SWEEPS: Stewardship

There's an inside joke in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the title character tells a newcomer that her town of Sunnydale, which is located over a hellmouth, usually has an apocalypse every May. Of course that was when the broadcast TV season used to end and that's why Buffy always had her final face off with the big bad vampire, demon, goddess, witch or whatever that month. They wanted you to tune in. But you may have noticed that there are other times of the year when there are a cluster of TV characters getting married, or giving birth or dying. They are in November and February. TV networks use the ratings of those 3 months to set their advertising rates. So that's when they schedule major events to take place in regular TV series and why they often preempt poorly performing shows and replace them with specials. They call them Sweeps Weeks.

We have something similar in churches. In the first part of the calendar year, priests and pastors of large denominations have to compile their attendance numbers and financial numbers for their parochial reports. Besides the average Sunday attendance, I had to send in the attendance figures for Easter. And I used to have to do it for Christmas as well. The church doesn't call them the Sweeps, but oddly enough, that word has been used as an acronym for 6 important activities that Christians should carry out in or through the church: Stewardship, Worship, Education, Evangelism, Pastoral care, and Service. And since Lent is one of the seasons of the church year that is focused on spiritual disciplines, we are going to look at these for this and the next 4 Sundays.

We start with stewardship and you don't need to be psychic to hear the inaudible sighs of dismay. Sadly, stewardship has come to mean nothing more than the church begging for money. I have heard people say that religion is just a scam for making money. These people do not go to church. If they did attend the average church in America, which typically has less than 100 people, they'd realize that most clergy do not go into the ministry to make money. If we did so, then we're stupid. The Joel Olsteens in this profession are as few as are the Howard Sterns in my old profession of radio. The vast majority of people in ministry will never get rich. We do it because we are called to it and we love it.

And stewardship existed before money did. In fact, you could say it was humanity's first and primary duty. In Genesis 2:5, we are told that before the creation of humans, there was no one to work the ground. There was originally no gardener in the Garden of Eden. That was to be our role. (Genesis 2:15) And that fact makes God's command to subdue the earth sound a lot less rapacious. We're to take care of the earth and its inhabitants in the same way a gardener does. He imposes an appreciative order upon the flora and the fauna in his care. We are to be stewards of the earth, not destroyers of it.

The word “steward” comes from the Old English for “hall keeper.” The great hall was the home of a lord and the steward was the person who took care of his finances and property. This was to be our proper role in creation, and it is obvious that we have failed. We have not merely filled the earth; we have overrun it and blighted a good deal of it. Even leaving ecology aside, we have not taken care of its creatures, which includes our fellow human beings. In fact, we have treated each other as badly as we have treated non-human creation.

It is this behavior in particular that is given as the reason for the Genesis flood. It says, “The earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:11) The Hebrew word for violence is used in other contexts to include injustice, cruelty, assault, murder and rape. When God commanded us to fill the earth, he did not mean to fill it with violence and evil. This is what makes God “grieve in his heart” and causes him to regret creating humanity. (Genesis 6:6)

So it's interesting that when Jesus, the firstborn of the new creation, is resurrected on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene originally thinks he is the gardener. (John 20:15) In a sense she is right. He is here to do what our ancestors didn't—put God's world right. And as his followers, Christ's body on earth, it becomes our task as well.

So stewardship can be seen as a broad mandate to treat all of creation, including our fellow humans, as belonging to God. Which means we do, too. So when we talk about stewardship we usually talk about how we as individual Christians deal with all that God has given into our care, especially our time, talent and treasure.

Time is what our lives on earth are made of. Time is a creation of the eternal God and so belongs to him. He has entrusted to each of us a certain amount of time at a certain point in history. We are to be stewards of however much time has been given to us and we are to use it for him. That means spending time not only worshipping him but obeying his commands to love others, to help the needy, to protect the oppressed, to act justly, to make peace, and to spread the gospel. Loving your spouse and family is a good stewardship of your time; working at the community food pantry is as well. Doing your job well counts too, as does signing up for activities listed in the church bulletin. And, yes, you need time to relax and rest. Bad stewardship of one's time would be devoting countless hours to activities that do not contribute to the long-term wellbeing of anybody or anything—or worse, spending time doing things that destroy people, other living things or our ecosystem.

I understand that the broadness of that last statement may leave some folks raising questions about using animals for medical research or developing land. However such things should always be evaluated as to whether they qualify as valid exceptions to the general rule. For example, we are supposed to consider whether an act of killing is self-defense or some other valid exception to the commandment not to murder. (Numbers 35:22-25)

Talent has come to mean an “ability of a superior quality” according to the American Heritage Dictionary. It often refers to an artistic ability. And defined that way, it leaves most of us out. For our purposes, let's define a talent as something you can do well. It doesn't mean you are necessarily better at it than others. Not everyone in a choir is a soloist but they are able to sing well enough and blend harmoniously with others. That's a talent. Some people have a talent for words without rising to the level of a Shakespeare. Others have a talent for numbers, though they may not be able to chart the trajectory of a space launch. And there are talents that might not be recognized as such. A talent for encouraging people or for helping them articulate what they mean to say or for just listening can be incredibly valuable. The talent for seeing what others don't is also vital. I think there is a talent for knowing when to say, “Enough discussion; it's time to decide.” There are lots of talents out there that we might not put on a stage or in front of a camera. There are talents that might not be easy to define but they are important nevertheless.

God's Spirit has distributed countless talents among us. (1 Corinthians 12:7) With his help, we need to discover and develop them. And then use them as part of our stewardship of this earth. We should be on the lookout for the talents of those around us. We should point them out to the persons who display them and encourage them to nurture and grow them. And spotting talent is itself a talent.

As for being a good steward of our treasure, money is one way of quantifying how much we value an item, experience, service, talent or period of time. Admittedly it is a very imperfect form of measuring value. We pay celebrity sports figures much more than we pay P.E. teachers. For that matter, we pay people who play teachers, cops, and healthcare professionals in movies and TV way more than we pay real teachers, cops and healthcare professionals. And that calls into question how much we understand the actual value of things.

I remember reading an article years ago that said the Great Recession of 2008 was even hurting strip clubs in Las Vegas. It gave as an example a club filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy because it was only making between $20,000 and $26,000 a week! That's a minimum of $1,040,000 a year! A Google search didn't give me the average income of a church in this country but I did find a statistic that the average amount that a typical church member gives comes to just over $1000 a year. And since 68% of American churches have less than 100 members, most must operate on less than $100,000 a year. That's a tenth of the income of a failing strip club. And it has to cover the pastor's salary and housing, utilities and maintenance of the church building, and any staff like a paid secretary. So what does this say about the relative value we place on these two establishments?

Should churches follow that model? Should they serve more than wine? Should they put more attractive talent up there in the pulpit? Should they have private rooms where you can take communion alone? Should they care more about appearances? The problem is that a strip club is really about fantasy. A church should be about truth.

Churches don't have a cover charge or a membership fee. They don't, like colonial churches used to, make you pay more for a private pew. What they do offer you is time to pray to God and to praise him. Churches using the lectionary offer you 4 generous helpings of God's word as well as insights into it and into what it says about God's holy, just, loving and forgiving nature. They offer you a time to sing out loud, regardless of your talent in that area. They offer you a cross section of your community, people you otherwise might not get to know. They offer you a place to celebrate births, bless marriages and commemorate deaths, opportunities to share your joys and sorrows with a community that will support you and pray for you. They offer you a place to bring your children to learn a worldview based on reverence, compassion, morality, self-control and love.

They offer potluck meals for the price of bringing one dish, with opportunities to enjoy what others have lovingly prepared. They offer you the Lord's supper, his body and blood, to strengthen you for the week ahead. They offer you absolution and blessings. They offer you a place to come for encouragement, comfort, counseling and community.

What's that worth to you? Remember, stewardship is a spiritual discipline. While most of your income is probably spent on the physical basics, such as food, clothing and shelter, how much of your time, talent and treasure do you spend on the spiritual basics? How much instead do you spend on entertainment, electronic toys, junk foods and other things you consume purely for personal pleasure?

