Hosts and Hospitality

The scriptures referred to are Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16.

One feature all study Bibles have is a map section. This is not included merely so you can see the location of the places scripture mentions. Many of the maps show the routes people used to travel. And there is a lot of traveling going on in the Bible. Cain moves to the land of Nod. Noah floats to Ararat. Abraham and his family move from Ur to Canaan to Egypt and back. The armies of various nations and empires flow back and forth across the Middle East. First Israel and then Judah are taken into exile. The Jews return 70 years later. Jesus travels all over Galilee, Samaria and Judea spreading the gospel. And Paul gets a map or two for his missionary journeys and perhaps another showing the churches he wrote to. And I've got a Bible atlas showing the battle sites of Joshua and the judges, the victories of David and the perambulations of the prophets as well.

All of this took place before Hampton Inns, Hiltons, La Quintas and Best Westerns. To be sure, there were inns operating in Greco-Roman times, but as the Dictionary of New Testament Background puts it, “Available literary and archaeological sources attest to generally ill-kept facilities—minimal furnishings, bug-infested beds, poor food and drink, untrustworthy proprietors, shady clientele and generally loose morals.” Sounds like the kind of places that inspired my wife and I as young parents to make our rules for hotels to avoid: any place offering rooms for $30 or less and any franchise with a number in its name. Today you can't find anything decent for less than $100.

So if you were a traveler in ancient times, to avoid staying in these filthy inns, you wanted to stay with family and friends if possible. But a day's journey on foot was between 17 and 23 miles, greater if you had a cart or were traveling on horseback. And unless you were lucky enough to have loved ones living at convenient intervals all along your route, you had to resort to local hospitality. Luckily, hospitality, welcoming strangers into your home, was and is deemed a cardinal virtue in the Near East and Mediterranean world.

The Greek word for hospitality used in Hebrews 13:2 is philoxenia. It comes from the word philos or “friendly” and the word xenia, which is related to xenos and means “stranger.” So it means “treating a stranger as a friend.” In fact, the idea was to forge a bond of friendship between the previously unknown guest and the host. In Greece this was cemented by a gift given by the host to his departing guest. It reminded the guest of the hospitality he received and obligated him to return the hospitality should his former host drop by his home. Hospitality was also expected to transfer to the descendants of the original host and guest. So the tokens of the hospitality were often carried by the next generation as identification. Such relationships created alliances between families and if the families were wealthy or important, they affected the relationships between cities and states. In the Iliad, Paris' seduction of his host's wife, Helen, was such an egregious abuse of the rules of hospitality that it triggered the Trojan War.

God commands his people to be hospitable to strangers and foreigners as a contrast to their inhospitable treatment while in Egypt. (Exodus 12:48-49, 22:21) Hospitality was highly praised and lack of hospitality was seen as a grievous fault. In fact, the chief sin of Sodom and Gomorrah can be seen as their inhospitality to Lot's guests. Jesus even refers to Sodom when he says that denying hospitality to messengers of the gospel will be remembered at the last judgment. (Luke 10:10-12) So hosting strangers was not really seen as optional.

And the practice was beneficial to both parties. Not only did the traveler receive food, shelter and a bed, but the host and his community were able to neutralize the potential threat of strangers in their midst. They turned the strangers into friends.

Here's how it would work: the traveler would wait at the city gate or well. (Genesis 19: 1-2; Exodus 2:15) In small communities, the fact that he was not a local would be noticed immediately. Someone from the city or settlement would invite him to stay with them. His feet would be washed and his head might even be anointed with oil. (Luke 7:44-46) He and his animals would be fed. Bread and water were the minimum meal offered but usually an effort was made to prepare the best food possible: curds and milk, wine, and as a special treat, meat. That's what Abraham offers the 3 travelers in Genesis 18. Sarah makes cakes and he kills a calf and cooks it. When one of the visitors promises Abraham and Sarah a son, he realizes he is entertaining the Lord, or perhaps the Angel of the Lord, as well as two other angels, God's messengers. That is obviously what the writer of Hebrews is referring to in today's passage.

In New Testament times, the guest was greeted with a kiss, the equivalent of today's handshake. Besides food, entertainment might be offered and the guest invited to speak, and even to enter into a discussion of the Torah. Thus Jesus was not violating the modern rule to avoid discussing religion, but was honoring the customs of his time. In fact, the Talmud, the collection of commentaries on the Torah that is the basis of rabbinic Judaism, resembles a big, messy, disputatious cross-generational discussion of the Law of Moses.

While under the host's roof, the guest was protected. This explains Lot's horrifying offer of his daughters to the mob accosting his guests, the angels, at Sodom. (Genesis 19:4-9) It also explains the verse in Psalm 23 in which the Lord sets a table in the presence of one's enemies. God will protect those who come to him for shelter in accordance with the rules of hospitality. He is the perfect host.

The picture of God as host pervades the Bible. The world is his and we are his guests. In Genesis 1:29-30, he says, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” Like a good host, God provides a feast for his guests and their animals. In Exodus God hosts the children of Israel. As Psalm 105:39-41 says, “He spread a cloud for a covering, and fire to give light by night. They asked, and he brought quails, and gave them bread from heaven in abundance. He opened the rock, and water gushed forth; it flowed through the desert like a river.” When they get to the promised land, it is described as a veritable banquet, a land “flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:8)

Jesus himself acts as host on a number of occasions. He saves the wedding at Cana by providing more and better wine. (John 3:1-10) He feeds thousands on the green grass with fish and bread in abundance. (Luke 9:10-17) After his resurrection he breaks bread with the two going to Emmaus and cooks breakfast for the disciples. (Luke 24:28-31; John 21:9-10)

But the chief event in which Jesus is the host was his last supper. Presiding over a Passover meal that already commemorated God freeing his people from physical slavery, Jesus took two of the elements, bread and wine, and imbued them with a greater significance: “This is my body...This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Matthew 26:26-28) The host offers sustenance that goes beyond generosity. He offers himself to his guest. The host is the feast.

