So we need to ask ourselves why would the Sadducee’s press John and Peter so hard and seem to come again something that was so good? It’s easy to write a song about them and toss them off but it’s important to know who these people were and why they would be so upset that John and Peter were proclaiming the news they were proclaiming. The Sadducees were an important sect of Judaism during the time of Jesus because they were a link between the Jewish religion and the political world around them. They were responsible for the maintenance of the Temple, performing certain sacrifices and were generally considered one of the highest roles within Jewish culture. Since the temple was very much the center of political and religious leadership in Jerusalem, it made sense that Sadducees would eventually move into places of power within politics. And they were. They performed all sorts of tasks for the government as well including collecting taxes, represented the state internationally, regulated relations with the Romans, equipped and led the army and administered the state.

The Sadducees were extremely powerful people. Their livelihoods were caught up in their vocation and they held the keys of power to the people in Jerusalem and the state that they were in. You can see now why they were so involved in putting Jesus to death, he was a revolutionary with a following who his followers called him Lord. There was supposed to be only one Lord and that was Caesar. If Caesar wasn’t Lord, then their entire operation falls apart and they don’t have a job. They no longer hold their powerful positions, they no longer are needed.

So you can also understand why when Peter and John start going around proclaiming that this revolutionary who was put to death by them is not really dead and then start performing miracles in his name why that might freak them out a bit. They are obviously willing to go to great length to prevent power from leaving their hand and a few loud mouths wasn’t going to stop them. But alas, the multitudes win again and they are all astounded at the healings and people started believing what they were saying. So they threatened them a bit more and then they let them go. They couldn’t win this one, so they probably muttered a few things about them not coming back and disturbing the peace and then told them to get lost. This is where Joe left us last week. With John and Peter just getting out of custody from under the Sadducees, and so we will read from there in Acts 4.

23 On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.[b]’[c]
27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29 Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”
31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

So Peter and John get back from their little battle where they get thrown in jail and argue with the powerful religious leaders and then they come back to their people and tell them everything. It makes it kind of fun doesn’t it? I think that at this point Peter and John are probably starting to get excited/worried as things start to unfold. They know the biggest secret in the world for man kind. Jesus is risen and he is our Saviour and he has saved the world from it’s downward direction. Why wouldn’t everyone get excited about this? The very people who should be excited are throwing them in jail for simply telling people what they know to be true. They start telling everyone what is happening then burst out into some spontaneous praying and rejoicing. They start making the connections with the very beginnings of creation all the way to David and quoting scripture and eventually tell the story again how everything has unfolded. They are acting in wonder and awe. Can’t you see it? They just have this run in with all the powerful types who just put Jesus to death and then they have this grand realization. Oh man, God knew this was coming all along. God had this all planned out since the beginning. He knew it! It’s all working according to plan. All this time we were freaking out, denying Christ and now look how it’s all unfolding. Let it happen God, they say, let the miracles flow and let your story continue forward. It’s like a movie plot unfolding.

I just find this little section to be quite transformative for the church. It’s like the moment when yet another light flips on for them. I feel like this is the moment when they decide to enter into the story at God’s pace and they are finding their place in it. It’s like the moment when they realize things are going to get worse before they get better but they all make the decision to jump into it. Like in Mission Impossible, when they are all sitting around and they get the news that they might die or if they get found out no one is going to vouch for them. It’s like that moment.

They ask for miracles, but really it’s not about that. They just want boldness now to speak what they have seen and not be scared by the powers that are oppressing them. This moment in Acts seems to be that realization, that moment where they make the connection that if they really believe what they are talking about here then the most powerful people (the very people who put Jesus to death) were going to be in their face trying to stop them at every turn.

At this point, at this realization, Luke tells us that the place they were was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and could speak boldly. So their prayer was answered. Like times before, this moment is seen as a signpost of the movement of Christianity and how it moved from twelve people to where we are today. This is how the Christian church started unschooled ordinary men being opposed by religous scholars trying to shut them down. The realization that powerful people will confront you is an important part of being a Christian, it’s an important part of this revolution. Learning how to speak boldly in their midst and prayer and understanding your place in the story seems to be an important part of how Christianity came to be.

Q: Do you see speaking boldly as a central part of your faith? 

If not.

Why? What has happened that having faith in Jesus no longer means the same things it meant to the first Christians?

Then we come up to the end of Acts 4, which I’m pretty sure Joe didn’t read whatsoever because if he read it he would have seen that it is pretty much the same as the end of Acts 2. Let’s read it together.

32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
36 Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), 37 sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Luke is pretty persistent on this idea and he always seem to bookend this idea of having things in common and making sure no one is need with a shift in the movement of the church. As the apostles begin to better understand their role as apostles and what their calling is, Luke keeps bringing it back to what they were actually doing with their lives. While they were speaking boldly and moving forward the good news of Jesus, their lives took on a very distinct way of living. They were together. There was no other way the church could have grown and achieved what it did unless this was the case. Unless they were of one heart and mind and taking care of each other and living life by the values of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God never could have gone anywhere. So Luke tells us again, in almost an entirely replicated passage two chapters later that this is what the early Christians lives looked like.

Luke seems to talk a lot more about money than any of the other gospels. The gospel of Luke is full of the parables that relate to money, and most of the parables about money are actually unique to Luke, meaning they aren’t in any other gospel. Only Luke tells the story of the rich fool. So it makes sense that he would carry this kind of talk over into Acts. It is important to note though that coupled with all these miracles are miraculous moves by this community and their economic situation. It is a miracle that a community of people would not claim any of their possessions as their own. It is a miracle that Barnabas would sell a field that he owned and give the money to the apostles.

Most of us now are just irritated about the constant bombardment of Sundays and and church that have to do with money. We are tired of the church telling us what to do with our money. Unfortunately though, a majority of the Bible and how it interprets our life under the Kingdom of God has to do with how we spend, use and view our money. You have to look at it this way. The world works in one way. To denote value it gives something a dollar amount and everything is defined by how much it is worth. Our entire world works this way. We all live in this world so we know this. Especially today. Everything is commercialized. If you want sex, buy it. If you want friends, buy them. If you want security, buy it. If you need to pay someone back because you killed their brother, well ask your insurance company because they have a price on their life. The overall price as estimated by economists at Stanford for your life is around 129,000 a year. Money literally makes the world go round and drives most passions, inventions, relationships, entertainment, grief, wars and greed. Very few things that you do in your life cannot be retraced back to money somehow. This is the reality of our life.

However, ever since the beginning of God’s story that we know, God has had a different way of denoting value to people and things and it has nothing to do with money. Read back into the Bible and see that every time there is mention of money or how to use it or how to view it it is almost entirely opposite to how the world around it at the time was using it or viewing it. Luke, picking up on this reversal all throughout God’s story, is consistent with the theme by telling these stories about the way that God’s people view and use money. It seems like there is a very clear distinction between the way the world works and the way that God works. So if you are part of God’s kingdom, then you follow by God’s rules when it has to do with money. God’s rules are that it’s not your money and it doesn’t denote value and it doesn’t give security, only God can do that. So then money gets reduced to something else, it’s a currency of the the other way of doing things. When a community of people who are committed to God’s kingdom, their entire lives change and it usually starts with how economics are dealt with in the community. So Luke shows us this. At the end of Acts 2 and now at the end of Acts 4.

“The church takes care of its own thus creating a vignette, a paradigm of the sort of world God intends for all.” – Willimon

Luke sees parallels to Jesus showing up and commencing the way of God to how God’s people use their money. This is the way that the Kingdom of God moves. This makes sense doesn’t it? God’s kingdom isn’t a kingdom of fighting, war, violence. But it is a kingdom. It does have a king and people in it. With kingdoms there has to be some sort of marker, something that makes you different then everyone else. For the Christian church according to Luke – it seems to be marked by how Christians spend their money and how they view their money.

