Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.

The first beatitude is the very basics of the Christian faith. It asks us to have an honest look at who we are and realize our own poorness and inability to hold onto any righteousness on our own. All are poor in spirit, but only some realize this and live in this reality. As the parables as well teach us, anyone who thinks he can make it on his own or come even close to being better off than someone else (Pharisee and the Tax Collector) is not poor in spirit. When we realize that death to ourselves is the only option and that life only comes by the death and Resurrection of Christ, that is when we become poor in spirit. We’ve also heard the opinion that being poor in spirit is not a quality that we should seek or desire. This isn’t saying you need to be poor. This is making a statement that it is those that are poor in spirit that the kingdom of heaven belong too. However, this of course makes you want to be poor in spirit, so that you will get the kingdom of heaven also.

This inevitably leads to the second statement by Jesus which Aaron spoke about last week. We end up mourning and crying out along with all the father’s of our faith. The earth, the angels, our spirits and Jesus all cry out and mourn the coming and redemption of all things. We mourn because things are not as they should be. We mourn because it doesn’t feel right, something is broken, and that something is us alongside of every else that we are surrounded by. We mourn because we are pour in spirit.

Out of these two, comes the statement by Jesus that we are going to focus on this morning.

Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.

This is a wonderfully backwards statement. The world in Jesus time, and conveniently enough for this sermon, the world today works completely different. In today’s world, in any world actually, the line would normally be something like

Successful are those that push to the top
for they can become anything they want

The world moves around through strength and power and success and self-congratulating and non-stop aggressiveness. We tell our children that they can be anything they want to be. Our schools are setup to be competitive in nature so our children are constantly compared to other children and then based on that we evaluate their performance based on a few letters. The more you assert yourself in this world, the better chance you have to get what you want. This is what we tell our kids, this is what we believe and this is how generally the world, and us, work.

Even in this Jesus time when he was saying these things, people would have not really grasped what was going on. The Jews had ideas for their kingdom that was going to be violent and militaristic. They were waiting for a Messiah to come and wipe their enemies and restore their power. They were trying to scheme all sorts of ways to speed up this process and bring back the control that they so longed for. They were expecting victory and world conquest. Then, this man who people claim is the Messiah launches into his victory speech. Remember the speech that Gladiator does before his army goes into battle? All his troops are lined up and ready to slit the throats of their enemy and then Russel Crowe gives his pump-up speech before the battle. That’s sort of an exaggeration, but this is kind of how I see Jesus’ sermon on the mount. Those that are listening to him are blood-thirsty and longing for freedom from their oppression by the Romans. They want vengeance. This Messiah is exactly that person who is supposed to lead them into that. Thousands follow him at this point in his ministry and it’s not just because he can do magic tricks. It’s because he was ushering in a new kingdom and people thought this meant forcing out the old. They were for their prophecies to come true and freedom to be taken a hold of.

If you’ve seen any war movie, the opening speech is usually a pump up speech that gets people ready to go into battle. People are hooting and hollering and banging their swords on their shields. They are all there to finally get what they deserve and give to the enemy what they deserve. This is how I picture the beatitudes. This kind of scene, with these kind of people just longing for God to end the suffering and free them from oppression and most importantly restore their power. Then Jesus gives his victory speech:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.

What? Really Jesus? What a downer. These are not what they would have expected. This was completely backwards and a little anti-climatic. Especially this blessed are the meek line. Like we get that the people who mourn are going to be comforted and we can even let the fact go that those that are poor will inherit their rewards later in heaven. But this blessed are the meek part doesn’t really fly. So why? Why not? What is meek and why is this so appalling?

Don’t get too caught up in trying to describe the word, sometimes it’s easier to describe the person. Generally the word meek as been thought to mean just humble. In many cases they are right, they definitely have similarities. Meek though has a whole bunch more meaning that doesn’t usually come with the word humble. Greek word Praus which mean gentle strength. So this word more denotes two different realities. Humility is only one of them. We can barely picture someone being strong and meek. A meek person is one who has great power and is confident yet full of humility and self-realization of who they actually are. It’s kind of a paradox. For this person will appear weak at times, but they will have great strength. They will have looked defeated yet they will be content with knowing they have won.

If we look at the word meek to simply mean “humble” then I think we have missed a step. We end up using teaching things like to go into the closet and pray, keep private, your faith doesn’t need to be on display. Jesus though constantly speaks against this type of humility in terms of becoming a disciple. Matthew shows us this in other chapters when he quotes Jesus saying things like ‘You are the light of the world.’ and ‘a city built on a hill cannot be hid.’ Jesus doesn’t want his disciples just to keep to themselves and be humble followers in a corner somewhere. He obviously wants his followers to be out there, not hidden, being light, not dark. Any attempts that we try to make ourselves invisible, Jesus diminishes. So meekness isn’t being hidden, or staying in a closet. So how does a humble person be meek?

So I’m just gonna throw this out there to get the conversation moving. Here is what I think a meek person looks like.

What qualities do you think I am wrong about in this list? Would you add any? What worries you about a meek person?

Lots of great discussion happened in this part.  Some said that you can still be worth something while not defending yourself.  Some said this description didn’t have enough outward action statements about what this guy does actually do.

So Jesus has done it again. He has flipped what was common feeling about how the world should work and he lifts up the losers and those that don’t have it together.

“…in the Gospels the kingdom message transforms those who meekly embrace it, just as it crushes the arrogant, the religiously and socially satisfied.”
- Craig S. Keener

So how do we be transformed into being more meek, if we have to meekly embrace the kingdom to do that? What comes first? Here is my suggestion. This is only one suggestion of a way that we can see the world and an attitude that I think will help transform us to become more meek. Paul echos the words of Jesus in a few of his passages in 2 Corinthians 6,  I think it might help us make more sense of what to do with Jesus’ statement.

We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

It’s this last sentence that I think is quite similar with what Jesus is saying here. How can one have nothing and yet possess everything? The same question I ask, how does one be meek and yet inherit the earth? So here is my suggestion. My thought here is that typically when we see a paradox in the gospels is because there are two different realities colliding. One one hand you have to die, but by doing that you live. Now this doesn’t mean that if you jump off a bridge, you are going to be resurrected. What it does mean though is you have to die to yourself spiritually, so that you can come alive in all things. How can we be sorrowful and yet always rejoicing? Well it’s the same like Aaron pointed out last week. Jesus was somehow able to live in both worlds. He was able to mourn the loss of Lazurus all the while knowing he could raise him from the dead. So there is a paradox here, but it’s an easier one to explain because it’s talking about two different realities and living in the tension of both.

To be meek is to understand and live in this tension of both realities. The realities are this.

• You have nothing and are nothing
• You possess everything and are loved

How do these two things work together? A meek man has somehow figured it out. This would be a good explanation of someone who is meek. Someone who has learned to live in both these realities.

On the one hand a meek man recognizes his sinful nature and sees himself as nothing special, nothing to be worshiped, not one to deserve his own way. On the other hand he recognizes he is a child of God, valued beyond all measure, and all things are his for the taking. Meekness can live in both realities. I found this quote online recently, and it came to my mind for this sermon.

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.
When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular thing up to that point, plus a nominal shipping fee, and my things are delivered to me so I can use them. When I am done with them, I return them to storage via Craigslist or Ebay, and I am given a fee as compensation for freeing up the storage facilities resources.
This is also the case with all of my stuff that Amazon and Walmart are holding for me. I have antiques, priceless art, cars, estates, and jewels beyond the dreams of avarice.
The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators.
As I am the curator of their things, and thus together we all share the world.

When I first read this quote to people, they gawked because it obviously isn’t a reality. All of the computers aren’t literally mine. However, here would be where I think separates a meek person apart. A meek person would have the attitude where this quote is true whether or not it exists physically or not. This isn’t a statement that describes reality, rather it describes a approach and attitude to a way of looking at the world. Meekness has a large part to do with an attitude towards life, and very little to do with what actually happens in your life. Someone who is meek sees all humans as equal, all in the same boat, all deserving the same fate, all having access to the same gifts as anyone else. All the early church fathers saw all possessions as being in common with all, why would one have more rite to something? They can live their life with this reality. Someone could steal a meek person’s IPod and they wouldn’t really flinch, because they never had the belief that it was really theres in the first place. Someone could hurl insults non-stop at a meek person, and the meek person could go on living their life, because meek people live in truth, not try to create fake ones.