Speaking of which, everyone has noticed how the stuff you view on your phone or even talk about in its presence tends to follow you around on the internet. Bots listen and the cookies that websites embed in your device make sure that the ads you see reflect your interests. They are evidence of what you really value and spend your time, talents and money on, as advertisers know. Which brings to mind the old saying: “If being a Christian were a criminal offense, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Relying on the evidence of how you used your time, talents and treasures, would you feel comfortable making an accounting to God on your stewardship of the life and gifts that he has given you?

Originally preached on February 21, 2010. It has been revised and updated.

Feedback

It's called the sixth sense by some. It's proprioception and it is your body's sense of where it and its parts are in space and what they are doing. Lacking this sense is rare. There are only about 7 people worldwide who have lost it. Ian Waterman got sick one day and went to bed. When he awoke he could not control his body enough to get out of bed. It was not that his ability to move his body had left him but without proprioception he did not know where, say, his legs were and whether they were doing what he wanted them to do, like swing out of bed and plant themselves on the floor. He eventually learned to walk again by mentally breaking down any large behavior into a series of simple steps, looking at the limb he wanted to work and consciously willing it through those steps in sequence. Everything we might do subconsciously, like fish a potato chip out of a bag, he has to plan out and then watch his body parts as they do it. On the episode of Radio Lab in which he was interviewed, he told of the time that a pretty girl crossed his path and caused him to stumble. When he shifted his attention to her for just a second, his feet began to falter because he was not looking at them and telling them what to do.

The only people who might have a clue of what Waterman is dealing with are those who get very drunk. One of the standard field sobriety tests is to have the suspected drunken person close his eyes and try to touch his nose. If you are inebriated enough, it degrades your proprioception to the point that you cannot find your nose with your eyes closed. Which means that Ian Waterman can never turn off the lights because if he can't see his body, he is as good as paralyzed.

The main problem is that Ian Waterman gets no feedback from his body. When you or I wake up in the dark, we nevertheless know where our body parts are. We can make them move when we don't see them. We can scratch our chin or find the light switch without looking. We can find a chip in a bag while watching TV because of a sense that we take for granted. If we didn't have this feedback, it is not hard to see how you could, say, smash your fingers in the process of closing a door or a drawer without looking.

You could make an argument that many organizations suffer from this condition, their right hand not knowing what their left is doing, so to speak, and consequently getting in the way of themselves. You could argue that many people live their lives that way.

Lent is very much an exercise in feedback. We often suffer from a lack of spiritual proprioception. Lent is a time to turn on the light, see where the various parts of our life are and observe how they are doing. It is a time to consider whether we are putting ourselves in danger of, or are already doing, spiritual damage.

In the Invitation to a Holy Lent, which follows after this sermon, certain spiritual disciples are recommended. One is self-examination and it is the essential first step in the process. We often pick up unconscious habits of mind and behavior that could use some scrutiny. For instance, Christians often hold onto certain cultural values even when they contradict Biblical principles. Here in America we live very materialistic lives while claiming to be spiritual. We create entertainment made up of behaviors like violence, idolatry and adultery that we supposedly condemn in real life. We have tried to wed a rugged individualism that says “you need to look out for number one” to a faith in which the highest value is self-sacrificial love for others. We need to turn on the light, recognize and deal with these clashes between our society and our beliefs.

Personally, we need to see where we are in our relationships with God, with others and with ourselves. Are we progressing in becoming more Christlike or have we stalled? Are we regressing and becoming more adversarial towards God, others and ourselves? Are we being honest with ourselves?

We need to see if, in our spiritual slumber, we have grabbed ahold of greed, or gotten tangled up in lust, or kicked out in envy, or drifted into laziness or gluttony, or struck out in rage or arrogance. And then we need to change our position, which is repentance, and marshal our efforts to get where we should be. Maybe we need to break it down into small steps like Ian Waterman. We need to repair what's been damaged, through humility and by both giving and asking for forgiveness. To do all that we need to be connected to a source of power, which means speaking to God in prayer.

And so that we don't stumble as we walk with God, we need to avoid distractions. This requires a measure of self-denial. Many find fasting helpful. But since staying in step with Jesus is not natural to fallen humans, we need to focus on each step in our journey.

And there is a map of the journey we must take that has guided people for millennia: the word of God. Reading and meditating on it will lead you to a treasure of truths about ourselves and about the God who calls us to be his companions on the way.

But, you may ask, is this the best way to begin our journey—bewailing our sins and putting ashes on our heads as we remember that we will one day die? Isn't that something that will stunt our spiritual growth rather than nurture it?

Jesus said, “I am the vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” (John 15:1-2) Things that are harmful and even some things that are just not helpful need to be removed from our lives if we are to fulfill our purpose and produce the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

And if we are not consciously part of the process of removing them, we can stumble. They can also be removed in a more painful way. Michael Gill was born into privilege and rose to a high position in a major advertising agency. Then he lost it all. He was fired from his job. An affair resulted in a newborn son and a ruined marriage. Finally he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. At the lowest point in his life, Gill was offered a job at the Starbucks he used to patronize. In cleaning toilets and serving customers, he found peace and a better grasp of the truly important things in life. Most of us would find it humiliating to be reduced to such a job at the age of 63. But as Gill sees things, it took him 60 years to finally see things clearly.

Lent is often seen as a time of self-flagellation and an unhealthy preoccupation with our sins. But Gill's experience shows us that the outcome of a drastic re-evaluation of your life can lead to a healthy appreciation of what is essential. You may have to let go of the things which the world values, but that doesn't have to be the end of the world. Seen properly, it can be the beginning of rebirth.

Originally preached on February 17, 2010. It has been revised and updated.

An Invitation to a Holy Lent

Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord's passion and resurrection, and it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a season of penitence and fasting. The season of Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism. It was also a time when those who had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians have to renew their repentance and faith.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a Holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word.

(from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, pp. 264-265)

Unveiled

The scriptures referred to are Exodus 34:29-35, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, and Luke 9:28-36.

Facial coverings are meant to conceal. Aside from brides and children on Halloween, veils and masks usually hide what's ugly—the twisted face of the Phantom of the Opera, the scarred proprietor of the wax museum in the Vincent Price movie House of Wax, and the true identity of every monster in Scooby Doo. The Ku Klux Klan wore masks to hide the ugly truth that some of your neighbors were violent racists. Bank robbers have worn stocking masks, an updated version of the veil, to make their squashed features look ugly and thereby disguise their identities. Even the curtain, the veil's larger “cousin,” covers up unpleasant things, like the messy interior of your house from passersby, or in the Wizard of Oz, where it hides the ugly truth that the awesome and powerful wizard is just a theatrical trick of an old conman. Even superheroes wear masks to hide their identities from ugly retaliation by their archenemies.

In contrast, Moses used a veil to cloak the reflected glory of God. Every time he came back from talking to God, his face shone. And it freaked out the Israelites. They probably weren't listening very closely to the words of God that Moses was delivering because they were too busy trying not to look at his weirdly shining face. Once Moses realized this was happening, he covered his face with a veil to minimize the effect.

By the way, the Hebrew word which means “beams of light radiating” was also used for horns projecting from a head. St. Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin, used the wrong word, making it sound like Moses grew horns. That's why Michelangelo's otherwise magnificent statue of Moses has those two distracting horns on his head. This mistranslation also led medieval antisemites to say that Jews had horns, making them less human and more satanic.

But the real significance of the incident recorded in our passage from Exodus is that God is light. He appears to Moses as a burning bush, and to the Israelites as a column of fire leading them through the wilderness and as fire on the mountain where Moses goes to receive the law. Humans are created in the image of God and are meant to reflect his radiance. Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights on Mt. Sinai and literally reflected this splendor. But the unfiltered glory of God makes most people uncomfortable. So Moses relented and veiled his face so his followers won't have to see what a person who is close to God is like.

This incident is not discussed much by Christians, although it bears on two of the other passages in today's lectionary. Our gospel, Luke, follows both Matthew and Mark in telling the story of the transfiguration right after the turning point in Jesus' ministry. After Peter declares him to be the Messiah, Jesus starts telling the disciples that he will be crucified. All of his talk about his death and resurrection was freaking the Twelve out and so Jesus takes the core of the group, Peter, James and John, up to the top of a mountain in order for them to talk to God about it.