Q: Does money play a central role in your faith? Do we separate it from our faith? How should we view money today so that we identify with God’s kingdom?

Here is what I think. I think us, here in the room today, have spent our entire lives living with two feet in two different worlds. In one world it’s all about money. We all have jobs so that we can make money to buy the things we want and need and provide for our families. We look at our money as ours that buys us things for our satisfaction. Money is on our minds every day, whether it’s to buy something or sell something or earn something. It consumes us. However, most of us in this room are also Christians. So we’ve been told and have been raised that we should live a certain kind of way. That way usually includes giving 10% of our money to whatever church we belong too, being nice to people, showing up somewhere on a Sunday, and upholding strong morals. Our version of Christianity that we all have grown up with intersects with the world’s value system at different times. Our faith tells us to spend the money on the right things and that 10% of it belongs to God. Then that’s about it.

Living like this is actually pretty complicated because both worlds promote very different messages. The world says invest your money and make your money work for you and be responsible and save your money and reward yourself with your money. That’s how we raise our kids to think, that’s why we go to school, that’s why we get jobs that’s why we are middle class people living the way we are
So we take all those messages and then try to Christianize them. We tell ourselves that we can invest our money by giving to our church because we are investing in the Kingdom. Or we tell ourselves that we only give money to those that are grateful and who will actually use it for a good purpose. Or we tell ourselves that we deserve to be rewarded, that we are somehow entitled to rewards that we give our self from the money that we earned. We Christianize the message of money so that we can live with it making sense. This poses a problem though because we end up starting with a twisted view of what money is and how we are supposed to spend it because we are starting from a worldly perspective.

The Kingdom of God though is completely different. Value is derived from being God’s creation. You trust God to provide for you and when you have something in your possession you see it as no more than a tool to help further the Kingdom that you are part of. When you start from this point of view, from this understanding of who you are and what your purpose is in life and then work money into the equation after this, everything changes. This is what was happening in Acts. This is why these people were living the way that they were living. They derived value and security and identity not through their economic place in the world but through their place in the Kingdom of God. So then if you start from this point of view of the Kingdom of God then money when it intersects with your life has a different role. It’s no longer what drives your life but is simple the thing that drives everyone else’s lives around you. Then you can see money as a tool rather than a lifesource. Which explains this church in Acts. No one saw anything as their own. No one was ever in need. People were selling the things that they did own and then giving the money away to the cause.

Can we be the kind of community that lives like this? Do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of community that live like everyone else but then make our faith something we tack on and insert it into the lives that we are already living? Or do you think we can be the kind of community that is driven by something else entirely and then we use our money to that end? Will we be a community where our church and our lives are driven and dictated by money or can we be driven by our faith and then money falls in line to that?

Let’s pray.

God forgive us for not truly living in your kingdom.
Whether it be through our money, time and relationships
We always tend to make it about us
We never think twice
Before following blindly what we think is normal

God forgive us for being dictated by our cashflow
For feeling secure when we have money in the bank
For feeling valuable when we buy new things
For feeling powerful when we show off

God forgive us for living by our own rules
For living by our own values
For dictating what we think we deserve
For trying to control outcomes

Free us to live the way you created us to be
Free us to live generously
Remind us of our insurmountable value
Remind us that love doesn’t come through things

Give us dreams that start with you
Give us dreams that aren’t selfish
Give us dreams that help the world
Give us boldness to live backwards to this world
Give us boldness to live without idols
Give us boldness to proclaim with our lives
The kind of life that you made possible

Related posts:

1. The Gospel Embodied in Community (A Sermon on Acts 2:42-47)
2. On Movements and Moving Speeches (A Sermon on Peter’s Speech in Acts 2)
3. Bible- Errors and Gods

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Acts 2:42-47

Luke doesn’t just leave us hanging with the story about 3000 people getting saved.  He shows us the very quick realization of what this looks like when 3000 people do get saved.  Now let’s just clear the air right now.  I probably shouldn’t be doing this message.  By now, most of you know that my preferred way of living is in community and we all sell everything we own and live in a box somewhere with fast Internet and make sure the poor are taken care of. So I might be a little biased in approaching this particular part of scripture.  So I’ll do my best to not use this as absolute proof why you should all drink my koolaid and sell all your stuff and give me all your money.  So if I start to go too off the deep end this morning, just stop me, and bring me back on course.

This verse here is one of a few summary passages that Luke writes to kind of give us an overall picture of what is going on all the while making theological statements along the way.  He is basically saying that this is, what the first believers did and looked like when they came to the realization that Jesus was the real deal and the realization of their hope and salvation.  Like any description like this, it is meant to be a summary but not to describe the entirety of an entire movement.  It’s also not meant to be prescriptive.  Luke isn’t telling us that believers have to do these things either.  I can sense the sigh of relief when I say that.  It’s amazing how much of a relief it is when we get off the hook for what we don’t want to do.  It’s also interesting at how we will never let other people off the hook for when we think something is mandatory.

Luke basically outlines four ways that the church started living out her life together.  They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, they were in fellowship, they engaged in the breaking of bread together, and they prayed.  These things are all pretty basic and don’t need a lot of explanation.  There is some debate around the idea of “breaking bread together.”  Some thing it is referring to the Eucharist and others think it just meant eating together.  However, both of them probably happened together, so it’s probably not that important.  We need to keep in mind that the things that these first believers were partaking in were not all that unusual.  Odds are that many of these people already had some sort of similar ritual or tradition that they were participating in already and it was a continuation of there life already.  Remember these folks were Jews, they had a way of life already very much steeped in prayer, eating together, studying and fellowship.  I don’t tell you this to make light of what they were doing but only to show you that it’s probably not a normal occurrence for someone to become saved and then all of sudden do all these things the next day.  But Luke is showing us this is what the early church looked like.  These were the the marks of the early church that set them apart as a redeemed people of God.

This was the way that these people embodied the good news of Jesus and what the realized about him.  That is the first sentence, telling us about the kind of rituals that the early church participated in.  Then Luke goes on to tell us that because of these rituals, awe came upon every sole and many wonders and signs started being done by the apostles.  This isn’t just the people that were in the community that were in awe.  Everyone was in awe.  This isn’t just because of the miracles but because of the way that this community was living.  It was like nothing else mattered.  I’m convinced one of the miracles that Luke is talking about here is the fact that this community could live the way they lived and actually share what they had, and not be obsessed with the rat race of wealth and pleasure.  Look at how well they took care of each other!  This for many, is actually a miracle, something to be in awe about.

I was speaking with an unchurched friend of mine and we were talking about the inner workings of the church and how it functions.  She asked how a pastor got paid, like where does the money come from?  I told her it came from all of us people that are part of this community, week after week giving of our hard earned money to this community so it can function the way it does.  She was in awe. Why in the world would a bunch of people give their money to an organization that just runs a service once a week?  Obviously she didn’t get it.  But I understand the awe.  I still see it on people’s faces today when I tell them about theStory or about some of the decisions that I make.   This is the kind of awe that the people around the first believers were experiencing.  Who are these people that are selling there stuff just so everyone else is taken care of?  Who are these people who eat together in each other’s homes?  This isn’t the way the world works normally.  Life then, as it is now, was plagued with individualism, greed and a constant chasing after instantaneous results and pleasure.  It is awe inspiring to see a community of people reject that way of living and take the narrow path toward a life of community, learning and downward mobility.

Q: What do you think inspires people about the church today?  Does anything?

The first Christians beliefs lead them to have all things in common and sell their possessions and belongings and distributing the money to anyone that had need.  The commonality of goods is set forth as concrete testimony that something unsettling, specific and substantial has happened to these people.

Q: What would have lead these first Christians to sell their things and give it to the poor?  What caused them to live out there convictions in that way?

