Purpose, Path, Power

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, and John 3:1-17.

Before my granddaughter got one, I used to think “kitten” was a noun. Now I realize it's a verb. This tiny thing is always rocketing around the room, exploring every nook and cranny, climbing on the furniture, the curtains, my leg. She is always ready to attack and do battle with stuffed animals, my shoe, the dog's tail. She's never still. I envy her energy.

The architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller said, “God is a verb.” And indeed when Moses asks God's name he says, “I Am That I Am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'” (Exodus 3:14) God's name in Hebrew is the third-person masculine singular causative form of the verb “to be.” Richard Elliott Friedman and the Jewish Study Bible feel that a better translation of this is “I cause things to be.” Everett Fox translates the name as “I will be there.” Yet another option is “I will be what I will be,” meaning “My nature will be evident from my actions.” But what everyone seems to agree on that God's name is a form of the verb “to be.” God is a verb.

And the God of the Bible is an action verb. In the beginning he is creating things and pronouncing them good. He makes covenants. He provides a sacrifice for Abraham in place of his son. He liberates slaves. He leads a nation to the promised land. This is not some philosopher's God, who is static and above all things, passively observing the world, an object to contemplate. This is a God who does things.

God the Son is no different. The first gospel written, Mark, is a breathless account of Jesus going around Galilee and Judea, healing, feeding and teaching people. The word “immediately” appears in Mark 17 times, impelling the narrative from event to event. He also makes a covenant and liberates those enslaved to sin by providing himself, God the Son, as a sacrifice. And then, he of whom John says, “In him was life,” returns to life, walking, talking, cooking and reaching out his nail-pierced hands to be touched.

Throughout both the Old and New Testaments, the Spirit is also active—in creation, in choosing and inspiring leaders, in speaking through prophets, in empowering Jesus and then in empowering and guiding us, the body of Christ, whom Jesus sends out to spread his message to the ends of the earth.

Today is Trinity Sunday and I am supposed to be explaining the Triune God so that you understand the idea. But I agree with C.S. Lewis that it is more important to experience the Trinity. So let's look at God another way.

We all have a vision of achieving what is good in life. It may be a vision of everything that is good in the sense of being right, or it may be a vision of everything that is good in the sense of being enjoyable. And most of us think that the two are very different. But in God they are the same. As we said, God made all things and pronounced them good. The problem is that we misuse them and thus often miss the pleasure found in doing things the right way, the way God intended. We are like babies, who, presented with a ball, try to put it in our mouth and see if we can eat it. Only when we realize that the purpose of a ball is in the throwing and in the rolling and in the bouncing, do we discover the true pleasure of a ball. Even a kitten or a puppy knows that. Using something the right way is also using it in the most enjoyable way. And that's how it is with God's gifts.

So our goal, seeking a good life, is really about seeking this binocular or three dimensional vision of God, the source of what is both right and pleasurable.

But we need help getting to that goal and God provides that as well.

First it helps if we have someone who not only tells us the way but shows us. And God the Son does that. He lives a life of love and service, telling people about God's goodness, forgiving, healing and feeding people. But he doesn't live a fairy tale life. It is a very human life. We see Jesus dealing with obstacles in the form of determined opponents as well as dense students and fleeing friends and even a family that at times doubts his sanity. He has followers who want him for what he can provide for them physically, not spiritually. He is so busy he can't always find time to eat and so tired he can sleep through a storm in a boat that's being swamped. He cries at a friend's grave and prays for an alternative when facing his own imminent death. During his worst hour of pain and humiliation, he feels abandoned by God. But in the end he is vindicated by the God who causes him to be once again. In Jesus love conquers hate, light conquers darkness, life conquers death. That's the kind of example we need as we encounter similar obstacles while going towards our goal. By his works and with his words Jesus helps us.

