<br />be human is to be, and I think is always to remain, vulnerable. You can almost<br />put it this way, that vulnerability is the essential condition of human life. No<br />vulnerability, no human life.<br /><br />Now that has very important implications for what it means to pursue security<br />and, I think, places certain limits on security. We tend to think that the more<br />secure we are, the better off we will be. But can vulnerable persons ever be fully<br />secure? Can we ever create conditions of inviolability? Isn’t it the case that for<br />vulnerable creatures to be inviolable is a contradiction in terms? And if we could<br />create conditions in which we would be fully secure, would it be desirable to do<br />so? Would it be good to create a world of total security? What kind of world<br />would it be? What implications would it have for freedom and for<br />unpredictability, which is related fundamentally to our freedom? What<br />implications would inviolable security have for the interdependence of human<br />beings, which qualifies us as human beings? Wouldn’t inviolability be the<br />equivalent of being an individual fortress, a completely independent individual<br />or a nation? And given human nature, would we not as such precisely be a<br />danger for others? So these are some of the reasons we chose to deal with<br />vulnerability and the limits of security.Bob Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01952855540657099098noreply@blogger.com0