Just Getting Some Things Off My Chest

February 5, 2012 - Answering the Skeptics: Suffering - The Achilles Heel of Faith?

2012-02-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

Job 13:1-15

A number of years ago I was called by the local funeral director and asked if I would be willing to officiate at a graveside service. He had asked me many times before to officiate at funerals, but this one was different. This was a service for a very young child. The service was held this time of year – in the midst of winter, but it was not in mild weather such as we are currently enjoying. It was very cold that day. There was snow and ice on the ground and the wind was blowing, which seemed to add to the bitterness of the occasion. I stood beside a tiny casket that was perched over a tiny hole in the ground and thought, what can I possibly say that would bring any sense of comfort to this young mom and dad?

As we continue our series Answering the Skeptics, this morning we come to what I consider the most difficult topic of all those we will consider in this series – how do we reconcile the belief in an all-powerful, loving God, with the presence of so much evil and suffering in the world? I have titled this message Suffering – The Achilles Heel of Faith? because it is the central accusation brought by those who are skeptics of faith. Skeptics will make their points about a lack of evidence for God’s existence, they will talk about what they see as the illogical nature of faith, they will claim that science makes belief in God nothing more than an outmoded superstition. And then, they pull out what they consider their trump card – the presence of evil and suffering, seeing this as the great argument that drives the final nail in faith’s coffin. This is the issue exploited by Richard Dawkins and others and is the most common reason why some people never embrace faith and is arguably the most common reason why people abandon faith.

The study of this question is called theodicy, which is a combination of the words for God and justice, meaning how do you justify God? There is no way this message will do more than barely touch the question of theodicy. Libraries are filled with books trying to understand this question; I have about twenty minutes this morning to try and do so.

Theodicy wrestles with the simultaneous existence of three competing realities:

1. God is all-powerful.

2. God is loving.

3. The reality of evil and suffering.

Skeptics will argue that given the reality of evil and suffering we must sacrifice either the idea that God is all powerful or the idea that he is loving and good, or better yet – in their minds – just abandon belief all together.

Let’s start with an important acknowledgement – Scripture never overlooks the realities of evil and suffering. Scripture never gives any promise that we will be spared the difficulties of these realities. Scripture actually raises the question of why we must suffer. As just one example, listen to some of the complaints of Habakkuk in the first chapter of his book –

How long, LORD, must I call for help,

but you do not listen?

Or cry out to you, “Violence!”

but you do not save?

Why do you make me look at injustice?

Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?

Destruction and violence are before me;

there is strife, and conflict abounds.

Therefore the law is paralyzed,

and justice never prevails.

The wicked hem in the righteous,

so that justice is perverted.

Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;

you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.

Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?

Why are you silent while the wicked

swallow up those more righteous than themselves?

(Habakkuk 1:2-4, 13)

Those are some pretty good questions, aren’t they? This is the Bible itself questioning why God doesn’t do something about suffering and evil.

And then there is the book of Job, part of which we read this morning. The book of Job is a long treatise about evil and suffering, and the book of Job seems to raise far more questions than it provides answers. The Bible is very blunt about the tragedy of suffering and evil, and the pages of the Bible reflect the anguish of the human condition in trying to come to grips with this very difficult reality. And while I’m mentioning what is in the Bible, let me mention something that is not in the Bible. It is often said that the Bible says God will not give you more than you can bear. That is not in the Bible. The passage that comes closest to that is I Corinthians 10:13, which says God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

You may remember the popular book that was released in the early 80’s – When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner. His solution was to accept the idea that God’s power was limited. This is a better solution than to abandon faith, but I would imagine most of us would find it to be an unsatisfactory answer.

Augustine, the great mind and most influential thinker in church history after Paul, said the problem lies not in the creator but in the creation, because mankind will too often choose what is lesser, resulting in sin. While this is certainly true, it still leaves the question of why God doesn’t just abolish sin so that people can only choose the good.

We can also talk about the most common solution – that of free will – but this view also has some holes in it, because it still leaves open this question – if God can prevent evil and suffering, even that which is brought on by poor choices, why would he not do so? This solution also fails to engage the question of natural evil – why do people suffer from natural disasters, and why must people suffer the consequences of terrible diseases, neither of which have anything to do with free will.

In fact, every attempt at a solution to this question seems to come up short in some way, and every explanation will still be mocked by skeptics who believe evil and suffering to be the Achilles heel of faith.

So this is my solution – to admit there is no answer that will adequately cover every objection because of our inability to understand the mind of God, but continue to struggle to understand this question, all the while realizing that people who are skeptical of faith will always seem to have an edge when it comes to this question, but that is because those who deny faith do not have the perspective necessary to trust that God knows what he is doing. So there you have it, and our Invitation Hymn is…

It is my prayer, though, that this message will give you some help in dealing with this question.

Let’s begin with –

1. According to the Bible, good is always the intent of God.

Genesis affirms at every step of creation that it is good. Even though things go wrong very quickly – Cain murders Abel, the Tower of Babel brings division to mankind, and the flood ends most of mankind – creation is instilled with a goodness that God always affirms and is always trying to restore.

There are two questions in this topic related to theodicy, and the second question is generally overlooked. The first question is why do evil and suffering exist, but the second question is why does good exist? I would say that if the existence of suffering and evil is the hardest question for believers to deal with, the existence of goodness is the greatest challenge for skeptics.

(Stories Jesus Still Tells: The Parables, John Claypool. 2^nd edition. Cowley Publications: Boston, MA, 2000, p. 53)

If evil and suffering causes one to question God, where does one get the idea that goodness is how things should be? The very idea that a difference exists between good and evil supposes there is a notion of what ought to be. This presence of a knowledge of good and evil needs to be accounted for.

(The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, Lee Strobel. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p. 34).

Interestingly, this is a strong theme in books written by four authors – C. S. Lewis, Alister McGrath, Frances S. Collins, and Patrick Glynn – all of whom were atheists who came to faith largely because of coming to understand that good must come from somewhere.

This is why, throughout history, mankind has overwhelmingly believed in God, even though through most of history people have suffered very difficult lives. Why did they not abandon faith? It is because, I believe, that people have recognized that if there is a knowledge of good and evil that knowledge must come from somewhere, and it is recognized as coming from God.

It always amazes me that people want to say God cannot exist because of evil and suffering but fail to understand it is the existence of God that gives us the understanding of the difference between good and evil and that goodness is the preferred option.

2. Suffering proves the depth of our faith.

The test of Job was not if his faith was real, but would it stand once tested? Is faith real and valid if it has not been tested? And if suffering causes me to abandon my faith, was it ever really faith to begin with?

Augustine, in the City of God, writes this of our sufferings – For in the same fire, gold gleams and straw smokes; under the same flail the stalk is crushed and the grain threshed…so, too, the tide of trouble will test, purify…the difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer.

(Augustine, City of God. Doubleday: New York, NY, 1958, p. 46).

I really like that line – in the same fire, gold gleams and straw smokes. It is very close to what Paul says in Romans 5:3-4 – And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope.

What happens to our faith once it is tested? I’m not saying I ever want to experience suffering and I never want to invite it into my life, but the truth is that until my faith has carried me through some measure of suffering that faith remains an untested commodity. How do I know it is real faith until it has been tested in the fires of life?

It also poses this question to each of us – are we only one disaster or crushing problem away from abandoning our own faith?

3. Suffering can open our heart to others.

One journalist wrote of a trip to Bombay, India that served to confirm his atheism. As he witnessed the terrible suffering of so many people he asked why they were lacking the most basic needs of life. Where was God in that horrible suffering, he wondered?

I can’t speak for God, but I wonder if he wouldn’t say to that journalist I have provided all that is needed. There is no problem with resources, only a problem of distribution.

I find it exceedingly hypocritical for someone sitting in the lap of luxury to question why some have so little. To accuse God of not doing enough when one sits on an abundance is a great hypocrisy. When someone accuses God of not doing all he can to end evil and suffering in the world that person, I hope, is doing all he or she can to eliminate suffering and evil in the world.

C. S. Lewis writes this of suffering – God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

(Strobel, p. 44)

You see, anyone can comment upon the suffering of the world, but how many of those people are nothing more than armchair quarterbacks, passing judgment on how God should be operating the universe while they are doing little or nothing to help?

Several years ago Time magazine featured the story of a book publishing the correspondence of Mother Theresa. Her letters revealed that she experienced a surprisingly long struggle with doubt while working with the poor of Calcutta, India.

As she relates her struggle to experience the presence of God among the terrible suffering she encountered in that city, she wrote the following – as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear. That silence from God and the struggle of faith it triggered continued over decades, lasting the rest of her life and causing her at times to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God.

(August 24, 2007 edition of Time.)

Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything also authored a book critical of Mother Theresa had this to say about her doubts – She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself. I am not aware that Christopher Hitchens ever stepped into the poverty of Calcutta to work with the poorest of the poor. While he was content to criticize Mother Theresa, she gave her life working to alleviate the sufferings of others while people like Hitchens are content to only comment on suffering.

The theologian James S. Stewart says it this way – It is the spectators, the people who are outside, looking at the tragedy, from whose ranks the skeptics come; it is not those who are actually in the arena and who know suffering from the inside. Indeed, the fact is that it is the world’s greatest sufferers who have produced the most shining examples of unconquerable faith.

(Strobel, p. 49)

To open our hearts to others then leads us to understand –

4. God enters into our suffering and is present with us.

If you are a parent, think for a moment about how you handled the hurts and disappointments of your children. Did you place a protective bubble around them? Did you save them from every hurt and every problem they faced? No, you didn’t. Why? Because we recognize that some difficulties are necessary in life to make us into the kind of people we need to be. Does that mean we create the hardship? No. Does that mean we prevent it, even when we can? Not always. But what happens to your heart when you witness your children experiencing difficulty? It breaks, doesn’t it? And what do you do for your child? You hold them; you enter into their suffering.

Consider the greatest evil of history – the crucifixion and death of God himself. Who at that moment could have foreseen the greatest evil could result in the greatest good?

(Strobel, 39).

C. S. Lewis, speaking of how God works in this way, wrote, There's always a card in His hand we didn't know about.

This is why, in the end, Job was satisfied, even though his questions were not answered. He was satisfied because God showed up. Job was satisfied even with all of his unanswered questions because God became present with him.

What is it that we want from people when we go through difficulty? Do we want a lot of words and explanations? No, we want someone to be with us, to put their arm around our shoulder and embrace us. When you stand in the funeral home after a loss, do you need or expect great words of wisdom from the people that greeted you? No, you were just glad to have their presence.

As I began with a story of a funeral, I’ll close with a story of another funeral. Back in the 80s I visited a funeral home to speak with a family. I was standing by the casket when a young boy about five or six years old came over and started tugging on my pant leg. He was holding a picture he had drawn with some crayons, so I stooped down to look at it. He handed me the picture and said will you put this in there (the casket) for me? That’s my grandfather and I want him to have this with him. I took the picture and said I’m very sorry about your grandfather. That little boy looked me right in the eye and asked why did he die? I didn’t want him to die. I think theological questions ought to be answered simply enough for five year olds to understand, so I told him I know you didn’t want him to die, and I know he didn’t want to be apart from you. But you won’t be apart from him forever. You will see your grandfather again, because God’s love promises this.

What is the answer to evil and suffering? The answer is not a wondrously worded theological treatise or a well-written sermon; the answer is a person, the person of Jesus. As Peter Kreeft put it, what we need is not a bunch of words, it’s the Word.

(Strobel, p. 51)

And that’s exactly what God has given us, and this, I believe, is the answer.

January 29, 2012 - Answering the Skeptics - Why I Believe

2012-01-30T08:24:00.000-08:00

Matthew 16:13-20

This morning I am skipping ahead in our series of Answering the Skeptics. I am skipping ahead to what was to be the final message, and next week we’ll return to the planned order. The reason I am skipping ahead is because this type of series can easily come across like a collection of lectures or essays, and that is certainly not my desire. I have unloaded a lot of information on you in recent weeks, speaking more to your head, so today I want to give your minds a bit of a break and speak to your heart.

Faith is something that comes to us primarily through our hearts, and not our heads. While I believe that a good, logical argument can help to open the way to belief, most people do not come to faith through an appeal to their intellect, but by either an appeal to their heart or because of some kind of personal experience. Jesus spoke to the hearts of people far more than he spoke to their intellects. His parables were masterful stories that could tug at one’s heart rather than make them nod their head in intellectual agreement. He called his disciples to walk with him through life, inviting them into a personal experience. There is nothing like personal experience to serve as an open door to faith. If you have traveled to be a part of a mission or ministry team you probably found that experience to be one of the most powerful in your life. Camp is a powerful experience for our youth because it is a very moving personal experience.

People walking into our church want to experience something. They want to know that the music, the message, the prayers, the fellowship, that all of these will facilitate the moving of the spirit in this place and in each of us to bring us to an encounter with God.

For me, a personal experience of faith began at home. Faith is more often caught than taught someone has said, and that is certainly true in my case. My faith was caught from my parents.

My mom and dad didn’t come from families that were church-going families. As I told you back on Mother’s Day, my mom’s mother, because she married a Protestant, was denied communion and rarely attended church the remainder of her life. My mom would go with one of her brothers to a Methodist church in their neighborhood. My uncle didn’t really go to church – he would hang out with friends and tell my mom not to tell on him. My dad’s family were Episcopalians, but didn’t attend church. My dad and his brother, as kids, would sometimes walk to a Methodist church in their neighborhood. My mom and dad were married in an Episcopal church in Steubenville, Ohio, where my mom by then was attending. My dad didn’t want to attend an Episcopalian church, because when he was nine years old his father died, and his father’s family tried to take him and his brother and sister away from their mom. He disassociated himself from them, including their church affiliation. Fortunately, the Disciples minister in my hometown went by to visit my parents and they began attending there, and that is how I grew up as a member of a Disciples church.

I saw faith as something very real to my mom and dad, and it made a huge impression on me. It wasn’t just that they took us to church – although they did – it was seeing the role that it played in their lives and how real it was to them that made a difference to me. They didn’t really talk about it that much, which may be what made it more powerful, because I saw that it was more about actions than just words.

I have two brothers who are also ministers, and we are often asked if our father was a minister. He wasn’t. My dad was a steelworker, and my younger brother is also a steelworker and has just recently begun his life as a minister. He’s about the least likely candidate for ministry that I can imagine, and he would agree with that description. After many, many years of a rejection of spiritual things, personal experience of faith entered his life and changed it dramatically. It is proof, I believe, that after all the arguments for and against belief in God, it really, I think, comes down to some kind of personal experience with God. Something happens to us. We can’t force that kind of experience on someone else, certainly, but we can help to facilitate the opportunity for the experience to happen.

That’s why I’m such a strong believer in the local church. I believe in being connected to something – there is greater power in the many rather than the one, and the connectiveness that we have one with the other can help to bring about that experience with God. I know that church is not always a positive experience for some people. I’m a minister, so I can say it’s not always been a positive experience for me. I have been through my share of difficult experiences, but I couldn’t imagine ever letting go of this beautiful experience called church, or maybe more correctly say I can’t imagine this beautiful experience called church ever letting go of me.