The picture scripture paints of the culmination of the kingdom of God is the ultimate wedding feast with the Lord as host. (Matthew 22:1-10) And the guests are put up in the many rooms or places to stay in his Father's house. (John 14:2) The equivalent word in Latin was used for the elaborate way stations set up for imperial officials traveling. Eternal life as a party is a jollier picture than the unbiblical image of sitting around on clouds you see in cartoons. And a God who throws the party is a different image than the one we see in popular culture.

If God is our host then several things follow. We are guests, given nourishment, protection, and gifts. The things of this world are given for our use while here but they are not our possessions. We may not destroy, abuse or hoard them, because they are for all the guests. Eventually we will have to return the things of this life to their proper owner in as good or better condition than we received them.

It also means we should be grateful to our host for his gifts and his protection. Not only is gratitude the appropriate response to God's grace but it is a healthier attitude than carping over not always getting what we want. Studies show that gratitude not only makes us more optimistic and happier, it also boosts our immune system. We were designed to be grateful.

It also means that we are to reciprocate. We are expected to open our lives and let God dwell in us. (John 14:23) We are also supposed to show hospitality to other people. One thing I am not hearing very much about in the current debates about immigration is our duty to be hospitable to foreigners. In Exodus 23:9, God says to the Israelites, “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” We must never forget that we are dealing with people God created and God expects us to treat all people with the same justice and mercy we expect from him.

The opposite of philoxenia, the Greek word for hospitality, is xenophobia, fear or dislike of the stranger. Remember that one of the benefits of hospitality is turning strangers into friends. But that will never happen if we never get to know them, if we never step out of our comfort zone, if we never act in a friendly or generous manner. Let us not forget that our sins estrange us from God. (Ephesians 2:12) And yet that doesn't stop him from extending his hospitality, his friendship to us. (Ephesians 2:19; John 15:14-15) So, too, our attitude towards strangers should be to regard them as friends we haven't met yet. And when in doubt, we should do the friendliest thing. After all, someday we may be dining with them in God's kingdom. It'd be nice if they were familiar faces.

First preached on August 29, 2010. It has been revised and updated.

The Connection

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 58:9b-14, Psalm 103:1-8, and Luke 13:10-17.

The Jewish Sabbath was unique in the Ancient Near East. All the other cultures had holy days, of course. They celebrated new moons and harvests and seasons and days devoted to certain gods. But the Jewish Sabbath did not correspond to any natural phenomenon. And no one had a holy day that occurred every 7 days. In fact, in Mesopotamia the 7^th, 14^th, 21^st, and 28^th days of the month were considered unlucky. Where did the Jews get this idea?

The command to observe the Sabbath is found in the 10 commandments. In Exodus 20, the reason for the Sabbath is that God rested after the 6 days of creation. In Deuteronomy 5, the Sabbath is also supposed to remind the Israelites that they were slaves in Egypt until God liberated them. So not only are they not to work on the Sabbath but neither are their slaves nor their animals nor the resident aliens. And that was something else unique to the Sabbath. Generally speaking, in the Gentile world people had to work even on holy days, especially slaves. What's interesting is that the Sabbath is to be kept holy, that is, set apart for God's purposes, yet the real beneficiaries are the people who are given a day off in order that they may rest. (Deuteronomy 5:14) As Jesus said, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. (Mark 2:27)

And that gives us the background for today's reading from Isaiah. In fact, I wish the people who decided on the lectionary passages had started the reading a few verses earlier. The chapter starts with God telling the prophet to confront his people with their rebellious deeds. Though they say they want to know what God requires and wonder why God doesn't respond to their fasts, God says, “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.” (Isaiah 58:3-4) That kind of fasting will not get you heard by God. He goes on to say, “Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Deuteronomy 5:6-7) We are told, “Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.” (Deuteronomy 5:9a) In other words, truly worshipping God leads to helping and not harming your fellow human being.

So it's really odd how people keep separating what we do for God from what we do for others. As we see in our gospel reading, religious people were even doing this in Jesus' day. It's the Sabbath and Jesus is teaching in the synagogue as usual. He sees a woman who is bent over and unable to stand up straight. He lays hands on her and heals her. The president of the synagogue gets upset over this, insisting that the woman could have gotten healed on any other day of the week. And then it's Jesus' turn to get indignant. He points out that the prohibition on working doesn't mean doing nothing. Animals have to drink the same as people do. And to do so meant untying the animal. Now tying and untying were classified as one of the 39 categories of work that the Pharisees said were forbidden on the Sabbath. But unless you wanted your ox or donkey to get dehydrated, you needed to technically break this restriction.

And Jesus says that if folks can release an animal from its bonds for its health, he can free this woman from the ailment that has restricted her life. Human commands should not trump compassion for humans. I wouldn't be surprised if Jesus wasn't thinking of the passage from Isaiah that talked of loosening the bonds of injustice.

