We are spending a month in Jeremiah 29.  Joe gave some background information on the chapter and helped us understand what exile was, where Israel found itself and how they were oppressed by the Babylonians.  Israel was taken into exile in 587 BC.  They were pulled away from the land where they were born and the land that was promised to them.  They were forced a few hundred miles away from their homes to a very strange land where everything worked and functioned very differently.  The essential meaning of exile is that we are were we don’t want to be.  As Eugene Peterson puts it, it is an experience of dislocation, everything is out of joint and nothing really works the way it is supposed to.  Exile is a common but unwelcome thing that humans have been experiencing for thousands of years, and even to this day.  It would be very common to what our ancestors did to the natives that were on this land when we showed up.  We eventually forced them into our schools, used whatever land we wanted and forced them to play by our rules.  Even right now, in Darfur, millions of people have been displaced from their homes because of internal unrest and they are left in exile unable to go back home to everything that they have ever known or cared about.

However, I find exile to be difficult to talk about.  I have never known exile, and I don’t think anyone here has really known it either.  So while we can try all we want to make personal parallels about how Israel’s exile out of the promise land signifies our individual examples of overcoming hardship, it is very difficult to understand what is going on in a passage like this.  For years I’ve heard this passage in Jeremiah be used to provide hope for getting something that we want.  “I know the plans I have for you….plans to prosper you.”  This was most people’s life verse even.  This is why I’m hesitant to read a passage like this like it has anything to do with us at all.  As if we are somehow in exile and are waiting for God to free us.

We’ve done a lot of talking about the oppressed.  We spoke about it in the summer about where some of the Psalms come from.  This morning though, I want to try and understand this passage from a different point of view.  What does a passage like this look like from the point of view of the oppressors.  I don’t just mean how would Babylon like a text like this.  I mean how would Israel be reading a text like this if they used to be the oppressor and are now being oppressed.  Because if we are truly going to interact with this text we need to see where we are in the text.  We are not in exile, therefore this text probably isn’t for us in that regard.  The idea of the Lord having plans to prosper us is not language to tell a wealthy nation to keep up the good work and it’s only going to get better.  It’s written to encourage those who have nothing, with no foreseeable future and nothing to care about.  It’s written to remind those who are not prospering and who are being harmed and who have no future that this is only a temporary reality.  To hijack this text into our own lives is to force a improper hermeneutic on the text that will only serve to bloat our heads and make us more ignorant.  So Joe spent a lot of time from the point of view of the oppressed last week and how they would have felt and what exile meant and how we are like them.  This week though, I want to spend our time look at this passage from the point of view as the one who was once oppressed.  Israel used to be a nation that oppressed the people around them.  Now, they are being oppressed.  Jeremiah is written to former oppressors, not innocent bystanders.

So this is what we need to do in scriptures like this.  Without acknowledging our role as the oppressor in today’s day and understanding the circumstances of those being oppressed we will never change.  So before we jump into this passage.  I ask you.

Question: How are we the oppressor?  What are the circumstances of those we oppress?  Who are we oppressing?

I think it would be difficult to look at this passage from the point of view of the Babylonians and how they were oppressing Israel.  I do think though, that if we do some hunting, we can see how Israel was once an oppressive nation and how this is a command to an oppressive nation who finds themselves in a different situation.

Rob Bell in his book Jesus Wants to Save Christians helps us understand the heart of the oppressed and the oppressors and how this happened.  So the next section on Israel is largely attributed to him and how he explains it.

He likes to explain it in the following four stages.  Egypt>Sinai>Jerusalem>Babylon

We know the story of Israel and how there story basically started in slavery.  We know that eventually God heard their cry and freed them from slavery and brought them into the promised land.  So this is the first two steps; Egypt to Sinai.  God needed a nation that could enact his will in the world.  He wanted a nation that would represent his desires and wishes.  Israel, especially under King David, started to become this nation.  Over a few generations eventually Solomon comes into power and the nation of Israel begins to get a more global reputation for how great of a nation they are.

So they have this reputation and there is this story about a queen named Sheba who comes from far away to ask questions and find about what makes this nation so great.  Here is her verdict.

Praise be to the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on the throne of Israel. Because of the Lord’s eternal love for Israel, he has made you king, to maintain justice and righteousness.

We know that Solomon had a lot of possessions.  This is one of the things that Solomon is known for.  His massive amounts of gold and cattle and wives…it was all seen as being attributed to God blessing them. Sheba is praising God because she gets it.  She understands that the reason they have all this great stuff and seems to be blessed and everything is going their way is for a purpose.  That purpose is to maintain justice and righteousness.  So finally everyone and everything is in place.  They are in Jerusalem, the promised land and they are happy and content and they are blessed.  So we’ve gone from Egypt>Sinai>Jerusalem.  There was certain expectations, like Sheba mentions, for a city in this type of position.  They were supposed to bless and take care of those in need or as Sheba puts it to maintain justice and righteousness.  So did this happen?  What did Solomon do with everything he had?

Here is the account of the forced labor King Solomon conscripted to build the Lord’s temple…

What? How does this make any sense?  Is this the same nation that was once oppressed  and were forced to be slaved?  Are they now becoming oppressors?  Those who were freed from Egypt, are now in the midst of creating their own Egypt.  In the same breath of finding out that there is forced labour we also find out that these forced slaves were forced to build Hazor, Gezer and Megiddo.  These were military fortresses.  Why would anyone need such large military fortresses?  Well because he had a lot of stuff, and you have to protect all your stuff when you have it.  Israel has now become a nation that is about preserving what they have with their land and possessions instead of a nation that is bent on giving away and blessing those around them.  They did not do what they were supposed to and they did not do what Queen Sheba expected the would do with it all.  Then even further down we hear that he acquired fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousands horses.  Aren’t these the exact same tools that were used to drive Israel out of Egypt in the first place?  Now they are stockpiling all the same things that once oppressed them?  Then we find out that Solomon is importing horses and chariots from some countries and then selling them to others.  Now we have Israel becoming an arms dealer.  In other words, he’s making money of the violence towards the cities around him.  Is that maintaining justice and righteousness?  Is that hearing the cry of the oppressed?

Then we find out that Solomon had over seven hundred wives and over three hundred concubines.  And the women played a part in leading Solomon away from being fully devoted to God.  Of course Israel was warned against this kind of activity.  Don’t acquire a great number of wives, don’t acquire a great number of horses…or else you’ll probably go astray for what God has in store for you.

So this leaves God stuck.  The nation that is supposed to represent him and be his hands and feet in the world, now look nothing different than anyone else.  They look like anti-God.  They have become who God saved them from at the beginning.  God though is a God who hears the cry of the oppressed, and those that suffer.  He is looking for people who care about the things that he cares about and he blesses so that justice and righteousness can be upheld.  Unfortunately at the height of their blessing, Israel misinterpreted everything as entitlement and favoritism.  In the biblical story there is a word for when you have been giving all sorts of blessing and wealth and influence, but completely forget why you were given it in the first place.

It’s called Exile.

Exile is when you forget who you are; its when you forget your story.  It isn’t just about getting kicked out of a location but it is about of state of your soul.  It’s about when you find yourself as a stranger to the purposes of God.  Out of this exile comes the prophets, and comes Jeremiah which is where we are spending our time this month.  So now, with all this in mind, and what lead up to this, let’s read Jeremiah together.

Jeremiah 29:4-14

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:

“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.

Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.

Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.

They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,” declares the Lord.

This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

This isn’t just words to an oppressed group of people.  These are words to an oppressed group of people that are used to the benefits, lifestyle and wealth of being the oppressors.  They are used to easy money, cheap labour and exorbitant amount of amassed wealth.  They were upset because they didn’t get what they thought they deserved.  They were spoiled and now they were ungrateful.  So Jeremiah comes onto the scene, and is not really bringing words of hope right away.  It is more like words of work.  He’s basically saying “listen, you’ve had it pretty easy over the last little while, and even when it is easy you didn’t even live close to how you were supposed to live.  Instead of using what you had got for the benefit of others you used it to oppress even more.  So now, why don’t you just sit tight for a little bit and reevaluate what you are really doing here.  Israel’s entire identity became wrapped up in the idea of a promised land and what it was and that it was for them.  The idea of planting gardens and building homes in a land that isn’t theirs and that they don’t care about is ludicrous.

Israel was obviously not in a good spot, and they were unhappy and lived in unrest.  Many of them longed for a restoration of the power that was once there.  There was plenty of revolting movements found in this area during this time and many of them refused to live in exile as a way of life.  They were used to the political and national power that they had and they enjoyed it.  The only way they knew how to revolt was to live violently against the powers over them.  However, Jeremiah had something different in mind.  He tells them to build homes and plant gardens.  This is not what they would have been expecting.

One of the hardest decisions in buying my house was the idea of permanence that came along with it.  There is something about settling that is uneasy with me.  I want to be able to get up and go.  I want to know that there is always something else, something more out there that I have an opportunity to jump at if things get to bad here.  This was what Jeremiah was telling them to do though.  In the midst of the worst circumstances possible, they were to build homes.  This means to expect a long hall.  This means to get more permanent.  This isn’t a camping trip.  This is not the kind of information that they wanted to hear.  They would much rather be camping, because camping is temporary and they wanted out of there.  So you would not build a house and basically live in the hope that they were going to be freed again one day soon.  Building a house meant sitting tight and becoming more permanent.

Just like exile is deeper than simply where you are, so is building a house.  There is a lot of imagery that goes along with building a house.  Building a house is something you do to participate in the culture you are living in.  You build a house and organize your family in such a way that benefits and approves of the culture that you are building a house in.  This is about a household, not just a building.  Here we have Jeremiah telling Israelites who lived and enjoyed their lives off all the wealth and great things that they had and now they are living in an unknown land, unhappy, stripped of all they had and they are supposed to build a household?

Another thing that I have a difficult time doing is gardening.  Gardening in many ways for me is a waste of time.  I expect other to do it for me.  I want to go to the store and get what I want and come home.  Of course, because I choose to live this way, there are a lot of problems that come with that lifestyle.  I am not in touch with the nature around me and I am out of sync with the seasons.  I can eat Strawberry’s in January.  I don’t have to toil over my food at all.  Jeremiah though is telling Israel to not expect it to be done for them.  Do it yourself.  Grow your own food, do the hard work and be a meaningful contributor to your own sustenance.  You are not a parasite so stop living like one.  Planting gardens goes back to Genesis 1 and it is one of the first commands that humans were given.  This is Jeremiah telling them not to just be happy and provide food for themselves but to live like they should be living.  Be the human that you were called to be even when you are in a situation you don’t like being in.  You can still do what you should be doing.

See Israel’s identity was wrapped up into their land.  They took pride in it.  They went to great lengths to protect it and they boasted about it.  When they were stripped of it they almost refused to stop living.  Who were they without their land?  This message of Jeremiah tells them to suck it up and starting being who they were called to be even without the land that they were promised.  He was telling them that their identity did not rest on where they were, but who they were. He reminds them that all land is God’s land not just the promised land and they can still be the people of God even in the midst of oppression.  They were willing to compromise anything to keep their land.  They had traded the dream of being God’s hands and feet to the world for the smaller idea of controlling their own slice of the planet.

So Jeremiah was telling them to get back to the basics, back to the things that make them human.  He wants them to focus on the things that bring renewal to the present, not just sit around and depend on a promise that isn’t coming for a long time.

This also means that what Jeremiah is asking them to do is to live similiarily the people that are oppressing them.  This is what Babylonians were doing, they were building houses, starting families and planting gardens.  Now Jeremiah is saying that they should look like them.  I have a feeling though that he wasn’t telling the Israelites to do these things so that they will become like Babylon but instead he was telling them to do these things so they will realize that they are no different.  They were once oppressed, they were once the oppressors and now they are oppressed again and this isn’t a good way to live for anyone.  We are all the same, oppressors and oppressed.  So since we are the same; live like them.  Breath the same air as them, raise families along side of them.  Jeremiah is offering very radical advice here because he is trying to bring a realization and understanding to the Israelites.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed By Paulo Freire is a popular book that helps give us some understanding into this.  He would say that for the poor to be free, they must understand their situation and lift themselves above their oppressor without becoming the oppressor themselves.  For the oppressor to be free he must understand that he has become the oppressor and try to let the oppressed become free.  In both cases, the oppressed and the oppressor can not be free without understanding the damage they have done to one another.  Simply put, they are becoming aware of the other and moving towards a life of interdependence, in recognition that they actually need one another to be free.