Our New Testament reading this morning is a great passage, because it brings the question of Jesus to every person – Who do you say that I am? He begins by asking who do people say that I am? It’s a way of reminding them the question isn’t just the concern of others, but one for each of us.

But once we answer this question we cannot stop, because faith and belief must grow and deepen or it will remain so shallow that it will have no real impact upon our lives. This reality is powerfully demonstrated when, just a few verses after Peter’s great confession of faith, Jesus tells him Get behind me Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s. Peter’s confession of faith was a great moment, but his lack of judgment that immediately followed demonstrated the need for faith to grow beyond just an acknowledgement of belief. The book of James tells us that even the demons believe (James 2:19), which tells us that belief in itself is never enough. Belief is the seed in the ground that must be nourished and grow into a mature and ever-growing faith. If the seed remains in the ground and never grows, of what use is it?

The older I get the more I realize the implications that belief has for my life. I worry more about the future and I long for more and more security but belief, in so many ways, will challenge me to accept and embrace uncertainty. I an attracted to what we would call a normal life – whatever that is – but belief makes it more and more obvious that what is considered normal is little more than a collection of illusions about life. So belief leads to a faith that is willing to walk, as Abraham did, to a place that is unknown, but carries the promises God leads every step of the way.

What would my life be like if I did not believe, I sometimes wonder. To be honest, there have been times when I thought in some ways it would be so much easier to not believe. My time, my money, my life is all mine, but that seems a very impoverished way to live. Without belief, my life would be so much poorer. Belief has affected every part of my life. It was belief that helped me during adolescence, surrounded by the drug use and abuse of so many of my friends, to avoid going down that road. It was belief that led me to Milligan College, where I met Tanya. Without belief I would have been in another school and family life would be very different. I am forever grateful that belief has brought me the family I have. It was belief that led me to the different churches I have attended and served throughout my life, as it was belief that led me to this church. I can’t imagine how much poorer my life would be without each of you and the countless others who have entered my life. Without belief I would not be in ministry, and I would never have the opportunity to be invited into so many lives, where I have been given the gift of walking through the joys and sufferings of others.

Without belief I would not know the gratitude I have for the people who have invested in my life and whose love for me and confidence in me gives me the strength to continue in my belief every day. Many of those saints are gone now and you would not know most of those names. My heart will forever be inscribed with their names and their influence. Thankfully, there are many people still involved in my life – among them every one of you in this church – and not a day passes without my giving thanks to God for the people he has brought into my life.

May we give thanks to God for the gift of belief.

January 22, 2012 - Answering the Skeptics - When Evil Is Done in the Name of God

2012-01-23T07:22:00.000-08:00

I John 4:7-21

Look closely at the following picture. I debated whether or not to use this picture, because I really don’t like it. I find it offensive and unfair and I believe it draws incorrect conclusions about faith in general, not to mention that it is disrespectful to people who were victims of 9/11. The reason I chose to use the picture is because it sums up the way some people look at religion.

Would the Twin Towers still stand if there were no religion? That is certainly the implication of this picture. This morning, as we continue our series Answering the Skeptics, we come to the topic When Evil Is Done in the Name of God. This is a challenge that skeptics consider to be one of the strongest arguments in their arsenal when attacking faith – that religious faith is the source of all the ills of the world and is responsible for almost all the wars and human history and has been responsible for more deaths than any other factor throughout human history.

Well, let’s start with the obvious –

1. Is religious faith the cause of the world’s problems?

No, it isn’t. Plain and simple.

Having said that, it would be both naïve and wrong to say there have not been terrible things done in the name of religion. In the case of Christianity, we must contend with the Crusades, the Inquisition, the support of slavery, the subjugation of women – all terrible acts in which some used religious faith to justify their actions. But even when people use religious faith to justify their evil actions, is religious faith itself the cause of the evil? I would say that it is not.

The fact that many people commit evil in the name of God does not mean that belief in God is the cause of that evil. What causes people to commit horrific acts is a very complicated question, but it is certainly far too simplistic to say that religious belief is to blame.

When we look at all the atrocities and the hatred and the cruelty of history what is the common denominator – humanity. It is humanity that perpetuates the evil inflicted upon others and some of the greatest evils – such as the Holocaust – are evidence not so much of the problem of religion but the depths to which humanity will go in some acts of madness.

When I hear someone say that religion is the cause of most or all of the wars in human history I have one basic question – where are your statistics? Can you back up that claim?

Matthew White is the author of The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, a book released last year and which documents the 100 worst atrocities in the history of humanity. The book demonstrates the false claim that religion is the cause of more deaths than any other reason in history. The Encyclopedia of Wars (Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod) will make the same point. The authors document 1,763 wars throughout human history, 123 of which involve religious conflict. Even one, of course, is too many, but some of them can be debated. Northern Ireland, for instance, though it pits Protestant against Catholic may be more about independence from, or continued allegiance with, Britain than being about religion. We could also ask, did religion cause World War I? No. Did it cause World War II? No. The claim that religion has been the cause of most or all of the wars in human history is such an oft-made claim that many people never question it.

I watched a debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins, and the first question Dawkins asked McGrath was this – doesn’t it bother you to be in the same camp as some of the religious extremists? What he was doing was making McGrath, and by implication all of us, guilty by association. McGrath was very polite in his answer and let Dawkins off the hook rather gently, in my opinion. He said he doesn’t like the religious extremism he sees and distanced himself from such people. I agree. I don’t like religious extremism that manifests itself in violence either, but I would have gone further.

I would have asked Dawkins are you comfortable with some of the people in your camp? If I have to answer for every crazy religious extremist how do you feel about being in the same camp as Stalin? Do you have to answer for him? Do you have to answer for Pol Pot, who murdered millions of his countrymen in Cambodia? Do you want to answer for the atrocities committed during the French Revolution, which was very much an attack on faith by people who had rejected belief and embraced atheism?

I would also point out that if you follow the logic of rejecting something because of past history we would find it necessary to reject almost everything. A citizen of any country, including our own, would have to reject belief in the principles of their own country because of what was done in the name of that country. What would Richard Dawkins have to say about being a British citizen and the beneficiary of the British Empire, which committed their share of atrocities throughout history? I imagine he would condemn Britain’s role in the slave trade, but is he going to reject his own country?

2. The very false assumption that an absence of faith will make the world a better place.

As portrayed in the earlier picture, and in John Lennon’s song Imagine (which I very much like, by the way) the world would be a much better place without religion. Remove religion and you would have an almost utopian atmosphere. Gone would be war, prejudice, and hatred. In its place would be a human species ruled by reason and blessed by the advances of science. What a wonderful world it would be, if it weren’t for religion.

But what if all the religions of the world were suddenly gone? Let’s take Richard Dawkins’ supposition and run with it for a moment. Would a peaceful world exist? Would evil suddenly cease to exist? No. Evil would continue unabated, and to believe that the evil of the world would end if religion were nonexistent is a very naïve view of the world and of history. Besides, it has been tried, and it didn’t work out very well. It didn’t work out very well in the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, or during the French Revolution.

One of the assumptions of this position is that only religious people are capable of committing acts of evil or violence. But listen to what Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith. Harris is vehement in his opposition to any kind of religious faith, and often points to religion as being the source of the world’s ills. It is astounding then, that he writes the following – The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them (The End of Faith, pp. 52-53).

3. Evil done in the name of God is not authentic faith.

My friend Martin Cothran says it this way, as he responded to a skeptic –

Please explain to me which tenets of Christianity contribute to making someone worse than they were before. Is it Christianity's stress on humility? Justice? Honesty? Or maybe its advocacy of charity?

In fact, all you can do is to cite examples of bad Christian behavior…But, again, that is completely irrelevant. The question is not whether some Christians act badly; the question is whether there is something in Christianity itself that is to blame for them acting badly.

How can you say that the bad behavior of some Christians is attributable to Christianity when that behavior violates the very principles of Christianity?

Is it Christianity that makes them act badly, or their lack of adherence to it? Is it the practice of Christianity that is the problem? Or their lack of practice of it?...The abuse of something does not nullify its proper use.

(Source – Martin Cothran’s weblog, Vere Loqui).

Several years ago I heard Bill Maher – who is by no means a fan of Christianity or religious faith in general – comment that even when the church was at its worst, there has always been the person of Jesus to stands as a corrective, and no other religion has any such thing or any such person. That’s a pretty good observation.

In his book The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel quotes John D. Woodbridge, who says Nobody was more outspoken against hypocrisy or cruelty than Jesus. Consequently, if critics believe that aspects of the Crusades should be denounced as hypocritical and violent – well, they’d have an ally in Christ. They’d be agreeing with him.

(The Case for Faith, by Lee Strobel, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000, p. 207).

Just because something is done in the name of God doesn’t mean that it is of God. Any expression of evil is not an expression of authentic faith, and evil done in the name of God is not of God. Even in the darkest days of the church there were always voices calling out for repentance. In the darkest days of the Inquisition there were voices – Christian voices – crying out for it to end; in the days of slavery there were voices – Christian voices – crying out for it to end. Christians have stood in opposition to tyrants and despots from the beginning. Those voices are the voices of authentic faith; they are the voices reflecting the voice and the truth of Jesus, who is always the corrective of our wrongdoing.

Authentic Christianity does not abuse people; it does not seek power for the sake of power; it does not inflict violence upon people and it does not seek to force people into faith. Authentic faith stands up for the freedom and competency of individual souls; authentic faith is the defender of the powerless; authentic faith is that which would choose to perish by the sword rather than to wield the sword in compelling force.

4. Power is better left in the hands of God, not the church.

To me, the most influential event in the history of Christianity, after the resurrection of Jesus and the conversion of Paul, was the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who turned Christianity from a faith victimized by the sword to one that wielded the sword of the Empire. Constantine did Christians a favor by ending the terrible persecutions, but in the process he may have robbed the church of one of its greatest strengths – that of being dispossessed of any political power but possessing tremendous spiritual power. Constantine’s conversion made us the inheritors of a church rich in political and economic power, which in turn allowed for some terrible abuses to take place. Without Constantine’s conversion and his patronage of the church, there could not have been an Inquisition, the tragic consequences of Geneva under John Calvin, and some of the other dark moments in church history.

In America, we still deal with some of the implications of this combination of faith and power, but I think one of the great geniuses of America has been the attempt to keep government neutral toward religion; as Americans we are free to practice the religion of our choosing or none at all. It’s a free-market approach to faith – it stands or falls on its own. If you can get enough market support for your beliefs they will thrive; if not, they will fail. I believe this is why there is such vibrancy of faith in the Untied States, which is virtually alone in the Western world in terms of religious vibrancy. This is not so in Europe, where the legacy of state religion and church-sanctioned oppressive rulers have resulted in a large-scale rejection of not only Christianity but also any kind of belief in God.

The tragic condition of faith across Europe leads me to say that it is long past time for the institutional church to relinquish any temporal or political power it may possess or any goal it may have to attain such power. I am not saying we should give up our political voice, but it is clear from historical examples that political power in the hands of the church has too often led to disaster. The French Revolution cast aside the church because it was so closely aligned with an uncaring and oppressive monarchy and France has remained largely indifferent or hostile to faith since. Cathedrals throughout the rest of Europe sit largely empty, in my opinion, because of the emptiness of state-sponsored religion and the corresponding legacy of a church that was too often interested in capturing power rather than gaining influence that comes from humble and loving service.

It is important to note that power and influence are not the same. Influence is the ability to gain a hearing because people are impressed with how you live; power is the ability to force someone against their will to do what you want them to do. It is this kind of power that Jesus so often condemned, even as his disciples sought to attain it.

When James and John came to Jesus on the road to Jerusalem they said We want you to do whatever we ask of you (Mark 10:35). Pretty brazen, wasn’t it? They asked Jesus, Grant that we may sit in your glory, one on your right, and one on your left (Mark 10:37). They were seeking power, when they should have been seeking influence.

The danger of power is that it so often leads to force and violence, and it is never acceptable to inflict harm upon another person in the name of Jesus; better to endure harm or violence than to use it as a tool in the name of God.

Power has become the currency of the day. Many, in the name of faith, are pursuing power because they see this as the path to extending the kingdom of God. While tempting, this is but an illusion. The way to expand the kingdom of God is by following the example of Jesus, not the examples of kings, empires, and governments. The way of Jesus is influence born of loving service, which brings honor to the name of God. The way of power too often leads to harm and to dishonoring the name of God, and like the earliest Christians, we must be willing to lay aside all in being like Jesus.

May we pray.

January 15, 2012 - Answering the Skeptics - Is Faith Reasonable?

2012-01-17T06:22:00.000-08:00

I Corinthians 1:18-30

When I was in seminary one of my professors came into class one morning with something obviously on his mind. Over the weekend he had visited the church of one of his students. He was not impressed with the student’s sermon. He told us I felt like he was trying to tell me everything he knows. He was speaking to my head, when I really wanted him to speak to my heart.

It is easy, in a series about belief and unbelief, to give lectures rather than sermons. When talking about today’s subject – Is Faith Reasonable – it is especially easy to do so. It’s easy because it is necessary to employ a certain amount of logic and reason as we speak about the shortcomings of logic and reason. As I have worked through this topic I found it easy to get lost in the amount of information I had collected and struggled to fashion together into a message.

Though I will be speaking about logic and reason today, I really want to speak to you heart. We live in a very scientific and logical age, but we all want something that touches our hearts. Science cannot do so, but faith can.

I want to begin by asking you to look at the following image. Take a close look.

How many of you see a square in that picture? What if I told you there is no square in that picture? Your mind may be telling you there is a square in that picture, but there is no square.

Can we trust what we see? Do we always see what we think we are seeing?

This morning we continue our series of messages titled Answering the Skeptics, and today’s message asks the question Is Faith Reasonable? Is it reasonable – is it logical – to believe in God?

Skeptics are fond of pointing out that it is illogical to have faith. Listen to this quote from Sam Harris, author of the book The End of Faith – religious faith is the belief in historical and metaphysical propositions without sufficient evidence (page 232). In one sentence there is the basic charge of unbelief against belief – it is not logical to belief in something for which there is no evidence. And they claim further, that the use of logic and reason inevitably leads one down the road to unbelief.

Biblical Archeology Review published an article several years ago entitled Losing the Faith, and in that article took up this question of whether or not faith is reasonable. In the article four well-known scholars were asked the question What effect does scholarship have on faith? Did reason, did logic, have a negative impact on faith? Of the four, two had abandoned their faith. Both of them pointed directly to scholarship and to logic as the reason why they abandoned their faith. In the opinion of these two scholars, faith and reason are absolutely incompatible. They came to the conclusion that no thinking person could hold to belief in God. Interestingly, both also said they wish they were believers, but logic prevents belief.

But is it possible to trust logic? My brain tells me there is a square in this picture, but my brain is wrong. What my brain is telling me is there is irrefutable, visual evidence of a square in that picture, but there is not.

While skeptics say that faith cannot withstand the test of reason and the test of logic, I would ask can you trust logic and reason? When skeptics talk about objective evidence, I would ask what is evidence, and how objective is it, really? What seems perfectly logical today may be tomorrow’s equivalent of believing the earth is flat.

As much as skeptics love to talk about logic, it is important to understand that in other areas of life we know it is necessary to suspend logic. Love, for example, has a different kind of logic and uses a different kind of language.