Now to be fair, the religious leaders did not object to saving a life on the Sabbath. In fact, rabbis held that if it were necessary to save a life, you could break any of the 613 laws of the Torah, except idolatry, sexual immorality and murder. But Jesus was not saving a life; he was making a disabled person's life better by healing them. And various schools of Pharisees debated if that was allowed. Some Pharisees even said you could not pray for the sick on the Sabbath, while others disagreed.

In another place Jesus' critics brought a man with a shriveled hand to the synagogue to see what he would do. Jesus tells the man to stand next to him and says, “I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil, to save a life or destroy it?” Then he heals the man. He is showing that God wants us to do good on the Sabbath. But more than that, I think Jesus is saying that doing nothing when you can help someone who is suffering is evil. In his sermon on the last judgment it is the people who do nothing for those who are hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned or a resident alien, who are denied entrance into the kingdom of God. The point of that parable is that what you do or neglect to do to those in need you are doing or neglecting to do to Jesus, the Son of God. (Matthew 25:31-46)

Throughout the Bible our duty to God is linked to our duty to other people. And the reason goes right back to the first chapter of Genesis. We are told that God made humans, both male and female, in his image. (Genesis 1:27) We are told that the reason for the flood was that God saw that the world was ruined by violence. (Genesis 6:11) And after the flood God makes a covenant with Noah that for his part he will not flood the whole earth and our part is not to shed each others' blood because we are made in God's image. (Genesis 9:6) God is essentially saying that, like Jesus, what we do to each other we do to him. (Proverbs 19:17)

Again, when Jesus was asked for the greatest commandment, he gave not one but two. We are to love God with all we are and all we have and we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. He says that no commandment is greater than these and that all the other commandments come from these two. (Mark 12:28-31; Matthew 22:35-40)

As we saw in Isaiah, God's message to his people through his prophets is usually two-fold: you are not treating God as you should and you are not treating other people, especially the poor and powerless, as you should. (cf. Jeremiah 5:28-29; 22:16; Ezekiel 16:49; 22:29-31) As it says in 1 John, “If a man says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for if he doesn't love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20) Remember that we are to see and serve Jesus by seeing him in and serving others.

And lest you think that you only have to love your neighbor and your fellow Christians and no one else, Jesus said we are to love our enemies as well. (Luke 6:27-28) There is no one left that we can hate and still call ourselves Christians.

Jesus called us to be peacemakers. (Matthew 5:9) And if we are not at peace with someone, we are to fix that before worshipping God. Jesus said, “So then, if you bring your gift to the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled with your brother and then come and present your gift.” (Matthew 5:23-24) We are supposed to take the first step even if we are the one sinned against. (Matthew 18:15) And Jesus wisely says to do this while you two are alone together. Only bring others into it if it can't be resolved privately. Today people go right to the internet and tell everyone what their beef is with someone else. That makes it very hard to reconcile with that person later.

Speaking of the internet, people are isolating themselves with their screens. You've heard that church membership is declining. But as it turns out, membership in all voluntary organizations, like service, fraternal, recreational, political and civic groups, has also been plummeting. And, surprise! We are suffering an epidemic of loneliness. As well as an epidemic of deaths of despair, like suicide and overdoses. God said that it is not good for humans to be alone. (Genesis 2:18) We are social animals. I don't think it is a coincidence that people who aren't maintaining their relationships with others are also not maintaining their relationship with God. What I don't understand is how people do not see that you can't have a good relationship with God and treat other people, who were created in God's image, badly.

From the beginning God has told us that, yes, we are our brother's keeper. (Genesis 4:9) A better translation is “protector.” We are to look after one another. We are to help those who need it. As we see in today's psalm God cares about justice for all who are oppressed. You cannot be right with God if you are not trying to do right by others. You cannot be the apple of God's eye if you are at someone's throat. And if you turn away from those who are in need, you will not find God. He is with those who are neglected by other people. As Psalm 147 says, “He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3)

The Bible tells us repeatedly of God's love for us. The most famous verse in the Bible tells us that he loved the world so much that he sent his unique son to bring us eternal life. The next verse says, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him.” (John 3:17) There are a lot of religious people who seem to think their job is to condemn people, if not by doing something to them, then by standing by and condemning them to suffer neglect, hunger, homelessness, illness or injustice.

I think it is those people who on judgment day will say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in your name and in your name drive our demons and perform many miracles?” And Jesus will say to them, “I never knew you. Go away from me, you lawbreakers!” (Matthew 7:21-23)

What's the law they broke? The one thing they don't mention doing in Jesus' name: loving other people. Over and over we are told to love our neighbor, our enemy and one another. (Leviticus 19:18, 34; Matthew 5:44, 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 6:27, 35; John 13:34-35, 15:12, 17; Romans 12:10, 20, 13:9-10; Galatians 5:14; 1 Thessalonians 3:12; James 2:8; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 John 3:11, 23, 4:7; 2 John 5) The commandment to love others appears in scripture more than 20 times, as if to emphasize that it is twice as important as the 10 commandments.

And this explains why Jesus doesn't know them. Because as it says in 1 John, “The person who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:8) If they had shown love to the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the imprisoned and the resident alien, they would have seen and known Jesus and he would have known them.

Today we atomize everything. We take things apart, look at their pieces and try to put them in separate containers. The way you do when you autopsy something. But that's not how they exist in life. In a living faith, what you think about God is connected to what you think about human beings; how you relate to God is connected to how you relate to people. God is love. When we show him love in worship we remind ourselves of how he loves us and we feel his love. When we see other people, we are reminded of how they, like us, were created in his image and we approach them with love. When we see how that image has been damaged by sin and evil, we seek to repair and heal those who are damaged. That's what we do if our faith is living, if we are living in the love of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who loves us and heals us and gave himself for us.

