God is an Infracaninophile

Bullying is in the news a lot these days. And it hit me the other day that I was bullied, though it was not something I've thought about much over the years. I was called "four eyes" and "Poindexter" and ridiculed for always having a pencil and carrying my books in a book bag rather than in my arms and throwing off the grading curve. I was chased around the schoolyard, pushed into a bush, given a black eye. Once I was bullied by mistake. Some kids who were mad at my brother mistook me for him and put snow down my collar. But I never felt like a victim. The kid who chased me around the schoolyard regretted it. Boxed in at the corner of the school fence, I raised my foot to crotch-height just as he ran at me, causing him to, as we said at the time, "rupture" himself. Being pushed into the bush was a lot less worse than I expected and probably had something to do with my pointing out that this particular bully would prove nothing by beating me up since he was obviously much bigger than me. Who would this impress? Having taken away any glory he could possibly garner by pulverizing me, I was shoved into the bushes and he walked away grumbling in dissatisfaction. Again simply accepting the challenge to meet the 3rd bully in the schoolyard after classes, though I was obviously outmatched, may have cost me a black eye and a wicked headache, but the next day it made me the hero of 7th grade. All in all, the lesson I learned in these incidents was that standing up to a bigger and stronger foe, while not guaranteeing you a victory, could spoil your opponent's triumph.

And, yes, I was called "queer" back then, though neither I nor, I suspect, my accusers had any real understanding of what that word meant. Today it has a well-known meaning, though why it gives anyone a reason to inflict either physical or emotional pain on anyone else is beyond me. I agree we need to stop bullies but we also need to teach our kids what my Mom taught me: that words cannot hurt me unless I let them. And in a war of words, even the powerful are vulnerable. Still the magnifying effect of being attacked and slandered and mocked in the cyberworld as well as the schoolyard leaves children with no respite from the cruelty of other kids and, if they seek their validation from others, it can be overwhelming. Name-calling, slander and gossip need to considered bad behaviors again. And if the bullying is physical, it should be taken seriously and not tolerated. The Bible condemns both sins of the tongue and interpersonal violence.

There are a lot of titles and descriptors given to God: God Almighty, God Most High, the Lord of hosts, Creator, Redeemer, Comforter, Advocate. But you've probably never heard God called an infracaninophile. And that's because though Christopher Morley coined the word in the 1930s, it's rarely used. It means "lover of the underdog" and it certainly fits our God.

If you read the narrative parts of the Bible, you notice something. Though the society of the Ancient Near East favored firstborns and societies everywhere favor the powerful, God doesn't. The first firstborn, Cain, murders his younger brother Abel and God exiles him for it. Many of the heroes of the Bible are not firstborns: Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David, just to mention a few. God makes a race of slaves, Israel, into his people. And when he sends his son, Jesus is not born to a wealthy or powerful family but to a poor village craftsman and his wife. Jesus confounds his more powerful enemies through vigorous thoughts and strong words honed and wielded skillfully.

The classic underdog is David in his conflict with Goliath. Though some have cast doubt on the idea of a 9 foot 9 inch warrior, we have an ancient Egyptian letter that describes fierce 7 to 9 foot warriors in Canaan and we have found the skeletons of two 7 foot women in the area. Goliath was of that race and with his scaled armor, plumed helmet, enormous spear and full-body shield, he was a formidable foe. Who better to put forth in a contest of champions, through whom the gods will decide the conflict? Though King Saul was taller than his fellow Israelites, he didn't want to face this Philistine behemoth. And so it falls to David, who was dropping off provisions for his brothers in Saul's army. He overheard Goliath's insults to God's people and volunteered to face the giant.

David had never worn armor and so he rejected Saul's after trying it on. Instead he used his weapon of choice: the sling. As a shepherd, he had plenty of solitary time to practice his marksmanship. And it has paid off on the occasion when a lion or bear snatched a lamb from his flock and he had to retrieve it. Nor was David packing a peashooter. Slings were used in battle and typically they hurled rocks the size of your fist or a baseball. The weapon's range was up to 100 yards and a skilled shot could fling a rock at speeds from 80 to 100 miles per hour. Goliath probably didn't know what hit him.

But David was not trusting in his efforts alone. He knew that once that projectile leaves your hand, the wind, the angle of approach, a movement by your opponent, any one of a number of factors can deflect or lessen the impact of it. A sniper fired a head shot at my dad in World War 2 and it was stopped by his helmet. I understand helmets are not really designed to be bulletproof. The Mythbusters showed that depending on caliber of bullet, gun, distance, etc. it is possible for a Bible to stop a bullet. Even if the projectile hits the person, death is not a sure thing. I have personally taken care of 2 patients who were shot in the head and survived with minimal brain damage. So if that rock hadn't hit its target and with sufficient force, Goliath would have made shepherd's pie out of David.

Because we live in a universe with consistent physical rules, bigger and stronger usually rules the day. And the sheep-like behavior of people helps. People like to back a winner and so bullies are usually bolstered by hangers-on and sycophants. But just as it says in Ecclesiastes 9:11, battles do not always go to the strong. And as the game "King of the Hill" teaches us, those who make it to the top can still be toppled. Several tyrants in the Middle East have learned that recently. They trusted in their own strength to keep power.

The Lord is a God of justice and so he doesn't give special consideration to those who already have power. People who have earthly power are more likely to rely on and put their trust in that than in God. In David's case, his roving eye and royal power later on will lead him to commit adultery with Bathsheba and have her husband killed at the battle front. Through the prophet Nathan, God calls David on that and punishes him.

In fact, the prophets frequently speak God's unpalatable truths to those in power, even if they are Israelite or Judean kings. In a world in which religion's chief function is to bless the power structure and the status quo, the inclusion of the prophets in the Hebrew Holy Book is remarkable. Those in power don't like critics. In the 36th chapter of Jeremiah we are told that as the king's secretary read the prophet's scroll, King Jehoiakim would cut off what was just read and throw it in the fire. Neither he nor his attendants worried about destroying God's words because they really did not want to hear themselves or their ways condemned.

And what did Jeremiah and the other prophets condemn in their society? Two things primarily: people's messed up relationship with God and their messed up relationships with each other. In other words, violating the 2 Great Commandments. Either the Israelites and Judeans were worshipping other gods beside Yahweh or their worship of the Lord was empty and insincere. And that bled over into the way they treated the least fortunate in the land. As God reminded them in Isaiah 58, "Is this not the fast that I choose, to loosen 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, to bring the homeless into your house; if you see someone naked, to clothe him and not hide yourself from your own people?"  

The powerful used their wealth or connections to deny the poor their rights. To King Shallum, the disappointing son of the righteous King Josiah, Jeremiah says, "Woe to him who builds his house without righteousness and his upper rooms without justice, who makes his neighbor work for nothing and doesn't give him his wages….Do you rule because you lust to excel in cedar? Didn't your father manage to eat and drink and still do what is just and upright? Then it was well for him. He pled the cause of the poor and the needy and then all went well. Isn't that what it means to know me, says the Lord?" (Jer 22:13, 15-16) In Proverbs 31, kings are commanded to "speak out for those who cannot speak, for the cause of all the destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously and defend the cause of the poor and needy."

The reason misdirected worship and mistreatment of the vulnerable go together is because of God's nature. He is a father. He won't let the stronger pick on the weak. In Psalm 10, the psalmist says to God, "You do see it. You take note of trouble and grief to repay it by your hand. The poor commits himself to you. You are the helper of the orphan….You have heard the desire of the humble. You will strengthen their hearts. Your ear will hear them."  People come to resemble what they worship. People who worship God in the right spirit share his values. As Proverbs 29:7 says, "The righteous knows the rights of the poor; the wicked do not understand such concern." And in chapter 19 it says, "Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord and he will repay him for his good deed." If you helped out my daughter or son, I would consider it a good deed done to me and repay you for your kindness. That's how God views the poor. And in chapter 14 we read, "Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker but those who are kind to the needy honor him." 

Nor is this just an Old Testament thing. Mary, filled with the Holy Spirit, praises the God who scatters the arrogant in mind and heart, pulls down the powerful from their thrones and exalts the humble, feeds the hungry with good things and sends away the wealthy with empty hands. John the Baptist said, "Let the man with two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise." Jesus said, "Sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves purses which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys." Jesus also said, "Give to him who asks of you and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you." In 1st John we are asked, "If someone has worldly means and sees a brother in need, but closes his heart to him, in what way does the love of God continue to live in him?" Paul reminds us that Jesus said it is more blessed to give than to receive and that the Lord loves a cheerful giver.