The next part of Jesus’ statement is that they will inherit the earth. When we look at this verse we could interpret it has someone who longs for power would look at it. This meekness is not simply a tool to gain power and inherit the earth. Some think that this verse means that the meek will one day rule over us all. I’m more inclined it’s more like what we were talking about earlier. There is a paradox here. There is statement of what will happen to meek people. What if it means that meek people, because they are meek, have an attitude towards the earth that sees it as all theres already. What if meekness is the quality needed to fully embrace everything that is yours already?

If you don’t have any lower to go. If you have already admitted to yourself that you don’t really deserve anything, that you aren’t all that you want yourself to be, only then can you be free to see the world for what it is and receive God’s grace and your value from a true source. If you don’t see everything in the world’s as being a gift to us all, then you will not see everything in the world as yours already. If you see yourself better than you are, then you only have down to go.

“He that is down need fear no fall.”
- John Bunyan

So this morning what I want to do is grab the journals and write down and answer a few questions, then I want you to comment on your own answers and internally wrestle with your own answers.

Do you get/stay offended when someone says something mean to you?
Do you complain a lot when you go through standard trials in life such as sickness or over material possessions?
Do you think you have anything to learn from children or the disabled?
Do other people annoy you a lot?
When was the last time you took the back seat so someone could surpass you?
Are you mostly a content/happy person?
Do you find yourself upset about where your life is at and unable to make change?
Do you love having new things and shopping?

After you have answered these questions, just write about it. Why did you answer these questions this way? Are they good answers that you are proud of or do you wish you would change? What steps are you going to make to change? I don’t ask these questions to make you feel bad. I think it’s important to ask these questions because they help reveal parts about you that you should begin to discipline yourself to change. Is we are going to be a community of meek followers of Christ, then we need to all be actively seeking this way of living. So be honest with yourself. Question your motives. Dig deep into yourself and ask these questions and then after, just write and reflect on your answers.

Let’s pray together.

Related posts:

1. The One About the Rich Fool (A Sermon on Luke 12:13-21)
2. Doubt, Journey and Dirt: A Sermon On Our Relationship to Atheism
3. Let’s Not Rewrite History – A Sermon on Job’s Friends and John 9

God speaking is a pretty big deal.  Some scholars are so amazed that God actually pipes up and speaks at all, so much so that they barely pay attention to what he says.  They say that just the very fact of him speaking satisfies the deepest desires of Job.  We won’t stop there.  We will assume that because it is in there that his actual words have something for us to understand.  God’s speeches are split up into two different ones with a small part by Job in the middle of the two.  The first speech emphasizes God’s plan and as it evolves it gives meaning to all of God’s creative work and then second speech shows of God’s justice in how he runs the world.  The author of Job saves his best writing for God’s speeches.  This is considered beautiful poetry in the Hebrew language.  In his two speeches, God doesn’t even respond to Job’s questions.  He doesn’t bring up his problems, or pity him, or acknowledge any of the brutal things that has happened to him.  God opens up his speech with:

Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

God instantly accuses Job of having no knowledge and starts right in on the offensive.  God doesn’t respond to anything that Job asks.  Not a single thing.  So much for the idea of prayer or speaking to God, right?  We think that praying or begging God for an answer works, but we might not get anything in terms of what we are actually asking.  We might just get God showing up.  Are we happy with that?  Is Job happy with that?  When we pray, when we are suffering and we beg of God for answers, we beg that God tells us what is going on and especially why things are happening, are we ok when he changes the subject?  In this case, God gives no answer of sort.  The only thing remotes helpful is he actually shows up.  Sometimes this just isn’t good enough for us.  We don’t want God to just show up.  We want answers.  As if God knew what we were thinking.  He dives right into his assault:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-

while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,

when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,

when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

God, or Yahweh, starts going through the initial stages of creation giving us different pictures of what that would look like.  He starts to show Job through his questions that his troubles mean nothing in terms of the brilliant governance and creation of the world that he is in.  See Job doubted God.  He doubted that God was consistent in managing the world in righteousness.  So God asks him if he really knows what he is talking about.    He asks him as if Job was there at the beginning.  He reminds Job that his plan has its origin in the gratuitousness of creative love.  However, from the Hebrew Bible perspective, wisdom was God’s sole companion at the creation of the world.  So Job lacks useful knowledge of anything that God is talking about.  So he can’t really answer God at all.  God is full of beautiful imagery of how the world was created and how he keeps sustaining it.

Not only did God plan everything, the world, the skies, the water. He also made sure that everything was created and held into place according to that plan.  It certainly wasn’t Job that did all that.  Did Job even help with laying the cornerstone?  Did he cut the opening ceremonies ribbon?  Since no human was there, humankind as a whole is left in the dark about how the universe really works and was created.  Job is in no place to answer any of these questions by God.  So we have Job who has just suffered the most extraordinary of bad circumstances and then God finally shows up on scene, tells Job to give it his best shot, and using hyperbole launches into a full out show-off attack.  Here is God, who didn’t seem to have any problems with volunteering Job for the worst of circumstances and now he just wants to make a point about how great he is?

How do you feel about God’s response so far?  Is it cold and callous or does it speak to God’s bigness and supreme reign over humanity?

David Bazan thinks it is cold and callous, in his song “In Stitches” his final verse is:

When Job asked you the question
You responded who are you
To challenge your creator
Well if that one part is true
It makes you sound defensive
Like you had not thought it through
Enough to have an answer
Or you might have bit off more than you could chew.

I think that what was going on here isn’t so much God showing off without any care for Job or what he’s going for.  I also don’t think it’s simply God changing the subject completely ignoring what’s happening telling him to suck it up.  I don’t think Bazan is right in calling God defensive either.  What I think is going on here is God is setting people in their place.  He comes onto the scene after over 30 chapters of whining, accusations, complaining, questioning God’s wisdom and character and depression.  He just wants to set the record straight that none of them really have any clue what they are talking about.  The very fact that God comes in and speaks tells me that no one is really doing a good job in speaking on behalf of him at all. Job hadn’t sinned, and God was confirming that by not even once bringing anything up.  At the very least, Job hadn’t sinned nearly enough to elicit a response from God about it directly.  Job’s friends obviously didn’t get it either, because God doesn’t even acknowledge their existence at all yet.  The text says that God answered Job, no one else.

God is responding to this deep sense of selfishness and self-entitlement that Job and his friends all seem to have.  Job and his friends had this idea that the world was created for them and no one else.  If you have this belief, then you believe that everything around you is for your immediate use.  They thought that they knew the reason it was created and if they knew the reason then they assume they know the specific path it is supposed to take.  The problem lies with the fact that they did not understand how it all started, like they thought they did.  If they don’t know how and why it is all there, then they certainly have no idea what the path it is going to take will be.

Like we talked about in the first week.  They thought creation existed for them.  Since they thought they knew how it started they assumed that they way it worked was according to retribution theology, good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people.  God steps up and criticizes that entire way of thinking.  He says look, you have no idea how this all started, so you certainly don’t know how it’s going to end and you absolutely don’t know all the steps in between.

“What God is criticizing here is every theology that presumes to pigeonhole the divine action in history and gives the illusory impression of knowing it in advance.”
- Gustavo Gutierrez

This book, we can pressume from how God answers, is not a lesson in how to suffer and come out on top.  This isn’t facing into the problem of evil in the world.  For all the messages we’ve heard how Job is a book about the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, or why do bad things happen to good people I don’t know if they have done us much good in helping us understand what God is saying.  Here we are at the end of the book, God has spoken and he hasn’t dealt with any of these issues at all.  Instead he faces right into the idea that we can know anything at all about the ways that God works.  We don’t, so stop pretending.  We cannot lay hands on God and try to fit him into our narrow way of thinking.  We cannot imprison him into our ignorant theological concepts.  He asks, do we really want to make ourselves the judge of his actions?  In that kind of universe, where the creation can limit and constrain God’s action, God would not be God.  This is how they saw absolutely everything, everything had an answer, everything was reduced to cause and effect.