I don’t think what Luke was doing here was trying to paint a picture of an ideal society.  Again, this isn’t a list of commands for Christians.  As much as I don’t want to say that.  In fact, by reading Acts and the Epistles we can be quite sure that this ideal society never actually happened.  They certainly had their fair share of struggles and problems and had lots to work through.  Acts, as we will see, is full of problems amongst it’s people.  So we know that Luke isn’t telling us that if we live a certain way everything will be perfect.  Rather he is showing us that when you realize what these people realized, then you respond in a certain way that is full of generosity.

See what these people were doing was was the best response they knew how to give based on what they now knew.  For them, at this time it meant taking care of those who were around them and facing into oppressive systems.  This was bringing to fulfillment that which was promised to them all along.  Like in Deut 15:4-5 that promises a land free of poverty.

“In their eating and drinking the resurrection community is already a partial fulfillment of that promise, enjoying now what shall soon be consummated in the kingdom of God.”
- William Willimon

This is the answer I think to our second question.  The first believers were fulfilling and incarnating what they saw as the promise and fulfillment of the Kingdom of God.  They were living, to the best way they could, what the kingdom of God should have looked like.  Jesus was telling them over and over again that the Kingdom of God was here and now, and they, through there actions were there making that a reality.

We are taught to have things our way and that being able to have our individual needs catered to is how to measure the success of an organization.  In our culture, our individual needs and rights come before any needs of the group.  The biblical picture is not what someone receives from the church, although one does receive a great deal , but of what one gives and how one contributes to it.  The portrait of the early church in acts shows that community and the welfare of the group were a priority.  This attitude reflected spiritual maturity that allowed the church to grow.  In the case of this earliest community, the believers preaching was matched by their community, making a powerful testimony for their mission.  When the early church said that God cared, the care they gave their own demonstrated this. – Darrel Bock

Our culture tends to lean in a very different direction as the Kingdom of God.  The world promotes individualism, privacy and taking care of yourself.  None of these are healthy.  One of the marks of making the Kingdom of God a reality now is to oppose these things in our own life and live out a way that involves community, sharing and caring for those who can’t care for themselves.  Our culture pushes towards greed and collecting as many things as possible for yourself so that you are safe and taken care of.  The Kingdom of God on the other hand promotes sharing and refusing the right to see the world or anything in it as something you can own or are entitled to.  The Kingdom of God sees life as an adventure and not seeing money as something that can threaten you or make you safe.  The two directions are quite different but they both demand different things.

What is happening across and through the church with the first believers is truly remarkable.  We know that there was lots of boundaries setup between people during this time and many of them were enforced at the dinner table.  However, just like Jesus refused to make proper distinctions between person at his table so did the early church.  Eating together is a mark of unity, solidarity, and deep friendship, a visible sign that social barriers which once plagued these people have broken down.  And now here they were, breaking bread together almost every day facing into the cultural expectations of who they should eat with or not.

At the lead team level, we are starting to ask questions about our community.  We are starting to wonder what it means to consider yourself part of theStory.  I think these were the same questions that we are seeing the first believers ask and answer in Acts.  Is it just something that we do once a week?  Is the Sunday morning gathering the end all and be all of what it means to be a follower of Jesus along side of the community of theStory?  Obviously this is the default of our world.  We want to take the easy way out.  Show up somewhere, give some money and then allow it to remove any guilt or obligation that we might feel.  We don’t want to be put on the spot.  We want to be safe.  We want our kids to be taught the right things.  We all have expectations.  But what does it mean?  What does it meant to be part of theStory?

For the first believers it was quite radical.  As the story of Acts starts to unfold we are going to start to see how serious this move really was.  Selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor, taking care of those in need, worshipping together, praying together…this is what it meant to be a Christian.  This was the expectation, but not in a coercive way, but in an obvious way.  For us this might look quite different.  I can assure you though that it doesn’t just mean show up here on Sunday and sing a few songs and listen to me ramble on about whatever I’m thinking about this past week.  Being part of theStory has to mean more than that.  For the first Christians they had to be asked “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?” The answer to that question is, “We will, with God’s help.”  Sometimes this was a three year process of answering this questions for the early Christians.  But the lead team is starting to wonder, what is our questions?  What are the marks of theStory going to be?  How long will this take us?

Q: What does it mean to you to be part of theStory? What should it mean?

Again, these aren’t rules.  These are values.  Christians valued certain things and to become a Christian you basically say “I value what Christian’s value” and then you started changing your life to better reflect what you value.  This is the direction that we are going to move into as a church.  As we start to land on certain things that theStory values as a whole you will be able to join in with us and value these things alongside of us.  If theStory says that we value ‘left handed widgets’ because we think that God has given us a heart to manufacture them, then you will be given the same opportunity to say, ‘i value left handed widgets.’  This is what taking ownership over this community will look like.  It will look like this community starting to value the same things and then changing our lives to match what we believe.

Listen, I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel the crunch.  The world around us is literally out of control, and it has been since the beginning of time.  Corporations now control and own most of the world’s wealth and by law their only concern is for profit for there shareholders.  Our children are spending increasingly amounts more time in front of screen to keep them quiet so parents don’t have to deal with them.  Our food comes from all over the world with all sorts of chemicals in it.  Pharmaceutical companies continually offer solutions to problems they have created.   Our environment is slowly being destroyed by our obsessive shopping and travel habits.  Our neighbourhoods are being hidden behind fences and attached garages while other neighbourhoods are made out of cardboard and scrap metal.  Our fate is literally being gambled on by the powers that be in the financial district.  Our jobs are fragile.  The ones who say they are out to help us are really just about maintaining the facade of safety while reeping the benefits at the poor’s expense.  Our children are being marketed to a thousand times a day.   It’s not easy.  This is difficult.  I want to resist, but it’s easier not to.  I’m feeling worn out, I’m feeling alone.

But that is what this community is for.  Together we are coming to realize that the direction that the world is taking is not all its cracked up to be.  People are unhappy.  We can see a glimpse of another way to live.  People are starting to wake up and realize what Jesus was talking about.  It’s called the Kingdom of God.  This new way to live has different values.  It values love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self control and all sorts of other beautiful attributes.  Isn’t this why we are here?  We realize that the world’s fate doesn’t have to be our fate.  We can oppose it. We can choose to live different.  We can choose to be in solidarity with those that are losing and are marginalized because we see helping others as a value and no longer just helping ourselves.  For all of us this will look different.  For some of us it will mean quiting our jobs and taking care of our kids instead.  For others it will mean getting a second job to support someone who can’t work.  For some it will mean saving every last penny that comes in and for others it will mean giving away 90% of your income to those that can’t afford rent this month.  For some it will mean selling your house and moving in with others and for others it will mean keeping your house and being hospitable to your neighbours.  For some it will mean pulling your kid out of extra curricular activities because they are being drowned in activities and for other it will mean homeschooling while for others it will mean leaving your kids in public school.  For all of us it will mean becoming a people who is shaped by the values of the Kingdom of God rather than the longings of this world.  It will mean we will become a generous people.  A selfless people.  A people dedicated to a life of service to each other and the world.

I hope theStory becomes a community that navigates its way through this mess of culture and lands on what our values are and then works together to live them out.  The first Christians sold their property!  This is a big deal.  This is a group of people whose ancestral heritage was tied directly to the land that they were selling.  I think the kind of sacrifice and community involvement will be just as significant but we have yet to figure it out.  It’s coming though.  Our marks will be quite clear and our mission even clearer.  We will be called to be generous with whatever we have now for the sake of the Kingdom of God.  Will we choose to be generous?  Will be be like these first Christians who were willing to give up on it all because what they believed changed there lives so drastically?  I hope so.  I think we can do it.  I want to do it.  Let’s pray together.