This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with justice. As it says in Leviticus 19, "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly." And in an ideal world, justice would be blind. What you did would determine how you are treated.  Your race, religion, economic class, country of origin, anything you are would be irrelevant. But we live in a society in which, if you kill someone, statistically you're much less likely to be executed or draw a life sentence if you are rich and/or white than if you're poor and/or non-white; where you will go to jail if you rob a bank but not if you financially destroy one; where the quality of your legal representation is directly tied to your ability to pay for a lawyer. We live in a world where a country that just overthrew a dictator and held a democratic election is being denied that by that country's military, where in another country the dictator is killing his people with impunity, where children are abducted from African villages and forced to kill their families and turned into child soldiers, where the trafficking of women sex slaves has become more profitable than drugs. We live in a world where people who should be role models, coaches and priests and teachers and bishops, use the power of their positions to sexually exploit children. And why? Because they can. Because from the earliest time in history, people with power have used that power for themselves. Big guys bully little guys. Rich guys take advantage of poor guys. Big corporations give millions to politicians because, according to a recent study, they get an average return rate of 22,000% in terms of tax breaks. The way of the world is: if you have power, you use it for yourself.

God's way is: if your have power, you use it for those who need it. As it says in Philippians, "Have the same attitude among you that was in Christ Jesus who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard his equality with God as something to cling to but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, becoming the likeness of a human being, and being found in human form, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name." That is our God. That is why we worship him and that is how we should emulate him in regards to others. He had absolute power and gave it up, limiting himself, to live and die as one of us to save us, to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. That is what power is for. That is how it's to be used in the Kingdom of God.

We are citizens of that Kingdom. We are to work for justice and fairness, helping those who cannot help themselves as Jesus does for us. But the Lord is also a God of mercy. If not, we would never survive his justice. And he is a God of grace. The best explanation of the differences that I have heard is this: Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting everything you deserve to get. And grace is getting what you could never deserve. God not only saves us from the spiritual consequences of our sins but gives us grace to be his children and heirs. We do not deserve his grace but being recipients of it we pass it on to others. We take our role as Christ's body on earth and work for justice, offer mercy and dispense grace.

The world may owe us nothing but we owe God everything. For that reason we cannot let ourselves be counted with the bullies and the oppressors and the thieves and the exploiters and the self-indulgent and all the folks who make this a terrible place for the poor and the sick and the damaged and the neglected and the despised and the vulnerable. We cannot be a part of those people who look at the unfortunate and say "Tough luck" and move on. We don't believe in luck, tough or otherwise. We believe in a gracious God and so we stop and help. We believe in a merciful God and so we offer forgiveness. We believe in a just God and so we work to rectify injustice.

We are called to be the anti-bullies of this world. Bullies pick on people and knock them down. We reach out and pick up fallen humanity. Bullies instill fear. We instill faith. Bullies use their power to intimidate weaker people into doing their will. We imitate Christ using his power to help the weak find God's gracious will for them. And we know that even in this dog eat dog world, we needn't worry. Because God loves the underdog.

More Than Meets the Eye

The Scripture referred to is 2 Corinthians 6-17.
 
It sounds like the premise of a movie but what if a loved one was convinced that you were not who you said you were but an impostor? If questioned, this person would admit that you looked and sounded and moved just like their father, mother, spouse, etc. but they just knew you weren't really that person. It's called Capgras Syndrome and it can be the result of schizophrenia, dementia or brain injury. Unlike prosopagnosia or face blindness, patients who suffered from Capgras Syndrome recognize the faces of family and friends but the usual emotional response to them is absent. This leads some neuroscientists to postulate a disconnect between the temporal cortex of the brain, where facial recognition is performed, and the limbic system, where emotions are generated. Because the person's spouse, for instance, looks like the spouse to them but just doesn't "feel" like their spouse, they reason that he or she must be an imposter. Thank God this is a rare syndrome.

The reason I bring this up is that when we see things or people, we perceive them not just as random objects but in some cases as more than that. A child learns to differentiate between toys in general and his toys, dogs in general and his pet, people in general and his family. We tend to remember events that evoke an emotional response in us better than, say, a routine visit to the store. Yet in an objective sense, our eyes see no more than a stranger would.

One of the wonderful features of the updated Sherlock Holmes TV series from the BBC is what we might call "Sherlock vision." At times, we see crime scenes through the great detective's eyes. In the first episode, as Sherlock examines a body, he pulls off the victim's wedding ring. Above the exterior of the ring floats the word "dirty." He looks at the interior and the word "clean" appears. Other signs indicate that she is from out of town. He later announces that she was a serial adulterer, based on the fact that she did not value her marriage enough to keep her ring looking nice but removed it so often that the inner side was smooth and shiny. The effect is humorously highlighted when he is confronted by a naked Irene Adler. When Sherlock looks at John Watson, words pop up indicating from the unevenness of his shaving which side his shaving mirror must be on and from the state of his clothes whether the doctor changed after coming home from a date. But when he looks at the unclothed woman, Holmes sees only question marks!

In our passage from 2 Corinthians Paul writes that "we walk by faith, not by sight." Skeptics take this as a statement of opposites. "If walking by faith is the opposite of walking by sight, then it must mean faith is blind." They think that faith means shutting your eyes to reality or at least certain parts of it and find it strange that we should brag of navigating in an impaired manner. But that is not what Paul means. He is saying that walking by faith is not the opposite of walking by sight but perceiving more than is seen by the naked eye. There is a logic to our spiritual approach that reveals dimensions mere materialism cannot fathom.

For reasons known only to the people who prepared our lectionary, our reading begins in the middle of Paul's discussion of life and death. In the verse before the one we start with, Paul says that God has given us his Spirit as a down payment or guarantee of what he has promised us. It is because we have God's Spirit in us that we are confident that whatever lies beyond this life is better, offering a greater intimacy with God than is possible in this life. It is in this context that he talks of walking or navigating through life by faith rather than by mere sight. In the light of our having eternal life, things look different.

Obviously, knowing that we have eternal life means we need not fear death but it also means we want to live in a manner that will please Jesus from whom we receive such life and whom we will meet face to face when we die. It is the relationship of trust and love we have with Jesus that makes us see the world as we do. While we may not exhibit the deductive ability of Sherlock, through faith, our trust in a creative, loving, redeeming God, we see that there is more to the world and to people than just a collection of atoms, chemicals and biological drives. Just as recognizing a person to be our father or mother causes us to greet that person more warmly than we would someone we are meeting for the first time, so recognizing Jesus in the people we meet every day will affect how we treat them.

Ideally, we should treat everyone as Jesus in disguise or in distress. That can be hard. The person we meet may be morally repugnant. How can we see Christ in someone who gives free reign to his rage, or is prejudiced, or is dishonest, or is always coming on to people, or who is always under the influence of drugs or who is arrogant?

If you're hunting for treasure, unlike movies, you're not likely to find it in a cave, all shiny and alluring. Those who dive wrecks and seek valuables that have been underwater for centuries look instead for unnaturally shaped lumps under layers of muck. They know that precious coins and the like are probably covered with growths and corals and corrosion. They don't look like much to the untrained eye. But the salvors gather them up and send them up to the boat and later, in a lab, people will patiently work to gently remove all of the dirt and accretions until a golden goblet or a bejeweled cross is revealed. Hidden treasures have to be salvaged.

Or to change the image, think of a sea turtle who is disfigured or disabled by fibropapillomas. They will suffer and eventually die unless someone rescues them and takes them to someplace like our Turtle Hospital, so the growths can be removed. That's how we have to look at people who appear to be unChristlike. The precious image of God is there. Our job is simply to identify and acknowledge them and lift them up to God. If that person lets him, the Holy Spirit will work to remove those things which obscure and distort God's image in them and bring out the likeness of Christ. And of course, the same process applies to us as well.

Looking at your life through the eyes of faith, you will see that it is more than just a period between birth and death in which you work in order that you may eat, sleep, and procreate in relative comfort. Instead, life is a mission. But unlike James Bond, our mission is not to keep secrets and kill people, but to spread the good news and help people. It is unfortunate that our heroes today are so ruthless that they can only be identified as good guys by the fact that they kill bad guys. Jesus had a different way of getting rid of bad guys--he transformed them into good guys. If he were to come back now and, as some desire, scour the earth of all who were evil--not just murderers but those who lie and gossip and don't forgive and commit adultery in their hearts and don't use his gifts for his purposes and don't give to the poor or help the sick and aren't hospitable to the alien and don't visit those in prison and don't feed the hungry and don't stand for justice for the oppressed--well, none of us would survive. Our only hope is in being saved from those things that we do and which have become our habits by God's grace in Christ Jesus.         

And our talents and skills are not simply for advancing ourselves in this world but through faith we see they are gifts from the Spirit to use for furthering and fulfilling our mission.

Our mission as Jesus articulated it is to go and make students and followers of him in every nation, baptize them in the name of the Triune God and teach them to keep his commandments. We are not to use laws or force to bring new people to Christ but words of wisdom and acts of love. Which means learning more about the Bible and Christianity ourselves so we can pass it on. It also means we must be living examples of Chrislike behavior. We can't let ourselves off the hook by saying "do as we say, not as we do." That's hypocrisy.