But to get to that goal we also need insight and encouragement and strength and comfort. And God the Spirit provides that. He enters our hearts and minds and starts to change them so that we grow to be in ever closer harmony with God, the source of all that is good and right and enjoyable. Because he works behind the scenes, we often forget about him. But he is the one who drops an apt word of scripture into our mind or asks a pointed question that clarifies the issues at stake, or urges us to leave our comfort zone to do what's right and to help those in need. He recasts the world around us so we see it with new eyes. He assures us of God's love when we are assailed by doubt. He is God's intimate presence, the Father and the Son making their home in us and living their life in us. (John 14:16-17, 23)

If you can't wrap your head around the Trinity, don't worry about it. You don't need to understand exactly how a car or a computer works to experience the benefits of either. Just know that God is the light at the top of the mountain we are climbing. And he is our guide showing us where to step and what to avoid. And he is the motivation, spurring us on and encouraging us to take that next step. God is the goal which gives us the purpose we long for in life as well as the path to that goal and the power to make it to that goal. Or as Jesus put it, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

On Fire

The scriptures referred to are Acts 2:1-21.

The invention of fire was a huge advance for humanity. The Greeks thought it was a gift, stolen by Prometheus from the gods. One theory of how we got our big brain involves the invention of cooking food. Cooking makes food easier to chew and easier for our stomachs to break down. So our jaws shrank and our brains grew. And because we spent less time looking for food and digesting it, our big brains could occupy themselves with other problems. All thanks to fire.

Regardless of whether that theory is correct, fire is powerful, which makes it tremendously useful in some ways, like cooking and giving light and keeping us warm. But in other ways fire is dangerous. If you are careless with it or around it, you could get injured or killed and your home as well as the whole community could be destroyed.

So it is interesting that when God appears to Abraham, he appears as “a smoking firepot and a flaming torch.” (Genesis 15:17) When God appears to Moses he does so in fire. He first appears in a bush that appears to be on fire but which is not consumed. (Exodus 3:2-3) Later when God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses, he appears as fire on the mountain. (Exodus 19:18) And he leads the Israelites to the promised land in a pillar of fire by night and of smoke by day. (Exodus 13:21-22)

And the more dangerous aspects of fire are also there. When a bunch of Levites, which were kind of like deacons, try to usurp the high priest, they are destroyed by fire. (Numbers 16:35) It always bothered me that Belloq, the evil archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark, didn't remember that part of the Bible before dressing up as a priest and opening the ark. Of course, then the movie wouldn't have had that awesome ending.

God, speaking from the pillar of fire, does inspire awe as well as fear in the Israelites. So why does he often, though not always, appear as fire?

For one thing fire, though pivotal to human development and society, is not a natural element like water or earth or rock or wood or even air. Fire is a chemical reaction, an event. Mankind's first encounter with fire was probably a wildfire or possibly a tree struck by lightning. Mastering it, as Wikipedia points out, allowed humans to have a source of light and warmth, protection from predators (remember Mowgli confronting Shere Khan), as well as a way of creating better hunting tools and as we said, cooking. So here is this almost living thing that is not an inanimate element of nature you can simply locate and acquire, and yet it becomes essential to human life. We cannot imagine civilization without it.

Humans are meaning-seeking animals. Other animals can figure out the “how” of things. Humans wish to figure out the “why?” Other animals can discern and even invent new uses for objects or phenomena. Only humans, as far as we know, wonder why certain things are so inherently beneficial to us. As we said, fire was a game-changer and was considered a gift of the gods. Perhaps God, who speaks to us in metaphors drawn from everyday life, decided that, for certain purposes, fire was the best physical metaphor.

As the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery points out, “Just as all physical life depends on the fire that is the sun...so does all spiritual life depend on God. Just as fire both purifies and destroys, so does God purify the righteous and destroy the wicked.... Just as fire lights up the blackness of night, so does God overcome the dark powers of evil. Just as fire is mysterious and immaterial, so too God is enigmatic and incorporeal. Just as fire is always...changing its shape and cannot be held for examination, so is God the indefinable who is beyond our grasp.”