One of my favorite poems is i carry your heart with me, by ee cummings –

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

That’s a beautiful line – i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart). In the interest of logical thinking I have rewritten that poem –

I do not carry your heart in my heart, because we both know the heart is a physiological/biological pump that cannot exist outside of the body.

I do not carry your heart because that would actually be kind of gross, to carry one of your body’s organs, not to mention that it would be deadly to you for me to do so.

But I will share my logical assessment that biology has brought us to the point of recognizing that we have mutually compatible neuroses and our lives match on a subatomic level.

So, from this moment, let use our minds – not our hearts – and form a legal and social partnership for as long as our physiological systems continue to work and keep us living and breathing.

Wouldn’t you like to get that message on a Valentine’s Day card?

Love teaches us that there are times when we are better served by setting aside logic and reason. You might tell someone you love, I would give you the moon and the stars. Well, that’s a nice sentiment, but logic would say and just where would I put them?

But there is still a type of logic to making such a statement, because it tells another person I would do anything within my power to demonstrate my love to you.

Do you think he applies logic and reason to his marriage? Probably not. In fact, isn’t it true that logic gets us in trouble in our relationships? Guys, on your anniversary or wife’s birthday, try this logic – I was going to get you a present and take you out to a nice dinner, but logic dictates that I take that money and invest it in a good mutual fund. And I’m going to do that from now on. There will no longer be any birthday, anniversary, or Christmas presents; it’s simply illogical to spend money for such frivolous things. Go ahead; try it, and tell me what kind of response you receive.

And continuing to use pure logic, couldn’t you say that love is nothing more than a complicated combination of mutually compatible socialized emotional needs and chemical reactions in our brain that trigger responses that evolution has imprinted into our psyches. I guarantee you I am not whispering that into Tanya’s ear. And while it might be logical for me to hide her Banana Republic card I’m not doing that either. But a purely logical, purely scientific view of love could come to those kinds of conclusions.

We live in a world that recognizes the limitations of logic. How often do we say you know, you’ve just got to follow your head? What do we say? Follow your heart. Remember Mr. Spock, from Star Trek? Live long and prosper was as close to emotion as he could get. Who wants to hang out with that guy? Captain Kirk is the guy I’d want to hang out with. Captain Kirk, who never followed logical, but acted according to the heart, attempting to do what logic would dictate as impossible.

Let me add that we do need a certain amount of logic in life. We can’t make very decision based upon the instincts of our heart, but where is the beauty in life when there is only logic? We instinctively recognize that some things – such as love, and faith – have a different type of logic and language.

But we must also recognize there are limits to what logic can prove, because our logic is often constructed in a way to bring us to a conclusion that agrees with what we already believe. Victor Stenger is obviously a very accomplished physicist and astronomer who has a great intellect. Again and again he makes a variation of the following statement earth and life look just as they can be expected to look if there is no designer God (p. 71). He supports this claim by the use of a particular argument from logic –

1. Probably, if God were to exist, then there would be good objective evidence for his existence.

2. But there is no good objective evidence for his existence.

3. Therefore, probably God does not exist.

(p. 22).

Stenger sums all this up by saying that absence of evidence is evidence of absence (p. 18).

The failure of his logic is that he is fashioning an argument that guarantees the outcome he wants. What is objective evidence? What leads one to say objective proof is lacking? What is an open mind, and is anyone really open minded? How do we prove objective evidence has been found? What would be considered beyond a reasonable doubt?

Here is the trap of logic, and it is one that traps those who challenge faith – you can construct your logic to confirm what you already believe. It is a universal tenant of unbelief that faith is unreasonable because it is not open to rational evidence. But opponents of faith almost universally fail to realize they are shaping their logic to fit what they already believe, thus they are not open to rational evidence either. If you claim to be open-minded it’s not logical to then construct an argument in a way that will lead you to what you already believe.

It is also necessary to understand that faith cannot be measured in the same way as science and technology.

Sam Harris writes imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matter of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God…if religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less (The End of Faith, p. 22).

Certainly no one would go to a doctor whose medical knowledge is based on five hundred years ago or accept as a scientist one whose knowledge is unaware of any of the discoveries of the last thousand years. Does it follow, then, that we are wrong to cling to centuries old beliefs and should they then be discarded as ancient superstitions? Harris goes on to say the Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology (p. 45). Well, let’s think about that statement for a moment. I believe the pyramids, whose construction techniques we still can’t figure out, were built by “sand-strewn men and women.” I would like to know about these “sand-strewn men and women,” would they also include the ancient Greeks? The ancient Greek civilization had an advanced understanding about astronomy several thousand years ago. And what about the literature and art that dates back thousands of years that has yet to be equaled? And even before the time of Christ there is evidence that certain surgical procedures were used. Ancient technology may not always rival that of today, but to say that people were unsophisticated is simply wrong.

Ancient does not equal out of date. It is possible to pass on medical, technological, and scientific knowledge, so that each succeeding generation is able to build upon the knowledge of previous generations. But this is not true with either faith or morality. Medical science has known for centuries that “bleeding” people is not helpful, but harmful. Learning morality, though, begins anew with each generation. Timeless truths such as love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31), caring for the orphans and widows (James 1:27), and caring for the least of these (Matthew 25:40) are truths that are passed on, but each generation – each person – must decide whether or not they will accept them and live by them. One generation cannot choose the next generation’s faith and morality. These truths are also valid and necessary in every age; they are not truths or superstitions that we outgrow.

To believe that we have progressed in every other field of human endeavor and should thus dispose ourselves of religious belief is, then, a false comparison, because while there is accumulated knowledge there is no such thing as accumulated morality. We have certainly progressed in leaving behind a lot of bad theology – the kind of theology that supported slavery or led to the Inquisition – but we are not talking about false theology that is created to support our prejudices and hatreds; we are talking about the timeless truths of genuine theology, born in the heart of God and by design must be either accepted or rejected by every individual born into history.

Some truths simply do not change. To love one’s neighbor is and admonition that cannot be treated as though it were an ancient simply because it is two thousand years old.

Faith has a logic that often seems unreasonable and illogical because it is so in opposition to human logic and because it is human logic that is actually illogical. Jesus often spoke in opposites – whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it (Matthew 16:25); the last shall be first, the first last (Matthew 20:16); if any one wants to be first, he shall be last of all, and servant of all (Mark 9:35). And in the Beatitudes in Matthew chapter five we find this list of things that seem opposite of human logic – blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are those who mourn; the meek shall inherit the earth; blessed are those who have been persecuted. And Paul writes in Romans 11:33-34a – Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord . . . And our New Testament reading from I Corinthians this morning makes this point as well. I think it is accurate to say that the mind of God is beyond our grasp and at times we struggle to understand his ways. It is not the logic of God that is illogical, but human logic.

I have taken to heart two important ideas from a recent theologian and one from centuries ago. Tertullian, many centuries ago said credo, quia impossibile – I believe because it is impossible.

(Dismissing God, p. 11).

And Karl Barth, executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, argued that one cannot understand what God reveals to us without already, in a sense, believing it.

(http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/faith-re.htm)

This is a short point, because of our time constraints, and I close with a story about Alister McGrath, author of the book Dawkin’s God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. As a professor at Oxford University he is a colleague of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. McGrath came to Oxford first as a student, and a self-described atheist, and expected that his studies would confirm his unbelief. What he found totally surprised him and seemed to contradict all logic and reason; McGrath found belief and he embraced the Christian faith.

Is faith reasonable? I would claim that to believe is the most reasonable thing we can do.

January 8, 2012 - Answering the Skeptics - Do Beliefs Matter?

2012-01-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

Mark 9:14-24

Our Scripture reading for this morning ends with an odd statement – I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief! How do you affirm your belief in one moment while in the next proclaiming your need to overcome your unbelief? That’s quite a paradox, isn’t it?

We live in a world that doesn’t much understand the paradox. We live in an either/or world, especially when it comes to belief, and in particular, religious belief. You either believe or you don’t, right? But this father both believed and struggled to believe.

The inability to accept and live with a paradox is what drives some people, I think, to disbelief.

I received an email the other day that contained an article titled Why I Stopped Believing In God. Listen to a few excerpts –

After my sister was born, my mom was told she couldn’t have any more kids. Six years later, I was her miracle. She always told me I wouldn’t be here if God hadn’t intervened. So I guess it’s kind of ironic that I no longer believe in God.

More and more I began to see that pastors and leaders in all faiths are simply people hungry for power. They like to preach that if you love God, you will get rich. But if bad things do happen, never question God, and never question the pastor because his words come from God.

It seems lazy to never question religion, or explore all the evidence against it. But it has more to do with fear.

Religion is only made real by the minds that believe it is real. And religion will exist as long as there is fear - fear of ourselves, fear of death, fear of each other. Religion thrives on fear. And powerful people take advantage of this. They have always done their best to silence anyone who questions.

The claim of all religions is that you will be freed from pain and suffering if you believe. But I have not found this to be true. …my experience with Christians was always just the opposite. Repression equals depression. And as Christians look down on other people, it makes them feel just a little bit better.

Life after religion is a gift of happiness…made even more amazing without the existence of a man-made God and dictator. I am at peace with the unknown.

(http://open.salon.com/blog/lj_barnhart/2012/01/02/why_i_stopped_believing_in_god)

The author of that piece recognizes some of the paradoxes that we find in life. Sometimes, good people do bad things. Sometimes, churches hurt rather than help people. Does that mean all people are bad or that some people are all bad? I don’t think so. Does it mean all churches are bad because some churches hurt some people? I don’t think so.

The author of that piece also makes, I believe, several very questionable assumptions. Not every pastor or leader is hungry for power. Most aren’t, in my opinion. Most also don’t preach that you will get rich if you love God. Personally, I believe that if you love God you may have less money, as you find yourself giving it away. And plenty of people question God, and I think you shouldn’t be afraid of asking questions; I certainly don’t believe it is threatening to God. I would also question the statement that religion is based on fear. There is, I understand, fear involved for some people and some leaders do prey upon that fear, but that is not the majority. And neither is it true that religion is only made real by those who believe it to be real. God is either real or is not real, regardless of what we believe. And no religion of which I am aware claims that belief will keep you free from pain and suffering. A few people may make that claim, but it is certainly not a claim that can be verified in light of Scripture.

This morning we begin a new series of messages titled Answering the Skeptics.

Why do some people believe in God, while others do not? The reasons, I’m sure, are complicated and numerous. Some researches have even put forth the theory that belief – or unbelief – is part of our genetic disposition.

One statistic I find troubling is the number of young people who drift away from faith when they leave home to begin their adult lives. Part of the reason, I think is the failure to develop a faith that can stand the rigors and challenges of a college classroom or the work place. Some people are given a set of beliefs – or perhaps more correctly, interpretations – and are told that if you doubt a single one of them then the entire system of belief must all be discarded. So they hear something that is in conflict with what they have been told to believe and decide to do just what they have been told – they set belief aside, believing it to be incompatible with the world around them. What a tragedy!

How would you answer someone who asks why you believe in God? How would you answer someone who says they do not believe in God and they want to know why you believe? How do you deal with the relationship of science and faith? How do you respond when someone asks you to prove that God exists? How do you respond when someone says they cannot believe in God because of the evil and suffering in the world?

Does it matter if we believe in God? Some people would say that it does not matter what we believe. Nothing could be further from the truth. It matters a great deal what we believe. Life is driven by beliefs. Some people believe that strapping on a belt of explosives and detonating it in a public place to kill as many people as possible will guarantee they and their family will be given a place in paradise. It matters what suicide bombers believe. It mattered what Stalin believed. It matters if someone tells you that you are worthless and you believe it and the belief of worthlessness leads to self-destructive behavior. And it matters what a person believes about God. People who believe God is angry and vindictive hold up signs with terrible slogans at military funerals, such as the Westboro Baptist Church.

Here are some of the topics we will study during this series.

Faith and Reason – is it reasonable to belief in God? Does it make sense? Why do some believe that faith and intellectualism are incompatible?

Faith and Science – are faith and science incompatible, as some claim? Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, wrote an OpEd claiming that Francis Collins was not qualified to head the National Institute of Health because he is a person of deep religious faith. Dr. Collins headed the Human Genome Project and has a world class scientific mind, and yet Harris would disqualify him from service because of religious faith.

Why is there so much suffering and evil in the world? Why doesn’t God do more about this suffering and evil?

What about the wrong that has been done in the name of God?

Can the existence of God be proved, or disproved?

I will be making some assumptions as we move through this series.

*People are increasingly identifying themselves as spiritual rather than religious because they do not want to be associated with institutional expressions of religion. Just because people don’t belong to a church or attend church doesn’t mean they don’t believe in God. Many people, turned off by things such as the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church or televangelist scandals don’t want to be associated with institutional religion. People are also tired of the culture wars, and they most people aren’t interested in the politicizing of religion.

*People want their beliefs and their worldview affirmed. Some people are very threatened by the trend of less religious belief in our society. They fear their way of life, their worldview – all the things they hold dear and cherish – will be minimized or threatened. We see this dynamic in politics. People turn to some candidates because they affirm the same values and are fearful of other candidates because they threaten their values.

*People are very influenced by faith – especially the Christian faith – in ways they may not understand or recognize. Anyone who lives in Western society has been deeply influenced by the Christian faith; it frames our entire way of life. The emphasis on having a life of meaning and purpose and the charitable spirit of our society are just a few of the ways the Christian faith has so deeply influenced who we are as a people. It has also shaped our music, art, education, medicine, and politics.

*Religious faith is not diminishing in our world. It is shifting, but not diminishing. Research released at the end of the year gave the interesting results that the percentages of religious people worldwide have not changed since a century ago. Where those religious people are located, though, has changed. A hundred years ago, Western Europe was the center of the Christian faith. Western Europe is certainly not the center of the Christian faith today, although countries such as England are seeing an increase in church attendance and religious activity. Faith is exploding in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. China, officially atheist in their governance, is seeing a huge growth in faith.

*You don’t have to check your brain at the door when you come into a church, at least not all churches. I would be greatly disappointed if you checked your brain at the door when you walked into this church.

*We are spiritual beings – all people, regardless of belief or unbelief. Jesus said man does not live by bread alone (Matthew 4:4), which is a statement underscoring the truth that we are spiritual beings. We are more than just flesh and blood, more than our genes and DNA. Put on some great music, observe a beautiful sunset, look at a baby, or sit on a beach and try and deny that those experiences speak to something much deeper and greater in us.

*There are fundamentalists on both sides of the belief/unbelief argument. Richard Dawkins is just as much a fundamentalist as was Jerry Falwell. The fundamentalists on both sides of the divide do not add anything constructive to the debate, in my opinion. Both sides set up nothing but caricatures of the other side and distort the positions of the other. They make sweeping generalizations of the opposite side, and are basically speaking to those who already agree with them.

*We argue over how we got here, but we are here, and the critical question, I think, is where do we go from hear and how do we get there?

*Our focus should be on love, not in toeing a particular line of theology. Too many churches focus on right thinking to the exclusion of love. There are a lot of people who would take great issue with that statement, but Jesus never gave his followers a belief test. His test had one element – love.

