Go Team!

In America a lot of our heroes are lone wolves. They embody our idolization of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. We love the hero who can do everything and needs no one else. Perhaps that's the reason that even the success of two British heroes, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, was dependent on their enthusiastic reception over here in America. An American publisher asked Arthur Conan Doyle for what turned out to be the second ever Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four. And it was President Kennedy's recommendation of the James Bond novels that kicked off 007's international success. These heroes personify what someone has called “competence porn”: the fantasy that the hero is super-competent at handing anything that is thrown at him. Holmes is not only super-smart, able to deduce what really happened from the smallest of clues and able to break the toughest of codes, but, when it is called for, he is good at boxing, sword fighting and martial arts. Bond is not only an assassin but, at least in the films, able to pilot any vehicle, from planes to submersible cars to spacecraft. He is also irresistible to women, an expert on wines and gourmet foods, and a competent gambler. But the ultimate American superhero is Superman, who has super-strength, super-speed, super-hearing, heat-vision, and can fly. Quite frankly, I don't know why he needs the Justice League of America. After Superman comes Batman, who, while he lacks superpowers, is an expert at all forms of fighting, and is super-smart, being touted as the “world's greatest detective” in his comics. It helps that he is rich and can afford every possible gadget he will ever need.

In reality no one person can do it all. Truly intelligent people know their limitations. They know their strengths and their weaknesses. And the wise know that they need others to achieve just about anything significant. The most creative person in the world still needs others to edit, publish, produce, play, display, distribute and disseminate what they write, script, paint, sculpt, or record. Scientists need a team to do research; they need grants to fund the research; they need a company or university to house their research; they need scientific journals to publish their findings. Cooks and bakers depend on farmers, food companies, and grocery stores for their ingredients, as well as those who make the stoves, appliances and utensils they use. Builders need a construction crew with skills in working with wood, steel and concrete, as well as plumbers and electricians. You only have to sit through a movie's credits to see the hundreds of people required to create the blockbuster you just enjoyed. My sermons depend on the many Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, concordances, and other books which I consult that scholars have written, as well as the internet, the people who made my computer, and the people who keep the electricity on.

We all are dependent on others. Even the lone survivalist who is building a bunker in the woods to sit out the collapse of civilization is dependent upon others for the building materials, tools, nonperishable foods, fuel, how-to books and weapons he needs. And it seems that this realization has permeated even our pantheon of heroes. The Avengers need the individual skills each hero brings to the fight. Aside from Robin, Batman relies on his butler Alfred, an honest cop named Gordon, and the R and D guy at Wayne Enterprises who makes those wonderful toys for him. Bond needs Q as well as the agents he leads when he invades the villain's well-guarded lair. Buffy the Vampire Slayer realizes that she has lived longer than slayers in the past due to her friends who help her research and fight the demons. The various incarnations of Star Trek have always focused on the crews of the ships. The Incredibles presented a family of superheroes as a team. One of the joys of the current series of Doctor Who is the fact that the Timelord's companions aren't just there to look pretty, ask him to explain what's going on and get captured by the monsters. The Doctor and his companions act as a team. In fact, a theme I enjoy is that the Doctor inspires ordinary people to emulate him in acting heroically and joining him in doing the right thing.

Don't you wish you had a team? Don't you wish you had friends with various powers who could back you up and help you in difficult situations? You do. All Christians do. And our team is called the Trinity.

I was struck by this analogy when reading an online interview where Anglican theologian J.I. Packer talked of the Trinity as a divine team. Like all analogies about God, it breaks down if you stretch it too far. But at its core are 2 key concepts about the Trinity: unity and individuality.

The difficulty of understanding the Trinity is trying to reconcile the idea of the oneness of God with the idea of 3 divine persons within God. Some people think it is a needless theological innovation. But it came about because of the way the church experiences God. The church started as a group of Jews. They were born into a covenant with the Creator of the world. The covenant stipulated, among other things, that there is one God and that they weren't to worship any other. Then they encountered Jesus. It was obvious that he was a prophet and that the Spirit of God was on him. Then they realized that he was the Messiah sent by God to set the world right. But Jesus wasn't what they expected. He wasn't a holy warrior but a healer and teacher. And when he was crucified, as far as they were concerned, it was over for him.

Then God raised him from the dead. They remembered that Jesus said, “Tear down this temple and in three days I will raise it up again.” (John 2:19) The temple, at least before the exile when the Holy of Holies contained the ark of the covenant, was the place where God dwelt with his people. The temple was, as N.T. Wright puts it, the place where heaven and earth overlap. The disciples saw how Jesus lived—sinless—and what he did—died to pay for the sins of the whole world—and realized that only God, who is holy and without sin, could do those things. Jesus was the new temple, where God dwells. (John 14:11) Jesus is the new point at which the realm of God and the world of man overlap. (John 1:1, 14) Jesus the man was somehow God. (John 10:30) And yet he said that there was one God. (Mark 12:29)

Then came Pentecost. The church was immersed in the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised God would send as another advocate. The then still Jewish church was familiar with the Holy Spirit from the Hebrew Bible, where the Spirit is described as the power of God. The Spirit is involved in creation, in anointing the leaders of God's people and in inspiring the prophets. So now the church experienced God in another way—inside their minds and hearts and lives.

So they knew God as the Creator who is outside of them and this world. Yet God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. (2 Corinthians 5:19) And God was in them, acting in and through the body of believers, applying the love and power of God to their lives and to their encounters with the world. (John 14:17; Romans 5:5) So the Father is God. Jesus is God. The Spirit is God. But there is only one God. They may not have known exactly how this worked but they knew it to be true.

Many a preacher on this, Trinity Sunday, has tried to explain the triune nature of God by using shamrocks or cubes or the tripartite nature of humanity or the 3 states of water. All of these might help a little but none can really speak comprehensively about the deep nature of God. Even the orthodox formula of the Trinity, which we recite in the Nicene Creed and find in full in the Athanasian Creed, is not really an explanation of how this is possible but is only a way of preserving the paradox of Three in One and One in Three.

All language about God is at least somewhat metaphorical. So here is another way to look at it. And as C. S. Lewis would say, if this picture doesn't help you, then leave it alone.

One advantage to seeing God as a team is that it preserves the unity of God as well as the individuality of the divine persons. Each member of a good team has a distinct role or function and yet a good team acts as one. They have one goal, one will. But unity doesn't mean uniformity. In fact, it is the various strengths of the different members coming together that gives the team its power. A big problem I have with the Mission:Impossible movies is that they are ultimately all about Tom Cruise's character Ethan Hunt. The TV series was about the team, all working on the same plan, coming from different directions and using their different abilities and functions.

In team Trinity we have the Father. He is the source of creation. He is the idea guy, you might say, the Jim Phelps or Professor X or Captain Picard or the coach of the team. He looks at the Big Picture. He conceives the strategy. He sets the tone of the team. He cares for the team; it is his family.

Next in team Trinity there is the Son, Jesus Christ. He's the one who executes the plan, who embodies the idea. In the Mission:Impossible TV series he is Roland Hand, the member of the team who goes undercover and becomes an actor in the drama which the idea guy has conceived. He's the quarterback, the James Bond who is sent out on a mission by M, the Mr. Spock who knowingly sacrifices himself to save the crew.