“The revelation of God’s plan, when received with good judgment, will show Job that the doctrine of retribution is not the key to understanding the universe; this doctrine can give rise only to a commonplace relationship of self interest with God and others.  The reason for believing “for nothing” — the theme set at the beginning of the book–is the free and gratuitous initiative taken by divine love.”
- Gustavo Gutierrez

For nothing.  This is the part of this quote we need to take apart for a little bit.  This is what God seems to be saying in his speeches.  So no matter what questions Job and his friends asked.  They didn’t get answers.  They were told instead that the world does not turn and move on their questions and it does not behave the way that they expected.  Instead, the world was created because God loves it, and God loves us.  That is the purpose of the entire creation.  God created it because he loves it and finds pleasure in it.  He doesn’t create it to enact retribution laws throughout it.  The world is not about laws and having to work and move in a certain way.  Can you even fathom a world where things happen in it and you aren’t there?  God can.

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,

to water a land where no man lives,
a desert with no one in it,

to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?

In ancient culture, rain was directly related to being cursed or being blessed.  If you got rain you were being blessed.  If you didn’t you were getting cursed.  However, God is stomping all over this way of thinking.  The world doesn’t work that way.  To prove it he says why in the world would it rain where there is no one?  Why?  Cause God loves it.  God wants it to.  It has nothing to do with you.  You aren’t even in the picture.  How selfish you are to think that it only rains just to bless you.  It’s raining everywhere, all the time, and for no reason at that.  The world doesn’t revolve around humanity and what it’s needs are.  The world revolves around God’s never-ending, forever gracious love.

“Not everything that exists was made to be directly useful to human beings; therefore, they may not judge everything from their point of view.  The world of nature expresses the freedom and delight of God in creating.  It refuses to be limited to the narrow confines of the cause-effect relationship.”
- Gustavo Gutierrez

God starts listing example after example of things that have nothing to do with humans.  He gives examples of things that make no sense at all.

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
but they cannot compare with the pinions and feathers of the stork.

She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,

unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.

She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,

for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.

Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider.

He spends a bunch of verses here expounding on the stupidity of an ostrich.  The ostrich makes no sense.  God says it doesn’t have to.  He made it and he loves it and the ostrich loves it.  What else could you ask for.  Stop needing to make sense of everything.  God expresses full delight in the world because he made it.  It rains on no one and it rains on nothing; it doesn’t need necessity because it just pleases God.  Utility is not the primary reason for God’s action.  It doesn’t need to make any practical sense.  Yet we seem to try to fit all God’s actions into our theological constructs and refuse to seek him outside of them.  We want answers to our questions.  Why is their evil?  Why am I suffering?  Why did she turn into this?  Why did this happen?  We don’t think outside of that.  We think that because evil exists, there must be a reason for it, and that we must know what it is.  Our theology tells us that God is good, and if that is true, our theology also tells us that there are good reasons for all these things that have happened.  They don’t exist so we make them up.  We say that God must be teaching us a lesson.  Or God is trying to strengthen us for the next hardship.  Or God is building up our character to be a better person.  We have so many reasons as to why everything happens.  One thing we are unwilling to do, at any time though for some reason is to make the obvious observation that God just straight up caused all this grief for no reason.

Think about it.  Let’s just read this part of the story together.

Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

“Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied.  “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land.  But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”

The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”

Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.

God totally sets up on Job, and it doesn’t even look like he has a reason.  Then to top it all off, after Satan goes out and kills everyone the story happens all over again and this time Satan gets to attach his body.  Thanks God.  After all this, you don’t even have the decency to give some explanation why you did these things.

Why did God allow this?  Is God directly responsible for the evil in Job’s life?

If he is responsible, we want to give him a reason.  If he’s not responsible we have to explain why he is not.  It seems to me that God doesn’t want off the hook for the evil.

“The point is this: if God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn’t be, either.  Maybe our compulsion to wash God’s hands for him is a service he doesn’t appreciate.  Maybe–all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary–evil is where we meet God.  Maybe he isn’t bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation.  Maybe–just maybe –if we ever solved the problem, we’d have talked ourselves out of a lover….God neither apologizes nor explains, and he certainly makes no effort to solve the problem of evil for them.  He just goes on arranging rendezvous after disreputable rendezvous, no matter how little anyone thing of his choice of trysting places.”
- Robert Capon

Are we ok with allowing God to be the source and the reason for evil like in this story without trying to make it something else? Should Job have been OK with everything that has happened?  I don’t think he had to be OK with it, but eventually, to be part of this world, we need to learn what it means to give up ourselves to something else.  To be in a relationship with a creator that we can’t understand, sometimes we have to give up on what we think we know, or what we want to know.

“And what is love if it is not the indulgence of the ultimate risk of giving one’s self to another over whom we have no control?”
- Robert Capon

God is really not interested in cleaning up our stories.  He seems ok with it all being put back on his plate.  He seems like he wants to take the blame.  This isn’t really something that we should avoid.  We need to give it to him and let it rest on his plate.  The problem of every evil thing that happens in the world isn’t our fault.  So back to God’s response.  What he does want us to know, is that he is interested in being in love with his creation.  He created it.  He holds it all together.  He wants Job to know that he is in absolute love and is completely pleased with everything he is done including creating Job.  He is not regretting his decisions.  This makes it difficult for us.  This means that we are kind of stuck in this weird paradox of wanting and crying out for justice and wanting what is right and knowing that God also wants justice and wants what is right and in the same breath realizing that God is seemingly doing nothing about it.

Eventually we will see.  If God tells enough stories, maybe then we will realize that he doesn’t work even remotely like we imagined or thought.  The entire story of the Bible is completely opposite to where we would like to land.  Capon tries to explain it a bit using 1 and 2 Kings.

If you look at the author of 1 and 2 Kings, we an see that there was a theologian at work here trying to make a statement.  He didn’t just want to tell you what happened, but he had a theological understanding that the reason the history of God’s people went so badly was because their kings constantly broke and transgressed the law.  The theory of the author worked for quite a while.  You start with Eli the priest and his disobedient sons, which then the Philistines defeated the people of Israel.  Next, God sent Samuel to clean things up but the people pushed their way into needing a King.  Neither God or Samuel wanted that to happen but let it happen anyway.  They get a King, and Saul disobeyed.  David on the other hand did pretty good, but then gave it to Solomon who royally screwed it up which eventually lead to the kingdom falling apart.

So the kingdom is split and both the northern and southern kingdoms are failing to listen to the law whatsoever.  Every king that he lists did exactly what they were not supposed to do, none of them were good.  So the author thinks, that if there was only one King that would come along and really keep the law, and do it well, then everything bad would stop happening and everything would be honky dory.  So finally, King Josiah, King of Judah steps into the mix.  He keeps every law that was ever made.  He purifies the temple and keeps the passover and kids out all the idols, laws that weren’t kept since before any king existed.

“Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might….nor did any like him arise after him.”
2 Kings 23:25

Then guess how the story ends?  Josiah dies in battle, slain by Pharaoh Neco of Egypt, who also takes over Jerusalem.  Then he gets taken over by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon who then leads Israel into their time of exile.  Even the authors of the bible can’t wrap their heads around what is happening.  They are convinced God works one way.  Even when he doesn’t.  The author of Kings is at a lost, he hits a block in his writing for a little bit and then chooses to ignore it and goes right on writing again as if all it would take is a king to obey the law.  He’s desperately trying to make sense as to why in the world Israel would constantly find themselves getting destroyed, so he makes up a reason.

“Christian theologians who address themselves to the problem of evil should treat it as a mystery to be entered, not as a puzzle to be solved.”
-Robert Capon

We come to the same conclusion as a few weeks ago.  Instead of trying to answer and explain away everything that happens we need to be humbled.  This means that instead of trying to seek all the things that God does, why don’t we just seek God.  Job’s friends are determined to lay hands on God, instead of abandoning themselves to God’s embrace and God’s inconceivable way of doing things.

Jesus has a similar situation in Mark, where he seems to respond the same way as God does here.

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

“What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.

They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”

“We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”

Mark 10

James and John are even a little more forthright than Job’s friends are.  They just say straight up: do whatever we want.  Jesus takes the same response as God.  Who do you think you are?  Do you even know what your asking?  Can you do what I’m doing?  Can you handle what I’m going to handle?  Then he goes off into a rant about being great and becoming a servant.