O Jesus,

Who chose a life of poverty and obscurity, grant me the grace to keep my heart detached from the transitory things of this world.

Let it be that henceforth, You are my only treasure, for You are infinitely more precious than all others possessions. My heart is too solicitous for the vain and fleeting things of earth.

Make me always mindful of Your warning words: “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his own soul?”

Grant me the grace to keep Your holy example always before my eyes, that I may despise the nothingness of this world and make You the object of all my desires and affections.

Amen.

Related posts:

1. On Movements and Moving Speeches (A Sermon on Peter’s Speech in Acts 2)
2. Evangelism: Gospelizing the Gospel
3. Questions on Community

Think about the civil rights movement and how important that movement was to a massive systematic change in the way that the political systematic structures of the United States oppressed coloured people. It would be difficult to pinpoint one event and say “that’s where the movement started” or “this person lead this entire movement.” This movement does however, bring back images of specific events in its history of a movement that we can recall or refer back to.

Quick Q: When you think of the civil rights movement, what symbols, people, moments come to your mind?

Martin Luther King Jr. is a beautiful example of how a speech has an important part of movement as a rallying point for people who all agree to come together under one banner or statement. A good speech reinterprets history and mobilizes people into action for justice. This is how Martin Luther King Jr’s speech ends:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

With over 200,000 civil rights supporters, this day/speech solidified a movement. We could analyze the speech, and understand the context of the speech and what was happening and what the response was like and we could learn a lot about this movement and understand what they cared about and what they rallied around and what they believed in. Many people highly praised the speech and it was considered by many the high point during this movement.

If we see Christianity as a movement that started 2000 years ago, then we can see this next part of Acts as the Martin Luther King Jr. speech of Christianity. The speech isn’t what the movement is built on or even dependant on, but the speech was a tool that was used to propel the movement forward and bring validity to the movement. Last week we read about how there was around a hundred and twenty people when the Spirit showed up and it landed on these people in quite a drastic way. These people started speaking in other languages that other people around knew and it started turning into quite a spectacle. Joe ended with this line last week.

Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.”

So this is where we will pick up from this morning. Like most movements I think they start with the accusations flying around about the people in the movement being delusional, or drunk. So Peter, (who by the way we haven’t heard a peep from him since he denied Jesus three times) decides to stand up and address the crowds and let them in on what’s going on. So it is this speech of Peter that we are going to go through this morning. This folks, is the first recorded sermon of the Christian church. This is the first of nineteen different sermons recorded in the book of Acts.

Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
“‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood
before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
And everyone who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

So looking back into the oracle shrines such as that of Delphi of this time that Peter and the people there would have been familiar with, this whole event of people speaking in weird sounds and different languages has happened before and normally it was seen as the utterances of gods. Luke is following the archiving practices of the Greeks of how he summarizes Peter’s speech. What would happen is someone would stand up, normally seen as the messenger of God, or a ‘prophet’ and he would make the utterances make sense and translate them for everyone that was listening in. So this entire event isn’t that uncommon. However, what happens next is a bit of a twist. First, the languages that are being spoken aren’t just random sounds, they are actual languages. So Peter in standing up doesn’t have to translate anything. So instead of interpreting the utterances, he ends up interpreting the entire event of what is happening and why it is happening.

We need to understand the kinds of people that Peter was talking to. There was thousands upon thousands of people present in and around where this speech was taking place. Remember this was in Jerusalem and most of the people there were Jews who were there to celebrate a religious festival in which they were a part. So this speech was for them. In Peter’s speech we are listening to a Jew speaking to the fellow Jews, linking the story of Jesus with the scriptures of the Jews. This speech wasn’t for us. It was for the Jews in Jerusalem. Without understanding that we cannot understand Peter’s speech. So the imagery he uses, the quotes he uses, the references he makes all pertain to the history and beliefs of the people listening to him there that day. So if we are to really understand the this movement and this speech we need to understand why what he is saying touches the hearts of the people who are listening. The Jews read the scriptures inside and out, they saw themselves as a generation where it would all come true, all those prophecies. So Peter is playing right into their expectations and explaining what it all means. Only by understanding this world, where the people there have created and formed their entire lives reading these scriptures and prophecies and finding hope in times of sorrow can we ever really understand how Peter could even think of launching to a quote from the Prophet Joe. to explain what was happening.

The very first thing Peter does is launch into quoting the prophets to give validity to why such an event is happening. Peter did not proclaim these events in a vacuum, but in the context of scripture and history. To us, this means very little. So big deal, he is quoting something else in the Bible. But to them, what was happening in the present wasn’t in the Bible yet so when the scriptures were being quoted everyone knew what he was talking about. Not only did they know what he was talking they had built their lives on the words of these prophets. And Peter was not re-interpreting them to make sense for a current situation. Not only that. But he also is making an indirect statement that we are now in the last days! So he helps people see the reason for the craziness that everyone was observing to try and give it some historical validity through an story that they knew and understood. Peter continues.

“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him:

Now Peter moves from linking this event with the life of Israel and their prophets to the life of Jesus. Peter’s technique is to constantly point out this promise and fulfillment throughout. First the event is happening was a promise through Joel and now Jesus has come as a God had setup from the beginning. Peter is asserting here that the community that the Spirit is forming which they are observing falls into a patter of expectation and realization of Israel, they are used to this. So according to Peter, Jesus was born and was foretold. Jesus was filled with the Spirit and that confirms the messianic hopes of the Jews. Jesus suffered and died, and it’s all part of prophecy here and Peter is just connecting the dots. After Jesus’ Resurrection, it suddenly becomes clear to the disciples that the all of this was part of God’s plan all along and Peter (after denying him three times) in his boldness to stand up in the crowds is now ready to speak.

So Peter not only makes the connection with this event to the life of Jesus. He also make the connection between all the people listening in on his sermon to the death of Jesus. He says it like it is. He points to the evidence and points out that the Jews here have blindly rejected and killed their own Messiah. But not to worry. This was all part of God’s plan all along.

“‘I saw the Lord always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
you will not let your holy one see decay.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence.’
“Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay.

He then goes into a quote from David in the Psalms in which Peter claims David was never talking about himself because well, David is dead. In fact, he was talking about Jesus all along. Jesus was raised and is no longer dead. He might be giving David a little bit more credit than he deserves but he basically pointing out that even David, the King of Israel was pointing and hinting towards Jesus all along. Now it all made sense!!

God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,
“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’
“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.

This is really the crux of his sermon. Now keep in mind, this was never his entire sermon. Luke used certain practices to summarize and put together what he thought would best represent what happened that day and what was said. But this next section is a real sermon. This is where we start to better understand the idea of salvation. This is where he points out that not only is this true because of the scriptures and because of the King of Israel said so, but also because the apostles said so. They saw this happen with their own eyes. So now we are at two steps of proof of why this event is happening. On top of this he is bringing the history and the accumulation of their history to a glorious climax in pointing out how Jesus is the fulfillment of all that they were waiting for.

Q: In verse 37 it says that “when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart (very upset)” What do you think they were upset about?

They were probably upset because they realized that they killed their Messiah and they needed to figure something out now to do with their guilt.

Despite what we think was the reason as to why people were upset, there was definitely an appropriate response for this kind of realization. Right here, for the first time, people are starting to make the connection that everything they live for and have fought for and think about is for real and finds it’s fulfillment right here and now in Jesus. Peter tells them to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins and they will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Peter’s answer to the question what should we do was to have an appropriate response to the news and realization that they had just heard, it wasn’t to work up enough initiative in their lives, or to threaten them or else. This was a response to how these people were feeling and to the realization that they had that they missed what was going on but now wanted to join into the revolution, the change. This was not so much of a conversion of convincing people that they were on there way to hell. He’s saying THIS HAS HAPPENED. Jesus is who we were waiting for! Join in the revolution! This isn’t about saving yourself through this new knowledge. This is about allowing yourself to be saved because the reality of God saving the world through his son has already happened, so join in.