While they are praying, the appearance of Jesus' face alters and his clothes become dazzlingly bright. And if that weren't enough, standing next to Jesus are Moses and Elijah, the greatest representatives of the Law and the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. They are talking about Jesus's coming departure at Jerusalem. Both of these men left the world in unusual ways. Elijah was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Moses died on a mountain overlooking the promised land and was buried by God in an unknown place. And Jesus will have the strangest departure from this world ever. So they are backing him up by endorsing his message that he will first die and then rise again.

But the disciples aren't listening. Shaking off the sleepiness of a long prayer session, they are agog at Jesus' guests. Peter babbles that they ought to build some tabernacles or shelters for the three holy figures. Even though Peter is not thinking clearly, he is perhaps remembering the tabernacle that the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness. It became a mobile shrine and the place to meet God during the exodus. Perhaps Peter is thinking they can capture the glory of the moment and make it last by building three tents so they can stay on the mountain like gurus and grace Judea with the word of God. Or maybe he is thinking that if he can get Jesus to settle down on this mountain with his friends, he won't go to Jerusalem and get himself killed.

Whatever jumbled thoughts are in Peter's head, his words are cut off when a cloud engulfs them. Moses met God on Mt. Sinai by entering a cloud. And, just as what happened then, the voice in the cloud doesn't obscure things but clears them up. “This is my beloved son. Listen to him!” In other words, no more nonsense about telling the man you've just declared the Messiah that he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to his death. Hear what he has to say!

And then there's no one left but Jesus and the disciples. And it's what everyone needed. Jesus gets the encouragement he needs to face the ordeal in Jerusalem. And the disciples see the glory of Jesus unveiled, even though they still don't understand exactly how what he's saying fits in with what they think they know about the Messiah.

Obvious parallels are there: Moses, mountaintops, clouds, shining faces, freaked out followers. But there are contrasts as well. Moses came down with a shining face and communicated what God told him but when Jesus comes down off of this mountain, nobody's face is glowing and the three disciples are too affected to tell anyone.

In his epistle, Paul connects the glory of God both veiled and unveiled. The glory of God that was reflected in Moses' face was dimmed and eventually faded. And Paul says that same veil mutes the splendor of God's written revelation. People tend to read it and then filter out what is truly marvelous about it.

That's true of many preachers and churches. They take what should be good news and they muffle it. They flatten it and make it sound like any other inspirational message. The leader of a retreat I went to said that he knew of a church where the vestry (board of lay leaders) took the priest to task for talking too much about Jesus. “How are we going to attract new people if everything is all about Jesus?” There are those who would rather the Episcopal church become the liturgical arm of the Unitarians.

The Evangelicals can filter the gospel too, if every sermon is about salvation, especially a narrow interpretation of it that makes it all about the afterlife and never about this one, or all about your private life and not your public one as well. The opposite error is when a church makes the gospel all about social issues as if Christianity were just another social program or a party's political platform. All of these unbalanced, one-note ways of reading the gospel mute how glorious it is. Usually this is to mask how radical it is.

The Lord is the Spirit, Paul reminds us. And God's Holy Spirit is not barred from any area of life or creation. He is not merely a still small voice in our head, nor is he the voice of the mob. He is not confined only to personal spirituality, nor to the social arena. He is not excluded from sexual behavior nor is he primarily concerned with that subject. The changes the Spirit makes in us have repercussions in every part of our individual and corporate lives. He is God without borders.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” That's a passage of scripture rarely preached on because it's scary. And that's because when we say freedom we mean different things. Freedom means one thing when a teenager says it and another thing when a recovering addict says it. It has a different emphasis when said by an artist, by a cancer survivor, and by an immigrant. It can even mean different things to different prisoners, if one is in the general population and one is on death row. That's because freedom is never really defined until you ask, “What is it freedom from, and what is it freedom to do?”

From the context here, Paul is talking about freedom from a diminished, narrow sense of the gospel and freedom to fully reflect the glory of God. We are to mirror God's splendor and reflect it to each other and to the world. By doing so we are transformed into the image of God, moving from one degree of his glory to the next. Our God is infinite and no one Christian can reflect his image in its entirety. But all of us can come together to reflect the many facets of God. It's like one of those portraits of Jesus that are made up of hundreds of little photos of people, using them like pieces of a mosaic. It wouldn't work if we were all the same. We need variation and contrast to make an accurate picture of our huge, holy, loving God.

Recognizing that we all reflect some aspects of God and that by the mercy of God we are called to unique ministries that combine to reflect his glory, we must not lose heart, Paul says. We also need to make sure we don't dull our ability to reflect the nature of God by doing shameful things. Every time the secret sins of Christians are revealed, it makes it harder for other people to see God's goodness.

We don't practice cunning, either. The world has various tricks to promote its version of things, using spin to make its point of view look different from what it really is. We are not to engage in such things. We are not to falsify the word of God. Or as Eugene Peterson translates this passage in The Message, “We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don't maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don't twist God's Word to suit ourselves.”

Ultimately, it comes down to trust. Do we trust God's Word to liberate and heal and save people from their self-destructive ways? Do we trust the God who is behind scripture? If not, maybe we need to look with fresh eyes at his revelation, which in Greek literally means “unveiling.” God has nothing to hide. Do we?

Originally preached on February 14, 2010. It has been revised and updated.

Love My What?!?

The scriptures referred to are Luke 6:27-38 and 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50.

Now that we have the internet it is both easier to think a famous person said something witty and insightful and yet harder to prove that they did. I wanted to start this sermon with a great quote by Mark Twain. And though it sounds like something he would say, the website quoteinvestigator.com could only trace it back as far as 1915. Which is a problem because Twain died in 1910. Anyway, the saying goes this way: “It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it's the parts that I do understand.”

This line can be interpreted two ways. Skeptics, like Twain, could be saying that the parts of the Bible that trouble them are the parts they understand but don't believe or that they disagree with or which they find unpleasant. But it could equally mean that the parts that bother them are the parts they understand quite well but don't wish to obey. In other words, it could be the commandments that clearly say not to commit adultery or not to lie or not to covet your neighbor's stuff. It could even be the commandment to love your neighbor. But I will bet that the clear commandment Jesus gives us in today's gospel is the one that bothers most people: love your enemies.

When people say all religions are alike they don't mean that they all have the same conception of God, at least not if they have actually studied most religions. They usually mean that they all give us the same moral instructions. And, yes, there is a huge overlap. The virtues religions enjoin are largely the same: be honest, be brave, be wise, be kind. I've never run across a major religion that teaches its followers to betray each other. Even cults don't teach their followers that, whatever other bad things they teach. And you can find a version of the Golden Rule in just about every major religion and philosophy. Treating others the way you would like to be treated (or at least not treating them in a way you wouldn't like to be treated) seems to be a basic universal moral insight. But Jesus' commandment to love even our enemies and do good to them appears to be unique to Christianity.

Unfortunately, it's the law of reciprocity that is universal. That is, if you treat a person well it is likely that they will in turn treat you well. But if you treat them badly, they will do the same to you. Contrary to the Golden Rule, we don't so much treat people the way we wish to be treated but the way we are in fact treated. Be nice to someone and they will return the favor. Be mean to them and they will retaliate. The problem is that this begins a tit-for-tat situation. If you treat me badly and I do the same back at you, you are likely to continue to treat me badly and I you. This can go on for a long time. In the case of some racial or ethnic groups or some countries, the mutual mistreatment can last for generations. It can lead to discrimination, unjust laws, riots and even wars.

There are only two ways to end such a circle of violence. One is to totally eliminate all of your enemies. That seems to be the way preferred by most groups and nations. Oh, sure you can instead conquer and subjugate your enemies. But that turns them into an oppressed group. And oppressed groups can and do eventually rise up in revolt against their oppressors. Even if they don't succeed in overthrowing their oppressors, this can lead to continual unrest. That's why the Nazis just decided to eradicate all their enemies. And we aren't just talking about Jews. They also executed political opponents, Slavic peoples, communists, gays, the mentally or physically disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Roma (once called Gypsies), union members and Christian clergy who spoke out against what they were doing. Their death camps were basically death factories. They killed 12 million non-combatant people. And they still didn't manage to wipe out all their enemies. Authoritarian leaders never seem to learn that lesson.