James and John are making the same mistake.  They think they are the center of the universe.  They think that nothing else matters but them.  In Job, God speaks of all the wonders of creation and nature and makes the gap larger than Job could comprehend.  They are different.  Job has no idea what is going on whatsoever.  In Mark, Jesus makes the gap just as large and I don’t really think James and John know what they are talking about.  They can’t do what he is doing or going to do.

What I love about both these passages is that neither Jesus nor God punishes or gets angry at Job, James or John for their questions.  The questions are allowed.  The lamenting is allowed.  They are allowed to be in their ignorance.  Job finds some type of freedom in his complaints and rebellion.  God doesn’t correct him, he simply puts him in his place.

You and I are indeed free to cry out, to lament, to scream—if need be. The God to whom we call does not ignore his dearly beloved creature. It is just that God refuses to be confined within to a system of predictable rewards and punishments. Jesus reminds us that “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Mt 5: 45)
- Gustavo Gutierrez

It is difficult, but we must resist simply becoming like Job’s friends and creating reasons that don’t exist and trying to put God into our box of explanations.  Remember that Job never finds out why he is suffering.  God never gives him an answer.  God is completely uninterested in why and it seems to be that he has no interest on whether or not we care about why either.  He doesn’t answer why but he does reassure that Job is not simply a prisoner of retribution theology or karma.  He reassures him, and puts Job’s friends into place, by reminding them that God doesn’t work in the ways we want him to.

God wants to move us to a place of admiration.  The best people that can teach theology are not those that try to argue for the faith or explain away every single detail of some systemic rant.  The best theologians just display what they know.  Remember the blind guy in John 9?  I don’t know any of the answers to the questions you are asking me.  But I do know this.  I once was blind, but now I see.  Look at God’s answers.  I am not going to give you any answers to the questions you are asking me but look at the waterfalls, and the animals and the seas and the beautiful creation which I keep in tact every day all day long.

(ht naked pastor)

We need to move from explanation to appreciation.  Admiration will truly set us free.  God knew this.  So he sets up the stage and performs and reminds Job of all the wonders of nature, which God created.  I can only show you this paradox that leaves you upset and wanting more.  I cannot give you anymore thing more than that.  This is what God leaves us with when we are presented with the problem of evil.  His wonderful and awe-inspiring image of creation and everything his hand can do, that ours can’t.  This isn’t to stop us from asking questions, this is to remind us that all the questions and answers we are dying for might not be as necessary to right now as we think.  We don’t stop asking questions, we just need to remember that we are no longer prisoner to the answers.

So when people are dying to know where you stand on the subject of secular music, or birth control, or abortion, or homosexuality.  You can exit that situation with having to worry about what the right answer or Christian answer is.  Your truths don’t rest in systemic theology of right and wrong answers.  Instead your truths are proclamations that once you were blind but now you see.

“We arrive in our several pulpits not as the bearers of proof but as the latest runners in a long relay race; not as savants with arguments to take away the doubts of the faithful but as breathless messengers.”
- Robert Capon

Related posts:

1. Bible: The Answer Book
2. Bible: The Rule Book
3. Webber’s Book on the Younger Evangelicals (thoughts on revival and evangelism)

This month we are going to pull apart the text just a bit and split it three ways. We have a whole lot of speeches in the text that typically when we hear the story we ignore completely. We enjoy focusing on the story where job gets tested a bunch of crappy things happen and then in the end he gets everything back but even better. However I think that is the entire problem with this text is that we don’t spend any time in the speeches.

If we look at the story of Job as a man who was innocent and then got crapped on from whatever powers he was subject too but because he was innocent and stay steadfast to God, he was then blessed later, then we are going to have some serious theological issues. It is these theological issues that I want to tackle today. I think we have embedded deep in us a sense of what is called retribution theology that I think needs to go. Retribution theology is a theology that tells us that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. The underlying assumption is that there is a God out there that rewards good behaviour and punishes bad behaviour. We even take this belief into our views of eternity. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of most things that the Scriptures teach us, and I think the book of Job faces into these questions pretty directly. So this month if you want to, you can read the story of Job on your own, just read the first two chapters and the last one and that basically summarizes what actually happens. However, it is important to note that most scholars agree/disagree that the story is different than the dialogue. Whoever wrote it probably took a similar story and reworked it so he could frame his dialogue. So this morning we are going to stick with Job’s friends, follow their framework of speeches and see how it fits into the larger story and then see how it fits into our story and if we have anything to learn from it at all. We’ll jump into Job’s speeches next week and then God’s speeches in the third week.

So, there are three sets or cycles of speeches in Job from the friends. In the first cycle we have Job’s friends that show up on the scene and they try to console Job by recounting to him the just and wise ways of God. They sit with him for a few days, but then it seems like they want to do a bit more than just have compassion, so they start talking. They make large and general statements about what blessed people look like and their blessings and compare them to the calamity that falls on the wicked. They push Job to keep seeking God, promising him prosperity and joy.

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple. I myself have seen a fool taking root, but suddenly his house was cursed. His children are far from safety, crushed in court without a defender. The hungry consume his harvest, taking it even from among thorns, and the thirsty pant after his wealth. For hardship does not spring from the soil, nor does trouble sprout from the ground. Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.
Job 5:1-7

Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal. From six calamities he will rescue you; in seven no harm will befall you. In famine he will ransom you from death, and in battle from the stroke of the sword. You will be protected from the lash of the tongue, and need not fear when destruction comes. You will laugh at destruction and famine, and need not fear the beasts of the earth.
Job 5:17-22

I know we’ve all experienced calamity in our own ways, and I want to get an idea of how and when you’ve been this type of friend or you have been this kind of friend. The kind of friend we are talking about here is the kind that sees the problems, that’s why they are there in the first place, and then just keeps reminding you that God is good, God is just, all things work together for the good of those who trust in God. Here is some of the things that Job’s friends were saying.

Have you ever been this type of friend? Have you ever had these types of friends? What are some of the positive or negative results of this type of thinking and friendship?

For me these verses do very little to comfort. There is the benefits of continually being reminded that God is good, and that he loves me and that he doesn’t want to bring harm to me in anyway. It is good to be reminded of these things. However, there is a few things wrong with this picture. For starters, the friends had to come from their homes to come and sympathize and comfort him. Their motives were good, but where they were coming from doesn’t help the situation really at all. All your friends coming from their places of wealth and privilege to sit with you in your place of misery is not a recipe for encouragement. Then as they come, they don’t spend a lot of time actually offering much in terms of comfort; he gets more of a sermon. He gets a sermon about what the fate of the wicked are. He gets another sermon on the fate of the righteous. Then he is told to seek God and has to hear proverbs read off, and other scripture that is just quoted to him. There is no real consolation happening here. Before he even really opens his mouth he is being told that the things that are happening to him are the types of things that happen to wicked people. He is being told that the lives that they are living are the types of lives that righteous people live. He is being encouraged to be more righteous so he might inherit the fate of the righteous. Talk about accusation and assumption to the poor man. Then Job jumps into his speeches back at them and spends most of his time describing the suffering, describing his fear and sorrow for all human suffering. It seems that Job wants to talk about something a little different. Not about what he may or may have not done wrong but rather just realizing that the present situation sucks. No matter how he got there or didn’t, it sucks, but it’s a present reality and there isn’t much point in analyzing it now. For him it wasn’t about analyzing the situation, because in his opinion, he didn’t do anything wrong. All Job wanted and needed was a little bit of comfort, someone to suffer along side of him.

This is the first thing that I think it’s important for us to remember when we deal with people, or when we deal with sorrow ourselves. Analyzing why things are the way they are does not help anybody or anything. It burns bridges and makes it more about what they did right or wrong than about the fact that they are suffering greatly. Christians still do this today. For some reason we have determined that it is our job to be the moral whistle blowers of the world so if someone is doing something that is wrong or sinful we feel the undeniable desire to tell them. We think our bible is full of answers as to why everything happens, so we make some sort of reason up for everything. Do this so this will happen, don’t do this so this won’t happen. Now the good Christians will only give you examples of other people and won’t accuse and judge you, but that’s what they are thinking. The bad Christians, while they just outright tell you why bad things are happening. We have lost the ability to sympathize, instead we analyze situations. This is the ultimate epitome of theology backfiring. When theology ostricizes us from community and relationships and turns what should be about a relationship into a theological example, we have gone a long way from where God intends.