Like fire, having God in our life is beneficial as well as powerful and we have to have a healthy respect for him. But I think there are a couple of other reasons why fire makes a good metaphor for God and one is important to our passage about the first Pentecost after Jesus' ascension.

We are told that “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” One aspect of fire that we have not discussed is the fact that it spreads quite easily. And that's what the Spirit is doing here: spreading the gospel to a group of Jewish pilgrims from countries all over the known world who grew speaking languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic. The tongues of fire indicate that God intends the good news of who Jesus is and what he has done for us to spread like wildfire.

And indeed God's Word is compared to fire. Jeremiah wrote, “Sometimes I think, 'I will make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger any more.' But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in; I cannot contain it.” (Jeremiah 20:9 NET) When the risen Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus with the 2 disciples, he explained that the Christ must die and be raised. When they realize it is Jesus himself accompanying them and he disappears from their sight, they say, “Didn't our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32) God's Word generates an intense desire to share and spread it. That is probably what the tongues of flame represent.

But there is another thing that scripture compares to fire: love. In the Song of Solomon, it says, “For love is as strong as death, passion is as unrelenting as Sheol. Its flames burst forth, it is a blazing flame. Surging waters cannot quench love...” (Song of Solomon 8:6-7) If that is true of human love, how much more does that describe God's love for us? If, as 1 John 4:8 says, God is love, he is not mild affection or faint fondness but a burning love. As it says in Deuteronomy, “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; he is a jealous God.” (Deuteronomy 4:24) The context here is God telling his people, who have entered a covenant relationship with him, not to go after or worship other gods. Jealousy is bad if it is unwarranted, if your lover or spouse is unreasonably jealous. But if you love someone, you are going to feel jealous if some other person steals away their love from you.

And God's situation is unique. He not only created us in his image, to be loved by him and to love and enjoy him forever, there are no other gods. So this would be like finding out your spouse was seriously in love with and wanted to leave you for James Bond or Wonder Woman. You not only might feel jealous, you would realize that they are delusional and you would be worried that they are headed for disaster, like the folks who stalk celebrities because they believe they are in a relationship with them. That's how God must feel when we put ephemeral, not to mention wholly imaginary, objects of love ahead of him.

Yet he continues to love us. Paul says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) Most people expect a religious message to go along these lines: God will love you if you do something for him. They don't anticipate the good news that God loves us in spite of what we do, in other words, unconditionally. Still less would they think it likely that God would take the initiative in repairing our relationship. The idea that God would become a human being was unthinkable to the Jews. And no one would ever think that God would willingly let himself be killed by sinful people to bridge the gap between the divine and the human. Or that he would then offer his eternal life to the very species that rejected him. Why would he ever do that? Because he has a burning love for us.

In this life we are faced with the question of whether the universe we live in is cold and indifferent to us or whether the love that we see in ourselves and the other animals is neither unique or anomalous but reflects something that is intentional and cosmic. And that love is not merely sex or a perfunctory part of insuring our genes gets passed on. Look online and you can see a monkey carrying the body of her dead infant for days, mourning that specific offspring. You can see elephants trying to revive a dying member of the herd or panicking as they try to rescue a baby that has fallen into water. And in this day when we can live better than the kings of old in comfort and with a variety of foods from all over the globe and with countless hours of entertainment, why did we find the last year so hard? Because we missed our friends and our family and all those we loved. Seeing them in a little electronic window was not the same.

We are created in the image of the God who is love, a love that is not discouraged by our unfaithfulness, but which seeks to win us back. A love that is stronger than death, that is unrelenting, a blazing fire which flood waters cannot quench. We long for this love that longs for us. Because such love is as essential as fire. We need its light; we need its warmth; we need its protection. The world needs it. And we know the source. Jesus said he came to set the world on fire. His words of love are burning within us. Stop bottling them up. Give them voice. Let them spread through this cold world like wildfire.

What's in a Name?

The scriptures referred to are Acts 1:15-17, 21-26.