The toughest member of team Trinity to pin down is the Holy Spirit. He's the resource person. He's like Scotty in the original Star Trek, giving the captain more power or raising the shields when necessary. Or he's like Uhura, passing on vital communications. Or Troy in the Star Trek: The Next Generation, the empathic counselor who understands and articulates our deepest emotions. Or he's like Barney on the original IMF team or Briana on the Leverage team, always toiling behind the scenes to make sure that the technical stuff will work when the team needs them. Or maybe he's like Willy. Willy was the big guy on the TV IMF team, who helped Barney or drove the truck or carried a message to Jim or acted as a repairman or did any other unglamorous job that was necessary to the plan. The spotlight never focused on Willy, this jack-of-all-trades, but he was vital. He made sure that whatever had to be done got done.

This is the team that helps you live the Christian life. God the Father has mapped out the plan and knows all the possible deviations from it and has contingencies for them all. He has given us the principles by which we live and he is waiting for us when we finish our part of the mission and make it home safely.

God the Son has the hardest part of the Father's plan. He can walk us through the plan and we can trust him and confide in him because he is also one of us; he's been where we've been as well as where we are going and he knows what we face. He has been to hell and back and so he can help us face the direst of days.

God the Spirit works with us and in us and for us so that we follow the plan. He relays messages from the Father and the Son. He translates our deepest feelings to them. He gives us power and encouragement and support and counsel and whatever we need to help us follow the plan.

So we don't have to do this on our own. God said he would never leave us or forsake us. Jesus asked his Father to send his Spirit to help us. For God decided out of love to let us join his team on earth to accomplish the final part of his plan. And our part is to be ambassadors of God spreading his good news, agents of God demonstrating his love and forgiveness and power to transform lives. Because the plan is for God to reunite with his erring creatures, to remake his fallen creation and renew it. We are to recruit volunteers for his team and to support each other as we discover and do our part.

This is our task and we have all the resources of heaven at hand. We have access to the mind who dreamt up the universe and even ourselves and who, when we screwed it up with our arrogance, put in place the plan to set it all right. We have access to the one person who understands things from both our standpoint and God's and who also knows pain and joy and life and death firsthand. And we have access to the power that runs the universe and can remake us in the image of the one who created us and redeemed us and loves us. In every situation, through every peril, in sorrow and triumph, we have ahead of us as our goal, above us as our protection, beside us as our companion and within us as our compass, the divine team of the Father, the Son and the Spirit to lead us, equip us, encourage and help us. Glory be to our wonderful, multifaceted and quite singular God!

First preached on June 6, 2005. It has been updated and revised.

Happy Birthday

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

When you're a kid, your birthday is, after Christmas, the most anticipated day of the year. The closer it gets the more giddy you are. All you can think of are gifts and cake and a party with all your friends. After a certain age, your birthday is much less of a celebration and more of a nod to the passage of time. Maybe even a shrug. Your birthday only becomes a big deal again if you live to be very, very old. At the nursing home where I used to work, we had at one time 3 people who were 100 or more years old. You can bet they got big parties!

The Pentecost recounted in our passage from Acts took place somewhere between 27 and 33 AD. So Christianity is just a bit shy of 2000 years old. Pentecost is considered the birthday of the church because that's when it took its first breath, so to speak, apart from Jesus' physical presence. And before the invention of the stethoscope, breath was considered the vital sign that separated life from death. On Pentecost, the church came alive.

In both Greek and Hebrew, one word was used for breath, wind and spirit. The movement of air is a powerful but invisible force. Wind can be felt and its effects can be seen but wind itself cannot be seen. Neither can breath, except on very cold days and even then you don't see it for more than a second or two. It's easy to understand how breath came to be used as an analogy for spirit, the unseen but powerful force that gives us life.

Even today, when a baby is born, doctors and nurses are intent on clearing a newborn's airway and hearing that first cry. We rate the baby on a scale in which 3 of the 5 signs—the color of its extremities, its response to stimuli and the quality of its crying—are related to the adequacy of its respirations. A baby who doesn't get enough oxygen during the birth process is at risk for cerebral palsy. You may count your baby's fingers and toes when he or she is born; we nurses are looking to see if they are blue or not.

So it is natural to associate the coming of the Holy Spirit, appearing as a wind that shakes the building the apostles met in, with birth. Birth is a starting point and Pentecost is a good place to say the church first began to function as the body of Christ.

But before the descent of the Spirit on the church Pentecost was a major Jewish holiday. Called Shavuot, it was the 50^th day since Passover. It was the day when the first fruits of the spring crops were offered to God along with prayers for the rest of the harvest. It was also the time when Jews commemorated God giving the 10 commandments to Moses at Mount Sinai. (Exodus 20:1-17) That's why so many Jews from all over the known world were gathered in Jerusalem.

The parallels are easy to make. At Pentecost the first fruits of the church are brought in and offered to God. In that day followers of Jesus went from about 120 to 3000. (Acts 1:14; 2:41) A very promising start on the harvest to come.

God gave his people the law on a Pentecost 1200 to 1400 years before Christ. This Pentecost he sends his Holy Spirit, making a different way of living a godly life possible. So the church being born on this auspicious day is akin to a person being born on his grandfather's birthday.

But there is another Biblical event that relates to this Pentecost. In Genesis chapter 11, we read the story of the tower of Babel. Humanity speaks one language, something we also find in ancient Sumerian writings. But they are using this common language to coordinate efforts to build a tower to the heavens. For this arrogance, God confuses the language. And divided by a variety of languages, people scatter to the ends of the earth.

On Pentecost, Jews from all over the known world come together to go to the temple in Jerusalem. They speak a variety of languages. And then God pours out his Spirit on the apostles and they speak in different tongues. Out of the cacophony, people manage to pick out the language they know. They are drawn together by this spectacle. And then Peter preaches the gospel to them.

He probably spoke in Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman empire ever since Alexander the Great. Luke is obviously giving us a summary of a much longer speech. What is interesting is that Peter goes from Joel's prophecy to Jesus as the center of the phenomena the people are witnessing on that Pentecost. And Peter emphasizes Jesus' resurrection. He mentions his death and says it's part of God's plan but he doesn't explain why. Instead he focuses on Jesus rising again. Why? Partly because it is so fresh. Jesus' resurrection was only a month and a half ago. But mostly because it validated who Jesus is: the Messiah, God's anointed King.

What made this Pentecost so effective wasn't the sound of the wind or the tongues of flame or the speaking in tongues. God wasn't interested in giving everyone a magical experience. He was and is interested in redeeming people. He is interested in bringing them into the body of Christ, of uniting them to his son, who is the divine love incarnate, and making them like him. So the focus of the church has to be Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us and is doing in us and how we should respond. The farther we get from that, the more likely we are to go astray.

When the Jews of the diaspora heard the gospel proclaimed on that Pentecost, thousands claimed Jesus as Savior and Lord. They repented and were baptized. And Luke tells us, “They were devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” (Acts 2:42) That's what we do today. We devote ourselves to the teachings of the apostles, found in scripture and summarized in the creeds. We devote ourselves to prayers, new, old and ancient. The first part of our worship service is very much like the synagogue service the apostles were familiar with. We pray, we read the scriptures and someone comments on the passages read.

They also broke bread together. That is probably a reference to the earliest form of what became Communion or the Eucharist. The second part of our worship service is all about our sharing the bread and wine which become for us the body and blood of Jesus, incorporating us into one body, his.