When I was in seminary I took a class in Systematic Theology (it was actually more interesting than it sounds) and Dr. Frank Tupper was the professor. Dr. Tupper could be very provocative in attempting to get us to think, and sometimes members of the class were upset by his comments. One day, a student became so upset by one of Dr. Tupper’s comments that he jumped up, and with tears in his eyes shouted Dr. Tupper, why are you trying to destroy my faith? Dr. Tupper’s response was so memorable I can replay it in my mind as clearly as if it happened yesterday. Dr. Tupper walked over to the student and placed his hand on his shoulder and had him sit back down. Then he sat on the edge of the student’s desk and said Son, I’m not trying to destroy your faith. I want to make sure your faith is strong. If it cannot survive this classroom, it will never survive outside of this classroom.

I believe Dr. Tupper was exactly right. We must develop a healthy and vibrant faith, understanding the challenges to faith and how we will answer them. While in this sanctuary we are in a bubble, a bubble where faith is encouraged and nurtured. Things change when we leave this place, and we must develop a faith that does not fade in face of the challenges that come our way.

May we pray.

A Vision to Live By - January 1, 2012

2012-01-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

Luke 9:1-6

Next week I will begin a new series of messages titled Answering the Skeptics. We live in a time where it appears that skepticism and challenges to faith are growing, and I believe it is important to have answers to the questions that come to faith and to us as people of faith. Is it possible to prove the existence of God? Is it logical to believe in God? How do science and faith relate? Are they incompatible, as some say? Is suffering the Achilles heel of faith? What are the evidences of faith, and what qualifies as evidence? What about the evil that is done in the name of God? Is it true that most wars have been fought because of religion? There are a many important questions to consider.

Today, we will take a few minutes and talk about vision. Our Scripture reading for this morning is one of the many examples of how Jesus kept a sense of vision in front of his disciples. And it demonstrates how Jesus taught his disciples that vision is not just an idea but a way of life. Vision is a set of guiding principles that provide the foundation for who we are as a church, as people who are followers of Jesus.

Finding a Student Minister. The difficulty in finding candidates for Student Minister is reflective of the growing scarcity of candidates for all ministerial positions. As a congregation, it is important that we begin to identify those young people who demonstrate the gifts that may be guiding them to ministry. My home church was aware, probably before I was myself, of a calling upon my life.

Children – what a blessing it has been to watch the work of the Children’s Education Committee.

Four Core Values – Children, Worship, Youth, and Welcoming.

Outreach and ministry – we are doing a lot of good things – Arriba Ninos, Christmas baskets and Angel Tree, God’s Kitchen, men’s shelter, and many others. Look for ways we can increase the outreach and the ministry of our church. Partner with other congregations and ministries when possible. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

To continue to emphasize the SHAPE test. The SHAPE test helps individuals to discover their spiritual gifts(s) and after discovering their gifts(s), to put them into practice. A number of you have already taken the test, and had an opportunity to discuss it earlier in the fall at our Dessert With the Elders.

To continue being open to people. Not all churches are open to people. Some churches, while professing their desire to grow, are a closed circle. When people ask me questions, they often begin their question in an interesting way – I want to ask you a question, and I want you to tell me the truth (as though I don’t normally tell the truth!). One of the most common questions I get is, when you are on vacation, do you skip church and sleep in? I am happy to report that when I am on vacation I always attend church somewhere. I attend because I enjoy it, but also because it is an important reminder to me of how difficult it can be to enter a church for the very first time, and we need to be aware of that difficulty. While visiting my mother-in-law several years ago I visited a church where not one person greeted me or spoke to me. From the time I got out of my car to the time I got back in my car to leave, no one said a word to me. I even walked around in the lobby trying to make it obvious I was a visitor. There were a couple of greeters at the door of the sanctuary but they were talking to each other and I had to find a worship program from a table because the greeters were so preoccupied with their own conversation.

Become a Green Chalice congregation. It puzzles me that environmental issues have become so politically controversial. I am not naïve to the reasons why, but it still puzzles me when we consider the stakes involved in the continued degradation of our environment. I grew up in a part of the country where it was very obvious. Strip mines that were never reclaimed and steel mills that filled the air and water with pollutants made our local environment particularly bad. We must remember that we are stewards of God’s creation, and as stewards we must care for what has been entrusted to us.

Build an ecumenical spirit in Shelby County. There is not much of an ecumenical spirit in our country. Ecumenism is one of the foundational principles of the Disciples. When Thomas and Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, and Walter Scott observed the religious landscape of frontier America, they were troubled at the division within the body of Christ. We should be more involved with other congregations and organizations in our community. When it comes to ministry, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can partner with other congregations and with agencies and organizations.

Continue what we are doing. I can’t really think of a way to describe what we are doing, to be honest. I believe there is a spirit of welcome, of acceptance, and of love that is building on the past and growing our community of faith. The most important part of that, I believe, is to not get in its way. Many churches say they want to grow, but they really don’t want to grow; they don’t want to grow in ministry, in community, in outreach, or numerically. They create a closed circle that new people cannot break into, and they are unable to see that they are a closed circle of people.

I am not interested in “running” this church. My goal is to equip you to use the gifts God has given you in order to offer those gifts back to the kingdom of God. A “permission-giving church”. To empower you to be a spiritual entrepreneur.

To bring the Good News to people who are hurting. There are many people hurting, and not just economically. You only have to scratch the surface of the lives of others to find there are deep hurts.

I want to offer you a personal vision for the New Year, as it is a time of new beginnings and many of you are making resolutions.

Do not let the past define you. Some people don’t believe it’s possible to change, and they want your past – your failures and shortcomings – to define you for the rest of your life. Don’t let them!

You may need a fresh start today. This is the time of year when people think of new beginnings, but God provides a new beginning every day. Maybe you desire to come and ask for prayer. I recognize that not everyone is comfortable doing so, and that’s fine, but it might be helpful to someone. If so, come.

The Gift of Hope - December 25, 2011

2012-01-03T06:24:00.001-08:00

I hope you do not have the experience of one man I read about. In the rush of the season he went to the store, grabbed a big box of Christmas cards, went home, signed them, and mailed them, without reading the message inside the card. On Christmas morning, as he was enjoying a few moments of peace and quiet, he saw one remaining card on the table. He picked it up, opened it, and with alarm read this message – this card is just to say, a gift will soon be on the way.

The more things change, it is often said, the more things stay the same.

The Christmas story, as told by Luke, is remarkable as it relates the issues and struggles facing people when Jesus was born. It is remarkable because those issues and struggles still confront people today. As much as the world has changed, much remains the same. But the message brought on that first Christmas was one of hope, and it remains a message of hope. God knows our struggles, and he walks with us through our struggles.

Mary and Joseph were traveling to Bethlehem because of a census taken for tax purposes. I’m sure there was a great deal of discussion about taxes on the journey, among their fellow travelers and in every town and village they visited on their journey. Taxes were the topic of many conversations, and here we are, two thousand years later, and taxes still dominate many of our conversations!

The cost of the journey, added to the crushing tax burden of the Romans, brought a great deal of anxiety to daily life. While Joseph and Mary traveled, there would be no income earned and the journey would have some expense to it. Christmas began expensive, and it’s still expensive.

The joy of the day, and the joy of the season, is dampened for many because of economic uncertainty. Job losses continue to mount and among those who are employed there is anxiety about what their future holds. But the message of Christmas remains a message of hope. We worship a God who cares that we have what we need, and he has provided resources among his people to care for one another.

Political uncertainty was the order of the day when Jesus was born, and that certainly hasn’t changed for much of our world. The brutal reign of the Romans is now reflected in many parts of our world, where the news brings us images of people who want nothing more than their freedom, but they receive violence and oppression. But the hope of Christmas is that God will break the yoke of the oppressor, and will answer the cry of the human heart for freedom.

There was great loss, as Herod’s murderous reign took the lives of innocent children, and today we see that the youngest among humanity continue to be among the victims of tyrants. They suffer under terrible conditions, but the hope of Christmas is that God hears their cries, and God will deliver them.

And there are those who suffer from the loss of loved ones. Christmas is forever changed when we lose someone we love, but Christmas brings the hope of resurrection. For three or four years in a row I spent Christmas Eve or Christmas day in the hospital with families. Some of those who were hospitalized recovered; others did not. One year I stood with a family in a funeral home on Christmas Day, thinking what a terrible time to be in a funeral home, but Christmas brought them hope.

Because of such difficult circumstances in the time of Jesus, many were without hope, and many are without hope today. Years ago I received a call about a family needing assistance. It was just a few days before Christmas, and I drove to their home with some groceries and other items. It was a dreary day, cold and rainy. Their home was back a long, muddy driveway, and the yard was more mud than grass. The home was in very poor repair, and it was obvious the family had great financial needs.

As I got out of the car a young boy about six or seven years old came running out to greet me. My first thought was to feel bad for him, living in such difficult circumstances. I thought about Christmas and wondered if there would be much for him and his family. I asked him how he was doing and he was so excited. He talked about Christmas being just a few days away and his excitement level rose the longer he spoke. I wanted to say don’t get your hopes up. It’s okay if you don’t get much. In my mind, I could just sense the disappointment he would face on Christmas morning. But I realized later how wrong it was of me to try to qualify his hope, because hope is one of the greatest gifts of Christmas. The message of Christmas is especially designed for those who need hope.

In one way or another, we all need hope, and as we gather here today, on Christmas morning, may we give thanks to God for the hope that Christmas brings to us.

December 18, 2011 - A Perfect Christmas? Matthew 2:19-23

2011-12-21T05:55:00.001-08:00

There is a Christmas commercial that has run every year for a number of years. It is a classic in Christmas advertising. It’s an ad for Folgers coffee, and the brilliance of the ad is that it really has nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with crafting an image of Christmas. The problem is, the image it creates has nothing to do with reality at Christmas.

The ad begins with a taxi pulling up in front of a beautifully decorated home on Christmas morning. Out steps a young man carrying an armload of presents. He walks up to the door, turns the knob and it opens! What world is he living in? Who leaves their front door unlocked? Why not just put a sign out front that says come in and steal our stuff!

Then the camera shows him stepping into the front hallway of the house. Everything is perfect. All the decorations are in place as though Martha Stewart lived there. Is that your house? It’s not our house. We don’t have an angel on top of our tree – we have Yoda from Star Wars, brandishing his light saber.

To make matters worse, those two kittens we took home a few months ago are destroying everything. They climb the tree, bending down the branches, knock the ornaments onto the floor, and pull at the lights. Every year Nick lays out a Christmas village on a table, and one of the kittens keeps climbing up and chewing the people he puts in the village. It’s like an episode of Godzilla, as she stomps between the buildings snatching victims away and trying to eat them.

After stepping into the house the young man reaches to the wall, flips a light switch and all the lights in the house light up. The lights coming down the banister, the tree lights, lights on the mantle, lights along the windows – lights illuminate everywhere. Is that reality? One switch? At our house you have to connect fifty extension cords before any Christmas lights come on, and then the breaker box in the garage explodes completely out of the wall.

Then he goes into the kitchen and turns on the coffee pot. That’s when you finally see the Folgers can. The aroma of the coffee causes his family, who are upstairs in bed, to stir. They sniff the air and smile. Really? That’s when you call 911! Hello. Someone has broken into my house, and I think they’re downstairs in the kitchen making coffee!

Instead of coming down the stairs with a baseball bat, his parents and sister come bounding joyously down the stairs – all in perfect makeup, of course, and no one has bed hair. The image is perfectly formed, and as his mother turns the corner and sees him she says Peter! You’re home! And then I cry. Because of a coffee commercial.

Actually, it’s not because of a coffee commercial, but the image that is created. That’s the kind of Christmas we all want – a perfect Christmas. We want a Christmas where our family is gathered together, where everything works, where everyone is happy, where there is a beautiful home filled with plenty of presents and plenty of food.

But what is the reality of Christmas? It’s certainly not perfection, is it? Christmas in the real world is far from perfect. Christmas in the real world is a time of running around like some kind of maniac trying to get everywhere you need to go. Christmas in the real world is too little time and too little money. Christmas in the real world is one of stress and anxiety as many worry about not just paying for presents, but putting food on the table. Christmas in the real world is one of anxiety for many because health difficulties cause them to wonder if they will see next Christmas. Christmas in the real world is one of sadness for many because of empty seats at Christmas dinners, the result of loss or of broken relationships.

Our Scripture reading this morning tells us of the return of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus from Egypt. They fled to Egypt because of Herod’s murderous decree after the birth of Jesus. Herod was now gone, but one of his sons ruled in his place, so it was still not safe for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to return to Bethlehem. Instead, they traveled to Nazareth, in Galilee, the northern region of Israel, which was ruled by another of Herod’s sons. And Matthew closes this section of Scripture by writing and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.”

It wasn’t the plan Mary and Joseph had in mind, it wasn’t how they would have designed life to go, it wasn’t perfect in their minds, but somehow, God fashioned it into a greater plan.

Life seldom goes according to plan. Life seldom works out in the manner we desire – life is never perfect – but God can fashion a plan out of the difficulties we experience and can even turn those difficulties into something beautiful.

This sanctuary looks beautiful for Advent, doesn’t it? Let me tell you about getting it this way. You can’t imagine what a time we had trying to get these trees together. I lost count of how many times we took them apart and put them back together, trying to get them to look the same. We thought they were supposed to be the same, but there was no way that was going to happen. The one on the left came out okay, but the one on my right looks as though its missing a section and has another tree smashed on top of it, so I’m still not sure that we got them right.

And if you were here last night or Friday night for the cantata you saw a beautiful program. You should have been here on Tuesday evening. You always think it always comes together, but this may be the one time that it doesn’t. But it did, thanks to David’s great direction and talent.

But it’s okay when things seem to be falling apart. It’s okay because we need a reminder that in church – especially at church – we cannot forget that life is far from perfect. Sometimes, in church, we fall prey to the temptation of creating the illusion that everything if perfect. We can gloss over our failures and shortcomings in the hopes that we appear as though our lives are perfectly put together, when the reality is far from perfect.

If you fret about your family and your struggles this Christmas, know that the families in Scripture are far from perfect. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. Jacob cheated his brother out of his inheritance. David – well, David’s family was an absolute mess. If you’ve had a tough year, think about Job. Job lost everything, but in spite of all he lost, he held fast to his faith and knew that God remained with him. If you’re worried about your past and wonder how God could use you, think about Zaccheus, who was so unpopular because of cheating people out of their money that people crowded him out of the view of Jesus as Jesus walked through town. If you struggle with doubt and are overwhelmed with questions about God, think about Thomas, who couldn’t believe that Jesus had risen. Maybe you wish your would like for your house to look perfectly decorated for Christmas, but you’re more worried because you don’t know who much longer the roof is going to last, think about Joseph and Mary, finding shelter in a stable, and placing Jesus in a manger – a feeding trough.

The good news that comes at Christmas is that God’s gifts of love and grace come into our imperfect lives and imperfect world and create something beautiful.

The perfect Christmas is not one where every decoration is in place, where all the lights work, where the table is set for a perfectly-cooked meal, and where the tree is surrounded by presents. The perfect Christmas took place once – in that stable and in that manger, and that Christmas is where we find hope, and love.