The other way to deal with your enemies is to reconcile with them. People rarely do this because (A) it is unpleasant and (B) it is harder.

It is unpleasant because it means recognizing that your enemies are also human beings like you with a right to exist. It is also unpleasant because it means you are going to have to admit to the awful things you have done to harm your enemies. Actually both sides generally have to admit to this so it is not pleasant for either side. This repugnance to admit you were ever in the wrong is a large reason why people reject reconciliation. I've seen this in families where brothers or sisters or cousins or even parents and children would rather have nothing to do with each other for decades or even for the rest of their lives than apologize and reconcile. The grandfather of a friend of mine was estranged from all of his siblings. When my friend started researching his genealogy he found that he had dozens of cousins he never knew about. Two of them worked in the same company as his wife! He had grown up without the pleasant memories of having a large extended family because of his grandfather's unforgiving behavior.

That's another thing that makes reconciliation unpleasant: forgiving others for the wrongs they've done. We'd much rather hold grudges. We don't want to give up feeling justified in our behavior towards others. Frankly, we want them to suffer. Scientists have found that hatred can feel good. A lot of the same parts of the brain that are activated when we love are also active when we hate.

Reconciliation also means being forgiven. And while that might sound nice, it can be humiliating. First you have to admit to doing something bad and then you have to let the other person take the moral high ground and forgive you. Some people would rather die than let that happen.

The second reason people don't like to try reconciliation is that it is hard. And not just in the emotional ways we just talked about. Changing attitudes and behaviors take time. Changing laws that discriminate against others takes effort and will. Restoring what was taken from the other group can be expensive. Every time in this country the idea of reparations comes up, whether to the Native Americans whom the US government forcibly moved off their land, or to African Americans whose ancestors were slaves for the better part of 300 years and second class citizens for 100 more or to Japanese Americans who were forced to sell their houses and businesses and live in camps during the Second World War, it is buried in a blizzard of objections, mostly economic.

We call ourselves a Christian nation, yet we do not obey the clear commands of Christ. Today's whole gospel passage would be in red letters in many editions of the Bible. It is Jesus who is telling us to turn the other cheek, to lend to anyone who asks without expecting anything in return, to love those who do not love you. Don't we believe him? Or do we treat Jesus merely as a mascot, a symbol of our group, of our team, whose antics we like but whose behavior means nothing compared to whose side wins?

But there are consequences to not taking Jesus seriously. We think of reciprocity when it comes to others but we forget that God is also an interested party. So Jesus says, “Do not judge and you will not be judged...” In the parallel passage in Matthew Jesus adds, “For by the standard you judge you will be judged...” (Matthew 7:2) If you are harsh in your judgment, you will be judged just as harshly. If you judge others on the results of what they did rather than on their intentions, you will be judged that way as well. And though doing that is not fair on our part, having that same standard applied to us would be fair.

Jesus also says, “do not condemn and you will not be condemned...” We are quick to condemn others whose behavior or words we don't like. We like to pass verdicts on people. But we rarely know the whole story. Richard Jewel was a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. He saw a suspicious backpack that had three pipe bombs in it on the grounds of the Centennial Olympic Park. He alerted the police and helped evacuate the area, saving many people from injury and death. But based on psychological profiling, the FBI considered him a suspect. The media ran with the idea that the hero was really a villain who did this to make himself look good. All of the scrutiny made his life and those of his family and friends miserable. It took 88 days before the federal authorities cleared his name. Later domestic terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph pleaded guilty to this and other bombings. But for nearly 3 months the media made Richard Jewel look like the bad guy.

We're all guilty of judging and condemning others. And if God treats us as we treat others, then we are in trouble. But Jesus also says, “Forgive and you will be forgiven.” This is something we often forget even though it's in the Lord's Prayer: “forgive us our sins for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” (Luke 11:4; cf Matthew 6:12) God is forgiving. In 1^st John we are told “But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous, forgiving us our sins and cleansing us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9) But God is interested not just in wiping the slate clean but in transforming us into Christlike people. Which means we are to become forgiving. When Peter asks Jesus how many times should he forgive his brother when he asks to be forgiven and suggests 7 times, Jesus says, “Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy times seven.” (Matthew 18:22)

If we are to be that forgiving of one another, how much more forgiving is God! And Jesus is not just making empty promises of how forgiving God is. Jesus is God's son, the very image of God, the expression of who God is. (Hebrews 1:2-3: John 1:1) He was betrayed, abandoned, beaten, whipped, nailed to a cross and left to die. But he never fought back and from the cross he said of those who were in the process of killing him, “Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) If you want to know what God is like, look to Jesus.

And he expects us, his followers, to do the same. Jesus says we are to be merciful just as God the Father is merciful. And we see God's mercy most clearly in Jesus.

The purpose of God's plan is for us to become like Jesus. But how can we? Through the power of his Holy Spirit. The way God wants to eliminate evil is not to eliminate us but change us. We were created in the image of God but we have marred that image through our sins. It needs to be cleaned up and restored. As we said, we see that image of God in Jesus Christ. When we turn from evil, like violence, rage, revenge, and mistreating others, and turn to him, he gives us not only his life, eternal life, but he also gives us his Spirit. When we surrender our life to God in Christ, we receive the same Spirit who empowered Jesus in his earthly life. As Jesus saved us from the penalty of sin on the cross, the Spirit saves us from the power of sin in our life. It is not instantaneous. As we see in Jesus' parables it is a process, like seeds becoming plants and growing. When Jesus returns, when it is time for the harvest, we will be saved from the very presence of sin. The paradise God created and which we have turned into hell on earth will be restored in much the same way Jesus was raised from the dead. There will be a new heaven and a new earth, populated by people who are new creations in Christ.

Paradise cannot exist if it is filled with hate and people who see each other as enemies. We must come to see each other instead as people created in God's image, who have inherent worth. We must see each other as people whom God loved so much that he sent his son to die for and redeem us.

We often reduce the good news of the gospel to “God loves you, so love him back.” But it is also true that God loves others and so we must love them also. One way to do that is to treat others as we would treat Jesus. If you saw him hungry or thirsty or threadbare, you would give him what he needs. If you see him in those who are sick or who are in prison or who are new to your country, you will care for and visit and welcome them as you would for him. Jesus said how we treat others, however destitute, diseased, disabled, disadvantaged, or despised, is how we treat him. (Matthew 25:40)

It can be hard and painful to look for Jesus in someone, especially when that image of God is so deeply buried in the muck of sin that we simply have to trust that it is there. Imagine how hard and painful it was for Jesus! People saw him as the enemy and killed him. But he took up his cross for us. And as his followers we too must take up our crosses and follow him. (Luke 9:23) If we don't, we cannot be his disciples. (Luke 14:27) But Jesus thought the cross was worth the joy of seeing us redeemed. (Hebrews 12:2) If we do as he did, we shall reign with him when he restores the heavens and the earth and makes all things, including us, new. (Revelation 21:1-5) 

Blessings and Woes

The scriptures referred to are Luke 6:17-26.

Everybody has heard of the Sermon on the Mount. In today's reading from Luke it sounds like this is another account of that sermon. But it's not. For one thing we are told a few verses earlier that Jesus was on a mountain praying and choosing the twelve men who would be his core disciples. (Luke 6:12-16) Then our passage says, “He came down with them and stood on a level place...” (v.17) Thus what follows is called the Sermon on the Plain.

But if you read the whole thing you will see that while it has passages parallel to the ones in Matthew chapters 5 through 7, it's a lot shorter. Some of those other teachings are found scattered throughout Luke. (Luke 14:34-35, cf. Matthew 5:13; Luke 8:16, cf. Matthew 5:15, etc) Plus the parts of this sermon that sound like the Beatitudes are different. And we have a series of woes added. So what is Luke doing here?