Fiery Truths

The scriptures referred to are Luke 12:49-56.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our 32^nd president, chose Harry S. Truman as his running mate in 1944 because Truman had made a reputation as a senator for going after waste and inefficiency in military contracts during World War II. When Roosevelt died less than 3 months after being inaugurated into his 4^th term, Truman became president and oversaw the end of the war. During his re-election campaign in 1948 he delivered a fiery speech attacking his opponents. One of his supporters yelled, “Give 'em hell, Harry!” Truman replied, “I don't give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.” People liked Truman for telling the truth, even if it was uncomfortable.

While complete honesty has long been a human ideal, it's rarely practiced. We've tried to enshrine it in law, making manufacturers put all the ingredients on food packaging, making phone companies delineate all their charges on our bill, having internet platforms disclose what information about you they collect and to whom they sell it. And yet companies still try to wiggle out of letting you know precisely what they are up to. And financial institutions have fought tooth and nail to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent government agency that has saved consumers $20 billion through its enforcement actions in the 14 years since it was established. Now that lawmakers have tried to defund it, we are probably going to see less action on the more than 2 million complaints that it received last year alone about deceptive business practices and financial scams. Imagine having to be honest and tell people that your business is going to try to rob or exploit them! Outrageous!

So what are we to make of what Jesus says in today's gospel? He is talking about how he will divide families. We know that religion can do that. A child from a non-religious family will become born again or a person raised as a Christian will become a Buddhist and the rest of the family will not take it well. In extreme cases they may disown the person. In Muslim or Hindu countries, the family may even kill one of their own if they convert to Christianity. Why would Jesus draw attention to this? And why does he seem to be endorsing it?

The answer to the first question is that this is an example of Jesus' radical honesty. Usually if you want to persuade people to buy your product or hire your company or join your movement, you highlight the benefits and stay away from any of its liabilities, like the companies who oppose full disclosure. It's harder to convince people to do something if you admit that there are any negative consequences, especially serious ones. As a former copywriter, I would find it a challenge to write a TV ad for a prescription drug these days. By law they have to mention major side effects, adverse reactions and interactions with other drugs. That's why they have to include a long litany of reasons you might not want to try it. Some even mention death as an adverse effect! But it's better to find out that it can cause other health problems before you take it.

So Jesus is admitting upfront that following him is a choice that will divide people. But why is he bringing this up at all? Well, in the previous chapters of Luke we have seen Jesus under attack from the Pharisees. He casts out a demon and they say he has done it by the power of Satan. (Luke 11:14-23) He dines and they criticize the fact that he didn't wash his hands in the proper ritual way. (Luke 11: 37-41) Even after a scribe admits to the centrality of the two great commandments, he seeks to limit whom he has to consider his neighbor. (Luke 10: 25-37) Finally Jesus tells them off. (Luke 11:42-54) And in our passage Jesus acknowledges that even his message of love, forgiveness, and justice—things you'd think everyone would approve of—will cause people to take sides.

We see this today. Christianity encompasses a wide range of activities and subcultures offering an enormous variety of forms of worship, devotional practices, music, prayers, charities, ministries, issues and denominations. And often these things become more important to some people than the whole or even the core of the faith: Jesus. That's one factor at play when people who supposedly follow the one who is God's Love Incarnate nevertheless do hateful things to other people, including other Christians. People get so obsessed with certain details, practices or political positions that they lose sight of what is distinctive about Christian ethics and act like any other partisan of any other ideology. They get defensive. If they are dominant, they seek to suppress other groups. If instead they are a minority, they withdraw from mainstream culture. In either case, they can turn to violence despite what Jesus said about loving both neighbors and enemies and turning the other cheek and treating others as you wish to be treated. (Luke 6:27-31) For instance, empathy—understanding and sharing the feelings of others, something Jesus does (Hebrews 4:15)—is called by some modern day Pharisees toxic or a sin. What's the opposite of empathy? Being merciless, callous, ruthless and unfeeling. Jesus saw this hatred developing in those who opposed his ministry and he knew how it would end. So he tells it like it is.

OK, fair enough. Jesus is merely describing what would happen anyway as a reaction to his mission. Why does he say, “I have come to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were already kindled?” This sounds as if Jesus is looking forward to the conflict and strife. Plus his use of the word “fire” sounds, well, inflammatory! He sounds like the kind of fanatic who might be preaching sectarian violence today. How do we reconcile this with the man who rebuked Peter for wielding a sword at his arrest and who then healed the man whose ear Peter cut off? Jesus' last recorded healing is that of an enemy. (Matthew 26:51-52; Luke 22:50-51)

First we need to look at the way the Bible uses the word “fire.” Since we live in a world where we rarely use open flames anymore, we tend to see fire as a danger to be avoided. But in the past fire was seen primarily as a boon to humanity. The Greek told the myth of how Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. Fire not only allowed us to cook food and make it more digestible, and to light our ways and heat our homes, it also made the refining of metals possible. This led to harder tools and purer decorative metals like gold. And it is often in the sense of refining that fire is associated with God. God burns away the dross in our lives, leaving us purer, stronger and longer lasting. Jesus is not looking forward to the destruction of the world but to its refinement.