We throw around key bible verses like God works everything for the good of those who love him or God has plans to prosper us. We completely lose touch of any ability to mourn alongside of or sympathize with those that are suffering. We turn the one situation into a lesson or some universal example of how things are and try to fit it into our box of how we understand the world works. So we tell stories about other miseries. We give examples of how this kind of stuff has happened to other people you know. We start splitting the world and every situation into two categories. Righteous and Wicked, Good and Bad. There is no other category for their world. They only see the world in black and white. So it’s easy then to make assumptions. Really all it is is failed logic.

We know that: Bad things are happening to you and Bad things happen to bad people. So we assume that: Bad things are happening to you because you are a bad person.

We know that: Good things are happening to you and Good things happen to good people. So we assume that: good things are happening to you because you are a good person.

This is pretty much along the same belief cycle as those that believe in Karma today. Karma is the belief of a cause and effect world. That you can offer good into the universe and more good will come from it, and the same goes for bad. Whether you believe it is the universe or God that inevitably produces the good or bad result doesn’t really matter. The point is that Karma sees an absolute connection with your goodness and badness and whether or not goodness and badness will befall you. Job’s friends believed in Karma.

For some reason, at this point in the story, this is all Job’s friends worldviews can comprehend. There is no room for anything else. You’re either bad or good. So while they are saying it in this first cycle of speeches yet, the foundation is laid for where this conversation is going to end up.

Job offers his response. Basically, shut the heck up. What do you know? I’d rather silence than listen to this dribble. You aren’t helping. You don’t know what you are talking about. You are not in my shoes.

My eyes have seen all this, my ears have heard and understood it. What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I desire to speak to the Almighty and to argue my case with God. You, however, smear me with lies; you are worthless physicians, all of you! If only you would be altogether silent! For you, that would be wisdom. Hear now my argument; listen to the plea of my lips.
Job 13:1-6

So we move into the second cycle of speeches and some days have probably gone by, maybe weeks or months, and the friends start to think that Job must have done something wrong. They now stop even the little consolation that they were offering him and start making broad accusations against him.

“Would a wise man answer with empty notions or fill his belly with the hot east wind? Would he argue with useless words, with speeches that have no value? But you even undermine piety and hinder devotion to God. Your sin prompts your mouth; you adopt the tongue of the crafty. Your own mouth condemns you, not mine; your own lips testify against you.
Job 15:2-6

So as the conversation progresses, the friends are starting to get a little frustrated. Now he is for sure full of some kind of sin. Only sin would cause someone to call God out like he Job is doing. So you start to get defensive and hurl accusations back. Like whoa buddy, watch your mouth, do you even know what you are talking about. You’re letting this sin over take your words and it’s going to get you in even more trouble. Our God doesn’t want you talking like this to him. Keep quiet and seek your own life for what you’ve done wrong.

The first cycle of speeches at least had numerous lines of praise to God and calls to repentance. This second cycle is a bit different. Those lines of praise and repentance are absent. The three friends spend their time trying to convince Job that he is numbered in and among the wicked. Great friends they are aren’t they?

The third cycle gets even worse. Now we have Eliphaz, who does most of the talking start directly accusing Job of very specific sins.

You demanded security from your brothers for no reason; you stripped men of their clothing, leaving them naked. You gave no water to the weary and you withheld food from the hungry, though you were a powerful man, owning land– an honored man, living on it. And you sent widows away empty-handed and broke the strength of the fatherless.
Job 22:6-9

At this point in the story its just getting ridiculous. As the reader we know he is innocent, but we get a peek into the hearts of Job’s friends here. Job just starts taking a beating and starts getting accused of every sin in the book. This is the next logical step of where his friends have to take the conversation. See, when we see the world in black and white, and when we see God as a follower of formula’s, and when we think we know what those formulas are, we are unable to see things working any other way. Bad things are happening, therefore you must be bad. That’s the bottom line. This type of thinking isn’t just around in Job’s day. Our world, our Christian faith is saturated in this.

When we make assumptions, we are giving over to our own desires to control. We have answers for everything. If you want happiness, then you just follow these seven easy steps. If you want to have a good relationship with your son, then just do these three things daily. Everything has been reduced to a formula, and the worst part is that we assume the formula works and we start applying it to our own lives. We don’t know what to do when something goes wrong, because we have to have answers. Now we have formula’s for ridiculous things. There are workshops everywhere for how to become a millionaire. There are hundreds of techniques to remove baldness or to make your penis grow an inch bigger.

Let me give you a few modern day examples of these types.

Obviously it’s easy to pick on these guys, but this is the same type of consolation that Job’s friends offered him (of course with these guys there is a lot of financial gain involved and they don’t really sound like they are consoling). But this is underlying a lot of our consolation efforts. I think for us in this room, the intentions are pure, I just think we are misguided many times because we make unnecessary links in our heads about why things happen. In fact we do this without really knowing it. We feel so uncomfortable when our theologies don’t work out in real life that we try to force fit stories into our theology. We can’t just do that though, even though we might not know any other way.

Let me tell you a story about a king. This king was a rich king that had all the money in the world. Everything was at his beck and call. He always found himself unsatisfied in every pursuit though. Every time he purchased anything he found that he didn’t want it after he had it. He had a wife, but they were on a rough patch and the relationship was dwindling and turning into more of a formality than anything that a marriage should be. One day this king is sitting in his room, and a parlormaid walks in. This girl is beautiful. She looks flawless. She walks in with just enough confidence and at the same time with humility. She brings him food and he pushes the food aside and starts talking to her. He flirts a little, making some jokes about the servants and the type of food that they bring him. She laughs and they keep getting closer and closer. Eventually, after a few hours, they are right next to each other, drinking and laughing together when he leans in and kisses her. If this was a movie, the kissing would get more passionate and of course we are at church, and this is PG, so the screen would fade to black.

The next scene we see them in bed together after just have making love. The king looks into her eyes and says that he has never been happy until this moment. He says that he doesn’t know what he has to do, but whatever it is, he will make it work so they can be together for the rest of his life. They kiss again, her thinking that it’s impossible. They are talking again and he seems more serious. Whatever I need to do to make this happen, I am going to do it. We will start with you having to bring me every meal, breakfast, lunch dinner and all my tea. Then we will see how it goes from there. The parlormaid felt the same way towards the king, she was also in love with him. So she agreed. They agree that it will be difficult, the have to hide this love affair from the other servants, his wife and the entire kingdom, but they both agree that they won’t let that stop them. They embrace, grab hands and and stare into each others eyes as the screen goes black and text scrolls on and says “and they lived happily ever after.”

So how does a story like this make us feel?

It sort of eats away at us doesn’t it? I think it’s crucial to be honest about our feelings. Deep down we want justice here and now. We want to know that people who do something wrong, at the very least aren’t happy. Our theology tells us that people can’t be happy and be sinning, they can’t be happy and be wrong, or at least they can’t be happy for ever. So instead of changing our theology to realize that rain falls on just and unjust and that the wicked prosper with just as much, we get stubborn and try to re-write the story. We kick the person out. We tell ourselves the King deserved it. We accuse the person. We say things are there that aren’t really there, or we add things to the story that aren’t really there. We want the wife to stomp in and go insane and kill everyone in sight. Or we want him to realize his failure and stop seeing the girl and ask for forgiveness. But the story doesn’t leave us with that. How do we befriend someone like this? Do we constantly bombard this king with cliche lines about the fate of the wicked? Do we tell him over and over again to repent? If we do, why are we doing that? Is it only because of the fate that we think is going to befall on him? If that is the case, are we not just asking him to repent so he doesn’t get in trouble? It’s a complicated place to be in. We don’t really know what to do with a bad story ending happily. Just like we don’t know what to do with a good story that ends horrible. You know those movies, that are great and uplifting, then everyone dies and the movie is over. You know how you feel inside. It just isn’t right. So we want to rewrite the story. This is what Job’s friends were trying to do to Job, re-write the story for him and tell him what he did wrong. This is sort of what we want to do for this king, we want to rewrite the ending so it fits with how we think the world should be.

The same types of friends existed around Jesus time. In John 9 we are told a story of a blind man that Jesus and his disciples were passing and instantly they ask him a question about the man.