Last time they lifted themselves above their oppressors they became the new oppressors, but this time Jeremiah is telling them to do it in a different way.  God wasn’t going to come in on a white horse and lead them out and move waters and destroy the enemy.  Rather he wants them to live alongside of their oppressors so that they can truly be free.  Freedom is no longer in getting to a certain promised land, but freedom is found in the interdependence of one another.  They need to understand the damage that they had done to each other.  So that when they did rise away from the oppression, they would not just continue the cycle all over again.

As people like Jean Vanier and Paulo Freire have argued, we go to the poor, not only to assist them in finding their own liberation, but also so that they can help us to be liberated.  He does not want Israel to just simply repeat the cycle.  They must embrace their exile as part of their identity now rather than long for a return to power.  Power corrupts and creates a never ending cycle of oppressed and oppressor.

Egypt – Sinai – Jerusalem – Babylon.  This is the cycle.  Israel now finds themselves back in Egypt and Jeremiah is trying to explain to them that the only way to break the cycle is to not start it up again.

Many obviously did not like this message of Jeremiah, especially anyone who was in charge.  It sort of sounds like giving up.  It certainly doesn’t motivate anyone to rise up and fight against the power and attempt to free Israel.  Jeremiah was persistent though, saying this was what God was saying and that they need to give it up, that Babylon was here to stay and they needed to deal with it. As a result Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest and false prophet, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern by Judah’s officials, and opposed by a false prophet.  He was not a source of good news.

Turns out we know now that Jeremiah was right.  Israel was never (and still isn’t) truly freed from oppression.  They always were in battle with someone fighting over something and oppressing them.  So Jeremiah’s advice would have been good.  Get over it.  Plant Gardens.  Build Houses.  This is home now.  Get used to it.  The people you are living with, you are always going to be living with them.  It’s really not that bad.  They are just like you anyway.  Oppressing.  Oppressed.  Oppressing.  Oppressed.  So I’m going to figure something else out.  But in the meantime…just sit tight and get comfortable and try to be the humans I created you to be here.

Here is an example of someone who tried to do what Jeremiah was telling Israel to do.

Mike Pfotenhauer is a man who started a backpack company called Osprey.  You have probably heard of them because they make great backpacks.  If you are serious into hiking, mountain climbing, then you would most likely be using an Osprey backpack.  Eventually they got pretty good that they moved to Colorado and bought an old factory outside a Najavo Native reserve.  They did their best to hire almost all local people for their workforce from the reserve.  They even got profiled in Fortune Magazine for being one of America’s best companies.  They keep growing bigger an bigger.  They were one of the first companies to start integrating recyclable materials into their packs and they kept innovating and coming up with new ideas.

The hard part is that other companies started coming in and offering backpacks for really cheap because they were making stuff cheaper overseas and the competition started getting really tough to actually sell backpacks so they had to start making layoffs and it was hard to keep up.  So eventually they made the decision to shift some of their production overseas to Vietnam.  Now we all know about overseas production and the types of conditions that the workers go through a lot of times just so we can get low prices on all of our stupid stuff we buy.  They have to work very long hours, under harsh conditions and for very little pay.  So Mike and his wife decide that if they are going to do this, they want to do it right.  So they move overseas so that they can be with the people who will be building their product.  They packed up their family, and moved to Vietnam so that they themselves could experience first hand the conditions in which they were asking people to work.

Where the average wage in Vietnam is $40, they pay an average of $80 a month.  Where the average work week is 63 hours, Osprey’s average is 48 hours.  Osprey pays time and half for overtime and double time for holidays.  This is all going on where their top boss is working alongside of them in the same community and living in the same conditions.  Mike was unwilling to exploit people just to increase his bottom line and keep his business in tact.  Mike chose to understand and be with the people he would typically be oppressing.  Not only that, he chose to pick up everything he knew and was comfortable with and built a house and planted gardens in and amongst them.

I know an older man who I was speaking with over the last month or so, and he has some very strong views on the world and the people around him.  He was talking about Toronto and how lately it is just so full of “Indians.”  He went on and on about how they are just everywhere now and they are taking over the country and getting into positions of power.  He also told me at another point that the number one problem in the world is Muslims.  After all they are reproducing at 8 kids per couple on average and there is so many of them and the Koran says to kill the infidel and they are immigrating over here to take over our country.  He was so up in arms and irritated about these people who were coming to oppress us.

I guess he didn’t remember the time when he was in the same shoes has them, immigrating over to Canada to start a family here, build houses and plant gardens over here.  Somehow he has taken his own journey of being oppressed and wanting a better life and coming here and then turning into the oppressor of people who were in the exact same shoes.  He actually believes the lies of needing to fight against these so called infidels so we can hold onto our freedom.

Question: What can we do to change our lifestyles so that we can better understand the oppressed? What is a modern way that we can plant gardens and build houses? How do we live in and amongst the people we are oppressing?

The point of building houses and planting gardens is not just because you are going to sit around and wait until power is restored to you.  It isn’t just so you are comfortable in the long wait until the wrongs are made right again.  The point is that you are now living in and amongst the people who are oppressing you.  You are like them.  You are one of them.  You are human just like them.  You used to oppress just like they did.  Now it’s time for you to see your own similarities.  You are the same as them.  As oppressors, we need to live in and amongst the people we are oppressing.  Of course, we don’t want to do that.  For starters we don’t think we are oppressing them.  We don’t want to live anything like them.  The reason we are oppressing them is because there is something valuable to be gained by oppressing them.  Whether it be pride, jeans, backpacks, meat or oil.  So how do we as Christians truly live in and amongst the people that we are oppressing?

Just like the story with Mike and Osprey, the only way to change the awful system is if the oppressor lives with and among the oppressed and the oppressed live with and among the oppressor.  If they were looking simply to restore power to their nation then they would never see that the people they were desiring power over are the same as them; humans in need of a Saviour.  We must live with them to discover true power (left handed power?).  Israel can no longer be the hands and feet of God is they are lording power over the people they are there to serve.  Only through sacrificial service and giving up the power that they think is rightfully theirs will God’s wishes come true for humanity.  The only place you have to be a human is where you are right now, at theStory, in Sarnia, right here and right now.  So be who God has called you to be; and be those people to your oppressors and to the people you are oppressing.

This year, while Joe was off enjoying some much needed and deserved vacation time I led the Christmas Eve service.  After reworking our liturgy from last year, here is what I ended up doing.  Each of the readings were done from someone in the congregation and I tried to get a lot of kids to be involved and do the readings.  Feel free to use this, its under this creative commons license.

XMAS 2009

Intro: Nathan
-welcome
-the format of the evening
-stay for desserts following

In the Beginning

Before there was something, there was nothing. This has always been one of our longest and hardest mysteries to deal with as humans.  Many thousands of stories have been written to try and deal with this reality.  At this time, almost all stories left humans empty handed and pawns of a plethora of God’s that did not care for them and used humans to achieve their own selfish desires.  Genesis was written as an alternative story on how to see the world apart from these stories.  Instead of multiple God’s fighting, it is only one God who is responsible for everything.  Instead of humans being born out of the chaos of the abyss, humans were created with a specific order and purpose in mind.  The story was written to show how crucial of a role humans have in the order of creation.  God created creation and he thought it was good; not bad.  God created humans in his own image.  We were created to create and take care of what has been created.  This story is unlike any other story told in this time.  It is in the first chapters that we see the first markers of hope because we can see what was intended all along.  God’s intention is good.

Reading 1: Genesis 1:1-5; 26-30
Hymn: “O Holy Night”

The Fall

If there is one thing that we know about history it is that something went awry from God’s initial setup.  Intentions of goodness seemed to be lost.  Humanity is no longer all good.  350 people make more than 40% of the world’s population.  Children are being sold into the sex trade at an alarming rate.  While most of the world starves, a select few are dying of obesity.  Wars have killed millions of people.  People have been tortured and ridiculed for their race,  religion, gender or sexual orientation.  The world is a mess.  The world is not the way it was intended to be.  Isn’t this just what happens though when free will is an option.  When someone opens themselves up, to be truly love, the option of rejection has to be allowed.  At some point we walked away from living the life that we were intended to live.  The even harder part to admit is that we,  each and everyone of us in the world are part of the problem.  It lies in us just as much as it lies in the world.  We are sinful, we are not being who we are created to be.

Reading 2: Genesis 3:8-19
Response: Corporate Prayer for Humanity; Moment of prayer for forgiveness

Blessed!

Good thing God did not give up on us at this point.  The pursuit is quite clear.  He tried it with Adam, he tried it with Noah, and eventually he decided to try it with an entire nation.  He chose a very special people who he wanted to shape and form in hopes that he could bless the entire world through these people.  God seems to have a thing with using his creation to bless his creation.  He didn’t want it to come directly from him, but somehow show that his original order was the best possible way to live.  He had something very specific in mind when he created humans and he thought that if he could just setup a group of people who lived this way specifically, then maybe the rest of the world would see what humans were created for.  So he chose a complete no-name random man, called him out and blessed him.  It was a very specific blessing though, it was an intentional blessing that was meant to eventually change the entire world.  The point of this blessing was so that it could be used to bless the nations.

Reading 3: Genesis 22:15-18
Response: “How have you been blessed this past year? Where have you seen God at work?  How have you seen your blessing directly bless others?” (Verbal response by participants)

The Promise

Of course, like every other time with Adam and Noah, the desire to have an entire nation live a specific life just never came about.  The entire Israelite nation had very specific laws in place that were designed to help them truly live out their calling as a chosen nation.  Beautiful laws like the year of Jubilee, where every 50 years all debts in the nation would be forgiven.  Or laws that were meant to take care of the other nations, like leaving tons of leftovers in their fields for the poor, or how to welcome a stranger into your home.  Unfortunately, Israel didn’t heed these laws.  The sinful desires were just to built into them.  They ended up becoming like every other nation; participating in crazy genocides, becoming an arms dealer and oppressing other nations.  They followed this pattern for too long and eventually became enslaved to their sin and shrugging God off completely.  Out of this ignorance came one of God’s messengers.  This messenger had a hope that rested in someone, some type of child that was from Israel and from God.  This child would be called great names and do great things and finally start to put things back together again.

Reading 4: Isaiah 9:2,6-7
Response: Hymn – “O Come Emmanuel”

Change is in Order

Eventually Isaiah starts to get a bit more specific.  There will be a person that will come from a certain genealogy.  There is very specific things that this new person will do and a lot of it has to do with putting things back in their proper order; the order that was intended from the beginning.  Listen to the voice of Isaiah crying out for the kind of justice and equality that this new person is going to bring.

Reading 5: Isaiah 11:1-9
Response: Kids Video (They wrote it and filmed it for the month of Dec)

A Left Handed Infant

Israel is excited at this point.  There is a promise now of a Messiah, some type of Saviour that will come and finally free them from their oppression.  Many would have expected a very right handed approach to getting the job done.  Many of them would have expected some type of revolutionary to come in and wipe away with the Romans, or all other religions.  Others were expecting someone to come and get rid of all the impure and the unclean in their midst.  Others were expecting a political take over where someone would rise to the top and change the system to be more God-like.  It seemed though, that the typical ways of power; through war, manipulation, force and politics wasn’t working.  All these did was deepen the cycle and cause one to be more stronger and more powerful to come out on top.  God had something else in mind.  He decides to send a baby.  Not only that, he sends this baby to no-name parents, in a non-important town, in the stable of an inn when these no-name shepherds show up to worship him.  What was God thinking?  Did he not know that this was a horrible way to get the word out?

Reading 6: Luke 1:26-35
Response: Hymn – “Hark the Herald”

Placenta & All

The nativity scene is what we remember about the Christmas story in our days.  Now it might be up in our house, or we may drive by it on the way to the mall.  It really should be the most powerful scene in the history of the world, but now its been reduced to another product you buy on the shelves or a decoration in a front lawn.  It really has lost its significance.  The nativity scene happened.  There was a real baby.  There was most likely real animals and visitors.  There was a pregnancy for God’s sake.  Have you ever been there for a pregnancy?  That means someone had to cut the umbilical cord.  Someone had to do something with the placenta.  This was dirty and messy and this was our Lord.