But he knew it would be painful. He goes on to say, “I have a baptism with which to be baptized and what stress I am under until it is completed.” His baptism by fire is his coming crucifixion, of course. He will suffer the consequences of our sins. He will undergo the heat of the crucible, the vessel which is put in the refiner's fire.

But why would he want this to happen? If we look at these two verses, we can see that they are an example of classic Hebrew poetic parallelism. Listen to how they sound:

“I have come to cast fire on the earth and how I wish it were already kindled!

I have a baptism I must undergo and how stressed I am until it is finished!”

The casting of fire parallels his baptism by fire. His wishing the fire was started parallels the stress he is under until it is completed. He doesn't want to undergo this ordeal, as we see in his prayer at Gethsemane. (Luke 22:42) But knowing that he must go through it, the sooner it starts, the sooner it will be over. The anticipation is unbearable. Like a patient facing major surgery, he is looking at the pain and suffering and saying, “OK, let's get this done!”

One last observation: the word Jesus uses when he says he wishes his baptism by fire was over is the same word he says from the cross when he dies: “It is finished.” (John 19:30) His ordeal was done. And what he wished to accomplish by it was achieved: atonement for our sins, our reconciliation with God, a new covenant of peace, freedom for those held captive by evil, and the establishment of the kingdom of God.

The fire that Jesus wished to bring upon the earth was not the raging, destructive fire of hate but that of burning love. It is the fire that warms and enlightens and provides nourishment. It is the refining fire of God, the fire that strengthens and purifies us. It is a good thing. Knowing that, you'd think that getting people to sign on would be a no-brainer.

Sad to say, that is not true of all people. Some folks value other things more than love and peace and enlightenment. They put their culture, their form of worship, their tribe or ethnicity or country or social class or party ahead of peace. They value these things more than family, which they let be torn apart. Jesus told us it would happen and it did. It is happening. Jesus wasn't happy about it but he wasn't in denial about it. He made a full disclosure. In another place, he tells his disciples that he is sending them out as sheep among wolves. (Luke 10:3) He is not telling them to create divisions. Those will just happen inevitably when the gospel starts spreading like wildfire, making disciples. When folks take Jesus to heart, others will be alarmed and react.

As Christians we are called to love God and love those created in his image. We are called to act justly, to be ready to forgive, to work towards reconciliation, to heal, to teach, to comfort the afflicted and, at times, to afflict the comfortable. But as we are seeing in Gaza and in the Ukraine, where hospitals are bombed and people seeking food are shot, there are those who find even people who heal and help others threatening. And how are we to respond? What did Jesus command us to do to those who oppose him? Love them. Love our enemies. Pray for those who persecute us. Repay evil with good. They have no defense against the unquenchable, spreading, bright and burning love of God.

This was originally preached on August 15, 2010. It has been updated and revised.

Magical Thinking

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 15:1-6 and Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16.

The first musical I remember was “Peter Pan.” This wasn't the Disney cartoon but a filmed version of the original musical play starring Mary Martin as Peter. It premiered on Broadway the same year I was born. The TV version I saw must have been the 1960 color production which was also rebroadcast later. You may have seen the 2000 version with Cathy Rigby as Peter or the 2014 version in which Christopher Walken played Captain Hook. In any case, a key scene is the one in which the fairy Tinkerbell drinks the poison meant for Peter and is dying. As her light flickers feebly, Peter looks at the audience and tells us that if every boy and girl who believes in fairies claps their hands it will restore Tinkerbell to life. I remember my brother and I clapping our hands like mad and being overjoyed when Tinkerbell begins to shine brightly again.

The odd thing is I don't remember actually believing in fairies. I grew up with TV and I knew the difference between the make-believe stuff you see on TV and in movies and the way things work in real life. It may have been because my dad knew a guy who owned a store that sold magic tricks. I was into them for a while but my brother has made a life-long hobby of performing magic, which he still does at children's hospitals. But even if I can't figure out how some of the tricks are done, I know that magic is merely an illusion. It's fun to suspend your disbelief while watching a magician do the seemingly impossible. But you don't want to end up like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who thought his one-time friend Houdini really did have magical powers or that two British girls actually took photographs of fairies, which to us look like exactly what they were: paper cutouts. It is a testament to Doyle's integrity as an author that despite this, he never converted his character Sherlock Holmes to a belief in the supernatural. In The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, Holmes says, “This agency stands flat-footed on the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

So what are we 21^st century Christians to make of all the talk of faith in today's readings from the Bible? After all, in Hebrews we are told, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” So is our faith as fanciful as beliefs in fairies or vampires or Santa Claus? A lot of skeptics think so. Sigmund Freud saw religion as wish-fulfillment. Nobody wants to think the world is random so we dream up a God who is in charge. We dream up a devil to explain evil. We dream up heaven to assuage our fear of death and of permanent separation from our dead loved ones. How do we know that our rituals in church aren't the equivalent of clapping for fairies?

For one thing, not all beliefs are of equal validity. For instance, we all recognize some things are superstitions, at least when we see them in others. Like the baseball player who always wears his lucky socks because he once had a hot streak when he first wore them. Or the person who knocks on wood when they express any hopeful sentiment so that it won't be jinxed. Or the grandmother from the old country who spits or makes a gesture to ward off the evil eye. We laugh at such things, though we may have our own superstitions. I cannot shake a couple I picked up when I was a nurse, like deaths come in threes or that patients act up and things get hectic at the hospital or nursing home during the full moon. If I did a scientific study I would probably find that I only notice such things at certain times and don't notice the times when they fail to be true.