And that brings us to fellowship. The word in Greek, koinonia, means something more than friendship. It's more like partnership. We are partners in Christ, working together to become the kingdom of God.

It all began on Pentecost. And that's why we're celebrating it as a birthday. That's why some churches put up decorations. There's even a kind of correlation between the trappings of modern birthdays and Pentecost.

Birthday parties have candles. The candles in churches symbolize the tongues of flame that came to rest on each of the apostles, the purifying and illuminating energy of the Spirit. Plus God descended to Sinai in fire and spoke to Moses out of fire. The liturgical color of Pentecost is red because of the fire.

The breath used to blow up balloons at parties can represent the Spirit filling us.

At birthday parties we sing traditional songs for the birthday boy or girl. Here too we sing about Christ and his church.

Somebody usually gets up and makes a little speech about the significance of the birthday. That's what I am doing now.

And there is food and drink. Soon we will celebrate the Eucharist, a foretaste of the wedding banquet of the Lamb.

But where are the gifts? The initial gift is the Spirit of God himself. Through him, God not only comes to us, he enters into us. God is no longer someone out there but lives in our hearts and minds and lives.

And the Spirit in turn gives us gifts: wisdom, healing, grace, faith, hope, love and various abilities. Unlike some of the gifts we receive for birthdays, these aren't the kind that you get tired of or which are cool to look at but useless. As it says in 1^st Peter, “Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve another as good stewards of the varied grace of God.” (1 Peter 4:10)

Finally, there is one thing about birthdays that we are especially desirous of when we are young: we want to be older. No child really wants to stay a little kid forever like Peter Pan. We want to grow up and become like our father or mother. We want to be an adult like our older brother. We want to become a man or a woman. Each year is another milestone on the journey of our life. Somewhere along the line we can lose that desire. There's nothing sadder than an adult who refuses to grow up and continues to act like a child. Or an older person trying to hold onto or recapture his or her youth.

We confuse the youth we desire with immaturity and with outward appearances. But what keeps you young inside is not self-indulgence or recklessness or sex or looks but the ability to trust and a sense of wonder. When you lose those, you truly age in the negative sense of that word.

God gives us eternal life. On that scale, we are all still quite young. And so we should still desire to grow, to mature, to see what the next year brings. The church is still young, still making mistakes, still wanting to be popular rather than righteous, wanting to be cool rather than wise. Let our birthday wish, our prayer, be that the church appreciates what it already has and that it wants to grow up to be like its heavenly Father.

First preached on May 23, 2010. It has been updated and revised.

Relying On Jesus

The scriptures referred to are Acts 16:16-34.

Ever ask yourself, “How did we live without cell phones?” Once when I was between jobs, my son told me of an opportunity and I sent an application by email to a coworker of his. Then I went with my wife to her 911 conference, which was held at Disney World. While I was in the park, I got a call from my son who said the person did not yet get my application. Smart phones were new and I had just learned how to check my email on my phone. I saw that I made a slight error in the email address, corrected it and it got to the right person. And it reminded me that when telling computers what to do, you must be exact.

In everyday conversation, however, exact wording is not as important as getting the gist of what is being said. Some people have trouble because they take everything literally. “You said you'd be done in a second and it's been a minute and a half!” For most of us, when someone asks for a second, we don't usually look at our watch and fume if they take more than exactly one second. We know it simply means a very short time.

Exact wording can be important at other times. Mystery writers realize that. In Harry Kemelman's short story The Nine Mile Walk, an English professor, analyzing a sentence a colleague has overheard, uncovers a crime. Similarly in Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation, a surveillance expert also discovers a murder by closely listening to a sentence and realizing the inflection of certain words gives it another meaning.

When it comes to the Bible, usually getting the gist of what it says is sufficient. Otherwise, you could not translate it at all. Some Muslims feel that way about the Quran: unless you read it in the original Arabic, you haven't really read it. But Jesus said the gospel must be preached to all the world and that means in every language. (Matthew 24:14) The Bible has been translated into more than 3000 languages and there are Christians all over the world. (Revelation 7:9) Last week we talked of how you can't capture every nuance of one language in another. But the God who is love is not going to act like some bureaucrat and exclude people who trust and love him because they didn't get everything literally correct. What good is having Jesus and the Spirit as our advocates if our salvation can be undone by a technicality.

Still we should pay attention to what scripture actually says and what it doesn't say. Nowhere does it say that “God helps those who help themselves” That's Ben Franklin. Nor does it say that money is the root of all evil. It does say that “Money is a root of all kinds of evils,” and most modern translations render the Greek properly. (1 Timothy 6:10) Fortunately, there are lots of books and apps that will help you understand passages of the Bible that you may have trouble with. Remember that the word “disciple” means “student.” We are to be students of Jesus, studying his teachings and putting them into practice.

The reason I'm saying this is that there is an interesting word choice in our passage from Acts and I think in this case it is significant.

Paul and Silas have run afoul of the Philippian authorities. They were beaten with rods and thrown into prison. Now it's midnight and they are singing hymns when an earthquake strikes. It causes the crossbars on the doors to fall out of their holders and the prisoners' stocks to come apart. The jailer sees what has happened and pulls out his sword, not to chase fleeing prisoners, but to fall upon it and kill himself. Evidently, his bosses will brook no excuses for losing an inmate, not even acts of God. Paul realizes what the man is about to do. (I'm not sure how he knew this in the dark; perhaps he heard the jailer unsheathe his sword. Or he saw the jailer outside in the moonlight.) Paul shouts loudly for the man to stop. The jailer calls for lights, finds Paul, Silas and the other prisoners together and takes them outside. Then he asks Paul and Silas “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they reply, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.”

Did something sound a bit strange in what Paul and Silas said? They don't tell the man to believe in Jesus but to believe on him. I checked the Greek and sure enough, epi, the Greek preposition for “on,” is used. It's odd because the phrase “believe on Jesus” is rarely used, outside of John. And a lot of translations turn the “on” into “in” here. But I wonder if there isn't a significance in the choice of this preposition. If you are on something, it is holding you up. If you build on something, it becomes your foundation.

The jailer has literally had his livelihood taken out from under him. From what we know of the practices of that time, it was likely that he was a retired soldier. Roman soldiers weren't allowed to marry until they retired. So the children in his household may have been young. He was devastated, just like anyone who survived an earthquake. So when he asks how can he be saved, he probably wasn't thinking about heaven at that moment but saying, as scholar N.T. Wright translates it, “Gentlemen, will you please tell me how can I get out of this mess?”

That's why I think Paul used the preposition epi or “on.” The Greek word for “believe,” pisteuo, means more than just “to think something is true.” It can mean “to rely.” I think what the apostle was telling this poor man who is facing personal and financial disaster, “Rely on the Lord Jesus and you and your family will come through it all.”

There are a lot of people who call themselves Christians in the sense that, yeah, they believe that Jesus came to die for us, to save us, and to tell us that God loves us. But they don't rely on him, at least not in their everyday life. They rely on themselves—their intelligence, their bodily strength and stamina, their good looks, their ability to persuade or manipulate people, their wealth and power, their position, their influential friends and relatives. They rely on their possessions and obsessions to get them through daily life. Jesus is just insurance for when those things fail. He's Plan B. He's there for a rainy day. He's not something they need for ordinary days.