Reading 7: Luke: 2:1-7
Response: Painting by Brian Kershisnik (click on painting for larger version) while Sara G

I want us tonight to look at this painting that was done by Brian Kershisnik and listen to this song by Sara Groves.  Let’s practice the art of silence for the next three minutes and just stare at this painting.  Note some of the qualities of it.  I’ve been staring at it on my desktop for the last few weeks and it keeps becoming more beautiful.

1. See the size of Jesus.  He is almost unnaturally small, taking up such a small part of the painting, really emphasizing how insignificant of a move this is for someone like God to actually become human.

2. Look at the expression on the face of Joseph.  He looks exhausted, showing his humanness during the entire situation.

3. The biggest part of the painting is the angels, coming in and barely being able to take their eyes of Jesus but then they keep moving out into the world to spread the great news about this new game-changer of a baby that was born.

The Visitors

God chose the most random people to let in on the secret of Jesus’ birth.  No name shepherds and some maggi; basically astrologers.  It would be the equivalent of Jesus showing up to the variety store clerk and a a group of fortune tellers.  It just didn’t make any sense.  This of course though becomes a pattern with Jesus.  He picks those that are marginalized, outcasted and hated and brings them the closest.  He eats with the tax collector.  He turns failing students into his disciples.  He makes the failures into the heroes of his stories.  Jesus did everything backwards from what any successful person did. It is in this story that we are shown again that God refuses to use our expectations to play out his plan.  Through this story we are reminded that God uses anyone, and usually the people we don’t expect or want him to, to accomplish his purposes.

Reading 8: Luke 2:8-16; Matthew 2:1-12
Response:  Journal – the people who are last that have a voice in your life

Sight for Sore Eyes

While Jesus was a game changer, there is an obvious disconnect for many.  Many simply did not believe it.  What kind of Messiah is born in a stable?  What kind of Messiah dies?  These things just did not make any sense.  Even Jesus’ own parents were shocked at some of the things said about him.  Jesus was slowly figuring out his role and the people around him were slowly picking up on who he was.  The hope is that who he is and what he has done becomes known across the world.  There is purpose that lies in his words.  His role is to bring peace and justice to the world and his followers are doing the same.  If we want to follow him we can.  The hope and prayer of ours should be that all men see the truth and life of Jesus for what it is.  His role was to die, and to bring as many people down with him in his death as possible.  This is not an easy message to spread event though we try to sugarcoat it sometimes.  This was the kind of life, that first needed death.

Reading 9: Luke 2:25-33
Response: Silent prayer for all to see Christ for who He really is

The Light Has Come

Today is the day that we acknowledge Jesus’ birth.  We acknowledge it because it was a game-changing day.  Without Jesus, the world would still be going in a downward spiral of violence and hate and sin and destroying itself from the inside out.  Every force would be met with a larger force and every blow with a larger blow.  But Jesus steps in and reverses these cyclic systems.  Instead of becoming more powerful, he dies on a cross.  Instead of becoming more controlling, he offers a free choice.  Now he calls us, to follow him in recreating this world with peace, and justice and love.  He calls us to start living in the Kingdom of God here and now.  He calls us to participate with him in te reconciliation of all things and bringing the world back to the proper order like in Genesis.  He calls us to incarnate this good news of a new kingdom, of a new way of living called salvation into every aspect of our lives.  The light has finally come.  Let us rejoice that Jesus has come and is finally bring hope.

Reading 10: John 1:1-14
Response:  Christmas Prayer/ All Candles lit from the Christ Candle
Song: O Come Let Us Adore Him

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.… The people will rejoice.… For the yoke of their burden and the staff on their shoulder and the rod of their oppressor thou hast broken as on the day of Midian. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire.  For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder; and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time forth and for evermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:2-7)

The ideas of left-handed and right handed power come from Robert Capon’s book.

Alright, so let’s do a little experiment.  Let’s say your boy is 16 years old and he is standing at the edge of a cliff.  You obviously don’t want him there, because he could fall off.  So there is two different ways to exert your hopeful result; the result being of course that he doesn’t fall off the cliff.  One way to stop him would be to sneak up from behind him and tackle him away from the cliff, this would be a very direct way of making sure you got your way.  Or you could call to him from afar and try to convince him to come away from the cliff.  One would be very-direct straight line power, and the other more left handed.  Right hand power is that which comes out of our self-determination and self-direction, focused on getting the results that we want.  It is governed by the logical, plausible-loving left hemisphere of the brain.

Now direct, straight-line, intervening power does have many uses, so I’m not telling you this to say it’s wrong.  You can do most chores this way.  If you want to use the phone, you bring the phone to your head.  If you want to drive across the street, you get in the car and drive it there.   This type of power, the kind of power that uses the force that you need to get the result that you want is the reason that almost anything in this world exists. Anything you want done, you have to apply direct force and power to it.

So if you want your way…you apply direct force and get it. You use direct, right handed power.

Now let’s keep this analogy going for a bit.   Let’s say that your 16 year old went back to the cliff, and you told him not too and then he went back again.  Let’s say he just keeps going back and back and back and never listens to you.  At first you may drag him away from the cliff.  Maybe next time to drag him away and yell at him to try to scare him a bit more.  Let’s say he keeps doing it, again and again and again?  What do you do next if you only know straight line direct power?  Well I suppose you could start beating him, and then just beat him harder and harder.  Then you can chain him to a pole.   In the end of this exchange of affairs you get your way.  But there is something lost in this.  If we as humans believe that one of our main objectives in life is to remain in loving relationships with other people, then this direct, straight-line power becomes completely useless.  It doesn’t work.  The relationship will always be damaged.

This is where forcing direct straight line power gets you.  It gets you your way, when you don’t even want it anymore because your relationships have been completely destroyed.  It eats itself.   You will get your way most certainly, but the power you have exerted has caused damage elsewhere.

The other option in this situation is something Luther calls left-handed power.  “Unlike the power of the right hand (which is governed by the logical, plausible-loving left hemisphere of the brain), left-handed power is guided by the more intuitive open, and imaginative right side of the brain.”   Left-handed power, is paradoxical power.  It looks like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.  Examples of left-handed power would be what Gandhi organized in his non-violent resistance against the British.  Any martyr is using this type of power also.  This kind of power though, never ever guarantees that you will get your own way and it will never stop evil doers from doing evil things. The only thing that left-handed power does is guarantee you have not made the mistake of closing any relational doors from your side.  There is a deep paradoxical understanding that is needed for this type of power to be understood, but it is the only way that conflicts between people can ever be truly solved and dealt with.

Q: What are some modern day and biblical examples of obvious right handed or left handed power?

We see this kind of struggle all through the scriptures.  Man constantly trying to do things by simply getting them done and God always taking back roads and indirect ways of doing things.  Prophets are a perfect example of left-handed power.   Radical individuals who were set apart to call Israel back to God.  They end up alone, wandering in desserts with very few people listening to them.  You think that if God wanted to accomplish something he would make it obvious?   Use some of the power that he obviously had.  The examples are endless in how God acts within history and chooses a very left-handed solutions.   A solution that usually doesn’t even look like power at all, but rather weakness.  Atheists argue from this point of view all the time.  If God was real, if God was alive and wanted us to have a relationship with him then he would make it obvious.  In other words, he would use a very direct and straight-line approach of getting our attention to let us know he is out there.

In our culture we have been made incapable of understanding anything but right handed, direct power.  We go to war to get what we want.  We spank to stop our kids from doing what we don’t want them to do.  We push hard and fight hard and manipulate to swing the favour of an argument into our direction.  We always choose results over relationship.   We have no understanding of choosing relationships over results.   It barely makes sense to us.   This isn’t just happening in our culture or our time.   It is has been happening ever since humans realized that they could get what they wanted if they just pushed and forced harder enough. Let’s look at the Jewish nation, and the types of power they expected.

There were a few major sects of Jews that existed when Jesus was born, and I think if we understand them a bit, we can get a better understanding of the birth of Jesus and why it was so important.

The main group, that most of us are aware of are the Pharisees.  The Pharisees had very specific ideas of what they were expecting in terms of a Messiah.  They were studying the Torah in and out and they were convinced that someone was going to come who would finally purify Israel of all the sin and infringements on the Torah.  They spent their lives staying pure and chastising others to be pure also.  They had very strict rules following the Torah and they kept people in and out of their community based on whether or not the rules were followed.  This is why most stories we read in the New Testament have the Pharisees gawking at Jesus hanging out with impure people and having problems with the sin that they thought he was committing.   To them, a Messiah was coming to reward the pure, punish the impure.  He was coming to a cleaned up people, ones that were already fixed.  Because of this, the Pharisees found it necessary to use direct, straight-line power to try and make everyone pure so that their Messiah would come and not be disappointed.  They stoned prostitutes.  They instilled fear into tax collectors.  They eventually crucified anything or anyone that got in their way of doing what they thought needed to be done, even if it meant destroying relationships.

Another group that existed in this time was the Sadducees.  The Sadducees were much more involved in politics and they used that to sway the public. When they wanted to get something done, they simply used their social capital and made it happen.  Everything they did was very straight-line and direct to get their own way using very powerful structures to get their own way.

Another group that existed were types of revolutionaries.   There active slogan was “no King but God” and there was many violent attempts to remove power from the Romans. They did not believe in any sort of power in the king.

What they all had in common was that they were being persecuted and oppressed in the very land that God had promised them.  They all had their own ways to use direct, straight-line, right handed power to try and make this happen.  One used manipulation and fear, the other ones used politics and social capital and the others used violent means to get what they wanted or what they felt they deserved.  All of them chose results over relationship.  None of them would be in right relationship with the people they were trying to have power over.

So you have three strong people groups, all expecting some type of Messiah, some type of Saviour.  One group is expecting rewards and punishments, another is expecting the Messiah to be a political hero and the other is expecting a war hero.  This is the environment and the expectations that were everywhere when Jesus was born.  Everyone is expecting a messiah who is going to right-handedly take down Rome and usher in a new kingdom.

Jesus was born in a stable.  There is absolutely nothing royal, beautiful or exciting about it.  This is one of the filthiest places around.  This is where animals, the slaves of men, live.  He was armed with nothing but his own innocence.  The first things to experience the birth of the most important person to ever be born was a young virgin, her confused fiance and a bunch of farm animals.  This is what Jesus was born into.

Jesus, the messiah, the one everyone was waiting for, arrived on the scene in the most anti-climatic way possible.  Nobody knew it happened, besides a few animals. They couldn’t even get into the inn. The only people that found out were some random shepherds…people who really have nothing to do with the entire story. At this point in the story, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to assume or expect that this kid is actually a king. All the signs point away from it.   Out of wedlock, zero power, in a barnyard with smelly excrement lying around.  This is better told as a story of a kid in a trailer park.

This is a risky move by God.  God chooses to do the opposite of what the world expected and knew to start the beginning of the most important birth in the world.  I want to show you this clip from a radio show called wiretap. Wiretap is a show on CBC of scripted conversations that a guy named Jonathan Goldstein writes and performs on the radio. This one is about a guy named Gregor pitching his idea for marketing the Messiah.

This is what people expected the first time the Messiah showed up. They expected the fireworks, the battle where he comes out on top and for the world to know when he entered the scene.   Jesus though, was up to something else.   He is sent to a no-name virgin, in a no-name town, with literally no one around besides some no-name shepherds.   Either God needs to take some marketing lessons from Gregor or he had something else under his sleeve.

“The world does not understand vulnerability. Neediness is rejected as incompetence and compassion is dismisseed as unprofitable. The great deception of television advertising is that being poor, vulnerable and weak is unattractive.

The spirituality of Bethleham is simply incomprehensible to the advertising industry. The opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are being used to sell us a pain reliever, and the prayer of St. Francis is being used to sell us hair conditioner.