It also means we see everyone we meet as either a brother or sister in Christ or as a potential brother or sister in Christ. Which helps us in carrying out our mission by giving us motive. As Paul says, "For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all." Everyone we know, everyone we meet is someone for whom Christ died. But it does no one any good if they don't take advantage of it. After the Civil War, all slaves were free. But some did not act on that good news. They were afraid of freedom, its choices and responsibilities. They stayed on the plantations where they had lived and worked for wages that, after paying for food and lodging, left them as little better than slaves. That is the lot of all who do not respond to the fact that by his death Christ has freed us from enslavement to sin. All who are dead to the fact must be awakened.

In a sense it is as if we died to sin. "Therefore all have died," as Paul put it. We are as free from the penalty of sin as death would render us for any earthly crime. But it was Jesus who died for us. He took our penalty and we owe him our lives. Again, Paul says, "And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them." So we do not see ourselves as free agents who only have ourselves to answer to. We belong to Jesus and our lives are now in Christ. We are to put on Christ, which means our focus is not on ourselves but outward toward others.

"From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view," says Paul. The human way to look at people is to classify them as family, friend or foe. There is a reason why we prefer people who look and talk and act like us. When we lived in extended family units and clans, those are the people you could usually expect to look out for you and help you. Folks from other tribes might be friendly, might be potential allies, but they could just as easily be rivals for resources.

It is not unusual for animals to be friendly and even forgiving towards members of their own family unit. But meercats will battle other families of meercats, chimps will wage war on other groups of chimps, ants will march into the territory of other ants and fight to the death. That's natural and normal for them as it was for most of human history. But Jesus wants us to love not only those who already love us but those who don't. Because when he died for all, he died for them, too, of course. So we see them differently.

We see Jesus differently, too, Paul reminds us. The popular idea of the Messiah then was a holy warrior who was to free his people by killing those who were not his people. Instead Jesus destroyed the idea of a partisan God and a partisan savior. We don't see him as most of his contemporaries did. We see him as God-with-us, God who knows us all to be flawed and sinful and who died for us all anyway. He see him not just as a special human used by God but as God incarnate. We see him as the supreme exemplar of God's self-sacrificial redeeming love.

And so because of who he is and what he's done and for whom he has done it, we don't regard the people to whom he's sent us with this good news from a merely earthly point of view, especially if they respond to Christ. Those of us who let Jesus clean away those moral accretions and remove those spiritual tumors that obscure who he created us to be know there is more here than meets the eye. We are not who we were, who we once let ourselves become. That version of us is dead; God means to resurrect us and his whole creation to be something startling, something unanticipated, something groundbreaking. As Paul puts it, "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" Walking by faith, we see all people, this whole world in fact, as a work in progress. The mess around us is that of the new creation under construction, the new heavens and the new earth in embryonic form, new men and new women in the process of being born anew. Through the eyes of faith, we see the old paradigms falling apart and the new ones being built up, one principle and one person at a time. Walk by sight and you will stumble over the unseen and the imperceptible. Walk by faith and you will see a new temple being built of living stones, a more comprehensive image of God, comprised of all of us mirroring certain facets of our creator, coming together like a mosaic to show the full glory of our God our Father reflected in the face of his son Jesus Christ, whose body we are called to be.

Unforgivable

This is based on Mark 3:20-35.

If you visit enough religious sites on the web, you're likely to see an ad for "The God Who Wasn't There."  When I saw the film listed on Netflix, I finally decided to watch it. Basically it is one man's argument that Jesus never existed and was a myth used by Paul and the early church. Brian Flemming, the documentary's writer and director, interviews a handful of experts, mostly of a skeptical bent, with the notable exception of one: the principal of the Christian school Flemming attended as a kid. The principal obviously doesn't know that the alumna who is interviewing him is planning on challenging him on the basis of his faith.

Sadly, Flemming does not confront the educator on his principle failing: not teaching Flemming how to do research properly. Many of Flemming's "facts" are wrong; his timeline is off; and he really doesn't understand one key doctrine that he features prominently--blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Flemming seems to think that this means having doubt in God's existence, period. And because Jesus says this is an "unforgivable" sin, Flemming feels this is tantamount to mind control and is meant to stop people from questioning and therefore thinking.

It may very well be that this little religious school left him with that impression. It's too bad that Flemming didn't pick up any commentaries or even examine more closely the context of the Scripture in which this appears. If he had, he'd find a solid consensus that this passage does not say anything remotely like what he thinks it does. But this is a verse that disturbs a lot of people so we ought to look at just what is does and doesn't say.

By this point in Mark, Jesus' ministry is rubbing the Pharisees the wrong way. That was easy to do. The Pharisees were a religious group that not only were nitpickers about the Torah, the law of Moses as set down in the first 5 books of the Bible, but also experts in the traditional interpretations and applications of those laws over the centuries. You could get in trouble with them even if you obeyed what the Torah specifically said but didn't do it as laid out by the generations of rabbis whose interpretations were recorded in the Talmud, a commentary on a commentary of the Torah.

If you wanted to keep people from accidentally falling off a cliff, you would put up a fence. But you wouldn't put it at the very edge of the cliff. Someone might walk right up to the edge, lean on the fence and go over. You'd set the fence back from the cliff by several feet. The rabbis often did something similar with the 613 commandments of the Torah. For instance, in Exodus 23:19 and a couple of other places, the Hebrews are forbidden from boiling a young goat in its mother's milk. The reason is not given but it may have been a pagan practice. But scholars of the Torah, in order to make this absolutely impossible, forbade serving dairy and meat together. In orthodox Jewish homes, they have 2 sets of dishes, one for dairy and one for meat. Supposedly, the inspiration for Paul Simon's song, "Mother and Child Reunion," was his eating a cheeseburger, something an observant Jew would never do.

Some of these hedges around the Torah could get quite burdensome. Hebrews were not to work on the Sabbath. But what constituted work? The rabbis eventually enumerated more than 3 dozen categories. They debated whether one could eat an egg laid on the Sabbath. They prescribed a certain number of steps you could take--outside one's house, of course, or otherwise you might find yourself pausing in mid-stride just walking across a room. But what if your family lived in a camp? Rabbis decided that you could count anything that could be enclosed with a string as your home. After Hurricane Andrew I read about a neighborhood of Orthodox Jews whose first priority was to put up this very long string that had been strung along the telephone poles around their community, so that they could move freely on the Sabbath.

Jesus healed on the Sabbath and that was enough to inflame the Pharisees. Now they weren't merciless about this. You could medically treat someone on the Sabbath if they otherwise might die. But Jesus healed people who weren't in a life and death situation and so the Pharisees felt they could wait until after sunset. Jesus pointed out that the Sabbath--all of the Law, really--was given for our benefit, not the other way around. Why shouldn't he relieve these people of the burdens that made every day of their lives hard work and allow them the rest and refreshment of the Sabbath as well?          

Yet the Pharisees saw Jesus as an evil influence, a bad example, letting people slack off with regards to the minute details of observing the law. But how could they explain Jesus' amazing ability to heal those who were mentally and physically ill? Isn't his ability to do such great good a sign that, like the prophets of old, he was filled with God's Holy Spirit?

At that time, people believed that disease was caused by entities invisible to the naked eye called demons. Some people today feel superior because we know that many diseases are caused by entities invisible to the naked eye called germs (as well as toxins, DNA, nutritional factors, etc.) Regardless of that, they were almost as helpless in dealing with most diseases then as we are becoming in dealing with the ever growing number of antibiotic-resistant germs. So Jesus' healing ability was a godsend. But the real theological problem for the Pharisees was how could this slacker (when it came to the Law) cast out unclean spirits? It must be an evil ruse! Jesus must be casting out demons with the help of the prince of demons!

Beelzebul is literally "the lord of the flies" and possibly "the lord of dung." It is a Hebrew pun for the name of a Canaanite god, the "Exalted Baal." By Jesus' day, it became a synonym for Satan, which means "adversary." When Jesus hears this accusation, he immediately shows them how stupid this is. Why would the adversary be attacking against his own forces? If your enemy is fighting himself, that spells his eventual collapse.

The alternate solution, Jesus points out, is that the adversary is being defeated by someone more powerful than he. If you're going to loot a strong man's mansion, you're going to have to tie up the strong man. Rather than Jesus being in league with Satan, it makes more sense to conclude he is stronger than his adversary. But the Pharisees don't want to go there, so they would rather see the obvious good he is doing as some really subtle kind of evil.

That's when Jesus brings up blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. It is not disbelieving in God's existence. The Pharisees certainly believe in that. But they don't recognize God at work when they see it. They see God's goodness and say it is evil. They have talked themselves into such a state that they deny the clear evidence of the God they supposedly follow. That is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.

Why is it unforgivable? Because a person who sees good as bad is certainly not going to submit themselves to that badness. When I worked as a Psych Tech on the psychiatric floor, before I was a nurse, my coworkers and I would have to take turns looking after the patients in the locked ward. Here we had patients who were a danger to themselves and others as well as those who might wander off. The most seriously ill patients would end up there--the suicidal person, the patient in the manic phase of bipolar disease, the extremely delusional patient. It was just them and me and a panic button.