The first of the Great Courses I listened to was called The Other Side of History. Rather than being about the great men and movements of traditional history, this was about the everyday life of the average person in various eras and cultures. So the lectures were on “Being Egyptian” and “Being Greek” and “Being Medieval,” with specific lectures on things like “Being a Greek Slave,” “Being a Greek Soldier or Sailor,” “Being a Greek Woman,” “Being a Sick or Disabled Greek,” “Being an Old Greek” and even “Being a Dead Greek.” You learned what it was like to be Jewish under Roman rule, to be a Celt in Ancient Britain, to be a medieval heretic and to be a Viking raider. The professor, Dr. Robert Garland, explained how hard it was the glean this information from the sources we have since average people didn't usually get to write about their lives. Only the literate did, which meant the rich and the educated are our main sources of history. We rarely even know the names of average people from the past.

So the apostle Matthias is one step above most of the people. But just one step. The most we know about him for sure is what we have in today's passage from Acts. We know he was a follower of Jesus from the baptism of John all the way to the ascension. He is chosen by lot over a guy with 3 names, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus. So he becomes the only apostle who was not one of the twelve disciples, replacing Judas who was a disciple but who, for obvious reasons, never became an apostle.

And that's it! If you try to find out more about Matthias you get a bunch of stories from various sources that are hard to reconcile. A lot of them have him going to Ethiopia, which may simply mean Africa, while many others have him going to what is now the country of Georgia, just north of Turkey and bounded by the Black Sea to the west and Russian to the north and east. He was stoned there around 80 AD. Or he may have been stoned and beheaded in Jerusalem. Or he may have died of old age. Apparently nobody at the time bothered to write down and pass on the details of the last apostle chosen. Which is why I say he is just a step above the average person of the time, who lived and died without anyone recording so much as their name.

That's very different from today when everyone seems to have a social media account so that people in the far corners of the world can find out their names...and use them to create false accounts and commit identity fraud! But theoretically future historians will be able to look back on every person's digital record and get a better idea of how the average person lived. Naaah! There will be too many. They will have programs that will sift through the mountains of personal data and summarize what the average person posted. Actually they have those programs now. And who knows how long after my death Google will decide that my blog takes up too much memory on their servers and deletes it.

We will be forgotten in a few generations and our time will be represented by celebrities, whose lives are definitely not typical. So we have a lot in common with the apostle Matthias. He was not as big a personality as Peter or Paul, but nevertheless, he was chosen by God to spread the gospel. So somewhere people believed and some churches were started because of him. And some of their descendants are probably still believers. Matthias is like one of those long-bearded pastors from 150 years ago whose black and white photos line the hallways of some old historic churches. No one alive today ever heard them preach or knows much about them except that at some time in the past they were the shepherds of the church and they kept it going so that it still is around today. More than that, think about the then-important church secretaries and choir directors and treasurers and vestry or council members whose names might still be preserved in dusty records in banker's boxes stacked in storage but who are as good as forgotten.

The point is that one's importance to the work of God's kingdom is not necessarily indicated by one's fame or the lack of it. There are lots of workers in the fields of the Lord and not everyone makes the cover of Living Lutheran or The Living Church. And being well known is hardly an sign of one's worth as a human being. On Time Magazine's list of the 100 most significant figures in history, Hitler comes in at number 7. Yeah, he changed the world, but not for the better. Likewise Napoleon comes in at number 2, just under Jesus at number 1. But we wouldn't even know about Jesus if it hadn't been for some obscure fishermen and tax collectors and a tent-maker and (gasp!) even some socially unimportant women spreading the word about him.

The important thing is not having your name on a plaque or on a building or trending on social media. Rather it is what Jesus says in Revelation. To the church in Pergamum he says, “To the one who conquers, I will give him some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and on that stone will be written a new name that no one can understand except the one who receives it.” (Revelation 2:17) A secret name Jesus gives you! That's cooler than earthly fame. And to the church in Sardis, Jesus says, “...they will walk with me dressed in white, because they are worthy. The one who conquers will be dressed like them in white clothing, and I will never erase their name from the book of life, but will declare their name before my Father and before his angels.” (Revelation 3:4-5) Speaking of himself as the good shepherd, Jesus said, “He calls his own sheep by name...” (John 10:3) Who cares if the world knows your name? The world will not last forever. Its glory will fade. It is far better than earthly fame to be known individually by the eternal God and it is far sweeter than the acclaim of men is to be called by name by Jesus, who loves us and gave himself for each and every one of us.