The Bethlehem mystery will ever be a scandal to aspiring disciples who seek a triumphant Savior and prosperity Gospel. The infant Jesus was born in unimpressive circumstances, no one can exactly say where. His parents were of no social significance whatsoever, and his chosen welcoming committee were all turkeys, losers and dirt-poor shepherds. But in this weakness and poverty the shipwrecked at the stable would come to know the love of God.

Sadly, Christian piety down through the centuries has prettified the Babe of Bethlehem. Christian art has trivialized the divine scandal into gingerbread creches. Christian worship as sentimentalized the smells of the stable into dignified pageant…Pious imagination and nostalgic music rob Christmas of its shock value, while some scholars reduce the crib to a tame theological symbol.”

Brennan Manning

I would argue that what God was doing with the birth of Jesus was exercising left-handed power. This left-handed power at first glance looks weak, and barely deserves the name of power. But really, when you think about it, it is the only kind of power in the world that evil can’t touch. This is the only way that he could have actually accomplished the redemption of all humankind. It had to come completely different than anything before. It couldn’t come from just stronger force and louder voices. It had to end the cycle, not just add to it with a loud bang.  This was the basis of Christ’s life and ministry. He could have many times over and over again, destroyed Roman rule, take power in the dessert, pulled himself down off the cross.   All these temptations were there, in fact they were named many times over and over again through the entire New Testament.  No one really understood what was going on.  He was mocked, Peter cut off an ear, they challenged Jesus to show them miracles. Slowly as his ministry grew, Jesus used less and less right handed straight line power and started to see everything in a different light. Eventually the only option is that instead of dishing out power and justifiable pain and punishment he was willing, quite foolishly, to take it on himself. He refused to use his power, which is the ultimate showing of left-handed power.

Just like in the story with the kid at the side of the cliff, if relationship is actually important then right handed power does not actually work.  Instead of beating him into submission, you eventually take the beating on yourself, which we know that this is eventually what Jesus did.   God in Christ died because he refused to use right handed straight line power to make his point and get the results that he wanted.   In the end, he is on the cross, leaving the reality that there can be no more power that is exercised towards him, yet that leaves him with so much more he ever would have had if he ever forced his way.

Think about any situation where you are forced or coerced into doing something. While the person with the power may get his own way for a while, he will no longer have the relationships around him that he once had.  What happens if the results he wanted was love and followers? How do you force that? You can’t. The only option is to exercise left handed power, and take the brutality on yourself and allow it to happen. This truly is the only way.

It is this opposite left handed way of living that Jesus’ birth brought into the world.   He was an innocent baby, not a powerful ruler or king.  Only through the innocence of his birth and being a child could this entire system of right handed living be reversed.   If God would have sent another strong ruler, he would have only pushed a system that does not work, and would only make it worse and would still have no one following him after it was over.  A left handed baby brings hope to the entire world, because he takes left handedness to the extreme and destroys any hope of right handed power actually winning.  The only way to beat right handed power, is to take all the brutality of it on yourself and die.  The birth of Jesus was the beginning of this.

I want to end this morning with reading a chapter to you from Jurgen Moltmann called the Disarming Child. I think this chapter perfectly summarizes what I am trying to get across.

The Disarming Child by Jurgen Moltmann (from Power of the Powerless)

This mighty vision of the prophet is founded on the liberation of oppressed men and women through the disarming birth of the divine child. Its goal is the turn from bloody war to the peace that endures and is unbroken. And in order to portray this hope for liberation and peace, the prophet falls back on a picture that is positively expressionist in style. The images jostle and tumble over one another, distorted beyond any possible reality, into what is impossible for human beings — possible only to God.

Realistically, though the prophet talks about hunger, slavery and occupying troops, he ends messianically. He lets his vision of the birth of the child and the appearance of the peace of God shine like a light into the conflicts and experiences of real life.

Darkness and Light

More is promised here than can be expressed simply through old-soldier reminiscences. For God’s victory does not come about through new armaments and force levied against force, or through alliances and solidarity. God has his own, divine kind of victory. For God’s victory puts an end to all human wars and victories once and for all. It is a final victory, which serves peace, not one that leads to the next war, as our melancholy victories usually do. The prophet gives his images of war so alien an orientation that they actually describe the conquest of war. Every weapon becomes a flame, every aggression fuel for the fire. God’s victory puts a final end to the victories of human beings. People lose their taste for them. Swords are turned into ploughshares and peace treaties replace the atom bombs.

But how is this supposed to happen? Does not the power to liberate the masses stem from rifles just as much as the forces of oppression? How can oppression and war be fought against and overcome without bringing new oppressions and new wars into the world, again with bloody coats and the tramp of boots through the streets?

The Liberator as Child

All the images the prophet uses to paint the possible future point to one fact: the birth of the divine child. The burning of the weapons, the jubilation and the great lights are all caught up in the birth of God’s peace-bringer. They are all to be found in him. Now the prophet stops talking in intoxicating images and thrilling comparisons, and comes to the heart of the matter: the person of the divine liberator. “To us a child is born. To us a son is given.” This future is wholly and entirely God’s initiative. That is why it is so totally different from our human plans and possibilities. If liberation and peace are bound up with the birth of a little helpless and defenseless child, then their future lies in the hands of God alone. On the human side, all we can see here is weakness and helplessness. It is not the pride and strength of the grown man which are proclaimed on the threshold of the kingdom, but the defenselessness and the hope of the child.

The kingdom of peace comes through a child, and liberation is bestowed on the people who become as children: disarmingly defenseless, disarming through their defenselessness, and making others defenseless because they themselves are so disarming.

After the prophet’s mighty visions of the destruction of all power and the forceful annihilation of all coercion, we are now suddenly face-to-face with this inconspicuous child. It sounds so paradoxical that some interpreters have assumed that this is a later interpolation. The prisoners who have to fight for their rights also find it difficult to understand how this child can help them. But it is really quite logical. For what the prophet says about the eternal peace of God which satisfies our longings can only come to meet us, whether we are frightened slaves or aggressive masters, in the form of the child.

A child is defenseless. A child is innocent. A child is the beginning of a new life. This defenselessness makes our armaments superfluous. We can put away the rifles and open our clenched fists. This innocence redeems us from the curse of the evil act that is bound to breed ever more evil. We no longer have to go on like this. And this birth opens up for us the future of a life in peace that is different from all life hitherto, since that life was bound up with death.

“For to us a child is born. To us a son is given. The government is upon his shoulders.” The liberator becomes a pleading child in our world, armed to the teeth as it is. And this child will become the liberator for the new world of peace. That is why this rule means life, not death; peace, not war; freedom, not oppression. This sovereignty lies on the defenseless, innocent and hopeful shoulders of this child.

This makes our fresh start into the future meaningful and possible. The oppressed will be free from oppression. And they will also be free from the dreams of darkness, the visions of revenge. They stand up and rejoice, and their rejoicing frees their masters too from their brutal armaments. The oppressors with their cudgels, their iron shoes and their bloody coats, will be freed from their grim machinations and will leave the poor in peace. For the new human being has been born, and a new humanity will be possible, a humanity which no longer knows either masters or slaves, either oppressed or oppressors. This is God’s initiative on behalf of his betrayed and tormented humanity. “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” It is the zeal of ardent love.

There is no other initiative we can seize with absolute assurance, for ourselves or for other people. There is no other zeal for the liberation of the world in which we can place a certain hope.

The Zeal of Love

There are certainly many other movements, and much fervent zeal for the liberation of the masses. It certainly sounds more realistic for people in darkness to dream of God’s day of vengeance, finding satisfaction in the hope that at the Last Judgment all the godless enemies who oppress us here will be cast into hellfire. But what kind of blessedness is it that luxuriates in revenge and needs the groans of the damned as background to its own joy? To us a child is born, not an embittered old man. God in a child, not as hangman. That is why he prayed on his cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” It sounded more heroic when, in 1934, Hitler’s columns marched through Tubingen, singing with fanatical zeal, “One day, the day of revenge! One day, and we shall be free!” It was a zeal that led to Auschwitz and Stalingrad.

Emperors have always liked to be called emperors of peace, from Augustus down to the present day. Their opponents and the heroes of the people have always liked to be called “liberators,” from Arminius of the Cherusci to Simón Bolívar. They have come and gone. Neither their rule nor their liberation endured. God was not with them. Their zeal was not the zeal of the Lord. They did not disarm this divided world. They could not forgive the guilt, because they themselves were not innocent. Their hope did not bring new life. So let them go their way. Let us deny them our complete obedience. “To us this child is born.” The divine liberty lies upon his shoulders.

What does his rule look like? We have to know this if we want to begin to live with him. He will establish “peace on earth,” we are told, and he will “uphold peace with justice and with righteousness.” But how can peace go together with justice? What we are familiar with is generally based on conflict. The life of justice is struggle. Among us, peace and justice are divided by the struggle for power. The so-called “law of the strongest” destroys justice and right. The weakness of the peacemakers makes peace fragile. It is only in the zeal of love that what power has separated can be put together again: in a just peace and in the right to peace.

This love does not mean accepting breaches of justice “for the sake of peace,” as we say. But it does not mean, either, breaking someone else’s peace for the sake of our own rights. Peace and righteousness will kiss and be one only when the new person is born, and God the Lord, who has created all things, arrives at just rights in the creation. When God is God in the world, then no one will want to be anyone else’s Lord and God anymore.

But is this really possible here and now, or is it just a dream?

There is nothing against dreams if they are good ones. The prophet gave the people in darkness, and us, this unforgettable dream. We should remain true to it. But he could see only the shadowy outline of the name of the divine child, born for the freedom of the world; he called him Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

The New Testament proclaims to us the person himself. He is Jesus Christ, the child in the manger, the preacher on the mount, the tormented man on the cross, the risen liberator.

So according to the New Testament the dream of a liberator, and the dream of peace, is not merely a dream. The liberator is already present and his power is already among us. We can follow him, even today making visible something of the peace, liberty and righteousness of the kingdom that he will complete. It is no longer impossible. It has become possible for us in fellowship with him. Let us share in his new creation of the world and – born again to a living hope – live as new men and women.

The zeal of the Lord be with us all.

This is the sermon I spoke on Sunday, the first analogy in italics is what I did at the beginning of the message to illustrate the point.

This month we are talking about rhythms in our lives. Violent rhythms, healthy ones, God-ordained ones like the sabbath. This is an interesting topic, because these rhythms determine so much about the types of people we are and they determine the types of people we become. Darryl had a big part in helping me write this message, so thanks to him for setting me on this course.

Have Val come up and play anything she wants on the piano, anything at all. As Val plays something beautiful, let her sit down and thank her. Now ask Steve to come up, and tell him he can play anything at all on the piano. Anything. Taunt him a little while he’s up there trying to stutter through something, tell him he has complete freedom to do whatever he wants, that we aren’t imposing on his freedom whatsoever.

There is something odd happening here. How come, when given the same kind of freedom, Steve and Val give us two completely different results? Val is using her freedom wisely; playing us beautiful songs and actually giving us something we want to listen to. Steve on the other hand, who had the same amount of freedom, couldn’t play anything for us at all. In fact, he sucked. He completely abused his freedom and didn’t use it properly at all.

Unless of course, what we are talking about here is not freedom at all. Either there is something wrong with Steve, or maybe we need a different understanding of what freedom really is? What I would like to suggest that there is a large difference between freedom and opportunity. In this illustration with Steve and Val playing the piano, I gave them both equal opportunity to play us something worthwhile on the piano. However, only Val really had the freedom to play it. So what was different between Val and Steve that gave Val freedom but none to Steve?

We live in a time and place in the world where we celebrate freedom. We all love it and we all remind ourselves daily that we are free. We celebrate the fact that we can belong to any religious group, get a job that we want, make as much money as we want and speak about whatever we want. It is at the very core of our identity not only as Christians but also as Canadians. Our country is driven by a charter of rights and freedoms. This idea of freedom is so crucial to our being, the the idea of not being free (ie. communism) is an abomination to us. How dare someone strip humanity of their basic right to be free!

Of course the idea of freedom takes on different aspects depending on who you talk to. Ron and I met a guy in Las Vegas who was completely sold on the idea that he is a free man, and he is free to carry a firearm (or three) with him wherever he goes. Others have the belief that because they are free then they can decide if they have an abortion or not. Others believe that their freedom gives them the right to free health care. The list goes on.