One day I noticed that a schizophrenic patient we'll call George was looking at me very intently. A depressed person doesn't usually look mentally ill but a person who sees things that aren't there or who is listening to voices that aren't there has a particular look to their eyes that you pick up on after a few years of working with them. George had that look and despite the distractions of TV and the other patients, his eyes were on me alone. For my part I was mentally measuring the distance between me and the big red panic button on the wall above and to the right of where I sat. Suddenly George jumped up, pointed his finger at me and said "Chris, in the name of Jesus Christ I command you to be gone!" To his visible dismay, I did not vanish. But I realized I could not work with George anymore. He saw me as evil and so he wouldn't confide in me or listen to me, much less receive any care at my hands. If he saw me as a demon incarnate, he could never trust me or see anything I did as good.

That's what Jesus saw when the Pharisees accused him of being in league with the devil. As N.T. Wright says, "Once you label what is in fact the work of the Holy Spirit as the work of the devil, there's no way back. It's like holding a conspiracy theory: all the evidence you see will simply confirm your belief." The Pharisees weren't mentally ill. They had so blinded themselves with their spiritual ideology that they saw good as evil because it suited their purpose and would never trust Jesus. Which meant he couldn't help them.

When the New Testament speaks of believing in God or Jesus, the word really means trust. To be sure, it could be used in the sense of simply thinking something was true, whether you actually relied on that belief or not. But primarily it meant trust. The book of James points out the difference when it says, "You believe that there is one God? Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder." Sadly, due to certain dumbed-down presentations of the gospel, a lot of people think that as long as they simply believe God exists, things between him and them are fine. But they don't change their lives and this is pointed at by non-believers as evidence that God doesn't exist. In his film, Flemming excoriates such so-called Christians precisely because, unlike fundamentalists, they don't display the courage of their convictions. I've seen patients who professed to believe the doctors but not enough to change the lifestyles which have led to the problems they wanted the doctors to cure. The greatest physician in the world can't cure a non-compliant patient. You can do the surgery and put in the stitches but if the patient won't let anyone change the dressing or clean the wound site or if he won't take his medication, he could still die.

You can't work with people you can't trust or who don't trust you. It is the Spirit's specific role to work on the hearts and minds of those who turn to God. But they have to have faith in him; they have to trust him. And the first step in the Christian life is to accept God's forgiveness of your sins. God can't forgive you if you won't let him. Ironically, the sin that is unforgivable is not letting yourself be forgiven.

We all start out resistant to the Spirit. And accepting forgiveness means admitting we have done things that need to be forgiven. That's hard. The most difficult part of recovery from a substance abuse problem is admitting you have a problem. The work of getting better cannot begin until denial is overcome. If you deny you have a problem, if you say that black is white, if you see those who want to help you as meddlers and busybodies, as people wishing to do you evil rather than good, you can't be helped.

But of course, if they change their mind, they can be helped. That’s the thing. If you can change your mind, if you have a change of heart, you can be saved. In order to remain unforgiven, you have to persist in resisting the goodness of the Spirit. Paul thought the Christians were bad Jews and he persecuted them and tried to make them deny Christ. Then Jesus appeared to him and Paul changed his mind and became the foremost missionary for Christ. Blaspheming the Holy Spirit is an eternal sin only if the person continues to hold that God's Spirit is evil and does evil and won't let him in.  

There are some people, who, like Flemming, have read or heard this passage of scripture and began worrying that they have committed it. But as we've seen that's not the unforgivable sin is. It is not denying Christ. Peter did that in the high priest's courtyard the night Christ was betrayed and yet Jesus forgave him. It is not doubt. it is not questioning. It is not thinking. It is not even seeing evil as good. Nazis and Klansmen and even murderers have seen and felt the Spirit at work and have realized that what they thought was good was evil and have come to Jesus for forgiveness and healing and salvation. Jesus asked God to forgive those who were in the process of crucifying him. And one of the people in Flemming's film, a lawyer with a blog called the Raving Atheist, is now a Christian. If you can worry about being forgiven, if you want to be forgiven, God can forgive you. God loves you so much he will forgive you anything if only you ask. But he will not force you to accept his love or forgiveness. You have to let him in. So in the end the only thing that can stop God from forgiving you is you.

The Grand Inquisitor

This is Trinity Sunday, so usually I would tackle that most paradoxical and yet rewarding of doctrines. And I might touch upon Dorothy L. Sayers, because my understanding of the Trinity was greatly enhanced by her book, The Mind of the Maker. Sayers, a prodigious writer of detective novels, religious plays, essays on Christianity and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, drew upon her experience as a creative person in approaching the nature of God. She saw a parallel between the persons of the Triune God and the creative process. Everything a person creates begins with an idea. The artist, engineer, writer, or craftsman then has to realize his idea in some concrete form. Then the form is presented to the world. A truly great work is one in which the idea is great, the execution perfectly captures the idea, and the finished work communicates powerfully with other people. Sayers said the original idea is like God the Father. The realization or incarnation of that idea is like the Son of God. The communication of that perfectly realized work is like the Holy Spirit. 

A work of creation can fail at any point: the idea may not be that great, or the execution is sloppy or flawed, or despite the work having captured the basic idea, it says nothing to the world at large. Hitler did not get into art school because his very precise paintings of buildings were merely that. They were devoid of humanity or creative vision. Whereas the works of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren, Bach and many others continue to speak to us.            

Today's sermon suggestion is that we look at a piece of literature that still speaks powerfully to those who encounter it: the story of the Grand Inquisitor. It is found in chapter 5 of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which you probably read in high school. Ivan, who is an atheist, tells his younger brother Alyosha, who is a novice at a monastery, the plot of a poem he is writing. It is a parable about freedom of choice.

The poem takes place in Seville at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. Christ returns to earth, not to bring about the last days but to visit his people. He heals many and raises a little girl from the dead. Everyone recognizes him, including the Grand Inquisitor, fresh from burning a hundred heretics. The Inquisitor arrests Christ and visits him that night in his prison cell.

The Inquisitor tells Christ that he is not welcome here because he turned down Satan's offers during his temptation in the wilderness. Jesus said "No" because by using his powers this way or by accepting earthly authority he would have made accepting him as Lord irresistible and therefore would have made it impossible for men to come to him of their own free will. But people are so weak-willed they cannot come to Christ on their own. So the church has had to do what Jesus refused to. It has offered bread, buying the loyalty of the poor. It has offered miracles and mystery, compelling people to accept whatever it said. It has been taking on the secular power of the kingdoms of this world, so as to force people to accept its rules. And because his appearance could undo all that, the Inquisitor tells Christ that he will be burned at the stake tomorrow. Jesus says nothing but kisses the Inquisitor. The old man, overcome, throws open the cell door, telling Christ to leave and never return.

There are many reasons why this story has stuck in the minds of its readers. There is the rhapsodically written first part, describing Christ walking through the streets of Seville, healing people and their response to him. There is the juxtaposition of Christ, the church's model and ideal, with the Inquisitor, the most perverse office ever created by the church. There is the surprising action of the Inquisitor in arresting Christ and his novel argument for the way the church operates. Then there is Christ's silent response: a kiss. And the Inquisitor's reaction: releasing Jesus but warning him not to come back.

For our purposes I want to confine my comments to the Inquisitor's argument and how Jesus counters that.

I'm not sure that I totally buy the Inquisitor's interpretation of Jesus' temptations, that they were all about our freedom to choose to follow him. To be sure, one of the things Jesus was doing in the desert was preparing for his ministry. And, yes, had he succumbed to any of the temptations, it would have changed that ministry. But unlike the Inquisitor, I can't see that it would be for the better.

First off, the bread. Jesus had been fasting a long time and was really hungry. As I see it, the temptation to turn stones into bread is to use his power for his own benefit. Hey, what good is being God's Son if you can't use that power to meet your own needs? That's reasonable, right? But power tempts. If you have been given power, you come to think you deserve perks as well. If you're special, don't you deserve special treatment? I'm sure that's what is behind the mega-church and TV preachers who live in large mansions and drive limos and own private jets. "Hey, I'm toiling for the Lord. I'm getting him lots of followers. They're giving lots of money to the Lord's work. I deserve a cut." I'm sure that's what's behind a lot of cult leaders coming to think they can have any woman in the group that they want.

Power also means you don't need to suffer what other people have to--waiting in line, economy class on planes, running your own errands, putting up with ordinary people. If Jesus had let himself use his power to avoid suffering hunger, it would have been harder for him to not to use it to avoid suffering the things that would go along with his ministry--like being touched by mobs of people seeking healing, or being interrupted at meals, or being exhausted from all that he had to do and say to spread the message. And if he used his power to avoid suffering hunger, would he have been willing to go through suffering the pain and death of the cross?
 