Saying Yes to God - December 11, 2011

2011-12-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

My grandmother, on my mom’s side, was born on Christmas day. She was named Mary Christina, in honor of being born on Christmas. My siblings and I called her “Little Grandma.” We called my dad’s mom “Big Grandma.” Both of them were about the same size – about five feet tall, so I have no idea how we came up with “Big Grandma” and “Little Grandma.”

Though she was a small woman, “Little Grandma” commanded respect just through her sense of presence. My uncles were tough guys. They were big, tall guys, and when they were growing up no one messed with them. They lived in a tough neighborhood and they were about the toughest in their part of town. But I can remember being impressed at how those big, strong men snapped to attention when “Little Grandma” spoke to them.

“Little Grandma” was actually my mom’s aunt. I told the story in greater detail on Mother’s Day of 2010, but the heart of the story is that she traveled by train to an orphanage in Wheeling, West Virginia shortly after my mom was born. My mom’s mother died the day after giving birth, and a short time later her father left my mom and her siblings at the orphanage. “Little Grandma” was already a widow struggling to raise eight children on her own. Why would someone who was already struggling to raise eight children, on her own, take in another child? My mom needed someone to raise her, and so “Little Grandma” said yes.

I like to think of my grandmother as one who said yes. There was a need, and though it must have seemed like an overwhelming need to someone in her circumstance, she said yes to this little baby.

This morning, as we continue our journey through Advent, I want to talk about another woman who said yes – Mary, the mother of Jesus. Luke’s gospel tells her story, the story of her saying yes to God. Our Scripture passage for today tells of Mary’s joyous affirmation – her yes – to God. Hear her words in Luke 1:46-55.

That is a beautiful passage of Scripture, but its beauty masks the difficulties that came with Mary saying yes to God.

Mary was about to have her life radically changed. The arrival of a child, though exciting, is never the easiest of moments. The arrival of a child means your life is never the same as you suddenly have the responsibility of caring for this tiny, fragile life. I had this illusion that things were going to be relatively simple when we had children. How much disruption could a tiny little baby cause, after all? You bring them home, you fix them a sandwich and that’s it, right? If only it were that simple. When a child arrives, everything changes so much you feel your life has been turned upside down.

For Mary, that challenge was much, much greater than what the typical parent faces. After the birth of Jesus, when Joseph and Mary travel to the Temple to dedicate him, Simeon tells Mary a sword will pierce your soul (Luke 2:35). That’s not a very cheery thought to tell a new mother, is it? You’re supposed to say something like your child might grow up to be king. But Simeon, in a prophetic moment, gives Mary a glimpse of the future, alluding to the pain Mary would face because of what would happen to Jesus.

The first stab of that pain would come quickly, because of the threat of Herod. Joseph and Mary had to flee to Egypt because of Herod’s murderous rampage, putting to death all the male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem. In a life and death situation Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had to leave their home, their family, and all that was familiar in order to find safety. They become refugees, exiles, living in another land. That’s not how life is supposed to begin.

Life is not easy for many children. There are children, every day, born into incredibly difficult circumstances. My grandmother had to provide protection for my mom. My mom’s father was not a good man. He was an alcoholic who was violent and abusive and my grandmother had to be sure he would not try to enter back into my mom’s life. My mom had no knowledge of her father until she was a teenager, and then she had to learn the truth of the kind of person he was. That’s not how life should be – a child should not have to be protected from her own father, but such are the circumstances for too many children.

Saying yes to God means life is going to be different. It’s going to be different because God calls his people to take up for the powerless, for those who need protection from people like Herod, and from people like my grandfather.

But it’s also a reminder of a powerful truth – the world is going to be different because Jesus came to put things right in the world. That’s the good news – that Jesus came to put things right. The bad news is that not everyone wants things to be right. Some people benefit from things not being right.

When you put things right, there is going to be resistance. Mary says, in her response, he has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble (verse 52). That’s a beautiful sentiment, the idea of lifting up the humble. It would be nice message on a Christmas card. But think of the reality of that message – he has brought down rulers from their thrones. Removing rulers from their thrones is not a simple matter. They don’t usually say okay, I’m done. It’s all your now. My best to you. Here’s the keys to my kingdom; let me know if I can be of any help. Herod had power and he was so threatened at the thought of one who would usurp that power that he did not hesitate to take the lives of children. What kind of person would do such a thing? People like Herod, who will do anything to protect their power. The scribes and Pharisees would not receive Jesus well either. He was a threat to their power and so they resisted him and they criticized him and, eventually, some of them got together and plotted how they might put Jesus to death. As much as some people will do anything for money, people are willing to take even more dramatic steps to either get, or keep, power. Jesus was a threat to many who held the power in his day, and they were not interested in giving up that power.

Then Mary says he has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty (verse 53). That’s pretty good news if you’re poor, but not very good news if you are rich.

There were not many rich people in the time of Jesus. Most people lived a hand-to-mouth existence. It’s a grinding-down way to live, being in poverty. It’s a tough, tough life.

As you might imagine, my grandmother, raising nine children on her own, did not have much money. Her husband was a policeman, and after his death she lived on the small pension she received. I don’t know how much it was, but I know it wasn’t adequate to raise a family of that size. My mom grew up poor. I remember when I was younger my mom would tell some of those we were so poor stories. I didn’t know at times if she was joking or telling the truth about some of them. She would say they were so poor they could only afford one bowl of milk for their cereal, so the oldest would get it first, put her cereal in it, then pass on what was left. On it would go until it finally arrived at my mom, with very little left. That story was a joke. I think.

More and more, we see people slipping into poverty. It takes a lot of money to live these days. Housing, food, energy, health care, transportation – there is so much expense in raising a family, and many people are simply not keeping up with the costs.

One of the founding ideals of our society is that of compassion. It is a compassion rooted firmly in the gospel. Compassion is part of who we are as a people, and that compassion is a compelling force that continually calls out to us to never forget the poor and to be advocates for the poor. But more and more it seems that our age is beginning to reverse the words of Mary, to where we might say that the rich are filled with good things while the poor are sent away empty.

Every year at Advent we read about the so-called war on Christmas. If there is a war on Christmas it has nothing to do with how we are greeted when we walk into a store. Personally, I don’t care if someone says happy holidays or Merry Christmas to me when I enter a store. To tell the truth, I prefer that Jesus be left out of the commerce of Christmas.

If there is a war on Christmas it comes when we forget that Jesus was born into poverty and calls us to be compassionate and generous to the poor. Demonstrating compassion to the poor is such a strong component of the gospel that in Matthew 25 Jesus portrays the final judgment as a time when everything rests upon how we deal with the least of these (Matthew 25:31-46).

Next weekend we will deliver 125 food baskets and 70 Angel Tree bags. What a great thing it is to give away! What a blessing it is to be able to give to others!

Mary said yes to God. May we say yes to God as well. May we say yes to be instruments of the love and peace of Christ. May we say yes to be people of compassion and generosity. May we say yes to be people who will comfort the bereaved and befriend the lonely. May we say yes to God, this day, and every day.

May we pray.

November 27, 2011 - Writing A New Story

2011-11-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

Matthew 1:18-23

We live in a time of great poverty of language. So much of our language is unimaginative, unexpressive, and uninspiring.

I love modern praise and worship music, but the old hymns are much more beautiful in terms of their language. This year is the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible, which is not my favorite translation in terms of readability, but the language of the King James is beautiful and it has had an immeasurable impact on Western society.

Some language is either so powerful or beautiful that it lives on in just a phrase. In fact, if I start a few phrases you can probably complete them.

Today begins the season of Advent. As we begin our celebration of Advent we begin with a short phrase that rewrote the story of history. Matthew writes at the beginning of our Scripture passage for this morning with a ten-word phrase – This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. Those ten words herald the news that God was writing a new page in the course of human history, a new story that everything was about to change and history would be forever transformed.

The Christmas story is one that reminds us that while mankind attempts to write one story God is writing a new story. While mankind attempts to write the story to suit humanity’s purposes, God writes the story to suit his purposes. While humanity writes the story of power and domination, God writes the story of peace. While humanity writes the story of hatred and strife, God writes the story of love. While humanity writes the story of riches and wealth and gain, God writes the story of giving and sacrifice.

As you follow the Biblical story you find time and again God writing a new story. When Egypt enslaves the Hebrew people to build their buildings and become their servants, God writes a new story. God writes the story to say that people were never created to be enslaved by others and he frees the Hebrew people and fashions them into a people and into a people who would demonstrate to all people throughout history what it meant to be people who would follow God.

And the Biblical characters are time and again a demonstration of God writing a new story for individual lives. Moses, who took the life of another man, was the one chosen by God to lead the Hebrew people out of captivity in Egypt. After killing a man Moses flees Egypt but God sends Moses back. Who would ever imagine someone like Moses to be qualified for such a task? But God wrote a new story in his life.

David, the great king of Israel, enjoyed a lot of high points in his life, but he also endured some terrible lows. His power and political achievements fostered in him an arrogance so terrible that when he wanted the wife of another man he took her and then ensured her husband would be killed to cover what he had done. His family, because of his tragic example, became the textbook example of disfunction that led to the tragic death of his beloved son Absalom. And yet God wrote a new story in David’s life to the point that Scripture would say of David that he was a man after my (God’s) own heart (Acts 13:22).

Peter was a fisherman just living his life, scratching out a living, when Jesus approached him on the shores of Galilee. He was a willing, though flawed, follower. He denied Jesus, was restored, but still struggled. Paul had to confront Peter about Peter’s hesitancy to welcome Gentiles into the church. But Peter was faithful, and gave his life for his faith. God wrote a new story in his life.

Paul, still breathing threats and murder against the members of the early church, found God on the road to Damascus and God wrote a new story in his life.

And then there are the characters of the Christmas story. Joseph and Mary, a young couple chosen from obscurity to raise Jesus. That God would choose a poor, young couple would be a major new story in the course of human history. Jesus was born in the humble surroundings of a manger, not the halls of a palace, to a poor family rather than into the comfort of wealth.

Herod, who had both secured and protected his kingdom by any means necessary, was frightened to hear of the birth of Jesus. He attempted to rewrite history the same way as other tyrants – violence. But God was writing a different story. God’s story was one that said the tyrants of history will not always have their way, and in the end, a different way will prevail. We are seeing in our own time the story of tyrants being rewritten. The Arab spring has unseated tyrants and dictators and signaling a new story in nations that have long been subject to tyranny. The story of God’s kingdom, as opposed to Herod’s kingdom, was heralded long ago by the prophet Isaiah in the immortal words they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore (Isaiah 2:4). The birth of Jesus was a sign that the days of tyrants and their kingdoms were numbered. Though they may have power for a time, God’s story is that there is a far greater power and kingdom.

The magi, who came from a land far away, tell the story to always look beyond the boundaries and limitations set by humanity. While the story of humanity has often been that of us versus them and who is in and who is out, the magi being led from far away is God’s writing of a new story to remind us that he neither sees nor sets boundaries between people. It is a writing a story to say that his kingdom is open to all people.

The shepherds, the lowly shepherds, saw God rewrite their story as a reminder that God never forgets the poor, the outcast, and the powerless. The story written by humanity is to favor the rich and the powerful, but the story written by God is that a great reversal of values is on the horizon. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Jesus said.

God is writing a new story. There is much handwringing about the state of the world today, and there are many reasons to bring us concern, but God will write the story all the way down to the final chapter of history. The story of humanity will not be decided by the principalities and powers of this world, but by God.

And God is writing your story, and my story. When fears and worries, challenges and failures, appear to be writing the story of your life, remember that God is the author and the finisher of your faith and your life.

November 13, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - Beware the Shortcut

2011-11-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

Matthew 7:13-14

When I was in high school, one year I tried out for the cross-country team. Running in West Virginia is not easy, as there is very little flat land. The practice course went down the road a little from the school, across a small bridge and then onto a hilly, winding back road. Most of that road was very secluded and was a difficult run. A couple of the guys on the team decided to take a shortcut, so they parked a car along that road. They would run to the car, sit for a while, and then drive the car until they were near the end of the course, get out, and run the rest of the way looking barely winded.

I’m sure they thought it was a great idea and a great shortcut. But do you think they ever won a race? No. They won in practice but never came close to winning a race. The shortcut didn’t help them at all; in fact, it worked against them.

As we draw near the end of the Sermon On the Mount Jesus warns us to Beware the Shortcut. Let’s read what he says in this passage –

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Jesus is beginning his conclusion to the Sermon On the Mount and starts this final section by making an obvious point – the path he is offering is not an easy path. By this point in the Sermon this should come as no surprise considering some of the things Jesus says, but it is a final reminder that the path of faith is often difficult and demanding. It is not easy to step away from our own self-interest. It is not easy to walk the path of love, of grace, and generosity. But it is the best path, and the path for which we were created.

When I was growing up my family would sometimes pile in the car on Sunday afternoon to take a drive. Was it just my family, or did your family think that riding around in a car for no good reason was a good idea? Can you imagine getting your family in the car now just to drive around for no other purpose other than to cram in the car and burn up gas that costs $3.50 a gallon. Who has time to do that now? Who wants to do that now?

My dad loved to load us all in the car to drive up the river to the Dairy Owl for ice cream. The Dairy Owl sat right across the road from a smelly steel mill that was spewing ash 24 hours a day, so it wasn’t the most picturesque spot. To get there from our house was about a ten or fifteen-minute trip up Route 2, but my dad could not go the short, easy way. We had to drive all around the countryside and through the hills rather than the straight, easy journey. While my dad was extolling the virtues of the winding path we were in the backseat turning green because of that winding path. But looking back on it, every one of my siblings and I would now take a very different view, recognizing there was value in those times for our family and that our dad was trying to teach us that value.

Man makes the straight canal; God makes the winding rivers (A Word In Season, John Bishop, Nashville: Abingdon, 1979, p. 45).

There are no straight paths in Scripture.

When God called Abraham to leave his homeland and to follow him he did not provide a roadmap. The journey was full of twists and turns, surprises and challenges, but each one added to what Abraham learned while on the winding path. When the Moses led the Hebrew people out of captivity in Egypt and into their journey to the Promised Land there wasn’t a great physical distance to travel. From where they were in Egypt to the Promised Land was a distance of about 200 miles. If they had taken the shortcut they would have traveled along the Mediterranean Sea and could have spent some time at the beach enjoying the weather, but they didn’t. The book of Exodus tells us they didn’t take that path – though that way was shorter (Exodus 13:17). They wandered, and wandered, and wandered. They took long, winding, difficult, desolate, and dangerous path. And while they traveled that path they faced great difficulty and they complained. Moses, they would cry out, why did you ever lead us out of Egypt? We were better off in Egypt, though we were slaves (Exodus 14:10-12, among other passages). Why not take the shortcut? Why take the most difficult path?

But generations later, their ancestors were able to look back and see how God fashioned them into a people on that winding path, and how he made provision for them, and those lessons would continue to teach them for generations.

When Jesus called his disciples there was no easy path laid before them. Follow me is a very simple request but it set before them a path fraught with many challenges.