And of necessity we believe a lot of things that we haven't personally seen or verified. We believe in black holes and distant galaxies and what we are told about conditions on other planets like Mercury or Venus, though no humans have ever been there. We believe that we have internal organs that we have never laid eyes on. We believe in bacteria and viruses no human can see with the naked eye. Why? Well, in these cases, because reputable scientists have studied these things and told us about them. And that is an important feature of believing something to be true: you often learn it from someone you trust. A lot of what we believe comes from others. As children there is only so much we can learn from personal experience. And there are certain things nobody wants to learn from personal experience, like that drinking something you find under the sink will kill you. When Mom and Dad tell us not to do certain things because they are dangerous, we tend to believe them. You do not want to be like the girl I knew as a child who discovered why you should not play with matches. She lived but was scarred for life.

The key here is trust. You have to trust some people. If not, you can't function. For instance, when you take your car in to be fixed, you trust that they will in fact fix the problem. And they trust you to pay them. Of course, at first the trust is blind. Say, you are new to a town and find a place to take your car. If they do a bad job, you go somewhere else next time. If they do a good job, you now trust them for a different reason: you are building up a history with them. It's the same with people. It's called a blind date because you know very little about the person you are meeting for the first time. If it goes well, you meet again. Hopefully, you observe them in different situations, like how they react when either you or they are having a bad day and how they interact with friends and relatives, both yours and theirs. After a while, you feel that you know what kind of person they are. You learn over time who is trustworthy and who is not.

It's the same way with God. The Hebrew word translated “believe” in our reading from Genesis means “trust,” as does the Greek word translated “faith” in our passage from Hebrews. In the Bible belief in God is not merely thinking God exists; it means trusting God. Abram thought he was too old to have a natural heir. But God told him he would. Because of his history with God, because he had learned that God was trustworthy, Abram “trusted in Yahweh and he counted it to him as righteousness.” I like the way the NET Bible puts it: “and the Lord considered his response of faith a proof of genuine loyalty.” In other words, because Abram trusted God to be good to his promise, God trusted Abram to do the right thing, which in this case was to loyally wait for God to fulfill his promise at what would be the right time.

It is in this sense that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” They are not unseen in the sense of not really existing, as with fairies, but of not yet having happened. In fact you could call “hope” the future tense of “faith.” We trust in God to be with us now and we put our hope in him to make things right in the end. I hope that my grandkids have long happy lives. I will probably not live to see that. But I trust that their parents and my wife and I have set them on the right path. We have taught them right from wrong and encouraged them to trust in God. I pray for them every night and trust God to take care of them.

Even scientists have faith. They trust that the scientists on whose work they are building did their studies and experiments correctly, made accurate observations and did not fudge the data to get grants or get published in prestigious journals. But because scientists are human, we are finding that not all of them are trustworthy. We now know that the British doctor who linked autism with vaccines faked the results of his 1998 study in return for more than half a million dollars from lawyers who were suing the vaccines' manufacturers and wanted some “scientific” evidence.

For that matter, even atheists have faith. They trust that the philosophers and scientists they follow are right. Yet Anthony Flue, one of the most influential of modern atheists, decided that God existed when he realized that the math did not support the idea that this fine-tuned universe could come about simply through an unimaginable series of happy accidents. Recently another mathematician worked out that the idea that life could spontaneously arise from inorganic matter was so mathematically improbable that it should be considered practically impossible. Basically it would be like putting all the individual parts of your smartphone in a box, shaking it for billions of years and expecting it to come out not only properly put together but already programmed. We are born programmed to do and learn specific things like language. And if DNA is the code which tells us how every part of us is made and how everything in us functions, who wrote that code? Accidents in transmitting the code over time may explain variations, like why some people's earlobes are connected to their heads and why some hang free, but who wrote the original code that gave us the complicated inner structure of ears in the first place? Who made sure we have an incredibly redundant immune system that keeps us from dying the minute we encounter the millions of microbes we are exposed to every day? As someone said, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

But the real question is this: is God good? Is he trustworthy? Here we are in the same boat as scientists. First we act on information from those we trust. In our case, it is the gospel, the good news that is centered in Jesus. We read the reports of what he did and said. And he didn't merely come as a moral teacher. Jesus said he was the Son of God. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, then Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord just as he said. We also read about how he was executed and buried. We read how he rose again and this turned his followers from cowards into people who proclaimed his resurrection even though they knew it could get them killed—and in almost every case, it did.

Today we see how fast folks are to abandon the lies they tell when it gets them in trouble. We know about these lies because of whistleblowers, insiders who come out and tell the truth. Ten of the twelve people who co-authored the study that linked autism to vaccines retracted the idea that there was a causal link. In contrast, Jesus' disciples were either stupid to keep lying at the risk of death or else they really did see, touch and eat with the risen Jesus. Does it make sense that there were about 500 people who saw the risen Christ, as Paul tells us, and yet, if it were a hoax, none of them ever told the authorities, who would have loved to stamp out Christianity? (1 Corinthians 15:6)

But, like scientists, we also must test the God hypothesis. And scientists have studied believers. Since they can't quantify how religious someone is, they go by how often people go to religious services. And they have found that people who regularly attend services have a lower risk of death from all causes, including suicide and drug overdose, have better survival rates of heart disease and cancer, lower rates of depression, lower levels of anxiety, better overall mental health, lower rates of divorce, greater life satisfaction, and find life more meaningful.