The obvious answer is that he is reporting a different sermon, albeit one where Jesus is giving some of the same teachings and adding some new variations. I doubt Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount just once. How could the disciples memorize it perfectly hearing it for the first time and never again? Like people who give a lot of speeches, Jesus sometimes gave the same sermon over and over in different towns and regions. There were no videos to share nor even newspapers to publish the text. If he had a good line or illustration, he reused it. And sometimes Jesus changed or added parts of the sermon. That doesn't mean one version is superior to another version. Jesus always meant what he said.

So here Jesus said, “Blessed are you who are poor...” not “Blessed are the poor in spirit...” He said here “Blessed are you who are hungry now...” not “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...” Here Jesus is focusing not on people's spiritual needs but on their physical needs. Because humans are both spiritual and physical beings and both are important. Notice that before he starts to preach we are told that people came not only to hear him but to be healed. Jesus' ministry was not just preaching and teaching but healing as well. (Matthew 4:23) No doubt many people came primarily to be healed and only afterward stayed to hear what the man who healed them had to say about God's love and forgiveness. It's really hard to care much about your spiritual needs when you are sick or in pain. But when those basic physical needs are met, your mind is freed to concentrate on spiritual things.

In fact, Jesus' brother James says, “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes or daily food. If one of you says, 'Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” (James 2:15-17) If faith does not motivate us to act, it is just words. As it says in 1^st John, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” (1 John 3:17-18) As we said last week, we are not saved by works, we are saved by God for works.

Those passages are just echoing what Jesus is getting at here. Judea was supposed to be populated by God's people. They were supposed to be a nation of priests. (Exodus 19:6; Isaiah 61:6) And a priest is expected to behave in a godly way. In Leviticus 19, God says, “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them, 'Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.'” (Leviticus 19:2). What follows are commandments not merely concerning worship but also how you treat others, especially those who are vulnerable. “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that are fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:9-10) He goes on to say, “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another...Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him. Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord. Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor nor favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor's life. I am the Lord. Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share his guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:11, 13-18) Yes, that's the context of that famous commandment that Jesus says is the second greatest one after loving God. And just 15 verses after that God says, “When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34) So part of being holy is treating all people fairly.

And this makes sense because both in Hebrew and Greek, the word for righteousness is the same as the word for “justice.” A righteous person is just. They act fairly towards others. God is just and so should we be.

But if God were only just, all of us would be in trouble. Because we all do wrong things. As Paul says, “...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God...” (Romans 3:23) By all rights, a just God should punish us all.

But God is also merciful. Psalm 103:8 says, “The Lord is compassionate and merciful; he is patient and demonstrates great loyal love.” If God were not merciful, none of us would survive. And we should be like him in this way as well. Right after today's gospel reading Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:36)

But more than that, God is gracious. (Psalm 86:15) If justice is getting what you deserve, and mercy is not getting all that you deserve, grace is getting what you could never deserve. God's grace, his undeserved, unreserved goodness towards us, is what saves us.

Paul was acutely aware of this. Writing to his protege Timothy, he says, “I am grateful to the one who has strengthened me, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he considered me faithful in putting me into ministry, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor, and an arrogant man. But I was treated with mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief, and our Lord's grace was abundant, bringing faith and love in Christ Jesus. This saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance: 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”--and I am the worst of them.” (1 Timothy 1:12-15) That is why Paul mentions God's grace in every single one of his letters. He was grateful for God's grace.

Micah says, “He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Jesus' call to be just and merciful to the poor and needy explains the first part of his preaching in this passage. But what about the part where he says, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” Is Jesus against all rich people?

No. When invited, he goes to eat with rich people. (Luke 14:1) He invites himself to the tax collector Zacchaeus' house. (Luke 19:1-10) His friends Lazarus, Mary and Martha were rich. (John 12:1-5) He looked at the rich young ruler with love. (Mark 10:17-22) Jesus came to bring his message of salvation to everyone. But part of that message was to use what you have been given to help others. Which Jesus realized was extremely hard for the rich to do because of the extra temptations they faced. Why? Because almost everything is easier for people with lots of money. Nothing they desire is off the table for them. People let them do things they wouldn't let others do. Nobody bars them from going wherever they want to. But when Jesus said, “It easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into the kingdom of God,” those who hear this said, “Then who can be saved?” They thought the rich had an automatic “in” with God because he blessed them with wealth. Jesus replied, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.” (Luke 18:25-27) In other words, everyone, rich or poor, needs God's grace to be saved. No one can do it by themselves, no matter how much they have in terms of money or resources.

Jesus is trying to wake up the rich and comfortable. He is saying, “You have it good in this life but that doesn't mean you will in the next. And if you are doing well but ignoring those who don't, if you are not helping out those who are less fortunate than you are, you are lost.” He may well have been thinking of passages such as this in Deuteronomy, “If there is among you a poor person, one of your brothers within the towns of your land which the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother, but you shall be open handed to him and willingly lend him enough for whatever he needs. Beware of letting there be a wicked thought in your heart, saying, 'The seventh year is at hand, the year of forgiving debt,' and you show ill will to your poor brother and give him nothing. Because he will cry out against you to God and you will be guilty of sin.” (Deuteronomy 15:7-9) Not helping the poor is a sin, says God. Just before this passage God says that there should not be any poor in the land he is giving his people. (Deuteronomy 15:4) If God's people act with justice and mercy everyone should have their needs met. But God is a realist and so he makes the commandment to share explicit.

Nor is this the only place where the Bible tells us to take care of the needy. The poor are mentioned more than 200 times in 197 verses. In Jeremiah God talks of those whose “'houses are filled with the gains of their fraud and deceit. This is how they have gotten so rich and powerful. That is how they have grown fat and sleek. There is no limit to the evil things they do. They do not plead the cause of the fatherless in such a way as to win it. They do not defend the rights of the poor. I will certainly punish them for doing such things!' says the Lord. 'I will certainly bring retribution on such a nation as this!'” (Jeremiah 5:27-29) When preachers thunder about how God will punish nations for doing certain things, they rarely bring up this passage or say that God will judge us for what we fail to do for the poor. But here it is. And Jesus is echoing the prophets when he pronounces woe to those who can help the poor and hungry and thirsty and sick and imprisoned and refugees but don't. He does this explicitly in the parable of the sheep and goats. (Matthew 25:32-46)

Rich people think they have money because they are smarter or harder working than the poor. But studies have shown that the very rich are not smarter than the average person. And anyone who works with their hands and their back works harder than most of the rich. Studies find that the significant factors in becoming rich have more to do with family background, social connections and chance occurrences, ie, luck. And a third of the rich, especially the ultra-rich, inherited wealth.

The Bible does not denounce people who get rich through honest hard work. It denounces those who see this as an excuse to hoard wealth rather than as a blessing to be shared with those who are in need. In Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man is punished not for being wealthy but for not helping the poor, sick and hungry man who was lying right at his gate. (Luke 16:19-31) The rich man would have to step over or walk around this poor fellow to enter his house. His is a sin of omission, of not doing something he should have, which in this case, was helping someone he knew was in need of food and care for his disease.

As we said, we are both physical and spiritual beings. Loving our neighbor is not limited to helping them with their spiritual needs. If they have physical needs—food, clothing, shelter, medical care—God expects us to help. We can all do that to some extent. And those who can help the most are those who have the most in terms of resources.

Ultimately, all we have in this life—our talents and abilities, the support of others—are gifts and grace from God our Father. He wants us to share them with one another and to help one another. He is concerned not only with the bad things we do but also with the good things we don't do. Neglecting others is not love. And we are called to love one another over and over and over. (John 13:34-35; 15:12, 17; Romans 12:10; 1 Thessalonians 3:12; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 John 3:11, 23; 4:7, 11-12; 2 John 5, etc.) Because God is love. And he who does not love others does not know God. (1 John 4:8)

New Thought, Eternal Truths

The scriptures referred to are 1 Corinthians 15:1-11.