However, there is something that is odd about this kind of freedom. There are tell-tale signs that this may not be true freedom; like if your freedom only exists because it imposes on someone else and steals their freedom away from them or if eventually your freedom leads to the destruction of freedom then it might not be freedom. Like in the example with Val and Steve, I think that we assume these ideas of freedom onto our lives that don’t necessarily define freedom, but rather opportunity.

For instance, I grew up with the opportunity to be an American Gladiator. In fact, I would watch the TV show and I looked at it and I was convinced that I could be a gladiator. However, I never really had the freedom to become one, and I never would have become one. This isn’t because I didn’t have the opportunity. If I would have taken specific intentional steps to tone my muscles, get in shape, have my hair done and become very cocky, then the odds are I probably could have eventually ended up on the show. But because I never setup my life in a way that would truly make me free to do that, I will never be on American Gladiators.

Or another example. We are free to eat what we want, when we want it. Absolutely. The how come someone that ends up living by this freedom looks like this? Is this really a picture of someone who is free?

So we know now that true freedom isn’t just something that arrives one day. Something else is going on. What needs to happen for freedom to truly take hold is for one to be disciplined and formed into freedom. The only way Val is free to play the piano for us is because this is a result of years of practice, discipline and Val being formed into being a musician. The only way I would have ever become an American Gladiator is if I spent the years necessary training. This is true in absolutely every circumstance where someone desires freedom to do or be something.

Now let’s move this over into our Christian lives and this idea that we are free in Christ and see what happens.

Q: As a Christian, what kind of freedom are we promised?

“Freedom in Christ” is a cliche that we throw around constantly to denote some type of mental state that we receive from being brought into a relationship with Christ. It is a difficult statement though because as we can see that our understanding of freedom is a bit skewed. I would say that most Christians live in a “opportunity of Christ” rather than a “freedom in Christ.” If this is true, this means that a lot of us are living false lives; lying to ourselves about our freedom to make us feel better. We end up gaining our value from what is possible rather than from what is promised. We think we are free, but really what we are participating in only causes us to be less free. This is the life we live as an adbusters image shows us.

I think we all would agree that a statement like this is pretty ironic. This isn’t really freedom. Freedom looks different and is different.

The church in general offers a massive opportunity to become a Christian. Think about it. The entire idea of the alter call is an invitation to an opportunity of a life time. All you have to do is say this one prayer and well you get to go to heaven when you die and experience freedom in Christ. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. That may be taking advantage of an opportunity to make yourself feel better for a few days, but it certainly has nothing to do with truly experiencing freedom in Christ.

Paul understood this when he was writing to the Romans, here is a clip from what he said in Romans 6.

Romans 6:15-23 (MSG)
So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?

As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.

But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.

Now, as Christians, we are aware of our freedom. Freedom is there, lurking around the corner, but it isn’t just something that you have one day and don’t have the next. Paul’s life is an example to that, even in Roman’s. We see him encouraging people to live in their freedom and he acknowledges the struggle. He doesn’t however say that it is just something that lands on your lap as soon as you jump at the opportunity in a moment of strength.

Freedom can only come through being shaped and disciplined. The christian church has recognized this and has a history of learning to practice this type of freedom that Jesus and Paul talk about. Throughout history the church has picked up habits to try and bring the church closer to embracing and experiencing the freedom that is promised to them. One of the key things that Christians over the centuries have practiced have been spiritual disciplines. Every discipline helps take the Christian to a different understanding of freedom. Richard Foster is one of the most respected authors out there on the disciplines and here is what he says about the subject.

“Every discipline has its corresponding freedom. If I have schooled myself in the art of rhetoric, I am free to deliver a moving speech when the occasion requires it…The purpose of the disciplines is freedom. Our aim is the freedom, not the discipline. The moment we make the discipline our central focus, we turn it into law and lose the corresponding freedom.”
Foster (110)

So let’s look at a few of the disciplines and see what’s going on.

Fasting = Freedom from being controlled by our desire

“Fasting helps us keep our balance in life. How easily we begin to allow nonessentials to take precedence in our lives. How quickly we crave things we do not need until we are enslaved by them. Paul writes, “‘All things are lawful for me’, but I will not be enslaved by anything.”
(1 Cor. 6:12)

“What freedom corresponds to submission? It is the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get your own way. The obsession to demand that things go the way we want them to go is one of the greatest bondage in human society today. People will spend weeks, months, even years in a perpetual stew because some little thing did not go as they wished…They will act as if their very life hangs on the issue…In the discipline of submission we are released to drop the matter, to forget it. Frankly, most things in life are not nearly as important as we think they are.”
Richard Foster

“As Jesus made clear in our central passage, freedom from anxiety is one of the inward evidences of seeking first the kingdom of God. The inward reality of simplicity involves a life of joyful unconcern for possessions. Neither the greedy nor the miserly know this liberty. It has nothing to do with abundance of possessions or their lack. It is an inward spirit of trust. The sheer fact that a person is living without things is no guarantee that he or she is living in simplicity…Conversely, wealth does not bring freedom from anxiety. Kierkegaard writes, “…riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep’s clothing pretending to be security against anxieties and they become then the object of anxiety…they secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf which is put to tending the sheep secures them…against the wolf.”

Richard Foster

mediation
prayer
study
solitude
service
confession
worship
guidance
celebration

So the question really does lie with us. If we want to be free and live lives of freedom. If we truly want to experience this life of freedom that we are promised then we can’t just decide to do it one day; we must start practicing and disciplining ourselves so that we may live this kind of life. I would argue that if you are not intentionally practicing a specific discipline, than you are probably not living out it’s corresponding freedom.

Sin of course gives the illusion of freedom. It shows you all the opportunities in the world and teases you with them. Erwin McManus puts it this way.

“Yes the things we choose in our freedom soon hold us as their prisoners. So much so that we choose freely what we later find ourselves trapped within. Your passions can create the exhilaration of freedom while leading you straight into a dark and merciless dungeon. Not all free acts lead to freedom. In fact if you’re not careful, the choices you freely make may cost you a life of genuine freedom. This is why the Bible talks about human experience in terms of being slaves to sin. One of the odd characteristics of sin is that it is a free act that enslaves you. Sin creates the illusion of freedom. In the end it fools us into seeking freedom from God rather than finding freedom in God.”
- Erwin McManus

We can see this with how Canadians spend their money. The Canadian national household debt as just recently reached an all-time high of 1.3 trillion dollars. This doesn’t sound like a statistics of a free country. 1.3 trillion dollars owing is not a symbol of freedom but rather something else. Parents now celebrate their freedoms as couples. Women can now work, and often you will see families with both parents working. This of course is seen as a celebrated freedom. Yet with some of the statistics surrounding family life and TV, it seems to me that there isn’t much freedom in this lifestyle at all. The average amount of time that a child spends in front of a TV is almost 1500 hours a year, where the average amount of time they will spend in school is only 900 hours a year. Or the fact that the number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children is less than four minutes but the number of minutes per week that the average child watches television is 1,680. Are these statistics of free families? Technology offers us things that the world could not comprehend 20 years ago; many would call this freedom. However when you find out that the amount of outdoor and creative play time for children has dropped over 90 percent in the last half of century, it is obvious that these freedoms may not be leading to as much freedom as we hoped.

It is difficult to leave you with a challenge after a message like this. Any challenge I leave you with will come off across as leaving you with an opportunity to try something new, but it could easily fall by the wayside as quickly as you picked it up. To be honest, there is no formula on how you make disciplines work. You either do them or you don’t. Most of us choose the latter.

We have a culture based on jumping all over every opportunity that presents itself and celebrating the fact that we have opportunity to be anything and have anything. In the same breath, we live in a culture that is very unsatisfied and constantly looking to find new so called freedoms to participate in. We jump at every opportunity that presents itself, we want instant satisfaction and we have no concept of waiting. Our culture has a disease in that we are no longer as a culture able to create freedom, rather we end up consuming opportunities. Andy Crouch, in talking about the consumeristic culture that we live in explains it this way, which I’ll explain and end the message on this. (Here is the link to his entire message)

Let’s say I just find out that there is a new album for sale by U2. Within moments I can do online, download the album, and be listening to it within seconds. The gap between desire and satisfaction of that desire is barely existent. Our satisfaction almost starts instantly. I’m actually more gratified in my download than I am in listening to the album, in many of our cases this is the same with purchasing something. We are more gratified at the checkout than we are actually using the product. As I’m listening to the new CD my satisfaction grows even more. It looks something like this.

But like any CD (or anything else I’ve ever bought) the satisfaction eventually starts to wear off. As you listen to the CD the third, fifth or even tenth time the satisfaction begins to lose it’s weight.

This is of course our normal pattern for consumer goods and us buying things. Of course it’s just the initial satisfaction that any marketer needs you to experience, because this is the beauty of out consumeristic tendencies. If you experience the initial satisfaction, that’s all that is needed for the wheel to keep on spinning, because they got their money. Of course, our goal is to be satisfied. We use our so called freedoms in doing whatever it takes to always stay satisfied at all times.

Crouch keeps going

Now, as long as you have the money to keep making those purchases, this pattern works. You stay satisfied at a very high level, constantly enthralled by the newest and greatest. And you keep a bunch of companies in business. And indeed, there is something elemental about this pattern: it is, after all, the pattern of one of the most basic human experiences, hunger. We eat, are satisfied, grow hungry, and eat again. The genius of consumer culture is to extend this basic human experience to almost every corner of our lives: the cars we drive, the television we watch, the Web sites we visit. Call it the pattern of purchases. In a consumer economy, this is the template for more and more of our discretionary money and time: satisfaction sustained by frequent purchases. All it really requires of us is money.

Rarely though, does this pattern actually bring real freedom. Rather it probably starts to look a bit more like this.

This of course is the pattern of addiction. One does something that initially was great and offers a great amount of satisfaction. Wanting to repeat the feeling, the user participates in the same experience again; but something is a bit off, it’s not as powerful and it probably wears off more quickly, which of course pushes the person to jump into it again. The satisfaction keeps going down and down and eventually starts to go into the negative. The actions that were once bringing the most satisfaction are now depressing and the opposite of satisfying.

Andy Crouch puts it this way.

In the long run, with the most addictive substances and behaviors, the satisfaction from each additional unit is actually negative — unsatisfying and destructive — yet the user is so entrenched in the pattern, still clinging to the memory of those first euphoric hits, that he or she is unable to escape. With the worst addictions, apart from the grace of God, the pattern always and only ends in the premature death of the user, caught in a downward spiral that began with beautiful bliss.

This example is a destructive pattern of trying to satisfy yourself without properly understanding how freedom really works. It just doesn’t last. These so called free acts to not lead to eventual freedom but they lead to being imprisoned.

Like we have discussed earlier, there is a better way to truly experience satisfaction and freedom. We can bring it back to the example of Val on the piano. When Val first began playing the piano, I am sure, like any of us, it was horrible. Wrong notes, too loud, bad timing….I’m sure it was all there. There is very little satisfaction in starting to learn how to play the piano. I would say for many, there is almost no satisfaction, it’s almost the opposite. This is how my parents raised me in music. The understanding was there that I would not enjoy it at first, but they kept pushing me and pushing me, but for the time being there was negative satisfaction.

But if one, like Val, keeps up at it and keeps practicing and pushing through, over time, as she starts to sit down at the piano, it starts to become more satisfying (for her and the people that have to listen).

As you keep practicing you slowly start to learn the art of the instrument and you can actually start playing songs and they sound like the song. You start to become more and more satisfied with your participation. Here is the crazy part about this part of the graph, as Crouch points out, this graph keeps going up for a very very long time, and it may never go down. Even if Val stops playing piano for a while and picks it back up again, she will enjoy it. Playing her own instrument and creating her own music is a freedom that she never had before and now it is one of the most satisfying parts of her life.

This is what disciplines and practice bring into your life. It is a life that was never there before. This is the difference between purchasing something to make you happy and practicing something to bring you satisfaction. You can buy a CD but all the hard work of creating has already been done for you. Spend hours and years pouring your life into how to play the piano and then finally be able to re-create or even create some of your own music and it is a completely different experience.