Love and Obey

The scriptures referred to are John 15:9-17 and 1 John 5:1-6.

I can't remember if it was an episode of The Crown or an episode of Victoria but there is a point at which either Prince Albert or Prince Philip has to adjust to the fact that despite being married to the Queen, he is not a king but her subject. A lot of guys have trouble with their wives being more powerful than they are but they rarely have to literally obey her commands. And yet, by all accounts these were happy and successful marriages. Unlike, say, the more traditional marriages of Henry VIII. But he is an outlier. Most royal marriages do not end in beheadings.

Still the marriages of Albert and Philip point out that differences in power do not preclude love. Which helps us understand something that pops up in both our Johannine writings for this Sunday. Both tie our love for God with obeying his commandments. 1 John says, “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.” And in the previous chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus says, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.” (John 14:21) Wait a second! Isn't God's love for us unconditional? Yes, but here John is talking about how we express our love for God. And we do it by obeying his commandments.

This bothers us because we tend to think of love as egalitarian. After all, the phrase “obey” is no longer part of the wife's vow in the wedding ceremony. If we love God, why do we need to obey him?

Even today we expect underage children to obey their parents and this does not mean that there is no love between them. And the very rational reason we expect this is that the parents, by virtue of being older, should know better than their children. Yes, we can think of exceptions to this, but they are by definition exceptional, just as the marriages of Henry VIII are to the rule of royal marriages. Thus, for instance, we do not let children enter into legal contracts on their own. Parents and children generally love each other despite their differences in power.

With God the difference is even greater. And God is not merely our metaphorical Father but our literal Creator. He designed us and how we and the universe work. So he knows infinitely better than we what we should and shouldn't do.

But he didn't make us as robots, merely following programming without the ability to decide if we want to or not. Because a robot cannot love. Ironically, that fact is at the heart of the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. In the film, a childless woman gets an android boy to be her son and at a certain point she activates an irreversible imprinting protocol that makes the android love her. And even when abandoned by her, the android boy seeks her and wants her to love him back. But despite his experiencing the feelings of love, it isn't real because it is programmed. He has no choice. Real love has to be a choice.

God created us so that we have a real choice of whether to love him back or not. But since the universe is created by the God who is love, love is the best choice to make. It's like the fact that you can live on junk food, but that's not the best food for your body in the long-term. To live a long and healthy life, you need to cut way back on the fries and soda and candy and eat a balanced diet, including, as your mother said, your vegetables. Mother usually knows best. God always does.

Human love is not exactly like God's love. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis uses the fact that Greek has different words for love to explain the differences and the limitations of each. Yet they all get used metaphorically of God's love for us and ours for him. We have been talking about familial love, in which God is like our parent and we his children. In our gospel passage, Jesus speaks of his disciples as friends. And, yes, there are even parts of the Bible that use the image of romantic love for our relationship with God. The Song of Solomon would never have made it into the Bible had the Jews not seen it as poetic depiction of the love between God and his people Israel.

Why does the Hebrew Bible use the image of God and Israel as husband and wife? Because a parent and child do not have an absolute choice when it comes to loving one another or not. But individuals do when it comes to marriage. Rereading Genesis this year I was struck by how, even in a culture of arranged marriages, we are told that Isaac falls in love with Rebekah and Jacob with Rachel. Marital love requires choice and commitment and loyalty. And that makes it a pretty good metaphor for our relationship with God.

The New Testament changes that image somewhat to make Jesus the bridegroom and the church his bride. But in this metaphor Jesus isn't just a poor carpenter. He is the King of kings. Which means the church is not only his bride but also his subject.