God’s plan of salvation, Peter was saying was always intended by God from the beginning to reach it’s climax with Israel’s Messiah undertaking the ultimate task of rescue. Israel’s King would come to the place when evil had reached his height and where human systems were at it’s ultimate form of corruption (not just Rome and it’s horrible justice system, but Israel with it’s corrupt Temple system.) This evil would accumulate itself in one massive act of violence against this King, a person who had done nothing to deserve it. This is what the early Christians believe God has always intended.

This is the beginning of this talk of salvation – pointing to a very concrete and particular reality in the future. Salvation regularly refers to specific acts of ‘rescue’ with the present life: being ‘saved’ from this potential disaster, here and now.

“Being saved in this context of what Peter is talking about here doesn’t just mean “going to heaven when you die.” It means knowing God’s rescuing power which anticipates in the present, God’s final great act of deliverance. Peter then goes on to encourage people to know that salvation, that rescue as a present reality and also a future hope.” – N.T. Wright

I’m sure we’ve talked about this numerous times here at theStory, but I’m just going to continue to keep iterating the fact that you will have a hard time creating a theology from the scriptures that says salvation is about going to heaven when you die. Over and over again it’s about some form of rescue here and now on this earth from something. Whether it be living a purposeless life or from the dangers of sin, salvation here is about the present.

So after this we can see that through Peter’s sermon, the story of Jesus was told at three levels as a historical event (witnessed by their own eyes), as having theological significance (interpreted by the scriptures) and as a contemporary message (confronting men and women with the necessity of decision). This isn’t also a call to personal salvation, this is a corporate call and to have a public identification with other believers (which will come more in a few weeks when we do the end of this chapter).

Q: Is salvation real to us in this way? Witnessed by us, interpreted through scriptures (past story) and confronting people with the necessity of decisions? Is it any of these things? Why or Why Not?

What God has promised for the ultimate future has come forward to meet us in Jesus Christ. We should expect signs of that future to appear in the present. And, whenever we are in a mess, of whatever sort and for whatever reason, we should remeber this: we are ‘ turn-back-and-be-rescued’ people. We are ‘repent-and-be-baptsized’ people. We have the right, the brithright to cash in that promise at any place and at any time. No wonder 3000 people signed up that very day. We are meant to see here the fulfillment of Israel’s hope for the permanent giving of God’s presence and power to God’s people. – N.T. Wright

The revolution confronts us every day
Do we want to join in?
Will we live as if Jesus is alive and well today?
Or will we sit back take in the sites?
Will we hope that believing it happened is good enough?

God has been orchestrating a story
It is so grand that it doesn’t leave anyone out
When things seem to go in a bad direction
God uses it to show he expected it all along
In God’s story, death is actually life, emtpy is actually full
What feels like chaos is actually order

What God has promised, has moved forward to meet us.
What we need, stares us in the face
From this point forward, we are getting back on track
We will finish God’s story out faithfully and not selfishly

May we remember that salvation has already happened.
May we live like salvation is real
May we respond well to the news before us
May we know your rescuing power.

Related posts:

1. God’s on The Hook: A Sermon on God’s Speeches in the Book of Job
2. The Gospel Embodied in Community (A Sermon on Acts 2:42-47)
3. Gallery Lambton Moving Forward on Christina Street

The prophets were the pirate radio frequency of Israel’s time. They were the ones speaking when they shouldn’t and saying things that made people feel extremely uncomfortable. They were calling into question things that were not questioned, things that were normal, every-day activities that just happened. They called out the powerful and accused them of the way they became powerful was wrong. They consistently played a frequency that was offensive to the regular frequencies of their day. Amos was no exception. Amos began his life owning a farm and cultivating trees, he was a fairly wealthy man. Then he got the collect-call from God to be his messenger, to speak against the misuse and the immoral direction that the world was going in. Amos spoke not to just Israel but had a message even to the Gentile populations surrounding Israel. Amos was speaking on behalf of God now, and he wasn’t happy. Israel and Judah had become wealthy, were fighting no wars and spent their time developing their nation and becoming prosperous, which wouldn’t be a probably normally, if they didn’t forget who their God was and what their calling was in the world. They were always supposed to protect their slaves, protect the poor, and be the kind of nation that would represent the God of the universe, and their riches made them forget all this. Their riches distracted them and they soon forgot about their responsibilities. Amos reminded them.

When we are rich. When we are powerful. When we are comfortable. We generally don’t like what God has to say. We get angry at the person who speaks these truths. We make up excuses. But God is relentless. He always takes the side of the downtrodden and poor. I think you would be hard pressed to find one biblical story where God isn’t siding with the poor and marginalized. So prophecy becomes a soothing voice to those in need and generally a nagging voice to those that are rich, and have it all together. So then, a false prophet is one who flips this. They nag on the poor and comfort the rich (prosperity gospel anyone?). They make excuses for the wealthy and say things like “they just worked hard, they deserve it.” God doesn’t see things this way. He refuses to acknowledge any entitlement at all.

This is why I’m convinced that we don’t really hear the prophets voice today. We have no ears to hear. Prophets get drowned out in the sea of information, TV shows, false prophets and our never ending comfort. When the prophets speak we get annoyed, we justify and grumble. We accuse them for being too far fetched, unrealistic and oppressive. We are masters at being able to subtly ignore. We smile and nod at wave and barely absorb words of prophets. This is what wealth and riches cause. This is the kind of society that we are. We are deaf to the words of the prophets around us. When prophet’s speak we call them crazy, we ignore them or we fight back telling them that they are out of line.

Similarly, this is the same sort of environment that Amos came from. Amos came during a time when Israel was enjoying both prosperity and security. Luxury abounded as they were at peace with their neighbours and so they could focus on building up their economy and developing their nation. Religion ran rampant. When people are comfortable, they go to church a lot (what mega churches?), and pray a lot, and make sacrifices. They try to do all the right things on the surface because they want to keep their winning streak going.

“Go to Bethel and sin;
go to Gilgal and sin yet more.
Bring your sacrifices every morning,
your tithes every three years.
Burn leavened bread as a thank offering
and brag about your freewill offerings—
boast about them, you Israelites,
for this is what you love to do,”
declares the Sovereign LORD.
- Amos 4:4-5

What happened though was that making money ended up being more important than worshipping God and then everything hit the fan. The rich exploited the poor, the judicial system was corrupt and injustice flourished.

You levy a straw tax on the poor
and impose a tax on their grain.
Therefore, though you have built stone mansions,
you will not live in them;
though you have planted lush vineyards,
you will not drink their wine.
For I know how many are your offenses
and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes
and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.
- Amos 5:11-12

So we have a nation who has been through a hell of a lot. They have been enslaved, poor, starving in deserts who finally start getting established and developing and being able to eat. Israel and Judah are at peace with their neighbours – wealth and energy could be spent on developing their nations, cities were growing, new wealthy merchant class was developing – they were moving from agriculture to commercial and experiencing benefits and problems with that change. As soon as this happens though, those who become wealthy instantly forget about those who are poor and rather start engaging in these elaborate spiritual practices, that sound a lot like what our church services today. God wants no part of it.

“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
“Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings
forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?
You have lifted up the shrine of your king,
the pedestal of your idols,
the star of your god
which you made for yourselves.
Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Damascus,”
says the LORD, whose name is God Almighty.
Amos 5:21-27

Q: What does God actually care about? Why are these religious festivals despised?

The book of Amos is structured uniquely. Chapters 1-2 speak to all the nations surrounding Israel and then focuses in on Israel through a moral lens. Chapter 3-6 are a collection of verses that look specifically at all the things that Israel has done wrong. Chapters 7-9 consist of visions given to Amos and are written in more of a narrative when a priest comes out to oppose Amos and tell him to go away.