Nevertheless, the Inquisitor was right about one thing: more people would have followed Jesus if he was their meal ticket. Jesus did feed multitudes a couple of times and those people were going to forcibly make him king. But when Jesus told them he wanted to feed their souls with his body and blood, they got turned off. Jesus didn't want moochers and hangers on. He wanted people who would stick with him in good times and bad because it was the right thing to do, not because there was something in it for them. Or rather, he didn't want them to follow him because of physical things they could get from him but also from other sources; Jesus wanted them to follow him because of what only he could give: himself. If that isn't enough, nothing else would be.

I bet we could get a lot more people in this church if we gave them all $10 bills. Of course, some other church might start giving out $20s and we'd have a price war. Still, we could attract a lot more people that way. But I doubt we would get more Christians, more people willing to deny themselves, pick up their cross and follow the path of self-sacrificial love that Jesus blazed.

This is not to say we shouldn't have food ministries or ministries that provide other basic needs to those who have been doing without. But we should do these things out of love and to serve Christ when we see him hungry or thirsty or in need of clothing or of nursing back to health or of hospitality or of support when in prison. We shouldn't use these things as bait to get converts.

Next Jesus nixes jumping off the tip of the temple, trusting the angels to arrest his fall. This would not be much of a temptation for me. When I was a kid I never thought of testing my dad's love by jumping off of something high and expecting him to catch me. But it would be a spectacular way to kick off Jesus' ministry. If he did a back flip off the pinnacle of the temple and stuck the landing without shattering his shinbones, he'd be the talk of the town. In this case, the Inquisitor was on the money.

However, Jesus didn't do miracles just to convince people. He did them in response to people's needs. Of the 35 miracles the gospels record Jesus performing, only 9 were not healings or raising the dead. But they included feeding the hungry, some extra large catches of fish, and not letting the storm drown his disciples. Even so, he was reluctant to become the wine supplier to a wedding he attended until his mother put him on the spot. And he flat out refused to show off for skeptics when they asked. When people wanted a miracle as a sign of his authority, Jesus was at pains to point out that he'd rather they evaluated the truth of his words. He wasn't performing a magic show; he was showing them the gracious nature of God. When that required him to jumpstart or speed up the healing process or hasten the end of a storm or stretch a meal beyond what was humanly possible, so be it. But when it required explaining a theological or moral principle, he did that instead.  

But wouldn't ending every argument with a miracle have clinched things? No. People's capacity for rationalization can explain away anything. Thomas Jefferson was so skeptical about anything he couldn't explain that, when he received a report of a meteorite landing by a couple of astronomers, he was quoted as saying, "I would rather believe two Yankee professors would lie than that stones have fallen from the heavens." A recent study shows that if people strongly believe in one side of an issue, the more contrary data you give them, the more they cling to their beliefs. When Jesus' enemies couldn't deny the fact that he was healing people and casting out demons, they said he was doing it with the aid of the prince of demons. That's when Jesus warned them about blaspheming or insulting the Holy Spirit.

Still flashy miracles would have convinced most people and Jesus would have had a larger following. I'm not sure it would have meant much after he went to the cross. The disciples who lived with him for 3 years were discouraged by his execution. People who followed him merely because of some impressive miracle he did, but not because he spoke to their hearts and minds about the need to change and a kingdom based on love, would not hang around once Jesus was in the ground. As with giving everyone bread, more and flashier miracles would have brought Jesus the wrong kind of followers.

Finally, the Inquisitor says Jesus should have taken Satan's offer to receive all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worshiping him. The Inquisitor says that the church has essentially made that bargain with the devil. It has gotten temporal power. Taking away people's freedom to choose whether to be Christian or not, according to the Inquisitor, has made them happier. But the fact that he has to burn Christian heretics--the Inquisition didn't officially have power over Jews or Muslims--means that people were not happy with this form of Christianity. The real Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, had 300 bodyguards, so he had no illusions that he was making people happy. There wouldn't have been a Reformation if people had been happy with that version of Christianity.   

Ultimately, despite the novelty and boldness of the Inquisitor's argument, he is wrong. People would not be happier with no choice. Too much choice does cause unhappiness, studies show, but so does having no choice of, or control over, what you do. What the Inquisitor is doing is justifying the status quo and his own choices in life. What's ironic is there are still people who think forcing people to be Christians or behave like Christians is a good idea. Luckily the people who drafted the Bill of Rights put separation of church and state in the very first amendment. And they did it to keep the church from being corrupted as the state churches were in Europe.

Jesus didn't come as the holy warrior most Jews expected the messiah to be. He didn't intend to conquer the world by force. Accepting Jesus as one's Lord has to be voluntary just as love has to be voluntary. It only seems like it would be easier if we could make people become Christians. But a team won't work well if some members really don't want to be on it. Bribing people to become Christians doesn't instill genuine loyalty, either. Love is the key ingredient. Love is the best motivator. It works better than bribes or miracles or force. You'd think we'd have learned that by now.

On some level, Ivan, the atheist writer of the poem knows that as well. He has Christ answer the Inquisitor's argument with a kiss. And that makes the old man change his mind about killing him and release him instead. Why does he do so? We are not told. Perhaps he is still human, still compassionate enough, not to kill Love Incarnate. Perhaps he remembered his early love of Jesus before he became disillusioned and pragmatic. Perhaps he recognized that Jesus had demolished his elaborate edifice of clever words with a simple act of love.

Since the Enlightenment we have tried to reduce everything in the universe to hard logic and cold reason. But not everything worthwhile is rational. Hope is not always rational but take away all hope and people die as surely as if you had poisoned them. Faith, trusting someone else, is not strictly rational but destroy someone's faith and you have crippled them. Love…logic has as much luck pinning down love as you would a greased pig but without love, life wouldn't be worth living. And God's love is at the heart of creation, its origin, its motive power, its goal. God is love: the Father loving the Son, loving the Father, in the unity of the Spirit for all eternity. And if we respond to the love of God perfectly realized in Christ and let his Spirit resonate, renew and restore in us the ability to hope and to trust and to love like him, we can enter into the neverending circle of his love. 

The Impact of the Untouchable

Nursing is hard. You see people at their worst: in pain, demented, afraid, sometimes drunk or high. You're there to help them but they may not appreciate that, especially if you have to give them a shot, or do a dressing change on a painful wound, or tell them something they don't wish to hear. Add to that the long hours, unrealistic and dangerous nurse to patient ratios, the ungodly amount of charting done largely for legal, not medical, reasons, the physical damage and emotional toll that are part of the job and it's not surprising that you find nurses who act more like disgruntled bureaucrats than angels of mercy. Yet what you need when you are sick and in pain are caregivers who are caring and giving. If the physical part of the job were all that mattered nurses could be replaced by robots with pill dispensers in their torsos. Don't laugh. Companies in Germany and Japan are working on them. The German model looks like a robot with a TV screen for a head on which a real nurse can look in on the patient remotely. The Japanese version looks eerily human but not quite.

But most people would not relate well to a machine. In fact, I would not put a robot nurse in the same room as someone with dementia or even conditions like urinary tract infections which often have mental side effects. And of course a machine would lack human judgment. I met a man whose wife is battling Social Security over being classified as a male, despite having a female name. It's obviously a computer error. Someone clicked the wrong box. Can you imagine what could happen should the computer in question be the one that is taking care of you? Say, after bladder surgery? That might not be a problem in the German model, where a nurse is driving the hardware by remote control. (I just hope it works better during bad weather than cable or satellite hookups do!) But if you're dealing with Artificial Intelligence, as in the Japanese model, may God have mercy on your soul! And body!

The real problem is that a caregiver should not merely look alive or human but be so. How do you program a machine to be empathetic or compassionate or comforting or considerate? How does a computer recognize the subtle signs of disease or discomfort, like distaste for one of the foods on a plate, or sudden irritability? How does a robot pick up on loneliness? You don't replace the dispirited with the soulless.

Spirit is one of those indefinable but undeniable elements in this world. Perhaps that's why the Holy Spirit is manifested in the events of Acts 2 as the phenomena of fire, wind and speech. Each is real and incredibly powerful but none can be grasped or, in the case of wind and speech, seen. None of them can be totally controlled and so all must be respected. Yet each can, if properly approached, yield great good.   

What do these 3 tell us about God's Spirit?

Fire is often a metaphor for energy, which it physically is. It also is used for excitement and passion. We talk about an idea catching fire or a person being on fire or having fire in the belly. And when we talk about encouraging someone to act, we speak of lighting a fire under them. You could say that in Acts 2, the Spirit lights a fire under the apostles! Jesus has been raised, has taught them for 40 days and ascended to the Father. It's time for his followers to spread the news. The Spirit starts the fire. Like a fire with multiple points of ignition, it can't be stopped. The apostles use every language imaginable to proclaim the wonderful works of God, the chief one being what he has just done in Christ Jesus. And the message spreads like wildfire.