I recently finished watching the HBO documentary series Pray, Obey, Kill about a Swedish Pentecostal church that devolved into a cult centered around a woman who called herself the “Bride of Christ” and the “Queen of Heaven.” As with all cults, she, the leader, was given the power to act as a god to her followers. She demanded gifts and ultimate loyalty. And, as with most cults, the whole thing degenerated into sexual sins, violence and eventually murder. I find it interesting that this so-called “Bride of Christ” did not feel she had to obey Jesus, her “husband,” when it came to his commands not to commit adultery, and not to harm others. But then cult leaders don't like to play second fiddle to God.

We love the real God but we are to obey him. This could be a problem if he were, like that cult leader, unreasonable and abusive. But, as it says in 1 John, “his commandments are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:3) The Greek word translated “burdensome” literally means “heavy.” In various contexts, it can mean oppressive or even violent or cruel. God's commandments aren't any of those. Especially the one Jesus gives in our gospel: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)

And all of Jesus' commandments flow from that one. He commands us to treat others as we wish to be treated. (Luke 6:31) He commands us to be merciful as God is merciful. (Luke 6:36) He commands us to be reconciled to a sibling who has issues with us. (Matthew 5:24) He commands us to give to the needy. (Luke 6:30) He commands us to take care of the hungry, poor, sick, disadvantaged and despised. (Matthew 25:35-40) He commands us not to pass judgment on others nor to condemn them but to forgive them. (Luke 6:37) These may not always be easy but they are not oppressive.

They are in fact liberating. They liberate us from our suffocating solitary existence and give us useful roles in a community where we can express and receive love. They give us a sense of purpose and a variety of ways to use our talents and gifts. They expose us to people and situations we might not otherwise encounter. They challenge us to grow and enlarge our understanding of and our empathy for others. They help us become more Christlike, which is to say, more like the persons we were meant to be.

And 1 John makes this surprising assertion: “And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.” Jesus said, “In the world you have trouble and suffering, but take courage—I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33) But Jesus does not conquer by spilling the blood of others and forcing them to be part of his kingdom, as worldly conquerors do. He conquers the world by shedding his own blood and inviting people to willingly become citizens of his kingdom.

Jesus started this process by what he did on the cross. Through his death and resurrection, he liberated us from the penalty of sin, the evil we commit. Through his Spirit living and working in us, he is slowly liberating us from the power of sin in our lives. When he comes again to consummate his kingdom, he will liberate us from the very presence of sin. By being reborn through Christ, we can be part of his conquering the world and its snares and temptations.

But we must be reborn through him to be able to keep his commandments. We cannot do them on our own power. Which is why he gives us his Spirit to help and to empower us. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit within us are we able to follow his commandments to love God with all we have and all we are and to love each other as Jesus loves us.

Of course the most obvious example of showing your love for someone by obeying them is foremost on our minds today. It is Mother's Day and the way we show our mothers that we love them is to listen to them and do what they say. Like God, your mother has your best interests at heart. She wants the best for you. She wants you to be the best person you can be. Which is why she tells you to eat your vegetables and to be polite and to drive the speed limit and to watch your language and to call her once in a while! Many of us have lost our mothers but we can still hear them giving us advice if we just stop and listen.

But the point is that they tell you these things because they love you. And God gives us his commandments for the same reason.

And out of love for you, so that you can get out of here early and make it to the Mother's Day brunch of your choice, I'm going to wrap this sermon up early and summarize it in a way you'll remember:

God loves you; love him back. God loves others; love them too.

Lost Connections

The scriptures referred to are John 15:1-8 and 1 John 4:7-21.

If Jesus had been born today, I believe today's gospel would be about cellphones. Let me explain.