The central idea of Amos is that God rips into all these other evil nations and puts Israel at the same level as them. He uses the phrase over and over again, “for three transgressions and for four” which is a Jewish idiom that means an indefinite number that has finally come to the end. God expects more from them since afterall he did rescue them from Egypt and pull them to be apart to be a nation that blessed other nations. Just because they were chosen doesn’t mean God favours them, they are still held accountable, if not more so. The nation that represents God must be pure and holy and they allowed idols, and riches to seep in and determine the kinds of people they would be. They forgot about who they were. They forgot about the kinds of people they were called to be. A kind of people that always sides with the oppressed and marginalized and takes care of them even at the risk of loosing their own wealth. They didn’t do that and God let’s them have it.

Amos begins with Amos calling out Syria (Damascus was the capital) for treating the Israelites that were in their midst too harsh. He calls out Philistine cities and denounces them for trading human lives. He calls out Tyre because they were selling their friends (Israelites) as slaves). He calls out Edom because of their persistent hatred of the Jews. He calls out Ammon for being ruthless in their war and killing women and children. He calls out Moab for disrespecting the dead and royalty. Everyone has their problems. But then he faces into Israel for the rest of his message, and it isn’t pretty. Amos’ message is basically a message of cocky rich people that think they have it all together and have got figured out. God wants no part of it. So he uses Amos to tell them so.

God does not care if you show up to church on Sunday and give 10%, he wants you to care about what he cares about, the oppressed that are around you. He certainly doesn’t care that you give yourself the title of Christian.

So this the first section of Amos, basically an attack on Israel and how they are not being the kinds of people they should be and are rather masking their failure to live up to their identity with wealth and religious rituals. So Amos starts getting a bit more fiery and starts announcing the judgment that is coming. God starts giving him visions of what judgment is going to look like and Amos cries out to him not to harm Israel (after all, these are his people).

This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: He was preparing swarms of locusts after the king’s share had been harvested and just as the late crops were coming up. When they had stripped the land clean, I cried out, “Sovereign LORD, forgive! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”
So the LORD relented.
“This will not happen,” the LORD said.
This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: The Sovereign LORD was calling for judgment by fire; it dried up the great deep and devoured the land. Then I cried out, “Sovereign LORD, I beg you, stop! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!”
So the LORD relented.
“This will not happen either,” the Sovereign LORD said.
This is what he showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. And the LORD asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
“A plumb line,” I replied.
Then the Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.
“The high places of Isaac will be destroyed
and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.”

Interesting the response of Amos compared to the one we went through last week with Jonah. Of course, Nineveh was Jonah’s enemy, so I guess we can understand a bit why he didn’t want to see them repent. Amos cries back out to God to not be has harsh as God is suggesting. But there are people, obviously, that don’t like being told that their way of life is going to end. Who wants to be told that everything that puts a smile on their face is wrong and that it’s all going to crumble all around them one day?

Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent a message to Jeroboam king of Israel: “Amos is raising a conspiracy against you in the very heart of Israel. The land cannot bear all his words. For this is what Amos is saying:
“‘Jeroboam will die by the sword,
and Israel will surely go into exile,
away from their native land.’”
Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there. Don’t prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom.”
Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the LORD took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ Now then, hear the word of the LORD. You say,
“‘Do not prophesy against Israel,
and stop preaching against the descendants of Isaac.’
“Therefore this is what the LORD says:
“‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the city,
and your sons and daughters will fall by the sword.
Your land will be measured and divided up,
and you yourself will die in a pagan country.
And Israel will surely go into exile,
away from their native land.’”

Q: Do we want to hear God’s message for us? What do we do to ensure that we can hear what God is saying? How do we not become like Israel and kick our prophets out of our ear’s reach?

As a community we can learn to be the kind of community that listens to these prophets and learns to change rather than write them off. Communities need to make room for prophets to make wild accusations and imaginations, hurt their feelings and hear from God.

“when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal.”
- Wendell Berry

There is no room for us to be like Amaziah and kick our prophets away because we don’t like the way it sounds or if we believe it then it will change our lives drastically. We need to be able to accept that we are probably wrong, we are probably stagnant and we are probably not living the way that we are supposed to. We need to go out of our way and listen to these voices in the wilderness as they call us to come back to the way of living that we were meant to live. There are some people that speak as prophets into my own life, and when I read or listen to what they have to say I have a range of feelings. Some of them make me happy and encouraged that we are moving in a good direction and others make me pretty low because I know that we are eating our own vomit and writing our own disastrous ending. One of my favourite prophets of today is a guy named Chris Hedges; who depending on whose reading him will come across as extremely dreary and wildly non-optimistic. He is a straight shooter, exclaiming what it looks like if our society continues on this path of consumerism, war and destruction. He calls out the church, the liberal class, culture, the corporations and the wealthy to be who they should be. He used to be a wartime correspondent in Iraq for the New York times, ended up getting fired for being too honest, and now speaks very strongly against war, government and classes. Can we be the kind of community that allows people like this to help be our conscience as opposed to being offended by him and writing him off as a lunatic?

“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
- Chris Hedges

“The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.”
— Chris Hedges

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”
— Chris Hedges

Those are good words. But they face into things that make us comfortable. Many of us work for corporations who have used oppressive tactics to become the biggest and best. Many of us have had family that fought in wars. Can we allow someone to speak directly to our hearts and let that change us rather than getting offended? Or another one of my favourite prophets, who is probably a bit more like biblical prophets, Wendell Berry. He decided that the academic life wasn’t for him and moved back to his homeland, a life on a farm, and continued to write his stories and essays calling out culture for it’s spiral into chaos. He faces into the hard questions of our massive technological use and our industrialized food source and our lack of place and the degradation of families and marriage and sex. He says it like it is all the while being disregarded as a lunatic who is scared of computers.

“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
— Wendell Berry

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
— Wendell Berry

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
— Wendell Berry

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
— Wendell Berry

If we listen to Wendell Berry we will all live on farms, toiling in the soil for our food and only purchasing local. So we don’t listen to him and we call him a fanatic (like we call Jesus when he tells the rich man to sell everything he has). We don’t want to change. We should however be the kind of community that can listen to words like his and start to be transformed to be more like we should be. Not just get depressed because we are far from where we should be, but use it as encouragement to know we are doing right. Berry asks tough questions about things that we just do. The way we let our kids obsess over TV and video games, the way our kids are never outside, the way we think about the aboriginal population around us, the way the oil plants treat the earth. Can we be the kind of community that can ask ourselves these tough questions?

Then there is someone like Stanley Hauerwas who speaks directly to the church, where Berry and Hedges seem to speak to Western culture in general with jabs at the church here and there. Hauerwas speaks almost directly to the church all the time trying to help them see who they are to become.

What we call “freedom” becomes the tyranny of our own desires. We are kept detached, strangers to one another as we go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our rights. The individual is given a status that makes incomprehensible the Christian notion of salvation as a political, social phenomenon in the family of God. Our economics correlates to our politics. Capitalism thrives in a climate where “rights” are the main political agenda. The church becomes one more consumer-oriented organization, existing to encourage individual fulfillment rather than being a crucible to engender individual conversion into the Body.
- Stanley Hauerwas

The confessing church seeks the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God.
- Stanley Hauerwas

One role of any colony (church) is to keep the young very close to the elders—people who live aright the traditions of home.
- Stanley Hauerwas

Luther called security the ultimate idol. And we have shown, time and again, our willingness to exchange anything—family, health, church, truth—for a taste of security. We are vulnerable animals who seek to secure and to establish our lives in improper ways, living by our wits rather than by faith
- Stanley Hauerwas

Then as now, it is difficult to think of a more deadly adversary to the gospel and its church than wealth. To his disciples’ question about salvation, Jesus replied that it was humanly impossible for rich people (like us) to be saved, as difficult as pushing a dromedary through a needle’s eye. Best then to adjust to what is given, do the best we can to not feel too guilty
- Stanley Hauerwas

Hauerwas’s books are full of changes that need to be made by the church because we are not living like the people of God. If we were to take Hauerwas seriously then we would have had better responses to 9-11, our church probably wouldn’t be full of young families because we wouldn’t be so estranged from our parent’s faith, we wouldn’t know what to do with the phrase “rich Christians” and forgiveness would be something sought after and not forced on us. He’s a tough prophet to listen to because he isn’t just speaking to the broader culture. We can’t just disregard him because we are different. He speaks directly to us and who we should be.