And this points to an even more significant difference between purchases and practices. Practices, done consistently over time, expand our own capacities in fundamental and irreversible ways. Practice the violin for an hour a day, for twenty years, and at the end you will be able to do things, to create things, you were completely unable to do and create before. Listen to recorded violin music for the same amount of time, and while you may by the end have a pretty complete mental grasp of the violin repertoire, you will be just as helpless with an actual violin as you were twenty years earlier. When we purchase, we are simply freeloading off the capacities some other person has developed, and our own capacities change very little or, most often, not at all. But when we practice, we change.

So this is what I want to leave you with today. I want to be a community of Christians who do not heed to every purchase that presents itself to us and to every opportunity that arises just because we can. I want to be a community who chooses real freedom; a freedom that takes sweat and blood to experience. I want to be a community that runs deep because we are rooted in practices that help us become who we are talking about. So I challenge you to start living a life of practice and discipline so that you may truly experience the freedom that God has in place for you. It will suck at first and it will not be enjoyable but it is the only true path to real freedom.

Joe and I tag teamed this message. Basically I tried to summarize the entire story of what God has been up to through the biblical narrative and how all along he has been bringing heaven to earth. Joe used different themes in the story about heaven and helped bring them a little closer to home. So here is my section.

After the downer of a week last week we thought we would end the month on much more of an uplifting note: heaven. There is really no point in figuring out what to avoid if we are paying no attention to what we are aiming towards. This is actually a message I’m more passionate about than the first one. I love diving into the deep waters of hell and teasing out ideas and trying to understand what is really going on, but there is nothing more exciting than what is coming down the pipes in terms of God’s plan for creation. So basically what I’m going to do this morning is show you that through the entire story of the Bible, God has had a plan and he has been bringing it to fruition in all sorts of different ways. Our job right now is to look through history and the present and point out where God is moving and where his plan is in action and join with him in accomplishing it.

We get a lot of our ideas about heaven from Jesus himself. He was always talking about the Kingdom of God in the synoptics and the Kingdom of Heaven in John. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the Kingdom of Heaven in the parable series, but we did learn quite a few things. We learned that it is a present and future reality. We learned that it is moving all by itself. We learned that it is extremely exciting to find. We learned that it was very intertwined with it’s opposing kingdom. We learned that it spreads like wild fire from something as small as a mustard seed. There is lots of characteristics of the kingdom of God that we have discovered. However, something that we did not focus on that much is how Jesus’ life and ministry here on this earth was part of a larger plan of something that God was doing.

Jesus had a very specific role and place in history and fulfilled many things that to bring a nice finish to different parts of the story in the Bible. To start though, we shouldn’t start with Jesus, we should probably go back to Gen 1. Right at the beginning we have the beginning of the story: creation. Paul helps frame it for us in Colossians 1.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

The first chapters of the Bible are all about creation. We spent 8 months in Genesis, so I won’t spend much time on them now, but you know the drill. God created the earth, he created humans and he created animals and all things. God created humans to be in relationship with him and subdue and rule the world. They knew a intimacy with God as they walked together in the garden. Everything they wanted was theirs at their fingertips. This is how our story starts. It starts in Genesis 1, in a garden, with no clothes, and in harmonious relationship with each other, God and the earth. We will call this creation. The beginning. The starting point.

Then next in the story we have the fall. This is when humanity chose to go in its own direction, and depend on themselves for purpose and decisions. Blessing became a curse. When this began humanity started to fall apart. They started to kill each other and hurt each other and only think of themselves. We watch over 7 chapters the downwards spiral of sin and violence with Cain killing Abel, Lamech threatens retribution that is beyond ridiculous and then God sends a flood to try to put a stop to it. We see God trying to start with a “new Adam” with Noah, but this Adam has sin in his heart also and we see another downward cycle to the tower of babel. Most likely the biggest problem is the severence of their relationship with God. Things changed. They weren’t how they used to be. The order of creation had shifted. God created things in a very specific order and humans decided they didn’t like that order and wanted to be at the top of the list: like gods as the serpent puts it. We will call this the fall. The separation. Being out of order.

Up until this point, the first twelve chapters point to creation as a whole. All of humanity is included. Then enters Abraham into the story in Genesis 12. With Abraham, it’s like God is trying to start all over again. He pulls Abraham out of the life he was living and sets him apart, as something new, to bring about his plan to redeem the world. God says he is going to bless Abraham so that Abraham will be a blessing to all the nations around him. Let’s be clear about this. The point of Abraham being blessed is so that he would bless the other nations. This was God’s way of reconnecting back with his creation. This was God’s plan. He was going to use this man, to start a nation and this nation would be responsible for making right the relationship that was lost with God in the fall. There was a lot on this nation. It was starting to look like the problem of being separate from God finally had a solution ahead. God from this point on throughout the Hebrew scriptures centers his plan on Abraham and his descendants, the nation of Israel. It is important to understand how God is moving along consistently in the same direction here; we can see this by looking at the connections with Israel and Adam.

These are just the connections in the Old Testament. This could be easier fleshed out if we pulled in Paul’s letters or some of the beliefs of those in Jesus’ times. However, the connections that Israel has been given the role of Adam obvious. We could take this to the next step and say that not only is Israel is the new Adam, but Canaan is the new Eden. There are numerous parallels between the language here also. From walking to and fro in both Eden and in the sanctuary, the cherubim guard both the tree of life in Eden and the holy of holies in the sanctuary, Eden and the Sanctuary are entered from the East, the temple was decorated like a garden, Adam was to till and keep the garden and the priests were to till and keep the sanctuary, a river flowed from Eden just as Israel’s visionaries saw a river flowing from Jerusalem. The list is actually quite monstrous, especially for the little we actually know about Eden. The connection is clear. Israel is the new Adam.

“The Eden story was shaped to prefigure Israel’s own story. however, in the canonical context this is reversed, so that Israel’s story becomes a retelling of Adam and Eve’s story. Humanity, in Adam, lost the blessing, but Israel, in Abraham, is the vehicle through which God restores it. Adam and Eve’s expulsion finds its echo in Israel’s exile, and, as we shall see, Israel’s return foreshadows and precipitates humanities restoration.”
- Gregory Macdonald

So as you can see, there is some order to what is happening here. God is up to something. God is trying to bring back the blessings of Gen 1 back to all of humanity. Abraham is God’s way of dealing with the problem of all the nations, not just Israel. Remember, the promise was that their blessing was to be passed on to bless all the nations. This promise is repeated four more times in Genesis alone! Here is some good verses on Israel’s mission to the entire world and being for the sake of the entire world.

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him

and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.

A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;

he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his law the islands will put their hope.”

This is what God the LORD says—
he who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it,
who gives breath to its people,
and life to those who walk on it:

“I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness;
I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles,

to open eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.

Another interesting note, is that justice is obviously seen as a positive thing in these verses which sort of links us back to last week on judgment being about settings things right to where they should be. So Israel according to this verse is supposed to be establishing justice on earth, their laws will have hope put in them, Israel will be a covenant for all people and they will be a light for all gentiles. So, a lot of pressure is put on Israel. We’ll leave it at that shall we.

Like I pointed out above in the table, Israel fell short like Adam did. Israel did not keep the law, she was cursed. The plan wasn’t working. Israel goes through exile. They become a nation that fights wars and deals weapons and kills children. In other words, they become like every other nation. The very people that God set apart to be his representative on earth to bless the nations started to oppress them instead. Israel began to get in the way of God’s blessing rather than become the administrators of it.

“The Old Testament, when read as a whole, sees Yahweh’s plan as the salvation of all the nations through Israel, his new humanity. Israel herself actually ends up as part of the problem rather than the solution, but God sens his servant-Israel in order to enable her to fulfill her mission to the nations.”
-Gregory Macdonald

So what do we do? The only way out of this predicament is if God restores Israel. Well good news. He did.

As we start to see the story of Jesus unfold we see that it very closely linked into that of the story of Israel. The early Christian thought of Jesus as the one who fulfilled the story of Israel. I remember when I first discovered this and it was a major ah ha moment for me at Tyndale. I had been going to Tyndale for one semester and my first class back after Christmas was New Testament with Stephen Thompson. He started by asking a question about what was Jesus all about. People gave him all sorts of answers. To take the sin of the world, a good example, to die so we didn’t have to and the list went on. He said “wrong, he was all about the Kingdom of God.” I was confused. I had no idea what he meant. And then he started on his two hour lecture.This first class changed the entire way that I looked at the Bible because all of sudden he made a connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament for me and made it about one common story about God who was trying to accomplish a purpose with his kingdom. He took the Bible from being chopped up stories of random good things to teach your children and tied it all in together and showed how God was bringing about Eden again (or the kingdom of God).

Jesus isn’t just a random throw in story, but the entire Hebrew Scriptures were leading up to this event. We looked at Adam, and how Israel embodied Adam’s story. Now though, with Israel failing, Jesus steps in and embodies Israel’s story. Jesus is baptized and goes into the wilderness for forty days before crossing the Jordan into Israel to begin his mission. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Israel also went into the dessert for forty years before crossing the Jordan into Canaan. Jesus had twelve disciples and Israel had twelve tribes. However, we can already see from the very first tests that Jesus succeeds where Israel failed in the desert.

“Because the Messiah represents Israel, he is able to take on himself Israel’s curse and exhaust it…The crucifixion of the Messiah is, one might say, the quintessence of the curse of exile, and its climatic act…He is Israel going down to death under the curse of the law, and going through that curse to new covenant life beyond.”
- NT Wright

“In Christ’s death and resurrection Israel’s exile reaches its climax and Israel is restored (the new exodus occurs)….The blessing of Abraham that God had always intended to be mediated to the world through Israel was now set loose in Christ.”
-Gregory Macdonald

So basically here is what happened.

Humans Created>Humans Fell>Israel Created>Israel Fell>Jesus Created>Jesus Dies>Jesus Resurrected>Israel Returns from Exile>Humans are reconciled

Do you see How Jesus is at the climax of this equation? There is a progression and a goal and it is accomplished in Jesus. When it hits Jesus’ death and resurrection, the entire story gets reversed and we are brought back to our original intended goal and state with God. Paul explains it better than I can in Romans 5.

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.  For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do you see how everything is reversed? Many died, condemnation, death, condemnation to all people, all were made sinful because of one. Then, on walks Jesus on to the scene and the language changes to grace, justification, life and righteousness. Jesus acts of righteous obedience to the call of Israel completely reversed the results of Adam’s acts of disobedience in Eden.

Really we can insert all sorts of things of Christian history into this equation. If we looked at Noah and inserted him into this equation he would land before Jesus in the creation and fall part. If we inserted the church we would insert him after Jesus in the reconciliation part. The church is part of the reconciliation process and exists as living proof as a restored Israel, a restored humanity. Then we can jump ahead to Revelation and finally it seems John sees a vision for what God has always intended.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.
Rev 21:3

This is what he was always going for wasn’t it? This was the language with Adam, with Israel, with the Holy Spirit and now with the New Jerusalem coming to earth. This is God’s plan, to have all men reconciled to himself. To bring us back to Eden where we are in right relationship with God, each other and the earth. This is where God is aiming towards. This is the end of the story. This is what our relational God is longing for through the entire story. This gives us hope for today that not all is lost, but we serve a good God who reconciles things to himself.

This is where God is aiming towards. This is the end of the story. This is what our relational God is longing for through the entire story. So this is what it looks like. Paul, I think summarizes the entire story beautifully in Colossians, so I thought we would end today by reading this poem that he wrote.

Colossians 1:15-20
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,

and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Joe talked about Genesis 1 and 3. The fact that for so long the church has allowed their story to start at Genesis 3, when sin comes into the picture. The problem is, when you do that, the entire gospel becomes about getting rid of the problem that is presented at the beginning of the story. However, the story does not start there. It starts with Genesis 1, and when you start in Genesis 1 the story begins with God creating humanity in relationship with him and in relationship with each other and in relationship with the world. That is what we have to look forward to.