In the community of the chronically ill, to whose ranks Covid-19 is adding people daily, you will eventually hear of the “spoon theory.” It's not really a theory but a makeshift explanation of our problems with energy. Apparently a chronically ill woman met a friend for lunch at a nice restaurant and the friend complained that they rarely did that anymore. The other woman, casting about for an explanation, gathered all the spoons from the table and said that her energy each day was like so many spoons, which she had to give up or spend on any activity she wished to do. Taking a shower might cost her a spoon or two, getting dressed another, going shopping might cost a great many. She had to be frugal and budget the spoons given her every day and that meant choosing not to do some things in order to have enough spoons or energy to do other things.

That was a good improvisation but, to my mind, it needs to be improved upon. I have no idea how many spoons or how much energy I have at the beginning of the day. I might wake to find I have a normal amount of energy, or little or none. And that can change at any time. I can start out feeling normal and suddenly feel my energy draining rapidly by mid-morning, or mid-afternoon or at night. I might not get any energy back the rest of the day. Or I might just as suddenly find my energy restored after 40 minutes or as much as 3 hours later. What's really frustrating is at the end of a bad day suddenly feeling my energy return—at bedtime! So you have to add to the spoon analogy some kind of waiter who randomly takes your spoons or alternately gives you more, perhaps as some kind of prank.

I was discussing this online with others in the ME/CFS community when someone gave us a much better analogy. We are like faulty cellphones. You know how you plug your phone in at bedtime so it will charge overnight? We have all had the experience of picking it up in the morning only to find that it wasn't fully charged or that it didn't charge at all. Or you do have a full charge in the morning but when you check it just an hour or two later you are mysteriously down to 15%! And the longer you have your phone, the longer it seems to take to charge it and the shorter the time it holds the charge. At some point it may not charge at all. So you have to get a new battery, or, if you have an iPhone, a whole new phone! Unfortunately you can't do that with a body that just won't charge or hold a charge.

If you are lucky you will find that the problem is in the charger cord. You check to see if it is firmly connected to your phone AND to the plug AND to the outlet. Or you change the cord out for a new one and all is well. But you may have discovered that those cheap cords you can pick up in the drug store or the convenience store have a very limited lifespan. Or the part that plugs into your phone gets bent easily and suddenly it won't stay in. And so in just a few months you have to get another cord.

In the first century, of course, they did not have electronics, so Jesus used the grapevine as his metaphor. But the point is the same: you need a good connection.

Many if not most of the problems we Christians have are due to not being properly connected to Jesus. And I think, as Jesus used the grapevine as his metaphor, we, who may not know much about viticulture, can get some insights from thinking about it in terms of the devices we use every single day.

If you think about it, we need 3 different kinds of connection: one to get power, one to connect to the internet and one to get the right content. So let's look at each.

Sometimes the problem is that we just aren't connected to the power source. You can probably see where I'm going with this. The analogy is obvious and so is the solution. If we don't feel any connection to God, we need to check if we are communicating with him in prayer and by reading his Word. Are we worshiping and sharing the body and blood of Christ with the body of Christ, his church? And are we doing these things regularly?

Sometimes the problem is not that our device isn't physically connected and charged, it's that it can't connect to the internet. You don't have enough bars or you don't have the password or the router is down. And if your device is a tablet or a Kindle, it is almost useless. Now you may have some downloaded content you can use offline, like a book. But you can't get Wikipedia or the news or the weather.

If you aren't connected to God, what you need to know about him and from him is cut off or limited. Some people walk around with content about God and Jesus and spiritual matters they got when they were in Sunday school. And then there's the question of what was transmitted to them. One of my Sunday School teachers probably attended Sunday School himself in the early 1900s. If he didn't keep up with the latest in Biblical scholarship and theological reflection, what he passed on was probably influenced by what he was taught a half century before he taught me.

In the same way people who aren't actively connected to God today haven't gotten any updates on their childhood conceptions of him. They have no real time connection to the person they are supposedly following. That's like your GPS being out and so you find an old Rand McNally road map in the glove box to guide you but it's copyrighted 1978! Some of those streets have been altered or renamed or cut off by a highway built in the intervening 40-odd years. On the other hand, Jesus, we might say, is the Waze, the truth and the life!