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Here we go again isn’t it? Who cares that the man is blind, who cares that this man has probably spent his entire life suffering with blindness, let’s get all theological on him and figure out why it happened. There obviously was lots of discussion as to why this guy was blind before hand and they seemed to have narrowed it down to a few options. We do it with everyone don’t we? Why do all of the Natives surrounding us live in such dire poverty? Oh, it’s because they are lazy and they don’t really care. Why is the United Church falling apart? It must be because they legalized gay marriage in their denomination. Why did that woman lose her baby? Well it must be because she left her husband. The connections go on and we link everything with everyone. We have reasons why everything happens everywhere all the time. Unfortunately we don’t come to these conclusions because they are always true. I’m not discrediting the fact that there are certainly consequences and rewards for our actions, but let’s just not pretend that every action produces the desired results.

Jesus answers with

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”

Now Jesus doesn’t seem to say or debunk the fact that there is no way in the world that this man is blind because of sin in his life or someone else’s. I think it’s safe to assume, that it could be a possibility that this is why he is blind. Jesus simply gives them an answer that says that this isn’t the necessarily the case. This is our problem with living in black and white all the time. It might be black, but it might not be, and we really have no idea in most cases what colour it is. The answer cannot be to pick one of the answers and stick to it fervently. We have to somewhat live in the uncomfortable middle ground of not knowing. Unfortunately, this is super uncomfortable and we don’t want to be there, but I’m afraid in many cases this is our only option. As Richard Rohr puts it…

“What I believe is that the character, the very heart, of biblical faith is not to reach resolution and not to gain closure, but to live without resolution . . . and to be okay with that.”
- Richard Rohr

Read all of John 9

This chapter is kind of like a parallel to the book Job. Just look at the Pharisees. They can’t understand how God works outside of their box. The guys a sinner, there is no way God would have healed him. They eventually kick out the very guy who was healed. That is just the logical progression of such beliefs. If you think in black and white about people and circumstances. If God only works one way in their heads, then everything opposite of that way is sinful, or anti-God. This is the problem with putting God “in a box” as we Christians love to put it. I like to say we make formula’s for how God works. Unfortunately, both are not true. The Pharisees are going nuts in this chapter. They are going to the greatest lengths to rewrite the reality of this man’s healing. So much so they kick him to the street and call everyone a liar, they bring in the guys parents, they basically run an entire court case. They just can’t believe that their God would work this way.

Jesus at this point debunk this myth and teach us a different way to approach life.

Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.“ Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.

Jesus tends to flip everything on its head in everything he’s saying. First he says from this story that both of the regularly presuppositions as to why someone would be blind is wrong, then he faces into the entire attitude between those who can’t imagine God working outside of their formulas. He says, hey listen you people that think you have God figured out. You people that think you SEE everything and know how everything works. I came to help people that can’t see anything see, and I came to make all those that think they see things not be able to see anything at all. So by the end of this story. All those that had put God in boxes. To make huge statements about how God can and cannot work. Those that think they know who sinned and what they did and are convinced that God wouldn’t work in this way are blinded by their own need to explain and know everything. They are made blind because they can only see inside their box, and God is nowhere near it.

I live like this often. I buy into this type of retribution theology all the time. I assume that because I am doing the right thing, making the right decisions, that good things will end up happening. However, this just isn’t reality. The problem is, it is nicer and neater to believe in this, so instead of just accepting the mystery and the way things are, we try to force fit life into our theology. We are good at that. But it’s just not true. In fact, Jesus seems to think that that kind of thinking leads to blindness, not more understanding.

The answer is not and cannot be to concoct more formula’s and try to understand why God does things and then when we figure it out put the rest of life into them. It won’t work. We will be tempted to do it. Especially when it seems to obvious to us.

What are some of the formula’s for God and the way life works that we have made up?

We could look through the parables and see how Jesus constantly smashes every preconceived idea of every formula that the religious people had. They thought they were going to be freed from Roman oppression. They thought God cared if they were picking up sticks on the sabbath. They thought it was wrong to eat meat sacrificed to idols. They thought the strong would inherit the kingdom of heaven. They thought Jesus didn’t care about kids. Or that it was ok to exchange money in the temple. Or that their messiah would not die. Or that purity would save you. Or that you could be rich and still enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus never stopped showing people that he was unlike anything that they could comprehend. However, we seem to have missed this today. For some reason we think we have learned everything there is to know. We think that there are no categories left to break down in our minds. We think that the Bible tells us everything we need to know about what is right and wrong. There is no room in our formula’s for God to show us anything differently.

The only response, the response Jesus leaves us with no choice but to have, is that of blindness. Blindness is a symbol for humility. It’s the understanding that we don’t create the restraints of God by our understandings of him or his scriptures. We can’t fit him into our boxes. He can do what he pleases. As soon as we start to say God only does this, or God will only act like this, we’ve successfully pulled a Pharisee. This takes great humility. It takes honesty with our weakness and understanding the grace of God.

This inevitably puts us all on the same page. Its puts us on the same street. In the old paradigm of formulas and karma, we start to tell people where they are off. We act like Job’s friends saying that this is what good people look like, this is what bad people look like. This is what happens to good people, this is what happens to bad people. It puts us on different streets, in different neighbourhoods. We think that our street is the only street that God is on. What humility does is teach us that we all might be in different houses, understanding God from our perspective, but from where God is, we are all on the same street. We are all neighbours. Let’s pray this together.

God, forgive us for our formulas
Forgive us for thinking we know how it works
Forgive us for thinking we can see clearly
Have mercy on us, as our understanding is small

We are blind
We are unable to see everything you are doing
We are unaware of how you are at work
We are unsatisfied with not knowing

So give us eyes to see
Give us ears to hear
Show me where you have given grace
So I may extend the same grace to others

Show me who my neighbours are
Show me where you are at work
Break my formulas
Show me grace instead

Amen.

Related posts:

1. Friends
2. Seeing Old Friends
3. John Stewart on Crossfire

“There is probably no God”

I am greatly interested in this statement. I think it actually one of my favourite statements of any atheist. The world probably adds doubt into the mix of the statement. Any true atheist, must admit, that they can’t prove to you logically that there is in fact without any doubt certainly no God. They have to make room for chance. This is where I think the Christian can learn from the atheist. Christians have this ability to have unmoved certainty in things, things that we are unable to have that kind of certainty in. For as certain as they are that God absolutely does exist no matter what, the atheist is certain in the opposite. However, both sides have to agree, that neither of them can know 100% for sure. If we are being honest with ourselves, the best we can ever say is that “there probably is a God.” Our proofs of intelligent design, experience and our stories are easily matched by their proofs of evolution, experience and their stories.

The whole bus campaign actually started from a comedian named Ariane Sherine and she was walking home from work one day and saw a bus ad. The bus ad said “When the son of man comes will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:8, and pointed to jesussaid.org. So she went to the site and instantly clicked on the part about God’s wrath against sin and read that all non-christians were going to burn in hell for all eternity. She didn’t think that was very cheery. She eventually wrote a blog post which over time turned into their own campaign. It was never intended to be hostile, but simply an honest statement of what an atheists believe. The idea of the word probably actually arose because she remembered the Carlsberg beer company, and their slogan is “probably the best lager in the world” and since she knew that she couldn’t say for sure that God existed, that adding the world probably would be a perfect fit.

In the firm beliefs, there has to be room for doubt. The same is true for us. We need to make room for doubt in our Christian faith. Doubt means you are not standing still. It means you are asking questions and being stretched. The Bible shows example after example of doubters who God lives and communes with closely. Look at Thomas, Job, David, Jacob or Jonah, they all doubt and God used their doubt to accomplish great things. Doubt is crucial to growing as a Christian and in your faith.

“Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
-Frederick Buechner

“The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the ‘big questions’ is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble. And that’s what man needs to be, considering human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong!”
- Bill Maher Religulous

We typically run from doubt. We mock it. We tell people to keep their doubts to themselves and deal with it internally. We are afraid of where our doubts might lead, so we become naive instead and stay numb, unchanging. This of course is the complete opposite of how we’ve seen it exampled before. Jesus embraced the doubters. God challenges them back. The only people who mock doubt are those who are insecure in their own beliefs. Doubt proves that you are being stretched. It shows that you are truly engaged in what you believe. Leech I think puts it beautifully this way.