That's the way most people think of doctors. They never go to them when they feel okay, when everything seems to be working just fine. They don't even go to the doctor when they feel bad. They only go when they feel terrible, when they feel that they can't go on with their lives. When they have chest pains and it feels like an elephant is sitting on their chest, they finally call the doctor. And we often treat Jesus, the Great Physician, the same way. We turn to him only when we are in a crisis and need him.

But isn't that what a doctor is for—to treat you when you're sick? Yes, but he can also prevent you from getting sick in the first place. Shouldn't you go to him for that? Shouldn't you let him examine you and tell you if you are doing something unhealthy? Shouldn't you listen to him when he tells you what you should be doing instead? And shouldn't you follow his orders for living a healthy life?

That's what relying on Jesus is like. It's not just going to him when everything is falling apart. It's going to him to help keep it together. It's letting him examine every part of your life, even the embarrassing parts. It's letting him tell you what's wrong. It's listening when he tells you what you ought to do. And then doing it.

In medicine, the current focus on wellness rather than just illness is relatively new. It was not something that was emphasized that much when I entered nursing more than 40 years ago. But in Christianity, it was there all along. Being a Christian was always considered a way of life, a discipline. We were always supposed to be disciples, students and practitioners of this way of life.

Until, that is, modern evangelists shifted the focus to the moment of salvation. Now it is vital to make a decision whether to accept Jesus as Savior or not. For much of history, people growing up in a Christian Western society never consciously made the choice or understood the importance of doing so. But to make that decision and then go your own way is like designating someone to be your doctor on a form and then never actually going to him or following his orders. Some Christians so emphasize the decision to choose Jesus that they neglect the follow up. There was a man in my church who, at every chance he got, talked about the day he was born again. But he never talked about how that affected the rest of his days. It was almost like he was spiritually stillborn.

We have all seen survivors of heart attacks who owe their lives to their doctors and yet go back to the same lifestyle that caused their heart disease. Christians do that at times. We rest in the assurance that our salvation is based on the grace of God and not on our works. But that doesn't mean our works are unimportant. (Ephesians 2:8-10) As God says in Ezekiel 11:19-20, “I will give them one heart and I will put a new spirit in them; I will remove the hearts of stone from their bodies and give them tender hearts, so that they may follow my statutes and observe my regulations and carry them out. Then they will be my people and I will be their God.” Again it's like the relationship between a heart doctor and his patient. Only the cardiac surgeon could repair the damaged heart and give the patient a new life. But then the patient is supposed to follow this miracle up by changing his life and following the doctor's orders. If not, the doctor's life-saving feat won't do him much good. He'll become sick again. The goal is to become well, not to set up the next health crisis.

A life of faith is one of constantly relying on Christ. Day by day, we are to follow the Great Physician's orders so that we and our lives might become spiritually healthy, that is, more Christlike. Unfortunately it often takes a crisis to start the process. It took my father-in-law two heart attacks to convince him to change the way he lived his life. He changed how and what he ate, he exercised and he lived for 30 more years, into his 90s.

As for the jailer in our passage, it looks like he got off to a good start. After Paul explains who Jesus is and what he has done for us, the jailer starts acting like Jesus. He dresses the prisoners' wounds, takes them to his home and feeds them. And he and his family are baptized.

We aren't told what happened to the man after that. Was the prison rebuilt? Did the man continue to run it or did he go into something else? It seems likely that Paul introduced the man and his family to the small church that was organizing around the new convert Lydia, whom we read about last week. The man might have been one of the first to hear Paul's letter to the Philippians when it was read in that church. He might have come to see that earthquake as a blessing in disguise: the crisis that brought him to Christ.

Sometimes it takes a disaster, or a meltdown, or an arrest, or an intervention, or an illness to get a person's attention. Sometimes people have to find themselves face to face with their mortality—or their immorality. Sometimes you have to face the ugly truth about yourself before you seek help from Jesus. Sometimes we have to call the spiritual equivalent of 911. Sometimes we need Jesus as our Emergency Room doctor.

But if that's the only time you think about Jesus, if that's the only time you call on him, if that's the only time you seriously consider changing your life, if your prayers are more often “Yikes!” rather than “Thanks!” then you aren't really relying on him. Jesus doesn't want to be that friend you only call when you need to be bailed out. He wants to be the friend who keeps you out of trouble, the one who's there for you every minute of your day, sharing not only your sorrows but also your joys and your journey.

Who is Jesus in your life? Is he just the guy you go to when things go wrong? Or is he the one you follow every day, the one you think of and thank when things go right as well?

Don't wait for your next crisis. Make him part of your daily life. Start and end your day with him. Make him as indispensable as your cell phone and communicate with him as often as you do with others. The difference is you never have to worry about him being busy or out of range or dropping you. No matter how low you battery is or how weak your signal, he'll always get your message. And thanks to the Spirit you don't have to worry about always having the precise words you need to express yourself. (Romans 8:26-27)

And another thing: unlike your phone, he will never become obsolete. And there will be days, I promise you, when you won't know how you lived without him.

Translation

The scriptures referred to are John 14:23-29.

According to Google, the full Bible has been translated into about 756 languages. By itself, the New Testament has been translated into 1726 languages, while portions of the Bible have been translated into another 1274 languages. So you can find at least some of the Bible in at least 3756 languages, about 52% of the estimated 7159 languages in the world.

According to the American Bible Society, there are about 900 English translations and paraphrases of at least some of the Bible. More than 100 of these are translations of the entire Bible. Why are there so many?

In the beginning there were no whole Bibles in English. In the late 1300s, Oxford scholar John Wycliffe and his followers produced the first complete English version. It was based on the Vulgate, which was in turn a Latin translation by St. Jerome from the late 300s AD. In 1525, William Tyndale published the first New Testament translated from the original Greek into English. He followed this by his translation of the Pentateuch, the 5 books of Moses. Miles Coverdale finished translating the Old Testament. He incorporated Tyndale's translations, and in 1535 he published the first complete Modern English Bible that came from the original Greek and Hebrew. In 1539, Coverdale's Bible became the first authorized version in English. It was called the Great Bible.

This was followed by the Geneva Bible in 1560, the Bishop's Bible in 1568, and the King James version in 1611. Since then there have been many English translations, some for theological or denominational reasons and some because we now have many more ancient manuscripts of the Bible, like the Dead Sea scrolls in Hebrew and more than 5800 Greek manuscripts. In comparison, the New Testament of the King James Bible is based on the Textus Receptus produced by Erasmus using just 8 Greek manuscripts.

But another reason there are so many translations is that you cannot capture all of the meaning of one language in another. Some words and phrases defy simple word-for-word translation. Like the word I wish to look at today: parakletos. But with my Greek New Testament, lectionaries, study Bibles, Bible dictionaries, commentaries, apps and William Barclay's book New Testament Words, I have enough information to help us wrestle with this word which defies easy translation into English.

In today's gospel, Jesus is addressing his disciples just hours before his arrest. And he is promising them that, despite his going away, he will not abandon them but send them the Holy Spirit. He describes the Spirit as the Parakletos, which our translation renders as “Advocate.” But that's inadequate. It's not that the translation is wrong; it's that the word in Greek means so much more. And you may have noticed this if you have read a different translation. The King James version translates it as “Comforter.” The ESV uses the word “Helper.” The CSB renders it “Counselor.” All of the other modern English translations choose one of these 4 words to translate parakletos. And that's because the word means all 4 things.