In our modern lives we are always so anxious to just get somewhere, but God wants to make something of us on the way. My youngest sister got a speeding ticket not long after receiving her driver’s license. She was driving my dad’s old Ford Pinto. I believe she was clocked at over 80 miles an hour. I was amazed she could get that Pinto to go over 80 miles an hour! My dad did not like us driving fast. In fact, he had an old Chevy pickup truck that I often drove. The front end was in terrible need of an alignment. Around 45 miles an hour the front end would start shaking. We would often ask why he wouldn’t get it aligned. His response was if I do you all will drive it too fast! I remember the conversation between my dad and sister about her speeding ticket. He asked where were you going in such a hurry? My sister said nowhere, really, but I was in a hurry to get there! In our rush to get somewhere, we often miss what God is trying to teach us on the winding path.

It took a windy road through the wilderness to bring the Hebrew people to the realization they were a free people and it took the winding path through the wilderness to forge them into a nation. Only in the long and winding journey, I believe, could they learn those lessons. They could not learn them by taking the shortcut.

Paul had a pretty good life going for himself, and then came his conversion on the road to Damascus. Listen to where that path then led him - I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches (II Corinthians 11:23-28).

It is tempting to take the shortcut in life. Jesus calls us to avoid the shortcut. There are easier ways than the way we are called to by Jesus. There are easier ways than the way of loving one’s enemies. There are easier ways than the way of praying for those who would persecute us. There are easier ways than the way of being a peacemaker. There are easier ways than the way of investing in the kingdom of God rather than investing in ourselves. There are easier ways than the way of withholding judgments of others. There are easier ways, but they are not better ways.

In many ways, my life has not at all followed the kind of path I would have predicted or expected. My life has taken some unexpected and strange turns. My life has not always gone neatly from point A to point B, and there have been times when I was greatly troubled by the strange, winding path of my life. But I have learned that each turn, however unexpected, led to something I needed to learn or experience. There are times when I wish I could go back and do some things over, but I think if I could, I would miss out on a great deal. To go back, I would be tempted to straighten out all the winding and twisting turns of my life, and in doing so, would undo much of what God has taught me through that winding way.

Beware the shortcut. May we pray.

November 6, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - Is God Good?

2011-11-07T13:24:00.001-08:00

Matthew 7:7-12

Steve Jobs, often in the news, has been in the news even more in the weeks since his passing. Known primarily for his business skills, the details of his spiritual life were far less familiar to the public. When Jobs was thirteen, he asked the pastor of his parents’ church if God knew about starving children. Yes, God knows everything, the pastor replied. Jobs never returned to church, refusing to worship a God who would allow suffering.

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/steve-jobs-private-faith_n_1072631.html?ref=religion).

After Christmas we will begin a new sermon series. It will deal with questions of belief, unbelief, faith, doubt, the intersection of science and faith, and suffering. This morning we get a bit of a head start on that series as we continue our study of the Sermon On the Mount. In this passage Jesus is answering the question that Steve Jobs was really asking his pastor years ago – is God good? I think there were some serious flaws in Jobs’ logic, and we’ll touch on those briefly today and in more detail after the first of the year.

Let’s read what Jesus has to say in this morning’s passage –

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! So in everything, do to others what you would have them to do you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets – Matthew 7:7-12.

Immediately upon reading that passage there are a few questions that come to mind – does everyone who asks really receive? Does everyone who seeks really find? Is the door opened to everyone who knocks? I think there are some people who would question the reality of the statements made by Jesus, and many people do question it by asking whether or not God is good. There are people who, like Steve Jobs, look at the suffering in the world and ask whether or not God can really be good in light of all the suffering.

Jesus is affirming that God is, without a doubt, good. That is his beginning point, which is made in the second half of this passage, so we’ll start with that affirmation, as we look at the first half of the passage.

One of the underlying questions in the Sermon On the Mount is this – do we want to be like God? In the beginning of the Sermon, in the Beatitudes, Jesus lists qualities that demonstrate the nature of God – mercy, righteousness, offering comfort, and peacemaking, among others. Then there are all the qualities that show what a person is like not on the outside, but on the inside, demonstrating that matters of the heart are of incredible interest to God. And love, of course, is the foundation to everything, and we see this in a very dramatic way when Jesus makes the incredible statement that we should love our enemies.

Over and over, as we read through the Sermon, Jesus is sharing the attributes of God as markers for what our lives can be – we can be people who exhibit mercy, people who demonstrate righteousness, people who bring comfort, people who bring peace, people who are more concerned with the inward condition of the heart than with external appearances, people who will love all people, people who offer grace, people who make an investment in matters of the spirit and not just in matters of the world, to name just a few.

If we want to be like God, then, we will want the same things as God and we will seek the same things as God. So when Jesus says ask and it will be given to you, by the time we arrive at this point in the Sermon we will know the kinds of things for which we should be asking. If I have made it thus far through the Sermon, and if it’s getting through to me, I will certainly not be asking for a couple of new PRS custom guitars and expect that God is going to leave them on my doorstep for me. That’s the approach that the prosperity gospel preachers have taken with this passage. It’s Lord, gimme! Gimme this, and gimme that. Provide for me what I want. Indulge my selfishness with lots of stuff and by showering me with affluence.

Instead of demonstrating that kind of attitude, Jesus calls us to pray for what makes us like God – Lord, make me a person who brings comfort to those who mourn; make me a person who will work for peace; make me a person who does not strike back in anger and retribution at those who may harm me, but reach to them in love and grace. I don’t think God is going to give me a new car or a couple of new guitars just because I ask, or because I ask dozens of times. But if I ask to be a person who brings comfort, to be a person who works for peace, to be a person who will love my enemies, I believe that is a prayer that God will be very happy to answer.

But those are not qualities that come to us very easily. We may have to persevere in our asking and seeking for those qualities. This is why Jesus talks about seeking and knocking. Those are qualities that represent perseverance. I’m not sure that the first time someone comes up and whacks me on the jaw I’m going to be very forgiving. I’m not even sure that I’m going to be that way when they whack me on the other cheek. But with enough seeking and persevering in prayer I can become a person who says I can love a person who would persecute me or hate me. I may not be a person who wants to move beyond keeping up a nice façade in life, but with enough seeking and perseverance in prayer God can transform me into a person who is concerned that my heart is transformed and that the passions of my heart are equal to the passions of God’s heart. I may be a person who prefers to invest in the things of this life but with enough seeking and perseverance in prayer God can open my heart to the importance of investing in the matters of the kingdom and the giving of my resources rather than hoarding them for only myself.

And when we are transformed to become more and more like God it really changes the way we deal with people, and that’s where the last verse in this passage comes in. Often called the Golden Rule, it’s a version of a saying that long predated Jesus. But Jesus changes the nature of the saying that had been used. Prior to Jesus it was used in the negative – don’t do to someone what you don’t want them to do to you. Jesus turns it around into a positive expression – do to others what you would have them to do to you. He is saying it’s not enough to just avoid causing harm to another person. It’s good not to harm them, certainly, but it is more in keeping with the character of God to be active in our seeking to do good for others.

This is a big difference in how we deal with others. In the view of Jesus, it’s not enough to sit at home and say well, I’m not doing anything to hurt anyone. That’s great, but what are you doing to help another person?

This is where the young Steve Jobs made a mistake in his logic. He was disappointed that God wasn’t doing enough to help the starving children of the world. But don’t you think there’s some inconsistency in a person who was sitting on more than $8.5 billion dollars of personal wealth and yet decides God is not worthy to be worshipped because of the starving children in the world? How many starving children would $8 billion feed? Keeping a half a billion should be enough, shouldn’t it? My point is not to criticize Steve Jobs, but if you are critical of God for not doing enough shouldn’t you be certain to be doing all you can?

Being passive and not causing harm, Jesus said, is not enough. We are called to be active in our working to do good for others, and that’s why, in the end, the question is not really is God good? The question that is more pressing is are we good?

October 30, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - Judge Not...

2011-10-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

How many of you consider yourself to be a judgmental person?

In a moment you will see a series of pictures. I did not select these pictures to make a point about the individuals or to make any political or social statement. I chose images that would elicit a reaction. As you see the pictures take note of your immediate reaction. Most of them are familiar, but I will list the names beside each picture.

Barack Obama

George W. Bush

Glenn Beck

Whoopi Goldberg

Rush Limbaugh

Keith Olbermann

Gordon Gekko (as portrayed by actor Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street)

Bill Gates

Steve Jobs

Snooki (from MTV's show Jersey Shore)

(Benny Hinn - TV evangelist)

Joel Osteen

Mother Teresa

(Warren Buffett)

(A homeless man, whose name is unknown)

A man was eating breakfast and reading the paper one morning when his wife walked into the kitchen. She looked out the window and saw a neighbor hanging out laundry. It appeared to be very dingy and grey looking, so she began to criticize the neighbor’s ability to do laundry. Somebody needs to help our neighbors with their laundry. It looks terrible, she complained. A few days later the scene repeated itself. She looked out, saw the neighbor hanging laundry, and she criticized how dingy and grey it looked. A few days later, as she came into the kitchen, she looked out and saw the neighbor hanging laundry. This time, though, her reaction was much different. Someone must have finally taught our neighbors how to do laundry, she exclaimed. Actually, dear, said her husband, I decided to wash our window.

Jesus says, do not judge.

At this point in the Sermon On the Mount, I’m not sure why anyone would feel like judging another person. If you read through the Sermon On the Mount in one sitting, by the time you get to this part of the sermon it’s very easy to be overwhelmed with a sense of inadequacy about who we are spiritually and the idea that we would sit in judgment of anyone should be pretty well wrenched out of us.

I must note Jesus is not ruling out every type of judgment. There are times when it becomes necessary to approach another person to offer a point of correction, and we do so out of love. That is a healthy type of judgment to make, especially if someone is engaging in a behavior that is damaging or hurtful to them or another person. It also doesn’t mean we can’t speak the truth as it becomes necessary. Jesus could be very pointed at times as he spoke the truth. But even within those examples we must be very careful. There are people who, while “speaking the truth in love”, are really just using their so-called love as a cloak for speaking hurtfully to another person.

The kind of judging Jesus is speaking to in this passage is a specific type of judging – it is when a person decides they are of such a high moral standing they are qualified to pass judgment upon others. It is when one believes they are in possession of such a high level of righteousness they are morally superior to others and they congratulate themselves for being morally superior. This was the mistake of groups such as the Pharisees. There was certainly nothing at all wrong with their desire to lead morally upstanding lives and to follow the law as closely as possible. That is a laudable effort, but they fell into the trap of congratulating themselves for being so incredibly righteous while they viewed others as having a much more inferior type of righteousness.

Jesus says very clearly that no one is in the position to judge another in such a manner. He warns very clearly do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

If I want to find fault with another person that leaves me open to fault-finding as well. If I want to point out the deficiencies of another person that leaves me open to others pointing out my deficiencies. If I want to point out the failures of another then others will no doubt point out my failures. The judgment we use on others, says, Jesus, becomes our judgment. The judgment we pass on others is passed on us.

Judgment is also unwise because we don’t know what is happening in the life of another person. You never know what is going on in the life of another person. You never know what combination of stresses, struggles, and pressures exist in the life of another. Schoolteachers certainly understand this. Teachers know that behavior is very strongly linked to a student’s environment, and if there are stresses and struggles in that environment they will be manifested in the student’s behavior at school. There may be times when we shake our head at the actions or behaviors of another without understanding what might be driving those actions and behavior. I am sometimes privy to some of those stresses and pressures in people’s lives and I can say without hesitation that we don’t always know what is happening in the lives of others.

There is also an element of blindness that exists in judging. Sometimes we can see the faults of others very clearly but are blind to the same faults within ourselves. Jesus says it this way – Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Some years ago I decided to add a specific point to a sermon in hopes that an individual would be present. I thought it was something they really needed to hear, so I put it in a sermon. It was the first and the last time I did such a thing. The person was in worship the Sunday morning that I preached the sermon, and on their way out of worship stopped and said to me, you know Dave, I’m really glad you made that point this morning (the one I wanted them to hear. It worked, I thought). I’m glad you made that point because so-and-so was here and they really needed to hear it. People see in others what they cannot see in themselves.

The ancient Greeks, when they faced a very difficult trial, would sometimes hold the trial in the dark, so the judge and jury would not be swayed by anything but the facts in a case.

(Barclay, p. 264).

I’m not sure we can control our instinct toward judgment. I’m not sure it is possible for us to put ourselves in the dark to the point that we are not influenced by things such as how a person looks or acts. We can, though, control how we deal with others, and we can control how we treat others, and we can control what we say about others, and that is a significant difference.

I believe people are so anxious to find a spiritual home where no mantle of judgment will be placed upon them. I believe there are many people who would love to be a part of church, but they have experienced the heavy hand of judgment in such a hurtful way that they just can bring themselves to step into a church.

We can be living expressions of the grace of God. We can show people there are churches that will not judge them. We can show people God is pursuing them with love and grace and not judgment.

May we pray.

October 23, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - What, Me Worry?

2011-10-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

Matthew 6:25-34

The Sermon On the Mount

What, Me Worry?

Is anyone surprised we are here this morning? The world was supposed to end on Friday, did you know that? According to Harold Camping, who also predicted it would end back in May, we shouldn’t be here.

Back in 1988 a book showed up in my mailbox. Titled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988 the author had selected a weekend in September that would bring the end of time. Next year I received the sequel – 89 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1989. I didn’t receive a book the next near.

Why are people drawn to such predictions? I think much of it is because the anxiety of the present drives an almost insatiable desire to peer into the future to find a sense of hope. That desire to know the future allows people to be taken in by these predictions. People want to know the future because they are looking for assurance. It is no coincidence that these sorts of predictions come during troubled times, because people are very anxious, and they will grasp at what will provide evidence that God is in control.

As we continue our series on the Sermon On the Mount, this morning we come to a passage that speaks powerfully, I believe, to all of us. It speaks to our fear of the present and the future. It speaks to our worries and anxieties, which are very real struggles for all of us.

Would you like to live a life free of worry and anxiety? Is it really possible to live such a life?

Let’s read what Jesus has to say.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Piece of cake, right? Everybody okay about the worry and anxiety now? None of us are ever going to worry again, right?

Worry and anxiety are very real elements in life, and they are very difficult to overcome. Would, for example, unlimited wealth ease all of our worries? No. It matters not how much or how little we have, worry and anxiety are a very real presence in our lives.

So how possible is it for us to do what Jesus recommends in this passage? Well, let’s take a look at what he is recommending in this passage.

First, Jesus is not saying we should be irresponsible in our approach to life.

A few weeks before I graduated from college, a friend and I were talking about what was coming next for us and discussing our plans. I made a comment about needing to get a life insurance policy and he told me I was wrong to do so, which surprised me. I asked him what could possible be wrong with buying a life insurance policy. He used this passage as support for his position, saying that Jesus told us take no thought for the morrow.

The King James translation begins verse 25 by using those words, take no thought for the morrow. I don’t think that’s a translation that adequately captures what Jesus is saying. When Jesus says we shouldn’t think about tomorrow, or the next day, is he saying we shouldn’t make any plans or preparations for our future? I don’t think that’s what he’s recommending. It’s really more along the lines of do not be distracted.