Melissa Dougherty is a Christian whose videos I sometimes watch. She is a very intelligent and analytical observer of Christian theology. This week YouTube was flooded with interviews of her about her new book. It's called Happy Lies and it notes a troubling theological thread found in many practices and beliefs of popular Christianity. It tracks the idea back to a 19^th century movement called New Thought. This philosophy says that our thoughts can change reality. Dougherty traces this idea from hypnotist Anton Mesmer through faith healer Phineas Quimby whose Mind Cure inspired Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Its influence on Baptist preacher E.W. Kenyon in turn influenced Kenneth E. Hagin, father of the Word of Faith movement which underlies many Charismatic ministries. In its Christian form, this idea of mind over matter teaches people that through faith you can achieve health, wealth and power. God wants you to have these things and what's holding you back is your lack of faith.

What was weird is that I was independently studying the influence of New Thought on things like faith healing and the prosperity gospel. And then I watched an interview with Dougherty and it all snapped into place. Like me, Dougherty saw a distant connection to Gnosticism, a philosophy that tried to worm its way into the early church. This was the idea that only spirit is good and that you have to master this secret body of knowledge to be saved. We see this in teachings about manifesting and affirmations and visualizing and the law of attraction and exercising our authority to claim a comfortable life.

Of course, like all powerful lies, it contains a kernel of truth. Our thoughts do affect us. A positive attitude helps in life and a negative one can cause us needless problems. In medicine we call these the placebo and nocebo effects. People who go for radiation therapy thinking they won't have much nausea do better than those anticipating getting violently ill afterwards. Our thoughts can have a greater impact on us than we might imagine. But thoughts alone cannot change outside reality. That's called magic.

Dougherty spent years thinking this “name it and claim it” doctrine was Christian. She read and believed a lot of books that taught this as a central Christian doctrine. Only when she studied Christianity did she realize that this was a distortion of the gospel.

The problem is that it ultimately invests human beings with the power of God. We create health, wealth and success through our faith. This puts human beings at the center of Christianity and shifts our focus onto improving our own lives, rather than on serving Jesus and others. In fact, if others don't have these good things, it is not God's will but their insufficient faith that is the cause. People who are poor or sick or not successful are to blame for their own suffering. They just need to believe harder.

The center of Christianity, however, is not ourselves but Jesus. And that is what Paul is saying in our reading from his first letter to the Corinthians.

Apparently there were some who were saying that there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead. Paul points out that if that's true then neither was Jesus raised from the dead. “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless; you are still in your sins. Furthermore, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. For if only in this life we have hope in Christ, we should be pitied more than anyone.” (1 Corinthians 15:14)

The gospel or good news is that “Christ died for our sins...and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day...” (vv.3-4) Anyone executed by the state is not someone the world would consider successful. Jesus did not name and claim that he was healthy and powerful and thus avoid the beating, the whipping, the nailing and death. He did pray that God would let the cup of suffering pass him by. “Yet not what I will, but what you will,” he prayed. (Mark 14:35-36) The Gnostics, who thought matter was bad and only spirit was good, denied that Jesus had a physical body and was crucified. It was at most an illusion. But Paul says that Jesus' death on the cross is of “first importance.” As he wrote earlier in this same letter, “For I decided to be concerned about nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2) Nobody had a greater trust in God than Jesus and yet he suffered terribly. Nor do we get off the hook. Jesus said, “If anyone wants to become my follower, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) Following Jesus doesn't mean a comfortable, trouble-free life. As the Dread Pirate Roberts tells us in The Princess Bride, “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Nor did Jesus somehow survive crucifixion. He was buried. He was wrapped in a shroud and laid in a tomb and a big rock was rolled in front of the entrance. If he wasn't dead on Friday afternoon, he would most assuredly have perished, lying there without modern medical care, by Sunday morning.

Then God raised Jesus on the third day. If he hadn't, Jesus might have been remembered as a Jewish prophet, though that's doubtful. There were other would-be Messiahs after Jesus. Few people except historians know anything about them. But within 20 years after his execution, Paul and Peter and the other apostles have spread the word about him throughout the Roman empire. Furthermore, they are dying for their faith in Jesus. Would they do that if he hadn't been raised from the dead? Before Jesus appeared to them, the remnants of his disciples were hiding from the authorities in a locked room. (John 20:19) Less than 2 months later, those same authorities arrest and try Peter and John. “And they called them in and ordered them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, 'Whether it is right before God to obey you rather than God, you decide, for it is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:18-20) The one thing that eradicated their fear of death was having seen and touched and talked to and eaten with a man who had conquered death. The resurrection convinced them that Jesus was God's son.

Because Paul's letters were written before the gospels were, what follows in the 15^th chapter of 1^st Corinthians is the first ever account of Jesus' resurrection appearances. Besides the ones the gospels mention, Paul tells us “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.” (v.6) That's a pretty bold statement. Paul is essentially saying, “Don't take my word for it. There are hundreds of people who saw him alive after his crucifixion.” In fact, I think that's why the gospels were not the first books of the New Testament to be written. What need was there for them when on any given day of worship, one of the eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus might visit your church and give you a firsthand account? Only when the apostles began to be martyred, as Peter and Paul were under Nero, did it occur to people like Mark, who worked with both men, to get their testimony to Jesus' life, death and resurrection written down. Then Matthew and Luke, using Mark as a template, added what they knew. And then John, writing last, added his account, skipping some parts covered by the others and filling in some gaps left open by them.

Now if anybody had enormous faith, it was the men and women who had encountered the risen Jesus. Yet they did not become wealthy or enjoy worldly success. Paul recites a litany of miserable things he endured as an apostle, including being flogged 5 times, beaten with rods 3 times, being stoned, being shipwrecked, being in danger, suffering hunger, thirst and insufficient clothing during cold weather. (2 Corinthians 11:24-27) In addition, though he healed others (Acts 14:8-10; 20:9-12; 28:8), Paul suffered from some affliction that he called “a thorn in the flesh.” He prayed 3 times that God would take it away but he didn't. Paul came to realize that it kept him from being arrogant. What God told Paul was “My grace is enough for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9)

It is God's grace that Paul realized was truly essential. He tells us, “For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am...” (vv.9-10) Paul did not merit God's favor because of all he had done in persecuting Christians. But God's grace is his undeserved and unreserved goodness to us and that is the only thing that saves us. As Paul says elsewhere, “For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) God's grace saves us, not faith. Faith is not a magical power. Rather it is the conduit through which God saves us by his grace. Faith is trust. We put our trust in God's promises and that allows God to work in us.

Nor does it need to be some huge quantity of faith to be effective. When a father took his son to Jesus to be healed, he said, “'But if you are able to do anything, have compassion on us and help us.' Then Jesus said to him, 'If you are able? All things are possible for the one who believes.' Immediately the father of the boy cried out and said, 'I believe; help my unbelief.'” (Mark 9:2-24) The father admitted that he both believed and yet had some doubts. But that was enough faith for Jesus to work with.

The purpose of faith is to allow us to let God work in and through us. Right after saying we are saved by grace and not works, Paul goes on to say, “For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ for good works that God has prepared beforehand so that we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:10) We are not saved by good works; we are saved by God for good works. Paul says, “But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of the gift of Christ...It was he who gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, that is, to build up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God—a mature person, attaining to the measure of Christ's full stature. So we are no longer to be children, tossed back and forth by waves and carried about by every wind of teaching by the trickery of people who craftily carry out their deceitful schemes. But practicing the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ, who is the head. From him the whole body grows, fitted and held together through every supporting ligament. As each one does its part, the body grows in love.” (Ephesians 4:7, 11-16)

God's grace is given for the ultimate purpose of us growing together in love until we attain the maturity of being like Christ. We are not to fall for clever and attractive twistings of the gospel, which make this all about our achieving our personal desires. We are to use our gifts to equip and help each other as we build up the body of Christ.

In the interview with Michelle Dougherty one of the interviewers gave a very good summary of the questions we should ask whenever we hear some novel version of the gospel.

First, we should ask, “Is it new?” Scripture contains all that is necessary for salvation. God did not forget for 2000 years some key part of what he wanted us to know and preach.