The word parakletos literally means “one who is called in.” Bible scholar William Barclay points out that it was used of an ally called in to give support, a counsellor called in to give advice, an advocate called in to plead a case, a person called in to undertake a public duty, or even of the gods called in to help. Barclay says, “Therefore at its widest a parakletos is a person who is called in to help in a situation with which a man by himself cannot cope.” So Jesus is saying that the Holy Spirit is sent to assist us with situations that we cannot deal with simply by ourselves.

The most common usage of the word back then was in a legal context. A parakletos could be the counsel for the defense or a friend and character witness. So he presented the case of the accused in the best possible light. That is where we get the translation “advocate.” It is in this sense that it is used in 1 John 2:1, where it says, “My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one.” Jesus was sent not to condemn the world but so that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:17) That is why Paul says that Christ is the one “who is at the right hand of God and who is interceding for us.” (Roman 8:34) In Hebrews 7:25, it says that Jesus “is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” Jesus came to be our Advocate and that is why just a few verses before our gospel passage Jesus, who knows he is about to go to the cross, describes the Spirit as “another Advocate to be with you forever...” (John 14:16)

So Paul tells us “...the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how we should pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings.And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes on behalf of the saints according to God's will.” (Romans 8:26-27) So we have Jesus in heaven interceding with God on our behalf and the Spirit in us interceding for us even when we cannot express ourselves in our prayers. In that way the Spirit is our Helper.

In our gospel passage, Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” How is that possible? The Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, in our lives. That is why Paul speaks of him as the Spirit of Christ. (Romans 8:9) And that is how the Spirit is our Comforter. Knowing that he is with and in us, advocating and interceding for us, gives us comfort.

Parakletos means counselor as well. A counselor gives you advice. That's why lawyers are called counselors. They give their clients advice on how to present and argue their case. A good counselor will teach you what you need to know and will remind you of the things you need to remember. In our passage Jesus says that the Spirit, whom he called in verse 16 “the Spirit of truth,” will “teach you everything, and remind you of all I have said to you.” Elsewhere Jesus says that when we are called upon to be witnesses “do not worry about how you should make your defense or what you should say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that moment what you must say.” (Luke 12:11-12) As for remembering what Jesus said, you first have to learn it, of course. Which is why it is important to study the Bible and especially the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus knew there would be false prophets who would pretend to be his followers. (Matthew 7:15-23; 24:4-5) These days we hear so many people putting words in our Lord's mouth that my daughter got me a t-shirt with a picture of Jesus and under it the words, “I never said that.”

There is one other meaning of the word parakletos according to Barclay. A form of the word, parakalein, meant a call to rally troops about to go into battle. So Barclay says a parakletos was an encourager, someone who puts courage into the person about to enter into a dangerous situation. Surely Jesus was thinking of this meaning as well, since he knew that his disciples were going to face opposition from religious and civil authorities, leading to imprisonment and even martyrdom for following him.

Jesus said that he would not leave us as orphans. (John 14:18) He said, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) God said, “I will never leave you and I will never abandon you.” (Hebrews 13:5) Those things are fulfilled through the Holy Spirit. The night he was arrested, Jesus, speaking of the Spirit, said to his disciples, “But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:17) Paul said, “...God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:5) One way to think of the Trinity is that the Father is God above us, Jesus is God beside us, and the Spirit is God in us. It is good to know that when we commit ourselves to Jesus, God puts in us his Spirit, to advocate for us, counsel us, help us, comfort us and encourage us. It is the Spirit who empowers us to disown ourselves, take up our crosses and follow Jesus, our Lord and Savior, wherever he leads us. And we know that when this life is over, we will be with him, in new bodies and in a new world. But because of his Spirit living in us, we will know Jesus as an old and trusted friend, someone who has been a part of our lives all along.

The Perfect Ending

The scriptures referred to are Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:31-35.

I was watching a YouTube video on bad endings that writers should avoid because it betrays the emotional investment that the reader or watcher had in the story. The YouTuber John Fox listed 8 bad endings. Among them were the rushed ending, such as we saw in the last season of The Game of Thrones. There's the story without an ending, such as we see whenever a TV series is cancelled and ends on a cliffhanger. There's the Deus Ex Machina ending brought about by an outside or previously undisclosed force, such as in Live and Let Die when James Bond's magnet watch turns into a buzzsaw that cuts through his ropes, a feature not mentioned beforehand by Q. There's the unearned happy ending, such as you see in most Hallmark movies when previous conflicts to the couple getting together are easily reconciled. And let's not forget the infamous “It was all a dream” trope, forever remembered as the notorious way the TV show Dallas undid its entire 9^th season. Fox's last category to avoid was the predictable ending. By this he means the ending you could see coming practically from the beginning of the story. Fox did not mean that every story should end with a twist that changes the tone or genre of the story. Instead, he cited Greek playwright Sophocles who said that the ending should be both surprising and yet appropriate. You should be able to look back over the story and say, “I did not see that coming but it totally makes sense that this is how the story should end.” A great example is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.

Our passage from Revelation is the ending of the saga of the Bible. God creates a new heaven and a new earth with a new Jerusalem in which God will dwell with his people. Death, mourning, crying and pain all cease to exist. It's a happy ending but is it a good ending? To determine that, let's look back at the story.

The Bible begins with God creating the heavens and the earth. He forms the earth and populates it with plants and animals and then creates human beings in his image to take care of the earth. He pronounces it all very good. (Genesis 1)

God is love, we are told in 1 John 4:8. And for genuine love to exist people must have free will so they can choose to love. But that means we can also choose not to love. And humans chose not to obey their loving God and instead use the gifts he's given them to bring sin and violence into the paradise God has created. (Genesis 6:5,11) The rest of the Bible is the story of how the God who is love works to bring human beings back to him. He chooses to work through various people who respond to him by trusting and having faith in him. He works through people like Noah, Abraham, his son Isaac, and of his 2 sons, Jacob, who is renamed Israel. And then out of Israel's twelve sons, he chooses Judah, and out of his descendants, he chooses David.

Along the way God leads his people through folks like Moses and the judges and kings descended from David. Through Moses, God's people are liberated from slavery, enter into a covenant with God and receive laws to govern themselves. (Exodus 20:1-17) They later become a kingdom, bordered by much larger empires. But they repeatedly disobey God and forget his law. Finally they are conquered, their temple is destroyed and they are taken into exile in Babylon. In exile, they realize that they have not been obeying God and turn back to his law. When they are liberated again God's law is reintroduced into Judea under Ezra, and though the Jews rebuild their temple to God, they are now people of the Book, the written Word of God.

God's Word consists of the Torah, or law of Moses, the writings, which include the Psalms and wisdom books, and the prophets, who speak for God and constantly call God's people to repent and turn back to him. The prophets speak of a new spiritual covenant to come. (Jeremiah 31:33-34; Ezekiel 11:19-20) They also predict the coming of the Messiah, the Anointed One who will save his people. (Isaiah 9:6-7; Daniel 7:13-14) In the New Testament, which literally means the New Covenant, it is revealed that Jesus, a descendant of David, is the Messiah or in Greek, Christ.

Jesus heals, preaches and teaches about the kingdom of God. (Matthew 9:35) But this is not a worldly kingdom. (John 18:36) It is not a political kingdom with borders. It is not an ethnic kingdom made of one kind of people. (Revelation 5:9; 7:9) It includes all who respond to Jesus' voice and come to him, regardless of their race, nation or language. (John 10:14-16) As he says in today's gospel, the hallmark of his kingdom is love, the love we see in Jesus' own life and ultimately in his dying for our sake.