“The essential difference between orthodox Christianity and the various heretical systems is that orthodoxy is rooted in paradox. Heretics, as Irenaeus saw, reject paradox in favour of a false clarity and precision. But true faith can only grown and mature if it includes the elements of paradox and creative doubt. Hence the insistence of orthodoxy that God cannot be known by the mind, but is known in the obscurity of faith, in the way of ignorance, in the darkness. Such doubt is not he enemy of faith but an essential element within it. For faith in God does not bring the false peace of answered questions and resolved paradoxes. Rather, it can be seen as a process of ‘unceasing interrogation.’…The spirit enters into our lives and puts disturbing questions. Without such creative doubt, religion becomes hard and cruel, degenerating into the spurious security which breeds intolerance and persecution. Without doubt, there is loss of inner reality and of inspirational power to religious language. The whole of spiritual life must suffer form, and be seriously harmed by, the repression of doubt.”
– Kenneth Leech

I think it’s crucial for a community like ours to have a strong theology of doubt. Doubt needs to be allowed. We need to journey alongside of those that are doubting and embrace it. It keeps us honest. So the athiest here can teach us something about this idea of doubt. It isn’t something that we have to be afraid of. If an atheist can make room for doubt in their beliefs then we can make room for it in ours without making it weaker.

We already read through most of this chapter last week with Joe, so let’s just point out one part here and take a look at it when he faced into opposition to his strongly held religious belief in Acts 17.

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To an Unknown God. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

Paul, without any reservation walked into the midst of some deep discussions about the meaning of life. Athens was unlike anything we have experience in out culture. The best example I could give you to explain it would be online forums. People with all sorts of differing beliefs would dialogue all day long about everything and anything. Athens was seen as an intellectual giant, priding themselves with great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. When Paul walks into Athens, he engages their debates and their people with an understanding, with an education and even embraces their misgivings and what he deems and misunderstandings about God. He points them out, he uses them as analogy and he engages them where they are at. It says that he studied the idols and objects carefully. He isn’t kidding around, he truly wants to know these people he will be dialoguing with.

So let’s imagine for a moment that we are in Athens, and that we walk into the room and here is is what we hear. Here is an audio clip from one of the public service announcements that Ariane Sherine gives.

“We live in a beautiful, fascinating, complex world and we’re all trying to make sense of it the best we can. There are 6.7 billion of us living on this planet belonging to hundreds of different belief systems. Most of us want to live peacefully, yet we also want to think that are own personal beliefs are the right ones. And if we are right, whatever we believe, that means millions or possibly billions people must be wrong. As a world full of individuals, we are never going to think the same way. What we can do is accept that we hold many different beliefs and focus instead on what unites us as human beings because we are truly similar in so many ways. We all want to feel loved, and to give love freely. We all want to love long, enjoyable lives, free from fear and pain. We’re all muddling through life the best way we know how. What’s important are not the beliefs we hold, but that we are free to hold them and that we always express them peacefully.”
- Ariane Sherine

What do you like about this clip? What don’t you like? Does it make you uncomfortable that you have such similar beliefs to an atheist? Are you able to engage this belief without judging or condemning them like Paul did?

Paul engages the atheist, the Stoics and the Epicureans on a level that they understand. He isn’t afraid to use their imagery. He isn’t afraid to show them where he believes they are right. He adds his little bit to the conversation. He engages them on a level of where they are at, instead of bashing them over their heads with a bunch of useless cliches about where they are going to go when they die and about Jesus being the only way.

Epicureans would have been a major group of thinkers that existed in Athens and this time, they are one of the two groups that is pointed out in Acts who Paul would have engaged in. They believed that rather than resort to the internal motions of the mind and the cogitations of experts in the field of science, medicine and theology, to instead advocate a practical, common sense reading of the world. They believed in the five senses being the only thing that could lead us to truth. They believed that there could very well be gods but they were indifferent to what happened here on earth. In their belief, everything is determined by a fateful creation of compounds and atoms and that it is not moving in a direction that has been previously willed or planned by the gods. This means that death to them is just another ancient myth that torments the ignorant.

Sound familiar? This belief and way of looking at the world is still very prevalent. The bus ads that we were reading are coming from this point of view. Why would you worry when you can’t control it? Why would you worry when there is no one out there to please, disappoint or satisfy? This belief existed thousands of years ago and in many ways is a reaction to the constant sacrificing and attempts to please the “gods” through history. There were thousands of gods, and all of them were assumed to have different expectations. You didn’t want to piss off the gods, so you lived your life in a way to make them happy. You thanked them with sacrifices when they blessed you and you petitioned with sacrifices when they cursed you. It was a never ending battle of trying to please them and make sure they keep happy. An Epicurean in Paul’s time would have said the same thing or something along the lines of “even if there is a god, he doesn’t care about you and can’t affect you, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

I e-mailed someone from Sarnia that I have been corresponding with over the past year about God non-God and other religious topics. He goes by the name Sarnia Skeptic.  He says some harsh things online about religion and really calls people on their crap.  I wanted to get this guys perspective on the bus ads, and the underlying message of it and what he thought they meant.   I wanted to do this because I think there is a lot of validity in what he would say and also there is a lot we can learn from him.  So here is some quotes from an e-mail he sent me about this topic.

1.) Many people are brought up with the threat of eternal punishment/damnation – and it has proven psychological effects on children (and adults). “Stop worrying” would be in response to that.

2.) As there is no afterlife, many “believers” feel that life is meaningless and feel that people who accept that there is ‘nothing more’ than this life must be distraught, the “enjoy your life” is an encouragement to make the best of your only chance at this.

3.) Associating a positive message with “there probably is no god” is re-affirming to those who have questioned their faith.

4.) Simply making the statement (advertising as they have), gives support to those who do not believe in a god and have felt isolated (or unaware that others shared that non-belief).

5.) “probably” was necessary to be intellectually honest. Unlike most believers, most non-believers would be willing to accept the existence of a god with the presentation of real evidence to support such. (Oddly, honesty is one of the commandments, right? Just not practiced often?)

6.) To prove how easily offended “believers” are – simply putting up a contrary advertisement (that is hardly inflammatory) has irked a great number.

7.) To spark discussion. Many people avoid the conversation and religion is given a level of respect that it is certainly not due.

The “enjoy your life” provided us with an opportunity to explain that what we have is awesome enough without supposing an afterlife or an intervening/caring god.

9) It is possible to be good without god, millions of people are good without any gods – billions are good without YOUR god. Our world, our existence and our opportunity to ever live is beautiful and awesome enough. Knowledge is empowering, awe-inspiring and liberating. False knowledge is harmful to society as it creates false boundaries and groups – each with their own (false) claim to Truth (capital T).

If I’m going to be honest. This bus ad is mostly a correct and honest critique of Christian culture. It rips apart all sorts of the culture we’ve been taught and live with. Just look at this.

God probably. Atheists have an easier time with the honesty of uncertainty than Christians do. We talked about this already, but its crucial that we allow doubt and honesty to be part of our expression as Christians. God probably does exist is much better than God exists no matter what you say and I’m not even interested in what you have to say.

Stop worrying. Christians have for a long time used fear tactics and played on people’s worry to control them, this should have been the case, so what should be the appropriate christian response? Jesus commands not to worry. Worrying is not a Christian response to anything. It is a tactic to bring control. This is a great line.

Enjoy your life. Christians have been so focused on the eternal, the afterlife and heaven/hell that we are no longer interested in the present. If we are honest about the language in scripture than we know that the Kingdom of God, salvation and eternal life are mostly present realities. Enjoy them now. Enjoy your life.

The Sarnia Skeptic makes no hesitation to point these out. We need to learn to embrace the conversation and perspective from the skeptic to better seek truth. In a small sentence, just look at how much we can learn about our own failures and misgivings. On top of that, we build a relationship with the people we disagree with, learn from them and come out learning to love rather than to win.

From our stories that we know of God in the Bible, God has a way of journey with people where they are at. He doesn’t force the right beliefs on them. In fact he entertains a lot people’s misunderstandings and wrong views of him while they figure it out. Here is one of my favourite examples of God doing this.