Secondly, we should ask, “Is it secret?” Again Jesus wanted us to proclaim the good news. Secret doctrines are the stuff that cults traffic in. Paul mocked those who were selling secret divine knowledge by saying the open secret of the gospel is that God wants everyone, not just an elite, to become part of the body of Christ. (Ephesians 3:4-6)

Thirdly, we should ask, “What is emphasized?” If it is something other than the good news of the incarnate, crucified and risen Jesus Christ, who came to save us by offering his grace to us through faith in him, then it is probably leading us away from a genuine Christ-centered faith.

Finally, we should ask, “Who gets the glory?” Is it us for our tremendous faith and our authority to manifest our desires or is it God, who sent us Son to save us and sent his Spirit to make us more like Jesus?

Of first importance in our faith is Jesus Christ, who died for us and rose again, vindicating what he taught and assuring us that death should not determine how we live our life. We should not be focused on earthly blessings but spiritual ones. As we see in the Beatitudes, they do not always appear to be blessings in worldly terms. (Matthew 5:2-11) And as we've seen, wealth can be a severe hindrance to entering into God's kingdom. (Luke 18:25)

But even when seeking God's blessings, let's not be like the members of the church at Corinth who were pursuing the flashier spiritual gifts. In response, Paul said, “I will show you a more excellent way.” And he launched into his chapter on the superiority of love. (1 Corinthians 13) Love is the primary fruit of the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22-23) Jesus said that our love for one another is how the world will know we are his disciples. (John 13:35) As J.B. Phillips put it in his translation, “Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8) Even scientists in a 80 year long study of more than 200 people have found that it is love, not things, that makes for a good life. To paraphrase Jackie DeShannon's song, what the world needs now is love, God's love.

God and Evil

“If God is so loving—why the Holocaust, why cleansing + worldwide starvation? Perhaps our God just set everything in motion + is just watching?” Our sermon suggestion this week is a good question—one that merits an entire book. There are several I can suggest, such as C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain and Peter Kreeft's Making Sense of Suffering. If you want to read deep considerations of this problem by Christian philosophers written for a general audience, those two books are the best ones I've read so far. But since the implied promise of our sermon suggestion box is that I will present as good an answer to the question as I can come up with in the span of a week, I will try to at least give you a reasonable response within the confines of a sermon.

The problem of how evil can exist in a world created by a good and all powerful God is an old one. Various philosophers have tried to resolve the conundrum by questioning the premises we've just laid out. They say either God is not all powerful and so can't prevent evil, or he is not entirely good and so has no interest in preventing evil. Our sermon suggestion seems to point to the latter. Perhaps God is just watching how his experiment is working out, unemotionally taking it all in, like a scientist watching a population of microbes. Or perhaps he is like a Roman emperor, just enjoying the spectacle of people fighting and dying in a cosmic coliseum. This makes God either amoral or immoral.

The atheist solution to the question is that there is no God. The problem is this eliminates any basis for their moral outrage at anything, including religion. If there is no Creator, there is no objective moral law. There is no “ought to” or “should have.” What happens just happens, without any direction or goal. Your morality is just your personal preferences imposed on others. On what basis can you declare anything morally good or bad in a universe where, from an evolutionary viewpoint, everything can be reduced to “My genes need to be passed on, so whatever works for me is legitimate, where it's cooperation or coersion or killing”? Animals fight and kill each other. We're just animals.

Weirdly, though, if there is no God, religion still spontaneously arises in every society. Studies have shown that civilizations can't be created without religion to foster the massive amount of human cooperation necessary. Scientific evidence also shows that religion has mental and physical health benefits for individuals, including 3 to 4 years more life. Which is odd if belief in God is a misperception of reality. It would be as if bad eyesight gave one a better chance at survival and a long life than good vision. Anyway, removing God from the equation doesn't get rid of the problem of suffering and evil.

We Christians hold that God is not merely a psychological phenomenon but a reality and so for us there remains the question of how to reconcile a good, all-powerful God with a world that includes evil. And following the lead of our question, I am going to deal only with the problem of moral evil in this sermon. That's going to be complex enough without looking at what is called natural evil, like disasters and earthquakes.

For our purpose, we will define evil as the intentional infliction of harm on other people and/or the desire to do so. The question is therefore why did God make a world in which people can be evil?

Let's try to imagine a world in which people can't hurt others. At first it sounds nice. People just sing, play, paint, maybe work if they like. But they never hurt one another because they can't. Now imagine one of them falls and suffers a compound fracture of the leg. What do the others do? They stand around in distress because they don't know how to help him. If they help him stand, he screams in pain. If they merely touch his leg, it causes him pain. Since they can't hurt him, they can't help him. They can say nice things, bring him food and water and put a tent over him but he will be left to either painfully recover on his own and be forever crippled or he may get an infection or throw a blood clot and die. No one is going to do what a doctor in the real world will do, which would involve repositioning the leg, possibly even pulling and resetting the bone so it heals properly, despite the initial great pain this will cause. No one in such a world will discern that there is sometimes a difference between hurting someone and harming them. No one will develop the idea that fixing things may involve having a negative impact on someone in any way. The only fixes in such a world would be easy ones that offend no one, rather like the world of the Teletubbies but without the high drama.

More importantly, no one in such a world could really be good. Being good is a choice. You aren't actually good if you couldn't possibly choose not to be good. The singing and dancing figures in Disney's It's a Small, Small World ride could never go evil. They can only do what they are programmed to do. Asking for a world in which evil is not possible is asking for a world in which people are either robots or puppets, unable to do anything the creator doesn't want them to.

It would also be a world without love. If no one can choose to do evil, they can't choose to do good either. Which includes what most people consider the ultimate good: love. Because genuine love is a choice. I'm not talking about mere attraction or infatuation. Those may lead to love but they can also fade. Love is a decision. If you fall in love with someone and then they have a disfiguring and disabling accident, and everything that attracted you to them is gone and you still choose to stick with them and take care of them, that is love. That is a decision. 

After all, how would you feel if you found that the love of your life was programmed to act that way? What if that person couldn't not love you? How would they be different from a robot? In the science fiction movie A.I. a childless couple buys a totally realistic boy android whom they can program to love them. And the tragedy is that after they have a kid of their own, the android boy can't be unprogrammed. He far outlasts his human “parents” and can't stop seeking them because he has no choice. But is that real love? Would you prefer a machine that acts like it loves you to a real person who has gotten to know you and decided to love you?

But to be a part of a world with no evil, you would also have to be a robot. You would have no choice but to do only what you were programmed to do. You would, like the android, have made no consent to your condition. In the 2009 TV series Dollhouse, people's brains are wiped of their memories like computers and they are downloaded with personalities made-to-order to serve a very rich clientele. The people, or “dolls” as the company calls them, can become anyone—a hostage negotiator, an art thief, a bodyguard, or even the dead wife of an internet entrepreneur who never got to see him become a success. In one horrific episode, we discover that the “doll” in question did not enter the program willingly and sign the standard 5 year contract. Instead, she was the former girlfriend of a rich man who forced her into the program so she could be reprogrammed and never reject him as she had before when she had free will. Now she is programmed to love him, but on his part, it is rape. She did not consent to this.

God is love and real love doesn't force itself on others. God woos us by persuasion, by giving us his word and by acts of love, like becoming one of us in Jesus in order to save us. God offers us his love and asks us to consent to be part of his family. We are free to choose him or reject him. God created a world in which real goodness and love can exist because it is possible for people to choose otherwise. And, as we see, they do. Evil is the result of us rejecting God's loving ways of thinking, speaking and acting.

Ok, then why doesn't God use persuasion by making his existence undeniable and his presence visible so everyone knows he's watching? Imagine something like the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings gazing down on you every minute of every day. If that's too creepy, how about the laughing baby-faced sun of the Teletubbies? Everywhere you go, there's a visible sign that God is watching everything you do. And you can't even lock him out of your bathroom or bedroom like you might do with your dog.

But would that be enough to deter people from doing evil? If so, then you would expect surveillance states like China with its network of security cameras everywhere to dismiss their police forces. But they don't because while most of us won't do bad things when other people or the authorities are watching, that doesn't stop others.