The religious and political authorities do not understand Jesus' kingdom and have him executed on a cross, the most cruel method they had. He dies and is buried. But on the morning of the third day, he is raised to life. His disciples, his students, begin to realize that Jesus is more than just a man—he is God in the flesh, the Word of God incarnate, who shows his love by dying to save us from slavery to sin and by rising again to share his eternal life with those who respond to him with trust. (John 1:1-15; 10:30) He gives his disciples his Spirit and sends them out into the world to proclaim the gospel or good news of God's love, forgiveness and grace revealed in Jesus. (John 20:21-22; Matthew 28:18-20) And God's Spirit works through people to spread the good news and bring people into his kingdom. Like Jesus, his followers face hardship and opposition. They face temptation and those who pervert the gospel for personal gain. Yet the spread of the good news of the God of love revealed in Jesus Christ cannot be stopped.

Our passage from the Book of Revelation reveals how, despite all these trials and tribulations, God will resurrect the heavens and the earth as he did his son Jesus. He will make all things new and restore creation to being a paradise once more. He will populate it with his resurrected people who will no longer suffer death, pain or sorrow. He will personally wipe away all tears with his own nail-scarred hands. He will live with his people in the new Jerusalem, where heaven and earth meet.

That is the right ending to the story of the God of love and his people. It is certainly not rushed. Jesus' death and resurrection which set up the ending took place almost 2000 years ago.

It is not unearned. It was accomplished at great cost to Jesus, God's beloved son.

It is not predictable in the sense that how God would do this was not obvious at first and yet it is foreshadowed in the prophets, especially Isaiah 53, and so is appropriate and satisfying.

It is not accomplished by an outside or previously undisclosed force, because God has been at work with and in humans from the start.

It is not simply a dream, albeit a pleasant one, because the story of humanity has not come to an end. So it is also not a story that lacks an ending. As a character in the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel says, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, then it's not yet the end.”

The real question is whether we want this to be the ending of our personal story. Do we want to be part of God's people, who put their trust in the God who is love and who is revealed in Jesus? Do we want to let his Holy Spirit restore in us the image of God that we see in Jesus? Do we want to have Jesus, God incarnate, heal us and wipe away all our tears? Do we want him to make all that we have gone through meaningful because we were no longer struggling for our own selfish ends but carrying out his mission to bring love and forgiveness and grace to everyone we possibly can?

We will all die some day. We will all be as dead as the flies who lie on window sills or who were swatted with but a moment's thought. Will our lives be as insignificant as those of flies? Will we end up as merely another element of the soil people and animals walk on? Will all that we have experienced and learned be forgotten and lost?

Or will we trust in the God who promises life and joy eternal with him, wrapped in the love between the Father, Son and Spirit, the love which has existed before creation and which will restore creation and which lives in the very heart of creation? The choice is ours.

In God We Trust?

Our suggestion box sermon question reads, “Our money says, 'In God we trust.' As a nation, do we?” At first the answer would seem to be “Yes.” The United States is one of the most religious countries in both the northern hemisphere and the western hemisphere with 53% of Americans saying religion is very important to them. The average household owns 4 Bibles. Our Declaration of Independence invokes God. And in the 1950s, the phrase “In God we trust” was put on our coins. If you take what we say as evidence, then you would have to say that America puts its trust in God.

Of course, we have overwhelming evidence that people can say one thing and do the opposite. Politicians on both sides say that they have the nation's best interests at heart and then totally disregard the common good to pass legislation with an eye only to whether it will get them re-elected. Companies advertise how much they are doing for their customers while cutting corners that reduce the quality and safety of their products and services. Church leaders talk of the importance of Biblical and moral values and then violate them personally or support those who do.

Before we consider whether our nation really puts its trust in God, let's look at what the Bible says about the actions that should issue from having faith in God.

Jesus' brother, James, was keenly aware of the disparity between what Christians say and do. He wrote, “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.” (James 2:26) The Greek word for “spirit” can also mean “breath.” Breathing is one of the vital signs nurses and doctors check to see if someone is healthy or not. And its absence is a sign that someone is dead. James is not saying that we are saved by works and not by faith; he is saying that just like a healthy person breathes well, a Christian with a healthy faith does good works. In this he is in agreement with Paul who wrote, “For by grace you are saved through faith and this is not from yourself, it is the gift of God; it is not from works so that no one can boast. For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand so we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:8-10) We are not saved by good works; we are saved for them.

In his letter James says that at the heart of our faith should be such things as taking care of the fatherless and widows and keeping yourself free from the world's vices. (James 1:27) He goes on to say that a person who has faith in Jesus shows no preference for the rich over the poor. (James 2:1-9) The person who puts their trust in God is merciful. (James 2:13) Those who believe control their tongues and don't engage in gossip, boasting or lies. (James 3:3-10) They seek wisdom from above, love peace, are gentle, impartial and without hypocrisy. (James 3:17-18) They should be humble, not given to self-indulgence, be patient in suffering and help the sick. (James 4:10; 5:5, 10, 14)

How does our nation stack up against these virtues which should naturally flow from faith? Consider ancient Israel. There was a tithe collected to help the impoverished, including resident aliens. (Deuteronomy 14:28-29; 26:12) The edges of fields were not to be harvested so the poor could glean them for food. (Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 24:19-21) Every 49 years debts were forgiven and economic slaves were freed. (Leviticus 25:39-41) Helping the poor wasn't left to charity alone; it was part of the law!

The most disadvantaged, now as it was then, are women without husbands and children without fathers. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, our federal government has had programs to aid families with dependent children. We offer food stamps, educational help and housing benefits. But the qualifications change according to which party is in power. When I went to nursing school in the late 1970s/early 1980s, many of my classmates were single mothers who were only able to become LPNs because of a government program that not only paid for their schooling but also paid them to go to school as if it were a job. That enabled them to pay for daycare and buy food. When administrations changed, that program was discontinued, despite the fact that it was responsible for helping a lot of single mothers learn valuable skills, get jobs, get off welfare and decrease the shortage of nurses which has persisted to this day.

Since then, most of the changes in welfare, regardless of which party is in power, have been based on the assumption that the vast majority of people getting assistance are lazy rather than unfortunate. So we punish them with piles of paperwork, new hoops to jump through, and ultimately only give help to those below a poverty line that has not changed in decades. We are more willing to subsidize those who run their companies into the ground or those who ruin the world's economy than the poor—probably because the latter cannot afford lobbyists. Do we meet the Biblical standard for helping the poor? The answer is a heavily qualified “Yes”...so far.

Do we as Americans keep ourselves undefiled by the world's vices? Given that the porn industry in the US generates between 10 and 15 billion dollars a year, that there has been an expansion of gambling as a revenue stream for most state governments, that we see the horrific toll taken by the abuse of both legal and illegal drugs, and the fact that the majority of those who identify as Christians do not have discernibly different lifestyles than non-believers, I would have to say “No.”