I share these prophets with you because I want you to be aware of these voices and the prophets in your own life and in this communities life. We brought Shawn in a few weeks ago to show us where we think we have gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. I hope the things he said sit in the back of your head and gnaw away at your conscience and help initiate some change. Can we make room for the role of the prophet in our lives? Or will we flee from the hard words of change and revolution? I don’t know about you, but I want to listen and I want to learn and I’m hoping that we will begin to allow their words to change us and encourage us to turn away from the inevitable fate that awaits those on the path of destruction.

Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel

Amos ends with a promise, it is a promise of renewal and hope. After a long list of judgment and how Israel is going to be overcome and destroyed, it seems as if this is exactly where God wants because this is how the book ends, with God speaking.

“In that day
“I will restore David’s fallen shelter—
I will repair its broken walls
and restore its ruins—
and will rebuild it as it used to be,
so that they may possess the remnant of Edom
and all the nations that bear my name,”
declares the LORD, who will do these things.
“The days are coming,” declares the LORD,
“when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman
and the planter by the one treading grapes.
New wine will drip from the mountains
and flow from all the hills,
and I will bring my people Israel back from exile.
“They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.
They will plant vineyards and drink their wine;
they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
I will plant Israel in their own land,
never again to be uprooted
from the land I have given them,”
says the LORD your God.

God’s judgment never ends in destruction. It’s always beautiful. This is where we are going, this is what we are aiming for. There is a goal, meaning and purpose behind our repentance and the message of the prophets. It’s not a message of just “turn or burn” but rather it’s a message of “turn because this is what awaits.”

May we become people that listen to prophets and aren’t afraid of change. May we become people that can see our wrongs and stop being defensive about them. May we become a community that cares about the things that God cares about.

Related posts:

1. The One About the Two Debtors (A Sermon on Luke 7:36-50)
2. Waiting Well – A Sermon on Advent
3. A Sermon on Freedom, Opportunity and the Disciplines

This is our 2nd last message in our series entitled Lives.Dies. Rises. Reigns.  We were taken through Lent, to death on the cross to resurrection Sunday at the beach and we are now spending a few weeks on this last work.  Reigns.  What does it mean for Jesus to reign now?  What does it look like for us today?  Do our lives change whatsoever whether Jesus rose or not? Does Jesus rising again have anything to do with us now?   This is really the crucial question what I think for Christians today, so this is going to be the question we are going to play around with today.

For the most part, it’s agreed on that Jesus as a person existed.  It’s a historical fact that he had followers, he eventually was put to death.  Having this belief isn’t what makes us Christians.  What sets us apart it that we believe these things and then we believe that he rose again and reigns still today.  This is the Christian story, and this is the story that we’ve chosen to make our own.  The question though still remains is “does Jesus rising and reigning have anything to do with our lives today?”  If Jesus actually “reigns,” what does that mean?  Is it just something that we believe with our heads or should/does it change everything else.

Obviously the answer to this question is YES, it does have something to do with our lives today.  If we didn’t think that we wouldn’t be here.  There is something about this story, and this belief that puts us all in the same room together once a week.  We believe in this story enough that it wakes us up on a Sunday morning.  But do we believe it in enough to change our entire lives so we are as radical as the story calls us to be?  Do we actually love our enemies?  Why aren’t we giving all of our stuff to the poor?  Do we actually have peace?  Do we make healthy decisions?  We don’t.  Our lives are really not that much more different than those that don’t believe Jesus died and rose again.  So this morning, my goal is to prove to you that even though Jesus died and rose again, us believing that fact doesn’t actually do anything to change our lives, and that there is something a little bit more important that we have to do so our lives actually begin to change.

Let me explain to you a more obvious predicament to see if we can find ourselves in a similar one.

Wendell Berry in The Hidden Wound brings up the example of the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves.  “This action says that the master has the belief in the immortality of the souls of the people whose bodies he owned and used.  Yet here the master sits, with the assumption of owning, the body of a soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own.”  Now think about this for a moment.  This master is living a life that is completely contradictory.  His actions say one thing, his beliefs say another things.  If his actions collided with his beliefs at any given time, it would make tidal waves.

“To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder: somewhere down deep in his mind he always knew of the danger, and his nerves were always alert to it.”
- Wendell Berry

All right, so there is a contradiction here.  The master is maybe aware of it slightly, but the radical change of everything he’s ever known would be too drastic to him, so it’s always slightly ignored.  It’s just too much to handle.  There is also someone else in this story that we need to pay attention too.  It is that of the pastor.  Think about this awkward situation for him.  His livelihood comes from the dependence on the white half of his congregation, the half that are all owning slaves.  So you can imagine that this pastor shys away from preaching about some things and would highlight others.  You might start to hear sermons about resisting not evil, or turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, bless those that curse you etc.  But now you must think, what about these masters?  How can they just stand there while their entire lifestyles are conflicting the words from the pulpit?  There is a separation in the words coming from the pulpit and what all the people there are hearing.  The white slave owners had perfected the act of explaining and hearing things and actually living out what they were talking about.  The white people certainly don’t see themselves as the antagonist in these sermons.  Well it just wouldn’t happen.  If the preachers started to make these connections for them either the preacher would get kicked our or he would have to begin to honour the division in the minds of his congregation.  The preacher instead of focusing on how people were living would have to focus on something more heavenly, something more spiritual.  So this is what he did, and moral obligation gets cut right out of the equation and the focus of his preaching starts to become more spiritual and obsessed with the question “how do you get to heaven?”  No one is offended by this question or this answer?  So questions about how to live the best in the world and treat others and be in relationships were allowed to go to waste as everyone obsessed over the question of salvation.

Now if we were to read the bible and write down all the times it talks about salvation, we would see a massive range of ways for this to happen (of course it’s always through Jesus).  But we would see verses from getting baptised, loving one another in deed and truth, obeying the scriptures, having faith etc.  But in a context like this, all these other ways didn’t really match up with the lives of those with deep pocketbooks so instead all the focus went on faith.  If we all asked ourselves this question now even, the answer would be, You got salvation through believing.

This is where this obsession with going to some place that isn’t here and this over emphasis on the mystical side of Christianity came from.  It came from churches who refused to be preached at or admit their inconsistencies with their lives and who they were supposed to be.  It was way easier to just believe that you only had to believe to get into heaven, and that getting into heaven was really all this is about.

“And to this day that continues to be the emphasis of such denominations as the Southern Baptist: to be saved, believe! The mystical aspects of Christianity completely overshadow the moral. But it is a bogus mysticism, mysticism as wishful magic, a recipe by which to secure the benefits of eternal bliss without having to give up the benefits of temporal vice: corrupt your soul and save it too…..detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately?) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion. The religious institutions became comfort stations for scribes and publicans and pharisees. Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage—a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.”
- Wendell Berry

The reason I bring up this story is not to try and give a perfect historical account how we got to where we got to, I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to these rules and of course was happening well before racism in the 1900’s.  I bring up this story to show how deeply confused and mislead Christians can be.  So we don’t have to change the way we live, we completely justify and change what we believe and think we have to believe in order that we are right.  We are master justifiers.  I don’t think we do this consciously, but we do it.  I shouldn’t even say it’s just Christians that do this, all people do it.