But, you may say, these are studies of people who attend services of any number of religions and so do not differentiate what kind of God these folks believe in. We don't even know how many actually do believe in God and how many just go for cultural or social reasons. It may be that the social support they receive and the encouragement of healthier habits, like not drinking and smoking, might play a part.

True. So what's the next step we can take? First, consider this: French tightrope walker Charles Blondin crossed the gorge at Niagara Falls in 1859. He did it several times, sometimes blindfolded, or in a sack, or on stilts. If you had asked onlookers, a lot of them might have said they believed Blondin could cross the Niagara Gorge carrying them on his back. But I wonder if they would have taken him up on the offer. One man actually did. It was his manager, Harry Colcord. He trusted Blondin enough to climb up on his back and let himself be carried the whole 1,100 feet while 160 feet above the water. You can see a picture of them doing it on Wikipedia.

In the final analysis, the only way to see if God is trustworthy is to trust him. Put yourself in his hands. Follow his way. Put your hope in his promises. Which does not mean to imagine that your every desire will be fulfilled, but to trust him for your daily needs. He's your heavenly Father, not a genie. Nor does it mean you will never be given more than you can handle. It does mean that he will help you handle whatever comes. As a teacher of mine said, following Jesus doesn't get you off the hook.

Indeed, unlike cult leaders and con men, Jesus does not promise that his way is easy. He says, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must disown himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) The easy life is an illusion. The idea that things like wealth, good looks, popularity, a high IQ or the latest high-tech gadget are the keys to a good life is an illusion. A recent study shows that highly educated and otherwise successful people like lawyers, engineers, scientists and surgeons actually have an unexpectedly high mortality rate. But people still put their trust in these things and applaud those who have them as proof that they have achieved the good life.

Putting your trust in the things of this life is magical thinking. And a lot of people have a hard time believing that old-fashioned things like faith and hope and love and building character and being part of a church and helping others and trusting God are what really counts, even when doing so is hard. Ironically it is a magical person, Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books, who says it best: “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”

It is easy to do what appears to work in this life: looking out for number one and doing whatever it takes to get what you want. Yet every day in the news we see those who have reached the pinnacle of human success and are still unhappy and unfulfilled. Jesus asked, “For what good does it do a person if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Or what can a person give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in his Father's glory and then he will repay each person according to their deeds.” (Matthew 16:26-27) He also said, “This is the deed that God requires—to believe in the one whom he has sent.” (John 6:29)

So the question is: do you believe in the illusions of your fellow creatures or do you trust in our Creator, who knows how things really work, what we really need and who loves us enough to give his life for us and give his eternal life to us? 

Under the Sun

The scriptures referred to are Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23, Colossians 3:1-11, and Luke 12:13-21.

The most famous line from Shakespeare is the beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” What most people don't realize is that Hamlet is contemplating suicide. Basically he is asking whether it is better to live or to die. “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” In other words, by dying you end all the pain and suffering of life, just like a good deep sleep does. But then he realizes something. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub: for in that sleep of death what dreams may come...” Hamlet realizes that “the dread of something after death, the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of...” In other words, most of us would rather deal with the problems and pains of life than risk having to deal with whatever we might experience after death.

Long before Shakespeare penned his plays, the writer of Ecclesiastes wrestled with the problems of life. But he was not dealing with the problems most of us have—trying to make a living, dealing with difficult people who have power over us—the stuff 99% of the world's population throughout history have suffered. No, our passage says, “I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem,” which would indicate that he was Solomon. So he had it better than most people. And what does he conclude? All is vanity. The Hebrew word here literally means “air, breath, vapor.” It expresses something that has no substance. So the Jewish Publication Society's version of the Tanakh translates it “utter futility.” The International Standard Version renders it “absolutely pointless.” The Good News Translation gives it as “useless.” The NIV uses the word “meaningless.” The Contemporary English Version translates the first verse of our passage this way: “Nothing makes sense! Everything is nonsense. I have seen it all—nothing makes sense.” It's a pretty bleak assessment of life and a surprising one to find in the Bible.

But the Teacher's perspective is limited. He says “I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun.” Under the sun” is repeated 29 times in this short book. So he is looking at what happens between birth and death. He concludes that everything is temporary and therefore meaningless. Pleasures are meaningless, work is meaningless, advancement is meaningless, riches are meaningless. In other words, if this life is the only one we get, then nothing we do means anything in the long run. Add to that the problems that Hamlet later lists—the wrongs of oppressors, arrogant people in high office, “the law's delay,” seeing the unworthy succeed—and there is no justice in life.

My wife and I love to watch British mysteries or as my son calls it, “murder porn.” We don't like them too dark, however. We like clever puzzles. But of course, when the bad guy is revealed and caught, it is hard to see how the murder victim gets justice. Even Sherlock Holmes realized this. At the end of one of his more tragic cases, he says, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?...What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance,which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

I said it was surprising to find the idea that life is meaningless expressed in the Bible but you know who would agree? Atheists. Indeed there is a Youtuber who used to be a Mormon and is now an atheist who paints an even bleaker picture of life without God. Brittney Hartley says that along with the death of God comes the death of not only ultimate justice but objective morality, objective truth, tradition and culture, assurance of an afterlife, and progression towards an ultimate ideal. What Hartley doesn't list is the death of hope. There is no reason to believe that anything will ever get better.

If this is the only life there is, then everything is futile. And just as we see with the Teacher, even being rich and powerful can't make your life meaningful. It's not hard to think of rich and powerful people who had sad lives. They are not immune to broken relationships, losing loved ones, suffering disease, undergoing disasters, being murdered or committing suicide. They know better than anyone that he who dies with the most toys wins nothing of lasting value. If there is no afterlife and no loving and just God to make things right, then there is no justice or meaning to this life.