Do we show a preference for the rich over the poor? Our media is flooded with news about celebrities including those who have received that status, not through talent, but through wealth and fame. We have celebrities both providing or taking joy rides to space rather than spending that money on those in need who are on earth. Our laws give the rich breaks that the poor don't get. Part of that is due to the fact that while only 9% of Americans are millionaires, more than half of those in Congress are millionaires. Those who are not millionaires going into Congress usually make good money as consultants and lobbyists after they leave it. And the combined wealth of members of the current White House cabinet and presidential appointees is $460 billion. Do we show a preference for the rich over the poor? That's a resounding “Yes.”

Are we merciful as a people? Remember that justice is getting what you deserve and mercy is getting less punishment than you deserve. So forgiveness is mercy. Do we forgive? It depends on the persons involved and the crimes committed. Once again we forgive celebrities almost all of their misdeeds from adultery to drunk driving to violence. But if you are not rich or famous, you generally are given no slack. If you are undocumented, you get neither mercy, nor even, as we are seeing, justice. A disproportionate number of those who have mental illnesses or who are intellectually disabled have trouble receiving the proper medical and legal help. We Americans love a good redemption story but we will not pay for one. Often those who seek to turn their lives around must find help from churches and non-profit organizations. So are we merciful? “Yes” and “No,” depending on who you are.

Do we control our tongues? If we did, social media would dry up and blow away. Do we engage in gossip? Sadly I know intimate details about people I didn't even know were celebrities simply by turning on my phone and looking at the news. Do we seek out the truth even when it seems to discredit our most deeply held beliefs? Or do we lie instead? Who are we kidding?

Do we seek wisdom from above, that is, from God? Well, we have lots of people who selectively search the scriptures and then cherry pick verses that back up our prejudices. They tell us what we want to hear—that God wants us all to be rich and successful in worldly as well as in spiritual terms. Rather than wisdom, we like the idea of being street smart and pragmatic. We don't really look for wisdom that tells us God might ask us to make personal sacrifices and take unpopular stands, much less get crucified for our faith. So that would be a “No.”

Do we love peace? Have we ever fought unnecessary wars? Have we ever fought wars that weren't for defense? Did we ever deliberately bomb civilians? As a society are we peaceful or do we have one of the highest murder rates of any rich western country, 3 to 5 times higher than Europe? Is the US rate for rape 7 times higher than the average for Europe? Does our entertainment center primarily around violence? What about our most popular video games? Do we love peace? Not according to our actions.

Are we impartial? We can choose news sources slanted to our personal political and social views. Are we hypocritical? The comedy of “The Daily Show,” John Oliver and Seth Meyers consist largely of showing video clips of prominent people contradicting what they said before. Politicians and their supporters will be vocally for some action or against the same action depending on whose side is doing it. They will say we can't afford to pay for something that benefits some people and then turn around and spend the same amount to benefit other people. When your principles change depending on which people are being helped and which are being harmed, that's hypocrisy.

Are we humble? If so, why do we have so many publicists, PR firms and people whose job is to handle the press? Why do so many rap songs seem to be peons to the rapper himself for his coolness, prowess with the ladies and conspicuous consumption? Why do so many of our kids aspire to be internet influencers? It's hard to get a promotion today without doing a lot of self-promotion at work. We prefer hype to humility.

Are we patient in suffering? No. We like quick fixes. As a nation we are bad at dealing with complex, long-term and ongoing problems. We will throw all the technology and science we have at acute medical crises. But afterwards, should the patient need long term care, he or she will definitely be treated as a second class citizen. Ask anyone with a chronic illness, like long Covid, Ehlers Danlos, or ME/CFS.

How do we treat the sick in this country? Studies show a nurse should only have 4 patients or the death rate for all of them goes up. Did you know that the state of Florida allows one nurse to take care of up to 40 patients in a nursing home? To make the math easier, let's say the nurse has only 36 patients. In a typical 12 hour shift, all things being equal, she can only spend 20 minutes per patient. That includes giving them meds, which in some cases means crushing them and either putting them in applesauce and spoon feeding the patient or flushing them down a gastro-intestinal tube, as well as doing dressing changes, checking blood sugars, drawing up individual doses of insulin, calling doctors to inform them of test results and receiving new orders, making sure the patients are eating, pooping and peeing in the proper amounts, admitting new patients, and documenting it all. That doesn't include the nurse eating lunch or going to the bathroom. The reason: the owners of nursing homes have lobbyists in Tallahassee.

A study found that states deliberately raise the reading levels of forms to enroll children in Medicaid. For every level they raise the language on the form, there's a 47% reduction in successful completions of the form. They know that doing that as well as making the forms longer keep poor kids from getting medical help. Paperwork matters more than people and money matters most. Do you think God feels that is helping the sick?

So do we trust God, in the sense of believing his diagnosis of what is wrong with us and following his orders to get better? On the whole, no. We pay lip service to God. We pride ourselves on our outward declarations of faith but our society isn't noticeably more godly than the more openly secular European countries.

Part of the problem is that we want God as our ally, not our Lord. We want Jesus as our mascot but as not our divine Master. We don't want to give up any of the freedom we have to choose how we live, despite the fact that we don't make very good choices.

Can America become a nation which truly trusts in God? Only if we as individuals take seriously what Jesus said about showing God's love by obeying him. (John 14:15) And only if we take seriously what he said about treating others as if they were Jesus. (Matthew 25:34-46) As James wrote, we need to be doers of the word, not just hearers only. (James 1:22) Our faith, like our Bibles, tends to be something we leave on the shelf to gather dust. We are like the guy who loves his car so much he never takes it out of the garage. It may be a beautiful thing to admire but that's not what cars are for. They are meant to be taken out into the world and put to use. Not unlike our faith.

This sermon was first preached on May 2, 2010. It has been revised and updated.

The Real Paul

The scripture referred to is Acts 19:1-20.

Ever so often history has to be revised based on new data. For instance, they had to rewrite the history of World War II when the big secret finally came out—that almost from the beginning, we had cracked the German and Japanese military codes. Historians then had to rethink the reasons that the Allies succeeded in beating the Axis powers. It didn't diminish what everyone did, of course, but knowing what the enemy intended to do beforehand because we had read their orders made our generals look less prescient. There was a lot less luck involved in the Battle of Midway, for instance, because we knew what the Japanese had planned. We still had to counter their moves and advance our objectives but these revelations emphasized how important intelligence was in winning the war.

Not all attempts at revisionist history are successful, though. For years a certain British historian had studied the Kennedy assassination. He became convinced that the man who pulled the trigger was not the flaky, loose cannon named Lee Harvey Oswald but a Russian double. He said that Soviet intelligence had substituted this agent for the unstable American when Oswald defected to Russia. Eventually this historian convinced Oswald's widow to allow the assassin's body to be exhumed to determine his true identity. The result: the man in the grave was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald. This troubled loner, who in life acted alone because he was too volatile and unreliable to be recruited into anyone else's grand plan, remains in death a thorn in the side of conspiracy theorists. People just can't admit that one lone nut with a gun can kill the most powerful man in the world.

Like this British historian, there are some people who keep coming up with sensationalistic new theories about the Bible. Unlike the Oswald affair, these theories often cannot be so easily disproved because of the lack of physical evidence. Many of these theories revolve around the “search for the historical Jesus.” People keep trying to find a Jesus of history who is different from the Christ of faith. But more than a century ago, Albert Schweitzer showed that these so-called scholars tend to find exactly the Jesus they were looking for. The flavor of the month these days tends to be a Jesus who is an enlightened political and social radical with no pretensions to messiahship or divinity. The other biblical person most subject to radical revisionism is Paul.