Ok, then why doesn't God intervene when people get out of hand? Why doesn't he, like a human parent, break up the fights, stop the bullying, put bad people in Time Out? Well, how about, if you did something wrong, this Eye of God, or the flaming baby's head if you prefer, spoke to you and told you to stop. And did so in James Earl Jones' voice, just so you knew he was serious. And yet we know even that wouldn't stop some people. So what if he zapped people who were disobeying, like a dog with one of those invisible fence collars? Or what if he hit them with a freeze ray?

Welcome to the Village! This was the setting of the 1967 TV series The Prisoner, where former spies are involuntarily kept in what appears to be a quaint English village. In that show, a giant sentient ball chases and engulfs anyone trying to escape or misbehave.

It is interesting that freethinkers like atheists generally condemn universal surveillance and police state intimidation tactics when it's done by humans, but criticize God for not doing precisely that to prove that he exists and that he is serious about stopping evil.

Let's concede that God visibly stalking everyone is creepy and that him dishing out instant karma is not a lot less coercive than us being programmed to love and obey him without being able to do otherwise. What if he were subtler? What if God stayed invisible but caused heart attacks or comas in anyone who did bad things? What if Hitler had a massive stroke after he started the war or had the death camps built? What if God made explicit what we know: that what is morally unhealthy is also physically unhealthy? So if you do something bad, it's sudden death or disability. No second chances, no opportunity to repent and change your ways. That's not any less coercive and actually a great deal more terrifying.

And why wait until Hitler's already built the death camps to strike him down? Why not stop him earlier? Before he came to power? Or after World War I, when he was a decorated soldier but before he joined the Nazi party? But we know he hated Jews and non-Aryan people before that. Should God kill Hitler as a homeless young man? As a teenager? As a child? Now we've entered the territory of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, in which people are arrested and imprisoned for future crimes, ones they didn't actually commit but would have if they weren't stopped. You do the time before you actually do the crime. Which you can't ever do anyway.

In these scenarios, you don't get an earthly paradise but a prison. People are good, not out of choice but out of terror. And if you are wondering why I'm using all these sci-fi references, it's because speculative writers have explored all of these options, and most have realized that these efforts to make the world a utopia actually result in a dystopia. Yet in the real world, dictators keep trying to make the world better through coercion and fear.

As opposed to these “what if?” worlds, the world God actually made is one where people can choose to love and obey him, and in which some do and some do not. Even so, it doesn't take too much wisdom to realize that there are negative consequences to not doing what's right but these consequences are not usually immediately nor invariably fatal, so they are not coercive. God also has endowed us with the ability to think about long-term outcomes, which are definitely better if we choose to do good and worse if we don't. Unfortunately, we tend to go for short-term benefits. So we choose the more immediate rewards of intoxication, overindulgence, casual sex, inflated quarterly earnings or lying to get re-elected over the proven long-term benefits of an undamaged brain, healthy body, marriage, sound fiscal management and realistically solving your constituents' problems. Suffering the consequences of our own bad moral decisions is akin not to being struck by lightning but to camping on train tracks. You can change your mind. And if you get run over, you can't say you never thought it could happen.

A big problem is that someone else's bad moral decision can get you hurt. That was the real thrust of our sermon suggestion question. The victims of the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, lynching, slavery, drive-by shootings and many other sins are innocent, at least of those evils. Why does God allow people to hurt other people? Here we have to keep in mind the laws of physics. How does the God who created the physical world make it so that we can kiss each other but not kick each other, so we can slap a friend on the back after a game but not punch him in the kidneys, so I can shove you out of the way of an oncoming car but not into the path of one? But then should God make a world entirely out of foam rubber? Should he cover us all in bubble-wrap? But there are other forms of harm than just physical. How can he make it so that only sounds carrying the truth reach our ears but not sounds carrying lies or distortions? How does God arrange the law of physics so that we can only impact the world for good and never for evil? I've never read or seen a science fiction story that explores how that would be possible.

So does that mean that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds? Not yet.

One of the problems is with how we frame this question: literally like a photo. We assume that as bad as things are, they always have been so and more importantly they always will be. We assume that evil has always been in the world and always will be. And we assume that because we don't see God obviously stopping an evil at the moment that he is not doing anything about it. That's like looking at a snapshot of a man lying on the ground with a broken leg and, because we can't see the ambulance in the shot, assuming that he won't get help. The situation is more fluid than we realize and there are things we are not factoring into our evaluation of the situation.

We talk as if the only way to stop harm is to infantilize humans, by either eliminating our ability to choose or by making our choices inconsequential. Maybe God doesn't want to child-proof the universe. Maybe he doesn't want us to stay infants but grow up and learn not to do harm. God would rather we become people who want to do good. He's spelled it out, most fully in the Bible, but every culture has the equivalent of the Golden Rule. Jesus put it positively but most religions do it negatively: what you wouldn't want done to you, don't do to others. In most cases, the right way to act is not that hard to figure out, though it may be hard to do. Most moral problems are not really matters of ignorance. It's not that we lack knowledge, especially today; it's that we lack the will to do what we know we should.

Then there's the issue of what to do in the aftermath of bad decisions. What do you do to make things right once you've gone and done what's wrong? Again every parent knows what to do: think about what you've done wrong, admit it, apologize, forgive each other, give back what you took, and repair the damage. If the damage is huge, the parent will usually have to provide the resources to make the repairs. And so it is with our heavenly Father. Through Jesus he has begun repairing this world which we have broken with our tantrums, our sibling rivalries, our greed, our envy, our laziness, our lust, our gluttony, and our arrogance. He has paid the price for what we broke. He has sent us his Spirit. That's why I said that this is not the best of all possible worlds yet.

If God left the world the way it is, then, yes, he is either amoral, immoral or helpless. But he is working in the world. Historian Tom Holland has shown that the ideals of mercy, helping the poor, healing the sick, giving justice to the powerless, seeing the image of God in all people are only part of the modern world because of the teachings of Jesus. These were not virtues in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Their gods and their cultures favored the rich and the powerful. They did not care about the poor or the equality of everyone in society, including slaves and women. Their gods did not love humans. They certainly would not die to save them.

But then Jesus came, proclaiming the good news that God loves everyone and will forgive and transform all who turn to him. Jesus showed this in his life, in his self-sacrificial death and in his resurrection. Then he passed his mission on to his followers. They set up hospitals, schools, and charitable organizations. And 2000 years later, even the secular world assumes a decent society should feed the hungry, give clean water to the thirsty, heal the sick, make the lame walk, the deaf hear, the mute speak, and bring back to life those given up for dead. Jesus introduced that to the world at large.

To say that the world is nothing more than a place of suffering is like going into a hospital and focusing only on the pain and injuries and disease there and not on the efforts to make those who are suffering better. God is at work in this world. He is at work through those who feel called to serve others. Most of the nurses and doctors I have met and worked with, most of the people who are working to do good in this world, like social workers, family therapists and teachers, are religious. There are very few atheists among those who are most immersed in relieving the world's suffering.

But what about those we can't help, who have been killed by the neglect or direct action of others? If this is the only life we get, then you would have to say that there is no justice in the world. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and those who had millions killed got away with it and those they killed will never get justice...if this life is all that there is.

But the risen Jesus is the big clue that it isn't. God isn't the God of the dead but of the living. No one will be cheated out of his reward by death, nor will anyone cheat God and check out without paying for what he's done. Nor will the damage done remain forever. God will reboot the whole of creation. There will be a new heaven and a new earth and new bodies for us. The God who pronounced his creation “good” will see it become that again. That is the hope we proclaim every time we say in the creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

In the meantime, God has sent us out to show his love, not only in the words of the good news but in the good works for which he has prepared us. By investing our lives in helping and serving others we say that we agree with God that this world is worth saving. We show that there is more to life than evil and we show that evil does not get the last word.

A lot of people want to see evil eliminated, preferably by a lightning bolt. But how do you get rid of evil without getting rid of humans? God's plan is to eliminate evildoers, not by turning them into piles of ashes, but by forgiving them and turning them into his children through his son Jesus Christ. He took the most evil thing we could do to him and turned his death into the greatest act of love anyone has ever done. And he can do the same to our lives, however evil they have become, if we turn them over to him and join him in bringing healing and restoration to a suffering world.

Originally preached on February 7, 2010. It has been updated and revised.