Nevertheless the writer of Ecclesiastes concludes his book by seeing some value in obtaining wisdom and obeying God's commandments. It can make this bleak life better. The real problem, though, is that he is only looking at life under the sun. And humans find this perspective intolerable. As we noted last week, religion goes back to the beginning of our species. And as evidence in belief in an afterlife, anthropologists point to intentional human burials with grave goods, like one found in central Israel that dates back 100,000 years. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar asked why did our ancestors give things useful to living people, like pots and tools and weapons and food and drink, to a dead person if they were not intended to be used in the next life?

We have an advantage that the Teacher did not. We have the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Within 3 days his discouraged followers went from mourners cowering in a locked room from the authorities to people who were not afraid of death because they saw and touched and ate with the risen Jesus. They defied the same authorities that had Jesus killed because they knew that death, like the other things in this life, was also temporary. The only thing that isn't temporary is people.

Which means that what you do in this life is not meaningless. As C.S. Lewis pointed out that if you are just going to live for 70 or 80 years and then cease to exist, it doesn't matter what kind of person you are. But if you are going to live forever, it does.

When I was in a college ministry where we went to a nursing home, I noticed that some elderly people were very bitter at the end of their lives. They couldn't forget and move past old slights and injustices and feuds and disappointments and regrets but just kept going on about them. But some elderly people were happy, despite the circumstances that put them into the nursing home. One lady was a brittle diabetic who had lost her sight to the disease and eventually both legs. But she was always joyful. She sang the loudest at our church services and loved to talk with us students. Our time at the nursing home each Sunday often ended with all of us in her room, fortified by her strong faith. And if I was going to live forever I would choose to become like her rather than like the narrow bitter souls in the same place though they might be physically better off than her. She was like a ray of sunshine. And I could see some of those people becoming like spiritual black holes, sucking in everything around them, including light, and giving nothing back.

That's why what we are becoming in this short life is so important. It sets our trajectory into the next life. And that's why Paul says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly.” And by that he doesn't mean things like family and friends and the things essential to a physical life. No, he lists stuff like sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed (which is idolatry), anger, rage, malice, slander, and abusive language. As we read last week, if we are in Christ, Jesus has nailed such things to the cross. (Colossians 2:14) Sins are like cancer: they grow and grow in us until they kill us spiritually. We know that one way to prevent lung cancer is to quit smoking. In the same way, we must stop feeding the things that harm our relationship with God, our relationships with each other and our relationship with ourselves.

And you may have noticed that a lot of the things Jesus tells us to do make no sense if this is the only life we get. Things like not resisting an evil person, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, and not worrying about things like food and drink and clothing, do not make sense if you only live once. Those are the very things that got Jesus killed. As Paul says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to those who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) From God's perspective it is the world's wisdom that is foolish. Paul continues “But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24)

There is a famous psychological experiment that was done with marshmallows. Kids were shown a marshmallow on a plate. The adult told them that they could eat the marshmallow while he was gone but if they waited until he came back, they could have 2 marshmallows. They watched what the kids did and then followed up on them throughout their lives. They found that those kids who resisted eating the first marshmallow, who were able to hold off on getting an immediate reward in order to gain a greater reward later on, did better in school and in life. God is saying that that same principle applies to this life and the next. You can, like the man in Jesus' parable, just think about building up wealth so you can live this life eating, drinking and being merry, or you can look at life from God's perspective: eternity. And eternal life beats this temporary life in every way.

Jesus said, “And whoever has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29) Jesus is not talking about abandoning these things unnecessarily but being forced to by persecution, as the parallel passage in Mark makes clear. (Mark 10:30) Jesus is saying we should take the long view; see life through the lens of eternity.

Ultimately the Teacher saw that you can't find meaning through things. He does see value in having other people in your life. He says that one person working alone is meaningless but “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12) As God says in the beginning “It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) For us it is even better. Jesus said, “For where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) Whenever we gather in Jesus' name, however few in number, we are the body of Christ and his Spirit is with us, in us and among us. (1 Corinthians 12:13-14)

But what if we are wrong and there is no God and no afterlife? The mathematician Blaise Pascal looked at this question logically. If we Christians are wrong, and death is the end, we will never know that we were wrong. However, if we are right, we will receive a great reward. On the other hand, if an atheist is right that there is no God and no afterlife, he will never know that he was right. If he is wrong, however, he will be in the same situation as the man in the parable and that is not good. Betting on God's promise of eternal life for those who put their trust in him has a great return and no downside; betting against God has no return and a huge downside.

The Bible shows both perspectives on life. Looked at from a purely material point of view, life is meaningless. Looked at from a spiritual perspective, life is full of meaning. Everything we do can move us along one of two trajectories: closer to God or farther from him. Because every person you meet has the immense potential to grow into a wonderful, giving, larger-than-life person who will bedazzle you when they enter glory or they can shrink into an infinitely tiny ball of rage and regret and empty and unfulfilled desires. As someone said, a person wrapped up in themselves makes for a very small package.

Or look at it this way: everyone you meet is either a brother or sister in Christ or a potential brother or sister in Christ. So you can help them discover and develop this by what you say and do. And by giving of yourself to help them, you will also become more Christlike. So, with apologies to Shakespeare, to be a follower of Jesus or not to be—that is the question.