Paul wrote most of the books of the New Testament. His letters to the churches he founded or visited are the earliest Christian writings we have, older than the gospels. These letters and the Book of Acts are the main sources for our knowledge of the first century church. This era is so crucial to our understanding of the origins of Christianity and Paul is such a fascinating character that naturally scholars are attracted to figuring him out. Unfortunately, the difficulty of keeping track of all of the nuances of such a complex person, the “publish or perish” pressures on an academic career, and the dismaying lack of care and subtlety found in media reporting, have presented us with a number of one-sided Pauls. Since this is a sermon and not a symposium, I'm not going to go into a detailed refutation of these caricatures of Paul but instead will sketch as faithful a portrait as I can based on the only primary source data we have: the New Testament.

Paul was born Saul to a Jewish family in Tarsus, a cosmopolitan city in what is now Turkey. Though a Roman citizen, he was a zealous Pharisee, convinced that the salvation of this people depended on a strict adherence to the Torah or Law of Moses. He went to Jerusalem to train under the famous rabbi Gamaliel. He rose to prominence and became a feared opponent of the Christian movement. He asked the Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme court, for authority to hunt down and arrest some of these Jewish heretics who had fled to Syria. While traveling to Damascus, he encountered the risen Jesus. (Acts 22:2-8)

Our passage from Acts tells us how that encounter went. From his letter to the Galatians, we know that Paul went to Arabia shortly after his conversion. (Galatians 1:17) He had to rethink his entire life. If Jesus had been resurrected, then the Christians must be right and Paul had to be very wrong. How could he reconcile what the Old Testament said with what Jesus did on the cross and what he said about God's love and forgiveness?

Paul came to realize that the Law was essentially an educational tool. After all, Torah literally means “instruction.” In it God revealed what was right and what was wrong. But no one could be saved by the Law. It had no power to transform a bad person into a good one, anymore than a description of the signs of being a healthy person or an unhealthy one can cure a disease. The Law could not change the inner person. Only God's grace, his undeserved goodness towards us, could do that. And God's grace can only work in our lives if we let him—that is, if we trust him.

Paul further realized that trust, or faith, has always been the basis of a good relationship with God. It was Abraham's trust of God that led God to accept him as a righteous person. It was not the keeping of the Law of Moses, which came centuries after Abraham. The righteous live by faith, that is, by trusting in God. (Galatians 3:6-11)

In this, Paul was following Jesus. Jesus said that trust in God could move mountains. (Matthew 21:21) Jesus could only heal those who trusted him to do so. (Mark 5:34; 6:5-6) Jesus said that it is impossible for humans to save themselves; it is only possible for God to save us. (Mark 10:23-27) So Paul did not invent this emphasis on faith in Christ; he just stated it explicitly. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

When Paul returned from Arabia, he had reconciled the older covenant of the people of God with the new covenant of Jesus the Messiah, which had the power to change anybody into one of God's people. This was the good news that he preached in Antioch. The church in Jerusalem sent Barnabas to investigate. (Acts 11:22-26) Barnabas and Paul became friends and were sent as missionaries to Asia Minor. There they preached in the synagogues, enraging some but intriguing others. Often those who were most interested in the good news of Jesus were Godfearers, Gentiles who attended synagogue but who hadn't converted to Judaism. And so Paul had to deal with the question of whether Gentiles who came to trust Jesus had to first convert to Judaism. (Acts 13)

Paul decided that they did not. The Law of Moses was given to the Jews, not the Gentiles. And, as he knew, the Law could not save. Besides, by following Jesus, Gentile converts were already putting themselves in danger of persecution. Why should the church put further burdens on Gentile Christians?

But the church in Jerusalem, under Jesus' brother, James, wasn't so sure. Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem, spoke with James and Peter and put their case before the apostles and elders of the mother church. A compromise was worked out. Gentiles needn't be circumcised or follow all 613 commandments of the Torah, but should follow the basic rules of abstaining from sexual immorality, and from eating blood and meat that wasn't drained of blood and food offered to idols. (Acts 15:1-29)

Still, the matter was not resolved in the mind of every Christian and Paul was dogged by this controversy for the rest of his life. Though he fiercely defended the principles of salvation by grace through faith and not by our own efforts, he tried to balance freedom in Christ with a sharp moral sense. (Ephesians 2:10) He wasn't going to allow people to twist this teaching into an excuse to indulge in spiritually, socially and personally self-destructive behavior. (1 Corinthians 6:12; 10:23)

Paul also worked to reconcile the diverse elements of the growing church. He saw the church as the body of Christ, in which different parts with different functions worked together for the good of the whole. (1 Corinthians 12:12-27) He saw the unifying principle as Christ's self-sacrificial love, which puts the good of the other person above that of yourself. (Philippians 2:3-11) If everyone was thinking of others and open to God's Spirit, the church could work things out. Living in the Spirit and not by the letter of the Law was radical.

Being on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift, Paul had to work out the implications of the gospel in real life situations. So coming from a patriarchal society, he struggled with the place of women in leadership in the church. And yet he worked with women deacons and allowed them to preach, pray and teach, provided their heads were modestly covered. He even mentions Junia, the only woman called an apostle in the New Testament. (Romans 16:1-3, 7; Acts 18:24-26; 1 Corinthians 11:5, 16:19)

Paul lived in a society in which slavery was pervasive. He did not call for a slave revolt but told Christian slaves to obtain their freedom if they could and if not, to do their job well. (1 Corinthians 7:21-23) He also told masters to treat their slaves fairly, because they too had a divine and just Master. (Colossians 4:1) And in a personal letter to a church leader, Paul strongly hints that the man should not punish his runaway slave as he was permitted by law but that he should free him. He says treat the slave as a brother in Christ and as you would treat me, Paul, your spiritual father. (Philemon)

In a society where meat markets were attached to pagan temples and sold surplus meat offered to idols, Paul said that each Christian should follow his conscience but always think of and make allowances for those whose faith was less robust. (1 Corinthians 8)

In a church divided between Jewish believers and Gentile converts, he emphasized how none of the two sides had spiritual superiority before God but all were sinners dependent upon God's gracious love. (Romans 3:9-24)

Throughout all the controversies, despite what appear to be contradictions, Paul maintained “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

More than that, Paul was a poet. While some of his passages are very dense with rabbinic hair-splitting logic, at other times his writing soars. He often breaks into what appear to be fragments of early Christian hymns. And sometimes his prose becomes almost musical in itself. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” he asks in the 8^th chapter of Romans and then gets lyrical in listing all the barriers that God can overcome. (Romans 8:35-39) In the first letter to the Corinthians he waxes eloquent on the resurrection: “Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep but we will be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52) In Colossians, he sings the praises of Christ, the firstborn of creation. (Colossians 1:15-20) In his second letter to Timothy, facing his death, he says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7) And he left us with his paean to love in 1 Corinthians 13, which I was once startled to hear read at a Jewish wedding!

Paul was imperfect, as he was the first to admit. (Philippians 3:12) But his encounter with the risen Jesus changed his life. And we might not be here as followers of Jesus, had not God used Paul to bring the light of the gospel to those who dwelt in darkness and God's love to those who were not originally his people. (Isaiah 9:2; Romans 9:25-26)

This sermon was first preached on April 25, 2004. It has been revised and updated.