Jesus is not recommending a cavalier approach to life that never takes into account the things that are needed to live. Jesus uses the birds of he air to make his point. It is not that the birds do not work; it is that they do not worry. Jesus is not saying don’t work and don’t plan; he is saying we must not be consumed by a level of worry and anxiety that distracts us from life. So we would next say,

Worry and anxiety should not rob us of the joy and beauty in life.

I have spent countless hours in hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral homes over the course of my ministry. It is often a corrective to me, as I worry about so many things that do not matter.

Jesus says that we cannot add a single hour to our life by worrying. In fact, excessive worry and anxiety will take time away from our lives. Stress is one of the worst factors to act upon our bodies. Stress is, quite literally, a killer.

We lose so much of life to worry. One of the tragedies of worry and anxiety is the way in which they rob us of the ability to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of life. Yes, there are many, many things that are legitimate causes for worry, but there is also great joy and beauty in life.

Look at the lilies of the field, Jesus says. They bloom in beauty on one day and the next day they become little more than fuel for an oven, but there is beauty there.

I overheard a conversation the other day in which someone said I have this to worry about, this to worry about, and this to worry about. What an interesting way to speak. It wasn’t I have this to do or I have this to consider or I have this to solve, but I have this to worry about, as though our only option in life is to worry.

The real option is to say I will not allow the worry of so many things to steal away the beauty that is in life.

One of my favorite Wendell Berry poems is The Peace of Wild Things –

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what

my and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests

in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I think those are beautiful words, and carry the thought of Jesus to avoid the danger of missing the beauty and joys of life.

Enjoy the beauty and richness of life. Resist the temptation to allow the worry and anxiety of life to steal away your joy.

Worry about the right things.

One of my favorite Biblical stories is that of Jonah. We are familiar with the part of the story of the great fish but often forget the end of the story, where God chides Jonah. Jonah was angry that God had compassion upon the city of Nineveh – imagine someone being upset that God would demonstrate compassion – so he goes outside of the city for two reasons. He goes to pout over God’s mercy, and he goes to watch and see what would happen to the city, in hopes that perhaps God will relent of his compassion and destroy the city.

As Jonah sits and waits, God provides a vine that gave Jonah shelter from the hot sun. The next day God takes away the vine and Jonah becomes very hot in the blazing heat of the sun, and he becomes angry about his discomfort. God asks him if he has a right to be angry about the vine and Jonah, in a very petulant and rebellious manner, says he does have a right to be angry about his discomfort. And then God says you have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city? And that is the end of the book of Jonah.

Jonah’s mistake was that he was worried about the wrong things. His anger over losing his comfort betrays his failure to be worried about the fate of more than a hundred and twenty thousand people.

One of the dangers of worry is that it can so easily be the wrong kind of worry – the kind of worry that diverts our attention and our compassion away from people who need us, it can be the kind of worry that turns us inward and keeps us from being able to see the needs of those around us. If I worry about what I will wear tomorrow and what I will eat tomorrow, when I have no shortage of clothing or food, that worry can keep me from remembering those who have inadequate clothing or nothing to eat. If we aren’t worried about such things, then we aren’t paying attention to what is happening in the world around us.

This kind of worry – the worry over the wrong things – not only afflicts individuals, it afflicts groups as well. It affects churches, who can become so worried about what is happening within their walls that they fail to see what is happening in the community outside of their walls. It can happen to countries, who become so concerned about what is happening within their borders that they fail to see the tremendous need outside of their borders.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, our 32^nd president, gave his inaugural address on March 4, 1933. It was during the depths of the Great Depression, and he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I think that’s a great saying, but I don’t really agree. There are some things to fear in life, but he does point to the truth that fear, which comes from our worries and anxieties, will paralyze us.

Faith will never do away with all uncertainty and the worry and anxiety that come with that uncertainty, but faith helps us learn to overcome it. Studying Scripture reminds us that many of the great characters of Scripture had doubts, and fears, and worries and anxieties.

Abraham was never given a detailed road map of the path God called him to follow. It was simply go to a land I will show you. I will show you is the future tense. Abraham, you’re going to have to trust. Jesus called his disciples with the words follow me. No details, no road map, no discussion of salary and benefits; just follow me.

There are many things that cause us worry and anxiety. I am not where I need to be in relation to worry and anxiety, but I have made a little progress in recent years, and it has greatly improved my life.

In Matthew 11:28 Jesus says Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Allow Jesus to help you overcome your worries and anxiety. Accept his peace today, and may his peace rule your heart, your mind, and your life.

October 16, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - A Good Return On Your Investment

2011-10-17T13:12:00.001-07:00

This morning we continue through our study of The Sermon On the Mount. Today we study Matthew 6:19-24.

Listen to the words of Jesus as recorded by Matthew –

One of Ann Landers’ best letters came from a woman writing about her husband’s unusual request.

For years he was hiding money, saying he didn’t trust banks. She laughed about it, which made him mad, so one day he said he wanted his money to be buried with him. She agreed to honor his request, thinking it wouldn’t amount to much money. When he passed away she remembered her promise. Counting the money she was shocked to find it amounted to more than $60,000, in cash. That put her in a dilemma. She wanted to honor her husband’s request but didn’t want to bury all that cash. She agonized over what to do and finally came up with a great solution. She took the cash to the bank, deposited it in her account, wrote out a check for the amount, and placed the check in the coffin. That’s a wise investment.

This morning, continuing in the Sermon On the Mount, we come to a passage about wise investments – Matthew 6:19-24. Investments are tricky these days. If you have an investment account your are better off not opening a statement when it arrives in the mail.

Jesus spoke often of making wise investments – investments of our lives – and he certainly does in this passage.

He begins by speaking to our sense of security. Do not, he says, store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Everyone wants to build some measure of security in life, so we are naturally driven to try and build wealth, because wealth, in our eyes, represents security.

In my class on St. Augustine’s City of God, there is a section where St. Augustine compares a rich man and a poor man. Augustine writes Let us imagine two individuals – for each man, like a letter in a word, is an integral part of a city or of a kingdom, however extensive. Of these two men, let us suppose that one is poor, or, better, in moderate circumstances; the other, extremely wealthy. But, our wealthy man is haunted by fear, heavy with cares, feverish with greed, never secure, always restless, breathless from endless quarrels with his enemies. By these miseries, he adds to his possessions beyond measure, but he also piles up for himself a mountain of distressing worries. The man of modest means is content with a small and compact patrimony. He is loved by his own, enjoys the sweetness of peace in his relations with kindred, neighbors, and friends, is religious and pious, of kindly disposition, healthy in body, self-restrained, chaste in morals, and at peace with his conscience. I wonder if there is anyone so senseless as to hesitate over which of the two to prefer (Book IV, Chapter 3, pp. 87-88). When I ask the class if they agree that the poor man has the better life, they always agree. I then ask them, why is it, then, that no one aspires to be poor? People do not come to this country because it is their dream to be poor; they come to this country because it is their dream to be wealthy.

And make no mistake about it; a measure of wealth does make a difference in life. To be able to afford housing, food, education, and medical care is no small matter.

But Jesus provides a reminder that those resources are not as secure as we might think. No matter what we have, it is susceptible to loss. If you are seeking to invest money, where will it be safe? Is it ever really safe? A lot of people lost a lot of money in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. A lot of people have lost money on their homes. A lot of people have lost money in the stock market. It was just a few years ago that home values, the stock market, and other avenues of wealth-building seemed to be on the way up with no foreseeable end in sight. But the end came.

Jesus says treasure of the earthly variety is never really secure and points to the irony of investing so much of life into what is ultimately neither secure nor of lasting value. We think they are secure, but they are not. Everything, he says, is subject to forces that threaten security. Our stuff is subject to decay, it is subject to theft, and it is subject to market forces.

What do we have that we cannot lose? Almost everything is subject to loss, as Jesus says. What do we have that we cannot lose?

Jesus encourages us to invest in what is of lasting, eternal value. Jesus did not hold to the view that this world did not matter. Jesus knew that people needed bread to survive but also said that we cannot live on bread alone. His theology was not one of simply enduring this world until one reaches eternity. Jesus knew that people had needs and concerns and he was not insensitive to those needs and concerns. But Jesus reminds us of the spiritual component of life. Life does consist of more than our jobs and our stuff. Life consists of other people, many of whom face great difficulty and need us to enter into their lives.

A wise investment, then, is other people. How many of you remember the names of school teachers, Sunday School teachers, coaches, or others who invested in your lives. I can still tell you the name of my 2^nd through the 6^th grade teachers (I don’t know why I can’t remember the name of my 1^st grade teacher. Must have been a bad year, perhaps).

The message of investing in other people is a message to individuals but to the church as a body as well. During one of the Roman persecutions of the church, soldiers entered a church meaning to plunder the church of its treasures they believed to be there. The leader of the soldiers demanded show my your treasures at once! The church leader pointed at the orphans who were being fed, to the sick who were being cared for, and the poor who were receiving provision, and said these are the treasures of the church (Barclay, p. 242).

Then Jesus mentions the eye, and as he does he reminds that he seek to give us a new vision of life. We can be remarkably blind at times to what is right in front of us. When we took the youth to All People’s Christian Center in LA last summer, one evening we took a driving tour of downtown. A staff member from the center was with us and he took us down a block where there were some very upscale restaurants. There were tables along the sidewalk and a lot of people eating outside. It was in the evening, at dusk, and as we turned the corner there were people setting up tents on the sidewalk. They were homeless people, large numbers, just around the corner from great affluence. There were families, some with very young children, and it was a jarring sight.

I commented on the odd image of affluence and need being so close together and Larry, our guide, reminded me that it wasn’t any different in our community. I vividly remember him commenting on how we fail to see some of the needs right in front of us. Do we see what is on our own doorstep? We actually learn not to see the need in front of us.

There is a responsibility that comes with the resources we are given, I believe. There is a responsibility that remains to our brothers and sisters in need. One of the great dangers of affluence is the way it can insulate us from the needs of others. As we have more, our circles change, and the changes can further remove us from those who suffer great need in life.

There is also a need to hold accountable those who see people as little more than instruments to make money. There is, thankfully, a much greater awareness of the tragedy of child labor. Companies are more sensitive to examine their supply change to see if children are being exploited as cheap labor, but the problem hasn’t been completely solved, it is still a terrible blight upon our world.

Jesus then reminds us that investing in the wrong things can place us in terrible bondage.

One of the tragedies of our modern era is that we can find ourselves with so much, but at the same time with relatively little. We can have many things, and in the process find we are not able to be generous because we are so entrapped by those things that we have a poverty of the soul

When Walt Disney was working on a cartoon version of the legend of King Midas, the sound technicians found something very interesting. As they sought a way to create the sound of coins clinking together they finally discovered that rattling chains gave them the desired sound. Chains representing money. Isn’t that an interesting irony?

Interestingly, the word for mammon, which is the word for money in this passage, comes from a word that means to entrust. It carried the idea of entrusted to another that which we own or possess, as a person entrusts their money to a banker. Over time, though, it came to mean that in which we place our trust. So mammon – money or possessions – morph from being something we entrust to another to being something in which we place our trust. This highlights another irony as our money bears the imprint of In God we trust when the reality is that money so often receives our trust.

So the question comes down to this – what is our treasure? Is it something that is of lasting value, or something that in the end provides no security?

October 9, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - The Lord's Prayer - Never Give Up!

2011-10-12T06:14:00.000-07:00

Matthew 6:9-13 (KJV)

Winston Churchill is one of modern history’s most quoted individuals. There is a famous story about a speech he gave on October 29, 1941 to Harrow School, which he attended as a boy. The story is that when Churchill stood up to speak he said – Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give in. Never give in. Never give in. Never give in. Then he sat down.

The entire speech, according to the story, was just 18 words. It makes for a good story, but it isn’t true. Churchill actually gave a longer speech that day (the text of which can be read here – http://www.school-for-champions.com/speeches/churchill_never_give_in.htm) and it included these words – Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Though the story of the 18-word speech is not true, it continues to live on as fact to many. Why? Probably because it’s a great story, even if it isn’t true. It makes a great story because it distills the longer speech down to the essence of what Churchill was saying – don’t give up. That was the message people needed to hear in Churchill’s day and it’s one we need to hear today. Never give up.

We are attracted, I think, to stories of perseverance. The weight of what we face in our lives can bring about so much discouragement that we need those stories of overcoming difficulties.

The next picture reminds us there are people who overcome incredibly difficult situations in their lives, and we are encouraged by what they are able to accomplish in the face of such great difficulties. Bethany Hamilton lost her arm in a shark attack at the age of 14. Nick Vujicic (Voy – e – chick) was born without any arms or legs but has proved incredibly inspirational because of what he has been able to accomplish in spite of his physical limitations.

How many of you feel hopeful about the state of the world? Do you ever feel as though you want to just give up? Does life ever get to the point that you feel so overwhelmed you want to just throw up your hands and say what’s the use? I give up! I quit! Have you ever faced challenges that seemed so insurmountable that you felt there was no hope?

This morning we complete our study of the Lord’s Prayer, and as we come to the final phrase, this is the message Jesus offers – Never Give Up! Never Give Up! Don’t lose faith. Don’t lose heart.

Listen again to the final words of the Lord’s Prayer – and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

I believe the message of those words is that we should never grow discouraged and we should never quit. We should never lose heart. We should never lose faith. Those words are a promise of the goodness of God and the faithfulness of God.

There are a couple of unusual aspects to this final part of the Lord’s Prayer. First, depending on the translation of the Bible that you use, you may be surprised to find the final phrase – for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, missing. Some translations omit that phrase because it doesn’t appear in many of the early manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel. Interestingly, it begins to appear more often in the manuscripts that date to the time when the church was suffering terrible persecution under the Roman Empire. It was an important reminder during a very difficult time – Never give up! Don’t lose hope. Don’t lose faith. Don’t despair. The world is in the hands of God however much it may appear otherwise. That was the message sent to a church under terrible persecution – God is in control, not the Roman Empire.

The second unusual aspect of this latter part of the prayer is the phrase – and lead us not into temptation. Have you ever thought it odd that we should ask God not to tempt us? Would God do such a thing as tempt us? Isn’t life difficult enough without the worry that temptation might come from God?

Jesus is not implying that God would tempt us to into what is wrong. In fact, the book of James says When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone (James 1:13). The word used for temptation actually carries the meaning of being tested. Temptation and tested are two very different things. Temptation means to be led astray while tested means to undergo a series of trials or difficulties.

It is the evil in the world, I believe, that tests us, not God. The struggles and trials of life test us, not God. The evil in the world can cause us to lose hope; some people have abandoned faith because of the evil they see or experience. It is tempting to lose heart because of the struggles we fact in life. It is tempting to say what’s the use in trying? It is tempting to say What I do doesn’t matter. It is tempting to say Nothing I do makes a difference. But the end of the Lord’s Prayer is a reminder that in spite of how bad things in the world may appear, God is ultimately in control. And he’s in control forever.

Forever, Jesus says. Forever. When the economies of the world are shaky and on the verge of collapse, God is in control, and he is in control forever. When political instability threatens – God is in control – forever. When wars and violence rage on, God is in control – forever. When hatred seems to be getting the upper hand over love, God is in control – forever.