Fire also illuminates. Nowadays if we want to show a cartoon character getting an idea or an inspiration we draw a light bulb over his head. In those days, I'm not sure how one would depict such a thing but if they had cartoons it couldn't be a lightbulb; it would have to be a flame over the head. Which is what you would have seen if you had been in that house on Pentecost. Did those tongues of flame mean anything more than the presence of the Spirit? Did it mean an insight or an idea as well? Possibly. It could have been the idea that "now is the time to get started on the commission Jesus gave us!" That seems to be the heart of Peter's sermon: that this is what the prophet Joel was talking about. The outpouring of the Spirit was a dramatic sign of the beginning of the Messianic age, the next step in the spread of God's Kingdom.

Fire also is a metaphor for love. When we are in love, our heart beats faster which can cause our faces to flush and look red. We get hot under the collar. Our hearts burn with love. Cool is never a descriptor of love. We are hot for the person we love. We never want the flames of love to be extinguished. 

Fire also purifies. It is necessary to refine metals. The impurities must be separated if we want our iron to be strong and our gold to be beautiful.

Wind is an exhilarating but powerful force. When I was working at the radio station, some storm chasers brought us video of what a recent hurricane did on the mainland. We saw roofs peel off of buildings. We saw signs go airborne. We saw trees bend and boats capsize. But the scariest sight was one of the storm chasers out in the hurricane. He got blown off his feet and started to tumble and slide across the parking lot like a sheet of newspaper. It was frightening to see a human being get knocked down and rolled around helplessly by an unseen force.

Early on, people harnessed the power of the wind. They made sails for boats, creating the first vehicles not powered by muscles. But they learned that you had to respect the wind. You could not command it. Wind came and went on its own. It could blow fair or foul weather your way. It might be on your back or blowing against you. It could sail your ship or sink it. But without the wind, you are dead in the water. 

In both Hebrew and Greek the word for "Spirit" also means "wind" and "breath." There is a parallel between the movement of air that fills sails and that which inflates our lungs. Breath is a vital sign, an indication of life. It doesn't matter how good your heart is, how low your weight is, how much you exercise--if you can't breathe, you won't live long. After 4 minutes without oxygen, brain damage begins to set in and your revival is increasingly less likely. Of course, in biblical times, no one knew CPR. So no breath meant death.

That's what underlies Ezekiel's vision. He was a prophet in exile in Babylon. After 586 BC, Jerusalem had been destroyed, the Temple was burned, the reign of the Davidic kings had ended, and Judah was no longer an independent nation. It looked like it was all over for God's people. Ezekiel has a vision in which he finds himself transported to a valley that was the site of a great battle. And the victor denied the dead proper burial but left them to the elements and the scavengers, a grave dishonor in the Middle East. It's a picture of the utterly devastated Jewish nation. The Lord commands Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones. They come together and are covered with flesh but they're still dead. So God commands Ezekiel to prophesy to the wind and winds come from the 4 corners of the world and breathe life into the bodies. With the divine breath, the Spirit, God will bring back his people from death.

The Spirit breathes spiritual life into us as well. Without the Spirit, all you can have are the bare bones of a Christian life. You can say prayers and worship and read the Bible and volunteer and tell people about the Gospel and still find your efforts lifeless.

But doesn't the Spirit enter us at baptism? Yes, but just as you have to continue to breathe after that first breath you take as a newborn so your spiritual life is sustained by the continual inspiration (literally "breathing in") of the Holy Spirit. A lot of Christians get so busy that they get out of breath, so to speak. They need to stop and take a deep breath of the Spirit. Go on a retreat. Go for a walk, a run or a hike. Meditate. Meet with a spiritual mentor. Read their favorite Christian writer. I have a playlist on my iPod of music that stirs me up  and connects me with my feelings of nobility, peace and love. You need to go wherever God usually meets and speaks to and refreshes you and just let the Spirit flow into and through you.

Like breath and wind, speech is invisible but powerful in its impact. Like fire, it illuminates and once it begins to spread you can't stop it.

Speech is a miraculous gift. Unlike other animals, our mouth, tongue, lips, throat and brain are designed for it. Our thinking is influenced by it to the point that we can't think clearly about something if we have no words for it. Speech allows a person to take something that exists only in his or her brain and pass it into the brain of others. And by being passed from one person to another, an idea can become immortal.

Speech can unite or divide. At the Tower of Babel, miscommunication brought down a grand enterprise. Here at Pentecost it not only draws together people from all over the known world but they will become the means of spreading the gospel worldwide.    

But words are not magic. As a radio copywriter, I had to disillusion people who thought a good-sounding ad would make people flock in and buy what they were selling. But content is important. If you're giving away a gold bar with every purchase, I can have the person who does NOAA weather radio broadcasts record the ad in his deadly monotone and people will come in droves. If you're giving away a dead dog with each purchase, it doesn't matter if James Earl Jones records your ad, not many people are going to take you up on it. Memorable words spoken in an appealing manner are good but content is king. You have to have something vital to say.

You do have to get your message listened to and the uproar of people speaking in every language all at once did the trick. People stopped what they were doing. At first they thought the apostles were drunk. They were in fact filled with the Spirit.

That's not the only instance in Scripture that being filled with God's Spirit is mistaken for being drunk. And there are some parallels. People under the influence of either find their tongues loosened, though those filled with the Spirit aren't going to insult people or drunk-dial ex-girlfriends. One fruit of the Spirit is self-control, after all. But the Spirit will lead those under his influence to say the right thing at the right time, especially when it comes to sharing the gospel.

Both those filled with distilled spirits and those filled with the Holy Spirit will find themselves braver than they normally are. But while a person who is drunk might be reckless and foolish--they say the last words of many an inebriated person is "Hey, wanna see something cool?"--those filled with the Spirit will be emboldened not only to pass on the good news to those who need to hear it but to do good works for those who need them.

And the expansiveness of the Spirit is not like the maudlin "I love you" an intoxicated person says to all and sundry, only to have that emotion evaporate with the morning after. When filled with the Spirit, the genuine and unstoppable love of God moves us to see and serve Christ in everyone we encounter.

The outpouring of the Spirit on the apostles at Pentecost is considered the birthday of the church. In embryonic form, it grew and developed during the disciples' time with Jesus but here it burst into the world, took a deep breath, and let everyone know loudly it was here to stay. Like any child, it set out to explore every part of its world with lively wonder and making a racket while doing it. As adults we often lose that. The church today sometimes sounds like old men pontificating rather than the joyful noise that heralded the baptism of the Spirit.

In keeping with the original Pentecost, let us be more enthusiastic in our worship, filled with the Spirit, on fire with the Spirit, using our gift of speech to praise the giver of all good things. So let us really hear it for God the Holy Spirit!          

Did You Get the Call?

This sermon is based on notes of a presentation given by the Rev. Thomas Weitzel. The main points are his; most of the illustrations are mine. 

When I went to Wheaton College I met a lot of PKs. I even dated one--a Preacher's Kid, that is. Talking to them is enough to put you off the idea of entering ordained ministry. And sure enough, only about 10% of Protestant clergy is made up of PKs. I don't know if they get tired of church or tired of having to be the perfect child. But whatever the reason, it means that 90% of people called to the ordained ministry have parents in different occupations. Mine were a bartender and a nurse. Which makes sense: one heard a lot of sinners' confessions and the other helped make people better.

I can't find any reliable statistics on what professions contribute the most people to the ordained ministry. I did an informal poll on Facebook and got an agricultural engineer, a high school computer science teacher, the head of a construction company, a music teacher, and a manager at Office Depot. But one thing I do know: all of the Twelve were something entirely different before they were called to be apostles. Peter, Andrew, James and John were fishermen. Matthew was a tax collector. Paul was a tentmaker. We don't know what Matthias was! We do know he wasn't one of the original Twelve. But Jesus called them and they followed him. Their primary vocation became spreading the Good News of God in Christ. And who they were changed.

When we think of being called, we do so almost exclusively in regards to the ordained ministry, as if every other person in a church just sort of wandered in by accident. But when Jesus as the Good Shepherd spoke of calling his sheep, there was no indication that this applied to clergy only. We are all Christians because Christ called us. He doesn't always call us to change jobs. Often he needs us to be his agents in place, so to speak. But we are nevertheless called by him to serve him.

There are many ways to serve Jesus. Figuring out how we should do that may not be obvious. At least to ourselves. A lot of people, when they realize what they are called by God to do, find that those around them are not the least bit surprised. They've noticed what our gifts are even if we haven't. And God provides and equips us with what we need to accomplish what he calls us to. Often when we discover our call, we say to ourselves, "Yes, this is what I was meant to do!" When you find your call, you find yourself. 

That vocation gives us a role, an identity. Not every identity comes from a call; it could come from some other external motivator. Like your situation in life, such as marriage or becoming a parent. It can come from a job we get or a career we choose, such as becoming a cop, a teacher, a nurse, a fisherman, or a builder. Or it may be your role within a group: the leader, the spokesperson, the facilitator, the negotiator, the advocate, the joker (every group has one), the cheerleader, Mr. Fix-it, etc. It may not be our sole identity but it is something that is true and important about us. And having a clear identity is crucial. If you know how you fit into a group or into the world, it can give you a measure of peace. 