“The church latched on to that old doctrine of original sin like a dog to a stick, and before you knew it, the whole gospel got twisted around it. Instead of being God’s big message of saving love for the whole world, the gospel became a little bit of secret information on how to solve the pesky legal problem of original sin.”
-Brian McLaren

This part of secret information has basically lead us to believe, that if we don’t have this information (ie. that we have to invite Jesus to live in our heart), that we will end up in a place that we call hell. So that is what this week is about: hell. We are going to go through all the words for hell in the Bible and gain some understanding on people’s belief in hell and try to come to grips with what the Bible is doing with such a concept. Before we start though, let’s find out where we all are presently. Joe is going to come up and mind map all of our ideas, but basically we want to create a map of all the beliefs of everyone in this room and what hell is.

Q: What is hell? How do we know what hell is? Why is it important?
(Create a mind map on the wall with everyone’s ideas)

Everyone has very different ideas on hell. One of my favourite musicians, David Bazan, kind of gives his own take on it, so we asked Kevin to perform it for us and I’ll put the lyrics on the screen so you can follow along.

With the threat of hell hanging over my head like a halo
I was made to believe in a couple of beautiful truths
That eventually had thee effect of completely unraveling
The powerful curse put on me by you

When you set the table
When you chose the scale
Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail
Did you make them tremble
So they would tell the tale
Did you push us when we fell

If my mother cries when I tell her what I discovered
Then I hope she remembers she taught me to follow my heart
And if you bully her like you done me with fear of damnation
Then I hope she can see you
for what you are

When you set the table
When you chose the scale
Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail
Did you make them tremble
So they would tell the tale
Did you push us when we fell

What am I afraid of?
Who did I betray?
In what medieval kingdom does justice work that way?
If you knew what would happen
And you made us just the same
Then you my Lord can take the blame

I’ve read a number of books on hell and heaven in the past year and if I’ve realized one thing it is that there is tons of different, possible views of the afterlife and especially hell that all come from different honest, Jesus loving Christians. You will not agree with all of them, because these views are all contradicting. What we are talking about here is the Christian churches’ best guess after years of honest study, reflection and prayer.

Theologians, scholars and God fearing men throughout history have wrestled with the idea of hell and many of them have come to different conclusions. In some cases hell is believed to be retributive, a type of punishment for being sinners. Some believe that God simply chose some at the beginning of the world to go to heaven and some to go to hell, this is called the doctrine of election and would be held by many Calvinists. Some people believe that everyone has a choice and that some people freely choose to go to hell. Some believe its actual literal fire. Some believe no such place exists Some believe it’s God eternally separating himself from sin. The list goes on.

As we can tell from this mind map, even in this room there is contrasting opinions. I have a lot of problems myself with the traditional view of hell. The traditional view of hell that I was raised to believe is that there is an afterlife, and there is only two places you can go: heaven or hell. Depending on if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Personal Saviour is the sole determining factor on which place you end up in. Of course, this view is extremely one sided, only half biblical and barely takes into account all the problems people have with it.

Some of the objections that I have with current traditional view of hell are:

1. What possible finite human or crime is capable of committing that would be justly punished infintely in firey torture?
2. Am I really supposed to be happy in heaven when all my loved ones are tormenting forever in hell?
3. Free will can’t be altered ever? Even if they are so destroyed by sin that they can’t think clearly and properly? Wouldn’t a loving God interfere to set them in the right direction as to not be tormented forever and ever? Is this not more loving than giving freedom?
4. What do you do with all the verses in the Bible about reconciling all things and all people being justified?
5. If Jesus says forgive them for they know not what they do, why are they held responsible if they don’t know what they are doing? It’s like giving a 6 year old a gun, is it really a freedom worth having or is it a setup for failure for a horrible failure kind of like Bazan talks about in his song.
6. Why is death the last chance? Why is the Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames the accepted view on what happens?
7. Who says hell is eternal?

The list goes on and on and I’m sure if you were all honest with yourselves you could add to it. But here is what we need to understand before we dive into a topic as heavy as this one. The difference of opinions on this matter does not say anything about someone’s commitment to Christ, to the Bible or to their faith. If you are sitting there thinking well sure you can believe in universalism, but that’s just because you have a low view of scripture well then you are sorely mistaken and you will never be able to enter into a healthy dialogue on the subject. There are good God loving and Bible respecting people who come to different conclusions than you do on topics such as these, and we have to allow it to happen.

“Even a commitment to an inspired bible is not a commitment to inerrant interpretations.”
Gregory Macdonald

This is a crucial understanding before we start anything. We all agree here that the bible is inspired and it is unerring to its witness to Christ. This does not mean the way that you read the bible or the way I read the bible is inerrant also. If we can come to that agreement then we can move forward.

Hell is a touchy subject within Christian circles. Oddly, it has become a central theology to the Christian faith. It has slowly creeped it’s way into becoming one of the sole tactics that Christians have to make converts and raise their children. Just last this week I was hanging out with the families in my Circle group and a mom of two young boys told me that her seven year old some came home from Catholic school telling her that at school he learned that if he was bad that he would go to hell. She had to assure her son that if that was the case then she wouldn’t be around because she has done a lot of bad things. So what happened? Why are we here right now? How has hell got to a point where it is so important in our day to day lives? How come the only time I hear about hell its used to threaten?

“The christian understanding of hell is crucial for understanding your own heart, living at peace in the world and knowing the love of God”
- Tim Keller

The belief in hell is important and how we believe in hell also says a lot about our belief in humanity, God and grace. Hell is important and it will tell us a lot, but your salvation or participation in the church doesn’t require you having the right answers to this mystery. So let’s see where our beliefs in hell come from and where maybe we should land closer to. We should probably start at the beginning and we can figure out a healthy balance on where we should land on such a topic. Let’s keep in mind that I can only cover so much, so this sermon should be looked at as inspiration to go and seek God and the scriptures for truth. Don’t stop thinking about this after this message.

Old Testament

A large chunk of our Bible does not mention hell at all: the Old Testament. In fact, the OT doesn’t really have words or use for words like heaven and hell. The OT has no concept of an afterlife that is split up. The OT uses the word sheol when referring to where people go when they die. Those in the OT had no idea of a soul living after death. The concept just did not exist in their writing. Their understanding was that in the same way that they were created from dust that they would return to dust. All dead go to sheol and go to sleep together, not just the bad ones. Basically sheol is the negative of life or being alive. There is no idea of reward or punishment or judgment; it is just nothing. There was no coherent system of belief of the afterlife and what happens. The afterlife was simply not something that was talked about very much. Sheol was the closest you got.

“The concept of eternal punishment does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, which uses the term Sheol to designate a bleak subterranean region where the dead, good and bad alike, subsist only as impotent shadows. When Hellenistic Jewish scribes rendered the Bible into Greek, they used the word Hades to translate Sheol, bringing a whole new mythological association to the idea of posthumous existence. In ancient Greek myth, Hades, named after the gloomy deity who ruled over it, was originally similar to the Hebrew Sheol, a dark underground realm in which all the dead, regardless of individual merit, were indiscriminately housed.”
-Stephen Harris

So if we want to form a healthy theology of hell, the Old Testament doesn’t give us much to go on. A few hundred years before Jesus is probably when a understanding of hell as we know it today started to evolve. This started happening when good Jews were being martyred. Imagine a foreign king coming and conquering your land and the soldiers kill this good, Godly woman brutally. People started needing answers for this type of brutality. Because if all you get for following God closely, is dying a horrible death at the hands of your enemies. Jews eventually came to the understanding that if this is how it plays out now, well then there must be some way that God fixes the situation on the other side. Imagine entire villages being raped and brutally tortured and then to top it all off they are killed. There has to be some sort of retribution for this right? Something has to be set right. Now we talked about how some of the Psalms are from the oppressed and this is why they can sound so violent and desperate. It was out of this oppressed state that a theology of the afterlife was formed. It was only natural. If they believed in a good God who loved his people, then there must be something else than simply living, getting beat up and dying in the same place as the people who were doing these things to you.

One of my favourite authors, Miroslav Volf, in his book Exclusion and Embrace speaks of his experience as a Croatian. He had first hand experience with years and years of people being locked into a horrible cycle of vengeance and retaliation. He argues in his book that this cycle of violence is not fueled by a belief in a God of judgment but a lack of a belief in a God of judgment.  No one would follow or care about a God who is not angry at injustice. We believe that we follow a God that is going to set all things right. So in the Jewish context, eventually a belief in some sort of retribution comes from the injustice that is all around them. The only means of stopping this violence is if some kind of judgment is rendered from God. If you have talked to people who have seen their family tortured and their homes burned, what are you going to tell them so that they don’t jump into the same cycle and start doing it back to the people that did it to them? You can’t just say violence doesn’t solve anything, that just sounds dumb and creates morals around no substance. It doesn’t touch their heart. Volf says

“The only resource powerful enough to both passify the human hearts desire for justice and at the same time keep us from getting sucked into that cycle of blood and vengeance is to say there is a God and he will put everything right. If you think not believing in God is going to keep people from being sucked into the cycle of violence, you’re wrong. If you don’t believe that there is somebody that is going to make everything right, then you will pick up the sword and you will get sucked in. If you don’t believe that the doctrine of of God’s judgment is a resource for living at peace on earth you’ve had a sheltered life. Belief in a God of judgment is crucial for a Croatian to live at peace on earth.”
- Miroslav Volf

Justice is a necessary belief for anyone who has ever suffered. It is a necessary belief for anyone to live peacefully. The doctrine of judgment helps us live at peace in the world. So longing for justice is what came out of the oppression of God’s people, it is the belief that God will eventually set things right. It is the belief that judgment will be rendered and every time you have been wronged will somehow be set right. I think that this is a fair desire, I just don’t think hell as we know it today is the answer to this dilemma. I think judgment is. This is the type of judgment that we read about in the Psalms; this longing for God to bring justice and make things right again.

Israelite scholars now have this view of judgment, it is something that becomes more and more accepted. Justice is common language for them. Crying out to God for refuge and to take down their enemies was their way of dealing with horrible oppression. Like any theology over time it becomes taken advantage of and used to induce fear into people that they are speaking to. They take a natural longing of justice and turn it into a fear tactic into scaring people into living the right way and controlling them. So you have an entire sect of Jews, the Pharisees, who then start using this concept of God’s justice to scare people into doing the right thing, or they will suffer the wrath of God in a place called hell. Do you see how this change of context changes the meaning of hell completely? In one circumstance, you have God’s justice being the last little bit of hope for the oppressed. In the next you have God’s justice as being a tool used to to scare people into living right. First you have judgment as being hope for the people being oppressed, then something changes and you have judgment becoming the tool to oppress the oppressed. When God’s justice starts getting used to force morality, it completely misses any idea of love and grace.

New Testament
Enters the New Testament and the Pharisees that we have read about all our lives. One of the major Pharisee beliefs is that the reason they were still under Roman rule is because they thought that there was too much sin among them. There was just too many prostitutes, drunks, tax collectors and other sinners. If they could simply make these sinners stop sinning then God would finally come in and save the day and end Roman oppression. Therefore, they start formulating a belief that unless you repent, ie. stop sinning, you’ll go to hell. After all, because of their sin, the marginalized nation stays marginalized and oppressed, so they will get the same fate as the oppressors themselves, because they are delaying the arrival of the Messiah.

“First they would threaten sinners with hell. Second, they would extend the reward of resurrection from the heroic martyrs to all good people–good meaning those who fulfilled the Pharisees’ idea of good. Finally, they would use the language of hell to accomplish what they felt they needed to accomplish–to frighten sinners enough to repent and change their ways for the good of the nation.”
- Brian McLaren

When we read the bible in english we miss a lot of the meaning behind the words that we are reading. Hell is a perfect example of how a lot of meaning is missed in the translations. It only appears a few times throughout the entire New Testament yet we have created our main driving force of purpose and theology behind this idea. Throughout the entire NT, there is three different words that we translate into hell. So already we have our first problem. The Greeks were using three different words and we translate each of those into the same word. It’s like calling Iraq, grave and casket all the word ‘death’ and making no distinction of the three things. Or let’s put it this way. This morning I was listening to CBC Radio and they were talking about all the little devils that have come up from Mexico and have landed on Vancouver Island. If I give you no context (and especially if this is thousands of years later) you probably would have a belief that these were actual demons coming to torment the Vancouver island. Now what if I told you that Humboldt squid were called little devils by Mexican fishermen because they were large predators and that oddly they are washing up on shore in Vancouver in the hundreds. See how the story could easily get mixed up? We know this is ridiculous but if we don’t get into the actual meaning of these words this is exactly what we are doing with the concept of hell in the NT.