Now Naaman was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded, because through him the LORD had given victory to Aram. He was a valiant soldier, but he had leprosy.

Now bands from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “If only my master would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

Naaman went to his master and told him what the girl from Israel had said. “By all means, go,” the king of Aram replied. “I will send a letter to the king of Israel.” So Naaman left, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of clothing. The letter that he took to the king of Israel read: “With this letter I am sending my servant Naaman to you so that you may cure him of his leprosy.”

As soon as the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, “Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!”

This is an intense story. Normally we would read this story to our kids in Sunday school to show them the faith of the Naaman and how awesome God is. But really there is a few things in this story I want to point out to you.

1. Naaman was a man you wouldn’t want at your church. He took captive a young Jewish girl, and when the Hebrew Scriptures say young, they mean real young. This isn’t a lovely situation with rose petals. Naaman’s culture was greatly opposed to Israel and their way of doing things. Aram’s God was Raman. Raman was the thunderer God, he eventually turned into Zeus. The king of Aram’s name was Ben-Hadad, Ben means son, Hadad is another translation of Raman. So the king of this country was named the Son of Raman, or the Son of God. Israel has a different God, kings name is Jehoram, and their God’s name is Yahweh. So we have two neighbouring countries, each with their own king and each with their own God. Raman can’t cure leprosy. So the kidnapped young girl, who has obviously heard the stories of slaves being set free and their God coming to their rescue, speaks out of her natural understanding of what she knew God to be. Why wouldn’t he just go to the prophet and he will be cured? It only seems obvious.

2. So here we have the Israel King and he kind of freaks out a little bit, he tears his cloths and has a little mental breakdown. Yet for some reason, the King of Aram, seems to have a bit more faith in the God of Israel than their own king does. Does this sound familiar? This is what we have been talking about all along. God changes things up big time here. The Israel king is full of doubt and frustration and the King of Aram, who serves an entirely different God, seems to have better faith than him. So the people we normally see as the unfaithful atheists in our god have true faith and the people who are supposed to have true faith are completely freaking out. The story is flipping. God seems to have plans for those that don’t even believe in him.

When Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his robes, he sent him this message: “Why have you torn your robes? Have the man come to me and he will know that there is a prophet in Israel.” So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.”

But Naaman went away angry and said, “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than any of the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?” So he turned and went off in a rage.

Naaman’s servants went to him and said, “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.

3. A small point to make here. Horses and chariots are modern day equivalents of armed guards and tanks. So imagine what is really happening here. A general of an army comes walking up to this little house in the middle of a field and he brings all his defense weapons with him. This huge powerful army and his chariots, and this small little prophet. Not only this, Elisha doesn’t even come out to talk to him, he just sends a message to him. This guy is important and Elisha just sends a servant to go tell him to do something, a ridiculous request at this. Naaman is mad. He doesn’t get a proper welcome, he doesn’t get a proper ritual. He wants something that matches the person he is.

Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God. He stood before him and said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel. Please accept now a gift from your servant.”

The prophet answered, “As surely as the LORD lives, whom I serve, I will not accept a thing.” And even though Naaman urged him, he refused.

“If you will not,” said Naaman, “please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the LORD. But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.”
“Go in peace,” Elisha said.

4. Alright this is the point I want to focus on. So Naaman comes back and actually stands before him and he makes a huge statement. “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.” In the ancient near east at this time they believed in localized deities. There would be a god for each area, like God of Aram, Egypt, Israel etc. When you went to a region, you would ask, “who is the God of this country?”, and then you would offer up the proper sacrifices and be on your way. Everybody in the world thought this way. This is the dominant way of understanding things. Then Israel comes out of nowhere, for the first time ever, Israel starts saying that there is only one God and he is God over all the areas and everybody.

So when Naaman says, “now I know,” this is a moment of major spiritual enlightenment. People outside of Israel do not think this way. Now we know that you can worship God anywhere and anytime (ie read the women at the well). The women at the well thinks God is in one place or another. Jesus just says yes, God is in both places, God of all people. Namaan has this moment where he realized, that God is the God of everything. We could almost call this a moment of conversion in understanding God and the world.

Here is the key line. “please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry.”  It seems like an odd part of the story. Why in the world would he ask for dirt? It seems nonsensical? It was believed that the soil of a particular land was connected with the deity of a particular area. So if you were in a particular place, the soil there was connected with their God. So Naaman wants to leave now and here is what he’s expecting. He’s going to take the dirt home with him, lay it all out on the ground and when he wants to pray to the LORD he will go and stand on that dirt. So he just finishes saying that there is no God in all the world, and then he asks for dirt because he thinks that that God can only be worshiped if he stands on some dirt. It seems like he doesn’t really get it at all here. He doesn’t get that he doesn’t need to bring dirt with him because God is God of all the land, not just Israel’s.

And then he has the nerve to say “But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I bow there also—when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.” WHAT? How the world can he go back to work, serving unreal gods, and actually bow down to other gods or the king? This is the crazy world he is going back to. Now what does Elisha say? Does he ring off some cliches about standing for something or falling for anything? Does he show him a scenario about possibly dying tonight and masking sure he was true to his convictions? Does he tell him to quit his job that would obviously cause him to stumble? Nothing, Elisha doesn’t say anything about him compromising or not having a spine. He doesn’t even tell him to stay with others that share his belief. Instead Elisha responds with “Go in Peace.”

Did Elisha respond well? How would we have responded?

The Christian faith makes room for doubt. It makes room for the complicated spots in life that we all face into every single day. We are constantly interacting with people that serve different gods and with people that believe in no gods. This is not something to be afraid of. It’s not something to ignore or to postpone. The reality is, that you are on a journey and that they are on a journey and that is OK. God is OK with that. Your belief in God demands that you make room for relationships with people who are unlike you. There is something to learn in your relationships with them. The doubt that they may bring into the relationship is good. It isn’t something God shy’s away from.

These things that we normally run away from; doubt, uncertainty, compromise….maybe they are the things that God is waiting for us to run directly into? Maybe God uses these things and they are actually an important part of our journey. Understanding where the atheist comes from and grasping their perspective, is an important part of that journey. It’s about embracing the other. This is something we are going to do at the end of this month when Joe actually brings in a friend of his who is a confessed atheist. Our goal will not be to convert him, but to learn from him. To embrace his doubt. To understand his questions and his stories. Not to give him answers but to push ourselves to see if we can see it through his eyes. His experiences are just as much proof as our own.

This will be sketchy. There is plenty of warnings out there already for you as you enter into a world full of people who believe nothing of what you do. Yet God seems to be calling us deeper into it; recognizing their struggle as valid and wanting to teach us more about his Kingdom and himself through them. We must learn to be taught from people that are different, from people that we disagree with and by those that are opposed to us. So we enter into a crazy world, a world where we compromise our morals and what we know what is right. So as you enter into this week, into your relationships with those who are nothing like you, I leave you with the same words as Elisha left Naaman, “go in peace.”

Related posts:

1. Relationship Gaps and Growing Up
2. The Wrong Boat (Sermon at the FRWY)
3. Building Houses and Planting Gardens: A Sermon on Jeremiah 29

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.

Related posts:

1. The One About Crunching Numbers (A sermon on The Parable about Building a Tower and Going to War)
2. God Saved Those Two Houses Over There: Haiti Day 1-2
3. Building Price Drops $80,000

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

Related posts:

1. Do Something Christmas
2. Why I Hate Christmas (and its not because it derived from a pagan holiday)
3. My Christmas became X’mas

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.

Related posts:

1. Blessed are the Meek: A Sermon on the Beatitude of Meekness
2. The One About the Rich Fool (A Sermon on Luke 12:13-21)
3. Building Houses and Planting Gardens: A Sermon on Jeremiah 29

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.

Related posts:

1. Freedom Isn’t Free
2. Freedom from Quiet Time Guilt
3. Building Houses and Planting Gardens: A Sermon on Jeremiah 29

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.

Related posts:

1. Hell is Intersecting Earth: A Sermon on Hell
2. Kingdom of Heaven
3. Doubt, Journey and Dirt: A Sermon On Our Relationship to Atheism

“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.

Related posts:

1. Heaven is Intersecting Earth: A Sermon on Heaven
2. Conclusions on Hell
3. What I Don’t Believe on Hell, Salvation and Death