When we have a clear identity, it gives us a purpose. You know that you are to educate. Or to nurture. Or to protect. Or to make peace. Or to envision the future. Or to figure out the details of realizing that future. A recent study found that having a sense of purpose actually extends your life. It is also an important part of personal happiness. 

Once you have a purpose, you can work out how to translate that into action. If your identity is a nurse, and your purpose is to make and keep people healthy, that leads you to work in a hospital or a doctor's office or a home health agency. If your identity is an artist, and your purpose is to create works that affect people, that could lead you to create works of beauty or that question stereotypical thinking or confront people with reality.

Having a clear purpose is essential to ministry as well. Again if your identity is a nurse, your purpose is still to make and keep people healthy, and you might become a parish nurse, a ministry many churches offer. Or you could see your purpose as helping those who are at the end of life and your ministry could be working in a nursing home or for hospice. If your identity is an artist, your purpose is still to create works that affect people, and your ministry could be creating art that questions or confronts or inspires. You have a ministry, whether inside or outside the church. But it's impossible to do really effective ministry if you don't have a sense of purpose. Which goes back to having a clear identity. Which goes back to having a call.

You can lose your identity. Your situation changes. Get a divorce and you lose the identity of being a spouse. Lose custody of the kids and you may feel like you've lost your identity as a parent. Lose your job and you lose your identity as a manager or scientist or just as a breadwinner or a productive member of society. Loss of identity leads to feeling that you are lost in other ways, too.

When people lose their identity, they often lose their purpose and action. This can lead to depression and paralysis. But usually it leads to seeking another external motivator because we can't stand having an identity crisis. This can be good. A person who lost a business may create another. A person who is divorced may resolve to be a better parent. But losing an identity can lead to bad choices of a new motivation and identity. The divorced person could decide to a player or party animal. Or to be a bitter enemy of his or her ex-spouse. Or a stalker.

If one's identity as a member of a group is lost, it can also lead to an identity crisis. My mother's increasing hearing loss meant she could no longer continue as head nurse of the recovery room at her hospital. She got a degree in librarianship and found a position in the hospital as tumor registrar. Whenever cancer was discovered or treated at the hospital, she kept track of the patient and his or her treatment and progress. This is a vital position because the statistics help doctors and researchers decide on the effectiveness of certain treatments. It's also necessary for the hospital to keep its certification to treat cancer.

On the other hand, losing your identity within a group can lead to bad decisions, including betrayal of the group. In the early years of the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold captured Ft. Ticonderoga and played a key role in several important victories. He was severely wounded at the battles of Saratoga and, had he died of those injuries, he would have gone down in history as a great American hero. But he was passed over for promotions, investigated for corruption and acquitted, and was told he owed Congress money for his invasion of Quebec because he could not document all of his expenses. His military advice was ignored and he offered to surrender West Point to the British. When that plot failed, Arnold went over to the British and his name became a synonym for traitor ever since.      

God calls not only individuals but groups to serve him as well. He called the nation of Israel and blessed them so that they in turn may bless all the nations. In the same way, God's calls his church and blesses it in order that it might be a blessing to the world by bringing it to Christ. And that means he called this church as well. Which means everything we said about an individual's call is true about the call of a local congregation.

God is our motivator. He calls us as a group to an identity. That identity in Christ gives us purpose. And that purpose leads to action in the form of ministry. Unfortunately, churches can also get lost. And, according to the Rev. Tom Weitzel, to whom I am indebted for the chief points of this sermon, when a church is lost in any way, it is because it has lost its sense of call.

Any organization, if it's been around a while, begins to drift from its original purpose, its reason to exist. And its prime directive then becomes the perpetuation of its own existence. Along the way, it may forget what need led to its creation. We've seen that happen with companies doing brand extension, putting their name on whole lines of products that have little or nothing to do with the core business. Many movie studios make more money from selling the merchandising rights to the movie than from the movie itself (which explains why some movies seem like 2 hour commercials for toys.) We saw that happen when banks forgot their business fundamentals and began to act like casinos, taking and making bets on credit, even against their own clients. We've seen that happen to churches that have drifted so far from their original call and purpose that they seem to be in some other business altogether.

Like a person who has lost his identity and sense of purpose, a church may seek a motivator among things other than God, such as an obsession with success or a worship style or its institutional history or the latest cultural or church fad or a particular stand on a political or theological issue. A lot of mega-churches have as their motivator a celebrity preacher. If he or she retires or gets caught in a scandal, the church, its sense of purpose, and its ministry suffer. If its call from God has been lost, a church can't fix things by merely multiplying or tweaking its ministries. It needs to recover God's call.

It was God's call that motivated the prophets. It made them God's spokesmen, it gave them purpose and it defined and fueled their ministry. And what they did was issue God's call to his people--a call to return to the Lord.

All calls are first to faithfulness. We are called not merely to have faith in God but to be faithful to him. In a marriage, or any relationship, trust is a two-way street. It makes no sense to expect God to be faithful on his end and yet not strive to be faithful in return. If someone you were married to or were friends with or had business with, insisted that you keep up your part of the relationship while failing to do the same, you would be outraged at the injustice. Faithfulness is vital to returning to God and hearing his call.

Pastor Weitzel lists 10 elements of faithfulness. I'll touch on each briefly.

Number 1: Put God first. That should be a no-brainer but like most obvious things, we cease to pay attention to them and forget about them after a while. And it doesn't help that a lot of people think religion's primary purpose is to make them feel good about themselves. That's why everyone talks so much about spirituality. It's a word that most people have such a vague grasp of that it can be made to mean whatever they want. Put the word into Google and you get things like "…an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being…,"You are everything, yet you are nothing…," and "…that which relates to or affects the human spirit." The last is closest to the dictionary definition except that it narrows it down to the "human" spirit. Modern spirituality is all about "me." But we are created in God's image. God is the original Spirit. We're trying to draw the Mona Lisa from a very bad copy rather than going to the real thing. So we need to state the obvious: put God first.

Number 2: Seek and do God's will. That's both easy and hard. We know the broad outlines of God's will: love him, love one another as he loves us, go and make disciples and teach them all that he said. Which does cut off some avenues, like hating others, running off disciples and teaching them stuff he never said. Again, obvious things that get overlooked. What's difficult sometimes is knowing God's specific will in whatever time and place he has put us. For that we need to practice discernment. At this time that goes beyond the scope of my message though we shall return to it in the future.

Number 3: Pray daily. Again to maintain a relationship you have to communicate. It's vital for keeping a marriage healthy. Would you really want to be in one of those marriages where you barely speak? It is essential to a healthy relationship with God as well. Talk to him daily. You might be surprised at what comes up and how good you'll feel after sharing your deepest fears and hopes with the one who loves you more than anyone can.

Number 4: Worship weekly. Worship comes from the same root as the word "worth." In worship, we tell God how much he means to us. We do it with others the same reason we watch sports with friends or "Game of Thrones" with others. Because we love sharing what we enjoy with others. We also do it because God is Love and we are most like him when we are doing things together out of love with those we love.  

Number 5: Study and know God's Word. A few years ago, a study showed that most religious people knew woefully little about their own faiths. If you love cars, or cooking, I know you spend a lot of time looking up and reading about them. I bet you know all about your favorite shows or singers or teams. If we know more about them than about God and his acts and teachings as described in his word, what does that say about our real priorities? And how shall we answer the foolish and erroneous things said about God's word, if we don't know what it actually says?

Number 6: Love and serve others. When Jesus told a parable about the last judgment, his criterion was: what you do to others you do to him. Do we truly look for Jesus, however obscured by sin and misfortune, in others and do we really serve them as we would if they were Christ undisguised?

Number 7: Tithe thankfully. It's not like we are doling out a piddling allowance to a kid who's done nothing to deserve it. We are returning a small portion of the gifts God's given us for him to use in building up his kingdom. And we ought to do it with gratitude. Gratitude is an part of happiness.

Number 8: Share the Gospel. If you found a good doctor, who really helped your pain or diagnosed a persistent problem or cured an illness, you'd tell everybody. If you knew a reliable and honest mechanic, you'd pass the word on. If you discover a great singer or a really funny comedian, you'd want everyone to give him a listen. Why not Jesus? 

Number 9: Participate at church. When someone invites you to a party, you ask what you can bring. When you arrive, you ask if there's anything you can do. If the host or hostess looks like they're trying to do everything, you pitch in. This is your church. We can always use help. And like any activity, you get more out of it when you put something into it.

Number 10: Repent unfaithfulness. Repent, as we are learning in our Bible study on Mark, basically means "change your mind" or "turn around." God doesn't want people continually wailing but people who, when they realize they're on the wrong track, reorient themselves, change direction and get back on the right path.

If you've been neglecting God, if you've forgotten his call, forgotten who and whose you are, if you lost your sense of purpose and momentum, change the way you think and act and return to the Lord. Think of it as a second honeymoon with the person without whom love would not be possible.