“We tend to try to turn the rich and varied biblical lexicon into a limited range of synonymous technical terms. For example, judgment for us equals hell or condemnation. Condemnation equals hell, etc. We should be more careful than this in assuming words are synonyms, because the Bible is horribly disappointing as a modern-style technical textbook, even of theology. The Biblical lexicon of judgment includes sheol, hades, tartarus, gehenna, the abyss, death, darkness, fire, lake of fire, unquenchable fire, where the worm does not die, the Day, the Day of the Lord, etc”
Maundet.

So let’s go through some of these words so we can understand what they are really talking about.

tartaroō (2 peter 2) This is a term from greek mythology, punishment and disicpline of angels, only occurs once, peter borrows from the greek writing. We don’t need to focus much on this one because it shows up once in the entire bible and it has to do with angels.

hadēs – This word shows up 4 times in Revelation, 1 time in Acts, Jesus uses it 4 times in Matt 11, 16, luke 10, 16. This word is the Greek equivalent of sheol. We’ve already covered this word in the Old Testament, this we know is the same word because the greeks translated sheol into hades. So that leaves us with one word left that carries some meaning that we need to focus on.

gehenna – This word is in reference to an actual place, Valley of Hinnom (ga means valley). Every other mention of hell in the NT is referring to this word. Gehenna was on the south side of the city of Jerusalem.

So it raises the question, what does it mean? Gehenna had a real history, and it shaped the understanding of this word. This is where sacrifices of sons and daughters were given to Molech with fire. For a good jew this wasn’t a good place, things had taken place there that was the exact opposite of everything that God had planned for his people. This wasn’t really prime development property, this place just had this feel and stigma attached to it that made people stay away almost the same way that these kind of place have that type of stigma attached to it now. Basically mix the red light district and war grounds all in once place. So eventually what ended up happening was this place eventually got just used as a garbage dump. This place of course smelled horribly bad. You would go to the south side, to the wall of the valley and toss it over the wall to the dump below. Eventually the garbage would build up and then to push it back down, they would light it on fire so they could fit more there. Also, dogs in these days were not pets, they were wild, and the dump was a perfect place for them and they would fight over the food. When they would fight you would hear the weeping of their barks and their teeth would smack together. In other words, it was the weeping and gnashing of teeth. So Gahena was known as the place where the fire does not go out and there’s the weeping and gnashing of teeth. A place where things that once had value and worth were no longer useful and were tossed.

“Most of the passages in the New Testament which have been thought by the Church to refer to people going into eternal punishment after they die’ is not about Heaven and Hell at all. The great majority of them have to do with the way God acts within the world and history.”
- NT Wright

The word was used once by James, every other use of the word is from Jesus (12 times). This is because when Jesus talked about it, he was talking about a literal place. This was a proper noun with a capital at the beginning. It was a real place that they all knew about. It was a present that had future implications. “If you keep living this way, this is where you will end up.” It was still a warning and it was still horrible, but that at least gives us an idea of where this imagery is coming from.

“There was no single concept of hell in Second Temple Judaism but a cluster of images and concepts that held in common the claim that God would bring the wicked to account and punish them. Jesus and his followers took and made use of some of the language and images employed in the discourse of the time without endorsing every aspect of Second Temple Jewish beliefs about this fate.”
Gregory Macdonald

In Matthew 5, Jesus finds himself with large crowds following him, so like you do when large crowds follow you, you start to preach. He starts with the sermon on the mount. All pick me up kind of stuff, blessed are the poor, those who suffer etc etc. Then he jumps into this:

Salt and Light
13″You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

14″You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.
The Fulfillment of the Law
17″Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Murder
21″You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother[b]will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,[c]‘ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

23″Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.

25″Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.[d]
Adultery
27″You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’[e] 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
Divorce
31″It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’[f] 32But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
Oaths
33″Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ 34But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
An Eye for an Eye
38″You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[g] 39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Love for Enemies
43″You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[h] and hate your enemy.’ 44But I tell you: Love your enemies[i] and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This is one hell of a heavy sermon. Listen to Jesus, he makes demands that I certainly have not kept and at the end of some of them the threat of hell is hanging over their heads. Then to top off the entire sermon, he says be perfect, therefore as our father is perfect. What? No wonder Bazan sang a song like he did. Matthew writes it like a list after list of demands of what is expected by them. However, I think there is some keys in verse 20 that might help us understand a little bit more about what Jesus is doing.

“For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This is a key line. Jesus is setting this entire message up basically saying that even the people that are trying to do the purifying; even the people who have it all together and don’t break any of the laws and are telling you what laws you are breaking and don’t even know it are at risk here. They are telling you that you will go to hell if you don’t repent? Well I am telling you that it gets even worse, your righteousness has to surpass even theirs if you think you have any chance at making it into the kingdom of heaven.

“The Pharisees used hell language one way. Jesus turned it around and used it in the opposite way. They threatened marginal people will hell unless they submitted to their religious dominance. Jesus threatened the religious establishment with hell unless they showed compassion for the marginal people. Hell has been used and abused, back and forth, ever since. He uses power language of hell to disempower the injustice of the powerful and to empower the disempowered to seek justice.”
- Brian McLaren

Jesus is very particular when he uses this language. Jesus took the Pharisees threat of punishment and brought a present reality to it and start to deconstruct what they were saying. He is using such strong hyperbolic language that it makes the Pharisees look like idiots. Imagine, you have these Pharisees who for a few hundred years have been using the threat of hell to scare people into becoming pure enough so that their messiah comes back. Now, a so-called messiah steps on the scene and starts saying that even these teachers who have been correcting you are not entering the kingdom of heaven. In fact, if anyone is going to hell, it will be them. If you notice, Jesus is only talking to people who use this language already to throw it back at them. He is talking to people who are following him, people who have a concept of hell as a place where sinners go and then he flips it on them and says basically that if anyone is going to hell it is you people who are so certain that they know who is in and who is out. He isn’t saying that every person is going to hell. Instead, he’s hinting to a different type of system that determines on who ends up where, and it isn’t the system of the Pharisees.

“Contrary to the usual opinion that the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell, Jesus sets up his stories so that goodness and badness don’t count at all in the final judgment. The only thing judged at the end of these parables is faith, not works.”
- Robert Capon

Besides the story of Abraham and Lazurus that Jesus tells, hell doesn’t really come up in any other context in the entire New Testament. Every time it is Jesus using the threat of hell to show how the people who use the threat of hell cannot meet the requirements either and far from understand it.

With all that said though, there is some hope underlying all this. First, this tells me that the imagery of a fiery pit in the middle of the earth with people eternally tormenting forever and ever because they didn’t cognitively agree with our four spiritual laws might not be what is really going on here.

We need to recover a right use of the language of hell. The point of the language of hell is not for punishment for doing something bad and it is not to scare us into doing the right thing. The language is used to show us what justice looks like and to show us how bad we get if we try to do it on our own. It is to show us what humans left to their own good intentions will eventually lead to. It will lead to a garbage dump of lives that have are only concerned about their own skin and themselves and no one else and trying to earn favour through their sacrifice. Hell is where humans build their identity on anything but God as Soren Kierkegaard puts it. Hell is a present day reality, and whose to say that it can’t be a future afterlife reality? Hell is a freely chosen identity based on something else rather than God as Tim Keller puts it.

Hell is not punishment. Hell is not a pit that God throws people into that didn’t accept him as his personal saviour. When you picture hell, don’t picture all these people stuck in the middle of the earth begging to get out, trying to climb out and God up there saying, sorry buddy, no luck anymore, we don’t want you anymore. Hell is not a forced option, but freely chosen.

“The doors of hell are locked from the inside.”
CS Lewis

Hell it seems, all through the New Testament, is brought on by an inability to accept the love of God and to live under the illusion that sin really isn’t harmful. If we look at Romans 1:18-32, we get a better understanding of what is going on here. It says that God gave them over to the sinful desires of their hearts. God just let them go and chase whatever world they wanted to create. There is basically then two kinds of people: those that say to God thy will be done and those who God says to them “thy will be done.” Those that are in this concept of hell either now or later are there because they choose to live their lives by their own rules and refuse to find their value in God. Hell is what exists when God isn’t around and humans try to make it on their own. The language of hell is used to describe what happens when you start to go in a direction that isn’t from God. Hell is the opposite of the Kingdom of God.

Hell cannot be avoided by simply scaring people away from it. We’ve proved this over and over again with smoking. The cancer links are obvious, smoking is one of the most harmful things you can do to your body, it’s expensive and it smells bad. However, thousands upon thousands of people still smoke. Tobacco companies know that scaring them into the reality of how bad smoking it is won’t stop people from a life that they are addicted to. So sure, put the warnings right on the label, it won’t matter.

I don’t think we can make the mistake and not believe that a place that is horrible (that we can call hell) exists and people are either now there or will end up there ot whether its a place or a reality we experience.  The real question I think we need to ask is why? Why is there a place like this, and how does a place like this stay in line with a loving and merciful God?

Hell exists to bring God’s justice and to set everything wrong back to right again. If there is one thing that is consistent about hell throughout the scriptures it is that hell is closely related to God’s judgment and it being a place that is the opposite of the kingdom of God. God is constantly taking hell and changing it to be the kingdom of heaven. God setting everything right again is at the core of the Christian story. Hell is all the places that God has not set right yet.

Ever since Genesis 3 God has been bringing creation back to Genesis 1. God’s justice is what the entire story is about. Hell is not a punishment but a reality, and judgment is not a punishment but a setting things right. The entire NT is all about salvation by grace and then judgment by works. Hell is not related to salvation, but to judgment.

“Like the Kingdom of God, the subject of Hell is treated differently among the gospels and other NT writings. In the synoptics, the primary command of Christ seems to be to follow and do the will of God. In John, and in Paul’s writings, the prime detective is more often to believe in Jesus, or the gospel. Evangelicals tend to conflate the former into the latter, so that believing in some ways seems to negate the need to follow and do the will of God. Meanwhile, even in Paul’s writings, judgment is consistently associated with the phrase ‘according to their deeds,’ not ‘according to their beliefs.’ Also, while the synoptics frequently use similar language regarding hell, John uses a different kind of language. So, it seems to me that we are left with an embarrassing failure to take all of Scripture seriously, and we are left with a difficult challenge: how (or whether?) to integrate the various approaches to hell found in scripture.”
- Maundet

Hell is not an easy subject to tackle especially in one morning. However there are a few things we can be certain of with the God that we follow when it is all said and done.

1. We serve a good God.
2. We serve a God that is not retributive but restorative
3. We serve a God that was willing to die so we didn’t have to

Whatever hell is, we know that there are parts of it here and now that we deal with every day. And with our month talking about how heaven and hell intersect us here at earth it is obvious that hell has intersected all of our lives more than we care to imagine. The wheat and weeds are growing together and we are in the middle of it. We have talked quite a bit about looking for the mariage between heaven and earth. Discovering truth on earth today, bits of heaven. However the same could be true for finding hell on earth. Think about the world that we live in right now. Entire countries living in poverty because of the lives we live here in this country. The countries that struggle can barely make their interest payments. We spend billions on smart missles and atomic bombs and we tear down schools and hospitals. We charge for health care and we reward celebrities for being good looking.

Could these be the signs of the times? We are truly living at hell intersecting earth right here and now. This isn’t just a far off reality that we should be trying to avoid at all costs by doing some ritual, this is a reality that confronts us every day. We can decide. Bring heaven to earth or bring hell to earth. This is a choice you have to make everyday.

Hell is necessary for us to believe in a God of love and justice. If we are left to ourselves without God and we are never judged and we are never forgiven we will certainly only make this hell on earth worse.

I was hoping to finish this morning by continuing on from Matthew 5. After Jesus is done talking about all the ways that we need to be more like him and how easy it is to fall short. He starts talking about prayer and tells us this is how we should pray.

“This, then, is how you should pray:
” ‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
11Give us today our daily bread.
12Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.[a]‘ 14For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.