Seriously, though, there are a lot of outdated ideas about God out there. It's like when you boot up your computer in the morning and go to a familiar website. You might notice that it's not actually interactive at first. The stories are a day or more old. What you're really looking at is a screenshot of the last time you visited the site. You need to refresh it. And we need to refresh our ideas about God occasionally.

Some people are stuck with ideas of God that date back to Late Bronze or Early Iron Age theocratic Israel. So they are obsessed with things like ritual and purity and certain kinds of people being acceptable and others being excluded. They also believe a lot of interpretations of passages in the Bible that have been overturned by recent scholarship. But chiefly they lack the most fundamental understanding of the nature of God, found in our passage from 1 John: “God is love.” And they might actually disagree with 1 John that “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear...” How are we going to keep people moral if we don't teach them to fear God and hell?

They obviously haven't upgraded to Covenant 2.0, which would give them a clearer picture of God, focused through the lens of Jesus' teachings and his life, death and resurrection. And that leads us to a problem we see even when we are connected to the internet: the quality of the content. The internet gives us access to virtually all the knowledge of the world, yet some people gravitate to and get mired in the disinformation that is also out there. They are presented with angry and distorted takes on people and sinister motives that are supposedly behind certain groups and movements.

And the same thing happens with the Bible. People bring their own prejudices, fears and desires to the Bible and it often acts as a Rorschach test for them. Angry people see only an angry God. Fearful people see only a God to fear. Overly scrupulous people see a nitpicking God. People obsessed with purity see a God primarily interested in that. The Westboro Baptist Church elevated a person's reaction to homosexuality to the most important issue in Christianity. I often wondered how they dealt with things like the commands to love others including those we perceive as enemies. Then I heard an interview with a member who was expelled for basically asking about such things. The answer she gave is that they don't deal with it. They ignore such things or explain them away. A lot of people don't go to the Bible to hear God's position on things; they go to hear their positions coming out of God's mouth, even if they have to do a lot of editing to make that happen.

Like I said, the lens through which we view scripture must be Jesus. As John chapter 3 so famously says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever trusts in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world should be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17) Everything Jesus does is done out of divine love and to rescue, not condemn, the world. How do people miss that? It's held up at every single football game!

God is love; Jesus is the God who is love incarnate. If we want spiritual power, if we want to learn more about who God really is, if we want to do what he wants, not what we want him to want, we must be connected to Jesus. We need to connect to him through prayer, through his Word, through the sacraments he gave us, and through worship with others who are connected to him. We need to refresh our link to him and update our understanding. God's people aren't a bunch of nomadic tribes fighting to conquer a land anymore. We don't live under a mere human who rules as king by divine right. There is not one designated temple where we must go and make sacrifices. We don't belong to a race that must be kept pure from contact with other races.

“...the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world,” 1 John tells us. The focus of the Bible does at first narrow from all the people in the world to Abraham, and then to his grandson Jacob and his twelves sons, and then of the twelve to the tribe that comes from Judah and then to the descendants of David and finally to Jesus. But with Jesus the focus shirts to his twelve disciples and then to all the Jews, and to the Samaritans and to the Gentiles and then to every tribe and nation and tongue in the whole world. Because real love enlarges us and the circle of those we love. God loves everyone and wants everyone to know it. And we are to be the connection to and channel of that love.

“If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” That is a huge promise. But it doesn't mean that God is like Aladdin's genie. If we are connected to the God who is love and his words of love dwell in us, we will only ask for what will help us spread his love and connect more people to Jesus. And of course he will give us whatever we need to accomplish that.

And I hope that if you sense that you have lost your connection to Jesus, you react as you would if you find your phone is almost out of power or if you realize you have lost your internet connection or that you lost the link to the article you were reading online, and you immediately seek to restore the connection. The good news is you don't have to rely on some wires or an electric company or an internet provider. You can be in touch with God in a second, any time at all, wherever you are, whatever the rest of the world is doing or not doing. And with him you never have to worry about using up your data. We're on an unlimited grace plan.