The New Jerusalem

When Europeans discovered the Americas, they called them the New World. And we see that echoed by the fact that one region was called New England and we have lots of states and cities with the word New in their title (New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, etc) to distinguish them from their Old World namesakes. But the addition of the word New also betokened a hope in those who left the original that this place would not be more of the same but something better.

Jews end the Passover Seder with the toast "Next year in Jerusalem." It symbolizes the hope held out by Jews of the Diaspora, Jews scattered all over the world, that they would one day return to their homeland. At our Passover Seder, we modified this to "Next year in the New Jerusalem." And the question from our sermon suggestion box, which I happen to know was prompted by what we said at the end of our Seder, asks "What do you mean by the New Jerusalem?"

The reason we said what we did is because of the Christian hope that one day we will see what has been promised in Revelation 21: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with humans. He will dwell with them and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.' And he who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new!'"

To fully appreciate this passage and the import of the new Jerusalem, we have to look at each element of this passage. And before that, we have to understand the purpose and method of the Book of Revelation.

The last book in the Bible is a difficult one for us to interpret today. So why was it included in Scripture? Why was it written in the first place?

The early Christians knew persecution first from the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme court, which forbade them from proclaiming Jesus as the crucified and risen Messiah. Ironically, this crackdown on Christians pushed the church out of the Holy Land and into the Roman Empire. Paul and Barnabas, sent as a mission team by the church in Antioch, at first preached to Diaspora Jews in their synagogues. Occasionally they would stir things up to the extent that Roman officials stepped in and threw Paul and his associates in jail for disturbing the peace. But Rome saw these incidents as a dispute within Judaism, which was a legal religion. It didn't persecute Christians per se.

Then a fire broke out in Rome in the summer of 64 AD. After 6 days, it was put out but by then 10 of the city's 14 districts were nothing but ashes. The Emperor Nero rushed back to the city when the fire broke out and directed firefighting efforts. He let thousands of people who were made homeless by the inferno camp in his imperial gardens. Yet some blamed him for starting the fire. People suspected he did it to rebuild Rome to reflect his glory. Nero did what any politician would. He found a scapegoat. In this case, he chose to blame the Christians, who were by then distinct enough to tell apart from Jews, and whose rites and beliefs were seen as weird. Christians' love feasts were rumored to be orgies and they drank blood and ate flesh and they refused to worship the Roman gods, which meant they were atheists! So Nero had Christians torn apart by dogs or burned alive or crucified. Peter and Paul were martyred during this first wave of persecution. After Nero's death, persecution of the church died down for a while.

Then in 81 AD, Domitian became emperor. He didn't want to wait until he was dead to be declared divine. He demanded to be called "Lord and God." This posed a problem for faithful Jews and Christians, of course. In his later years, due to plots against him, he became very harsh. Early Christian historian Eusebius says that this is when he began to persecute Christians in earnest. And this is when the Book of Revelation was written. Domitian executed those who said anything against the empire and so Revelation's real meaning had to be disguised. That's why a lot of language and images from Old Testament prophesy are used. That's why certain figures are represented by fanciful animals and monsters. That's why there is a numerical code to disguise the name of the enemy. That's why there is so much talk about Babylon, the capital of the ancient enemy of God's people, who burned  Jerusalem and its Temple in 586 BC. It was code for Rome, the new enemy who burned them in 70 AD. John, the author, was trying to get his message out to Christians facing suffering and death without it being suppressed.

And the message was one of hope. Revelation does not say "take up weapons and fight the persecutors of God's people." Rather it says, "hold on, stay faithful, God wins in the end." Christians are never depicted as warriors but witnesses and martyrs. God fights his own battles. The vision that John is communicating is one of comfort to those who have seen the apparent triumph of evil over good. The book is saying, "Yes, things will get bad. But in the end, God will restore everything."

That's why, toward the end of the book, we get the picture of the new Jerusalem. God recreates the heavens and the earth as good once more, but there is one thing lacking: the presence of God. Genesis gives us a wonderful picture of God walking in his garden in the cool of the day. There is no sense of a great distance between him and human beings. But the result of mankind's sin has been estrangement from God. There was this gap between God's realm and the kingdoms of this world. People longed for a bridge between the two. And that's what the Temple in Jerusalem became for the Jews: the meeting place between God and man, heaven and earth. It was where, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest made sacrifices for the sins of the people, then entered the Holy of Holies, and sprinkled the sacrificial blood on the ark of the covenant, the symbol of God's presence. An image of God was prohibited but he was often envisioned as seated above the wings of the cherubim on the ark's lid. The ark was seen as his throne, or at least, the footstool of his throne, and thus the Temple, Mount Zion on which it stood, and the city of Jerusalem itself, all came to represent the presence of God on earth. So John sees a new Jerusalem that represents God's everlasting presence on his new redeemed world.

What's more, the city is described as a bride adorned for her husband. One Old Testament metaphor for God's love for his people is that of the husband for his bride. God is the faithful husband, who forgives his bride out of his great love. Jesus appropriates the image in the Gospels, speaking of himself as the bridegroom. Paul uses marriage to represent the relationship of Christ and his church. And the Book of Revelation leads up to the wedding of the Lamb, making the apocalyptic battles no more than a prelude to it, as the prince only fights with the dragon in Cinderella in order to get to and rescue his beloved. In fact, a lot of the imagery in Revelation has been appropriated by those who write fantasy: besides an evil dragon, we have a prince on a white horse who wields a sword, fights an army, frees his people, marries his beloved bride and they live happily ever after in a beautiful bejeweled city.          

The classic happy ending is a wedding, because, ironically, weddings are beginnings. A new family is formed. Husband and wife become one. The bride becomes a woman, and prospectively, a mother. Life continues. Small wonder Jesus' favorite image of the Kingdom of God was the wedding supper, the biggest event in the life of a village, a celebration that lasted a whole week or maybe two, with feasting, drinking, singing and merrymaking. And of course, after the wedding, faithful love is rewarded, becomes deeper, more intimate, more ecstatic.  
  
We are to become one with God and with other Christians. This was at the center of the prayer Jesus made for his disciples on the night he was betrayed. As it says in John 17:20,21: "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me." A big part of our witness to the world is our unity and love for one another. People certainly notice when we squabble over nonessential things. They notice when we schism.  And it discounts in their eyes the idea that we represent God. Because taking your ball and going home when you don't get your own way, and excluding people who disagree with you, are not divine acts; they are very human and very common. That's what goes on in Congress and in denominations and in other human groups. What's rare is when people disagree a lot on certain things and yet continue to work together for a greater good they do agree on.

Today we like to describe ourselves by adding modifiers to what should be our core identity. People say they are conservative Christians, or progressive Christians, or pro-life Christians, or pro-choice Christians, or gay Christians or biblical Christians. The problem is that the word that comes first in grammatical construction often comes first in their way of thinking as well. If your position on something comes before the word Christian when you identify yourself, it's likely it comes before your commitment to Christ. It might be better if we identified ourselves as simply Christians, and, only if pressed, admit that we happen to be conservative, or happen to be to be  pro-choice, or happen to be vegan, or happen to be evangelical, or happen to be Baptist/Catholic/Orthodox/Episcopalian/Lutheran. We are Christians first and foremost. Maybe if we stop putting our carts before the horse we might actually get to where we're supposed to be going.

Our primary allegiance should be to Jesus Christ, just as citizens of any kingdom owe their primary allegiance to their king. If we choose anything, however noble, over Jesus, we aren't really Christians. We haven't really given up our rights, or picked up our crosses, the symbols of self-sacrifice, and we aren't following him. We won't make model citizens of the new Jerusalem, which means "City of Peace." Those kinds of division can be found in the current Jerusalem. Those kinds of division exist in every country and kingdom of this world. And they always have. They're old. They're getting really old. Like the death and mourning and crying and pain they cause. And as Revelation says, our God is all about making things new.

We actually have people here who have truly made things new--mothers. They bring into the world new people. And not one of them wants to bring in something bad. No mother looks at her child and says, "I want this child to bring pain and suffering and rage and evil and dissension and arrogance." Every mother sees the promise of good things in her child. That's what she hopes for.

But we've made God's paradise into hell of earth. We're even raising the temperature. Why doesn't God abandon us? Because of his love. He wants us to be born anew, born from above, born into his Spirit. He wants us to become his children, who will obey his words and follow his example, the example of the first-born of his creation, Jesus Christ. And he wants us to be a family, which we are since science tells us we share DNA from the same common mother and from the same common father. But he wants us to be a spiritual family as well, his sons and daughters, living together in peace, loving and forgiving and seeing our differences not as liabilities but as gifts from him to help us do all the different tasks that make up his work in the world. It starts with seeing the world not simply as it is but as it could be, a city on a hill, a shining example, where, as Psalm 85 says, "Kindness and truth meet together, righteousness and peace kiss each other."  That is our hope. That is the good news Jesus brings. That is what he wants to see us working on when he comes again. And so we echo the Book of Revelation: "The Spirit and the bride say, 'Come.' And let everyone who hears say, 'Come.'…Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"