Scripture, on page after page, affirms that God is indeed in control. The Old Testament book of Job is about the testing of Job and raises the question of whether he would be able to endure in spite of a series of great trials and testing. In spite of all the difficulties Job experiences, he doesn’t lose faith. In spite of the fact that Job’s friends encourage him to give up, he does not do so. In 13:15 Job’s hold to his faith allows him to say though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.

The 23rd Psalm reminds us The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Isaiah 40:28-31 reminds us - Do you now know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Romans 8:37-39 says Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine of nakedness or danger or sword?...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Philippians 4:13 says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.

The book of Revelation, often seen as only prophecy, is really a book to instill confidence in people who were suffering terribly under persecution. So many of the images in Revelation are of a God so much mightier and more powerful than the armies of Rome. God is still in control is the message of Revelation.

And on and on we could go.

Some of you are facing tremendous challenges. Some of you may be on the cusp of giving up. Some of you may be wondering how you will make it. Never give up. Do not lose hope. Don't quit. Your life doesn't rise and fall on the stock market. Your life doesn't rest upon the success or failure of a political agenda. Your destiny does not rest upon the report a doctor offers, but upon what is deeper, higher, and more powerful - that which lasts forever. Forever! Say with me - Forever!

October 2, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - The Lord's Prayer - The Gift of Forgivenes

2011-10-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

Matthew 6:9-13

How many of you like to camp? I’m not talking about camping in a large trailer with a satellite dish; I mean hardcore camping. The kind of camping where you take a small tent, a sleeping bag, and a couple of cooking utensils out into the woods and you live off the land for a few days. Believe it or not, that’s the kind of camping I used to do.

My older brother and I, along with a cousin, would spend as long as a week camping in the woods of Ohio. We took a small tent, sleeping bags, some cooking utensils a little bit of food, and mostly lived off of fish we caught. I’ve wizened up since then.

If you have done that type of camping you know it is not for the faint of heart. Now, imagine living in an even more primitive fashion for six and a half years. Not because you want to, but because you have been kidnapped and forced to sleep on the ground, with no tent for cover and no sleeping bag for comfort. And then imagine you are not in the woods or a forest, but a jungle. And not just any jungle, but the Amazon jungle, a jungle so dense and dangerous it is one of the most inhospitable environments for human habitation on our planet.

That is the experience of a woman by the name of Ingrid Betancourt.

Ingrid Betancourt has a remarkable story. Harrowing, but remarkable. In 2002, as she was traveling through the country of Columbia campaigning for president, she was kidnapped and held prisoner for the next six and a half years. Her captors mistreated her, abused her, and drug her through the Amazon jungle for six and a half years before she was finally rescued. Life in the jungle meant she was constantly under attack by insects large and small. Fire ants and mosquitoes dug into her skin so deeply that she was in constant misery from their bites. Living in the jungle brought danger from large predators as well as the constant threats from her captors. Attempting to escape on numerous occasions she was recaptured, beaten, and received more severe treatment.

Shortly after her rescue she was asked about all the suffering she had endured. Of all she had to say about her experience, the most surprising and profound statement she offered was this –The only thing I've settled in my mind is that I want to forgive. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/colombia.france1)

Can you imagine saying those words after experiencing six and a half years of such horrible torment?

As we continue through the Lord's Prayer we come to the phrase forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Or, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Jesus taught about a lot of subjects, but there are certain themes he returned to time and again. One of the regular themes in the preaching of Jesus is that of forgiveness. A year ago today I preached on The Challenge of Forgiveness. We talked about it a little bit when we looked at the Beatitudes early in the summer. We return to it again today as we continue our study on the Lord’s Prayer. If Jesus spoke often about forgiveness, so should we.

Forgiveness is one of those topics that make us squirm, because we recognize how incredibly difficult forgiveness can be. When we hear a story such as Ingrid Betancourt’s we instinctively want to say instead of forgiving her captors she should be pushing for justice. I think that if we are really honest, we will admit that forgiveness comes neither easy nor natural to us.

Out of curiosity I did an internet search for stories of forgiveness. Some of the stories I found were absolutely mind-blowing. People who forgave others for acts so horrendous that it made me ashamed that I have withheld forgiveness for hurts so small in comparison to what others have suffered. I read those stories and wondered how can people forgive after experiencing such horrendous acts?

And yet Jesus calls us to practice forgiveness. Going through the Sermon On the Mount is a tough experience, because what Jesus asks us to do seems so monumentally challenging that it is easy to feel incredibly inadequate. But I believe we instinctively know that what Jesus says is true and that if we could all live what he teaches in this sermon the world would indeed be a better place.

When I visit other churches, and they repeat the Lord’s Prayer, I always hope I say the same version. Have you ever been to another church and said debtors while they said trespassers?

Whichever word is used, I think they both communicate some important truths.

When I was a teenager I spent a lot of time riding motorcycles. There was a great farm out the road from where I lived, and my friends and I really wanted to ride on that farm, but there were No trespassing signs posted everywhere. As much as we wanted to ignore them, we knew better than to do so.

The word trespass means there is a line you don't cross. To forgive those who trespass against us is an acknowledgement that someone has crossed a line of what is right, what is good, and what is acceptable and have done something that causes some kind of hurt to us. It acknowledges there has been real hurt that has taken place.

It also reminds us that perhaps it is us who have crossed that line. It’s not always others who do the hurting; sometimes we are the ones who hurt others with our words and our actions. And that is a difficult truth to accept.The word trespass means there is a line you don’t cross. To forgive those who trespass against us is an acknowledgement that someone has crossed a line of what is right, what is good, and what is acceptable and have done something that causes some kind of hurt to us. It acknowledges there has been real hurt that has taken place.When I was a teenager I spent a lot of time riding motorcycles. There was a great farm out the road from where I lived where my friends and I wanted to ride, but there were No Trespassing signs posted everywhere. As much as we wanted to ignore them, we knew better than to do so.

When My mother-in-law lived on Tybee Island, Georgia, my family and I used to visit a neighboring island, which had a statue of John Wesley, the great hymn-writer and one of the founders of Methodism. Wesley had some difficulties with General James Oglethorpe, who founded the colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe told Wesley, I never forgive. Then I hope sir, replied Wesley, you never sin.

(http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/forgive-us-our-trespasses)

Granting forgiveness and receiving forgiveness brings about an end to the toxicity that can exist in relationships, where hurt is piled upon hurt, and bitterness builds and builds until it becomes a soul-destroying force in our lives.

But the words debt and debtors are important as well.

What Jesus is saying is to release that person from the position of being a debtor. We are called to remove the shackles of guilt we want to fasten to them and we are called to release the other from any sense of indebtedness to us.We usually think of the word debt as a financial word – someone owes a debt to someone else. That’s how we sometimes see forgiveness. When someone hurts us, we believe they owe us something. They owe us an apology, they owe us an explanation, and they owe us restitution. It is easy to hold the offense of the other person over their head and to place them in a position of being a debtor to us.

I need to add another note as well – forget about the saying forgive and forget. We have so connected those two words in our minds that people believe forgiveness has not taken place unless they have completely removed the offense from memory. We do not always forget hurts, but that does not mean we have not forgiven and it does not mean that we are unable to move beyond them if we haven’t forgotten them. Forgiveness is an act of the will. Forgiveness means we make a conscious decision to refuse to allow the poison of bitterness to build up within our hearts and minds. It does not mean we forget the things that happen to us, but it does mean that we will not allow those memories to serve as open wounds that feed bitterness.

Who do you need to forgive this morning? Perhaps there is someone in your family. Perhaps it’s yourself. Perhaps it’s God. There are a lot of people who are mad at God.

When I was in the 6^th or 7^th grade, I got in trouble one day. My mom was not very happy with me, gave me a lecture, and sent me to my room to wait on my dad to come home from work. I waited in my room for a while, wondering what was going to happen. I can still hear the sound of his car coming down the driveway and the front door opening. I couldn’t hear the conversation he and my mom had, but I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs and then the doorknob turning. He came into my room, sat down on the bed beside me, and put his arm around my shoulder, and actually said very little to me. It was a moment of grace that I was given. It was also a good cop/bad cop routine I think my mom and dad were pulling on me as well, but it worked.

There are people who have hurt us, and they owe an apology that may never be offered. But we have caused hurt as well. Grace is what is really needed, and that is what Jesus is asking, that we learn to give and to receive grace.

May we do so this day, and all days.

September 25, 2011 - The Sermon On the Mount - The Lord's Prayer - Our Daily Bread: Enough

2011-09-26T07:26:00.001-07:00

Matthew 6:9-13 (KJV)

Tanya and I completed our annual cleaning of the garage last week. Not matter how much stuff we clean out, it seems to multiply throughout the year. We make piles of stuff – what we want to keep, what we want to get rid of, and looking at it, we wonder, why we have so much stuff? Where does it all come from?

As we continue through the Sermon On the Mount, and the Lord’s Prayer, we consider this morning the short phrase, give us this day our daily bread. We live with such an abundance of stuff that, on the surface at least, we hear the words of Jesus to give us this day our daily bread in a far different way than those who were in his audience the day he spoke them. How often do we worry about our daily bread? In our pantry we have today’s bread, tomorrow’s bread, and in the freezer, bread for more days. It’s not having daily bread that concerns us as much as it is having too much daily bread!

Even though we have our daily bread, it does not mean we are free from the anxiety of what we need in the days ahead. We live in very, very anxious days and that anxiety can drive us to a crippling sense of worry and it can drive us into an obsession with accumulating money and belongings in an effort to find a sense of security.

So let’s consider what it means to pray for our daily bread.

The call to pray for our daily bread is an invitation to simplicity.

Jesus was talking to people whose lives were the very model of simplicity. They led simple lives because there really was no other choice. While we can stockpile food in freezers and other storage methods, the people in the time of Jesus were unable to do so. They were people who lived on a day-to-day basis and struggled to have enough for each day. For most people in that time, getting one’s daily bread was a literal truth. They led lives of simplicity because of circumstance. They lived barely subsistence lives, working each day to earn enough money to feed their families. The far majority of people lived in a grinding poverty that left them wondering if there would be enough bread for that day, let alone the next day.

For the most part, we have so much more than the average person in the day of Jesus, but I’m not sure were any freer of worry. Perhaps it’s because we search for security in the things we own, and our sense of security has been greatly shaken in recent years.

Jesus invites us to a life of simplicity by asking us to pray simply for our daily bread. It is his invitation to ask for what we need rather than all the extras we either think we need or that we desire to have. It doesn’t mean we aren’t concerned with our needs, or that God isn’t concerned with our needs; it means we have learned to be content with simpler lives.

You remember, I’m sure, how God provided for the Hebrew people as they wandered through the wilderness after being freed from captivity in Egypt. God provided them with manna, a bread-like substance they collected every morning. It was, quite literally, their daily bread. They were only to collect what they needed for the day, and no more. It was a very dramatic lesson about learning to trust God.

Paul writes in Philippians 4:11-12 I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or in want.

But there is another reason why simplicity becomes important. As the population of our world will cross the 7 billion mark at any time, and the estimates of growth for the next generation are staggering, simplicity with either be voluntarily adopted or enforced by a scarcity of resources.

To ask for our daily bread reminds us we are not as self-sufficient as we think.

I remember on Christmas Eve, when I was in the fifth grade, our neighbor’s house burned to the ground. One of the kids was my age, in my class at school, and my friend. The flames lit up the night sky and the glow from the fire could be seen from quite a distance. It was hard for me to imagine the experience of losing everything you own in a matter of minutes.

We work hard to bring a measure of security to our lives. We work to save money, we invest money, we purchase insurance, and search for other ways to prepare us in the event of disaster or to bring a sense of security in life.

But the economic downturn has brought home to us the reality that financial security is more precarious than we want to imagine. Stock value can evaporate very quickly. A 401K can be wiped out in a single trading session. A job loss or emergency can eat away at our savings. A medical crisis, even with insurance, can stretch us to the limits financially and remind us in very vivid terms of our own mortality. I don’t say this as a way of generating fear or pessimism, but as a reminder that we often search for a measure of security in places and things that are not as secure as we think.

I listened to an interview recently with one of the wealthiest individuals in the world who had recently experienced a life-threatening situation. It was very interesting when the discussion turned to faith. When asked if he believed in God he said no, but added how he wished he did have belief and faith because of the comfort and sense of security it would bring in life. Here was someone who had the resources to buy anything he wanted, to travel when and where he wanted, and yet was still looking for a sense of security in life.

Jesus reminded his audience that our hearts long for security, that we expend a great amount of energy searching for security, and that means we should look for security where it can truly be found. It is a sense of security that gives us a peace and confidence in the face of life’s greatest challenges and will see us through the most precarious of moments.

To pray for our daily bread is a reminder that we need to remember those who struggle to find their daily bread.

Have you noticed what Jesus did not say in this line of the prayer? Jesus did not say give me my daily bread. We should listen to our prayers to see how often they are filled with the personal pronouns of I, me, and mine.

Jesus says us; our. It is a reminder that we are part of the human community. It is a reminder that the question asked by Cain am I my brother’s keeper (Genesis 4:9) is not just a rhetorical question, but has a very specific answer, and the answer is an affirmation that we do have a responsibility to those who struggle to secure daily bread.

Almost a third of the world’s population fails to find enough daily bread for their families. That’s more than 2 billion people. That number will only increase as the population of the world escalates and as environmental stress and degradation becomes more acute.

In the 6^th chapter of Mark’s gospel we read the story of Jesus and his disciples arriving in a remote area and a large crowd had gathered in anticipation of their arrival. The disciples told Jesus he ought to send the crowd away and into the surrounding villages to buy food. Jesus told his disciples you give them something to eat (Mark 6:35-37). Perhaps the disciples were simply concerned and believed sending the crowd away was the best solution, or, perhaps they didn’t want to be bothered by the needs of the crowd. Jesus forced them to confront the need of the crowd.

I’ll confess that I often don’t know what to do with the needs that confront us. They can be so overwhelming and so deeply entrenched that I want to throw up my hands and say there’s nothing we can do. But maybe that’s my own way of doing what the disciples sought to do – send the people away. I don’t always have an answer, but I know we are called to never forget those who struggle to have their daily bread.

Even when we eat alone, we never really eat alone. Every bite of food we take is a communal act. Someone raised the food I eat. Someone brought the food to market. Someone delivered it to the store. Someone sold it to me. Food is one of the few things in life that bind us together, and even when I think I am buying and preparing my own food, it is not a solitary act. It that bond of community is broken, we do not eat. If a farmer cannot raise food, we do not eat, and on down the line. It will matter not how much money I have to buy food, if the community of food production is broken down, I will find very quickly I cannot eat my money.

To pray for our daily bread is to be called to a life of gratitude.

I often find myself thinking of what I don’t have rather than thinking of what I do have. And when I look at my life, there really is very little that I don’t have. It’s not that I have too little, but too much.

And yet our culture will continue to present me with message after message that I need more, when there is nothing else I need in life. And those messages slowly and unknowingly soak into my mind and heart and gradually turn my gaze away from what I can do for others and cause me to think about myself.

It’s a very simple phrase – give us this day our daily bread. At least it seems simple at first glance. In reality, it is a huge acknowledgement we make to God of our dependency upon him and upon one another. It certainly asks us to be grateful for what we have been given. It could very easily be us who are struggling to find daily bread. May our gratitude bring us to be sure others have their daily bread.