My goal today is difficult because by the end of it I want to expose ourselves to this same hypocrisy.  By the end of this morning I think we all might feel a bit awkward because we will all be faced with the fact that we’ve chosen to live a certain way because it is more beneficial to the world we live in.  This causes our beliefs to be inconsistent with our actions, but these are inconsistencies that we have chosen to make have been made because it’s more beneficial for us in the world that we live in.

For example, my goal is to give you examples from my life so I do not offend, but please take these examples and use them to be introspective about your own life.

I have a deep belief about food.  I believe that it is right and good to eat healthy, organic, local food.  There is a million reasons why I believe these things, and I could go on for a while explaining all the intricacies about why my beliefs have lead me this way.  Whether it has to do with supporting those that are closest to you or treating our bodies healthily I’m convinced that eating food that is made close to you and in a sustainable way is the best decision for me.  That is my belief.  Now my actions will show you different.  The food that I eat comes from all over the world.  Sometimes you might catch me downing a bag of chips at night.  How can this be so?  How can my actions be in such drastic contrast to what I believe?

Q: In what way do your beliefs not line up with your actions?  Give some examples.

The examples are endless in my own life.  I am opposed to the oil industry and the havoc it is reaking on the environment, and yet I drive a car.  I am opposed to slavery and the mistreating of people and yet I don’t even think twice before putting on a t-shirt that was made in a sweat shop.  I think my money should be used to help those in need but I constantly buy things with it for my own pleasure and enjoyment.

Subjects were asked in a bargain store to judge which one of four nylon stocking pantyhose was the best quality. The subjects were not told that the stockings were in fact identical. Wilson and Nisbett presented the stockings to the subjects hanging on racks spaced equal distances apart. As situation would have it, the position of the stockings had a significant effect on the subjects’ quality judgments. In particular, moving from left to right, 12% of the subjects judged the first stockings as being the best quality, 17% of the subjects chose the second pair of stockings, 31% of the subjects chose the third pair of stockings, and 40% of the subjects chose the fourth—the most recently viewed pair of stockings. When asked about their respective judgments, most of the subjects attributed their decision to the knit, weave, sheerness, elasticity, or workmanship of the stockings that they chose to be of the best quality. Dispositional qualities of the stocking, if you will. Subjects provided a total of eighty different reasons for their choices.

In an experiment where women were asked to make a choice between 4 identical pairs of nylons.  They all made a choice and then explained that choice to them, even though they were identical.  Which tells them that these two parts of their brain do not talk to each other.  So if you compare this to me and what I eat.  There is part of what I do and the decisions that I make are completely separate from the things that I actually say/believe about those things.  It’s a bit terrifying that this has been proven through science.  I find this a little bit relieving because it reminds me that I’m like everyone else, but it is scary because it tells me that everyone else is a hypocrite.

There is a brilliant guy out there named Robert Kurzban and he has a book entitled “Why Everyone (else) Is A Hypocrite.”  Building off this experiment by Nisbett and Wilson, he goes on to explain how our brain works with all these inconsistencies.  One of the ways we work is that we are constantly trying to get ahead, to win.  Sometimes being consistent with our actions and our beliefs does not do this for us.  It actually is more true that in certain situations, being inconsistent is better.  So when being inconsistent is better and we can still kind of get away with it, we choose to just be inconsistent.  So in the example with my belief that eating healthy is better and wiser, and my action of eating a bag of chips, I’m living inconsistently but that’s because I believe that being inconsistent is actually better for me in that situation than being consistent (ie. being alone where no one can see me mowing down on a bag of Ruffles.)  But if you put me at the Treehouse with a group of vegans, I’m going to eat healthy and then live consistent with my belief because in that situation it is more beneficial for me to be consistent because I’m looking to preserve myself socially and come across as moral.  It is interesting because in both situations, whether I’m at home by myself or out with my vegan friends, at no point am I actually living out my belief simply because I believe it, there is always something else going on.  It’s either I want to satisfy my longings and feel good, or I want to uphold some sort of moral facade.  At no point am I doing what I believe because I believe it.  So do you see how this makes sense?  My beliefs are now completely separate things than my actions, I could believe anything about food really, but by the sounds of it, it wouldn’t matter because my beliefs really have no relevance to my actions.

I want to read you a story written by Peter Rollins.

“There was once a fiery preacher who possessed a powerful but unusual gift. He found that, from an early age, when he prayed for individuals, they would supernaturally lose all of their religious convictions. They would invariably loose all of their beliefs about the prophets, the sacred Scriptures, and even God. So he learned not to pray for people but instead limited himself to preaching inspiring sermons and doing good works.

However, one day while travelling across the country, the preacher found himself in conversation with a businessman who happened to be going in the same direction. This businessman was a very powerful and ruthless merchant banker, one who was honoured by his colleagues and respected by his adversaries.

Their conversation began because the businessman, possessing a deep, abiding faith, had noticed the preacher reading from the Bible. He introduced himself to the preacher and they began to talk. As they chatted together this powerful man told the preacher all about his faith in God and his love of Christ. He spoke of how his work did not really define who he was but was simply what he had to do.

“The world of business is a cold one,” he confided to the preacher, “and in my line of work I find myself in situations that challenge my Christian convictions. But I try, as much as possible, to remain true to my faith. Indeed, I attend a local church every Sunday, participate in a prayer circle, engage in some youth work, and contribute to a weekly Bible study. These activities help to remind me of who I really am.”

After listening carefully to the businessman’s story, the preacher began to realize the purpose of his unseemly gift. So he turned to the businessman and said, “Would you allow me to pray a blessing into your life?”

The businessman readily agreed, unaware of what would happen. Sure enough, after the preacher had muttered a simple prayer the man opened his eyes in astonishment.

“What a fool I have been for all these years!” he proclaimed. “It is clear to me now that there is no God above who is looking out for me, and that there are no sacred texts to guide me, and there is no Spirit to inspire and and protect me.”

As they parted company the businessman, still confused by what had taken place, returned home. But now that he no longer had any religious beliefs, he began to find it increasingly difficult to continue in his line of work. Faced with the fact that he was now just a hard-nosed businessman working in a corrupt system, rather than a man of God, he began to despise his activity. Within months he had a breakdwon, and soon afterward gave up his line of work completely. Feeling better about himself, he then wnet on to give to the poor all the riches he had accumulated and began to use his considerable managerial expertise to challenge the very system he once participated in, and to help those who had been oppressed by it.

One day, many years later, he happened upon the preacher again while walking thorugh town. He ran over, fell at the preacher’s feet, and began to weep with joy. Eventually he looked up at the preacher and smiled, “Thank you, my dear friend, for helping me discover my faith.”

Q: What does this story tell us about the connection between belief and action?

“In this story we begin to gain insight into how religious belief can itself be a barrier to living the life of faith.  It is all too easy for us to think that our religious beliefs express the deep truth of our inner life while what we do on a daily basis in work is only a mask, a necessary evil that must be endured in order to get by in today’s frenetic, consumerist world.”
- Peter Rollins

I want to be honest here this morning.  I can prove through my life, your life, and all these experiments over and over again that just because we believe something does not mean that we live a certain way.  We very rarely live what we believe.  Now this leaves all of us in a very awkward position because we all believe that what we believe is crucial to how we live and to the state of the world.  We believe that because Jesus rose again that we are now included into a new kingdom and this kingdom values and lives a very different way.  So what do we do if our beliefs don’t change our lives?  If our beliefs don’t change our actions then what does?  Let me tell you another quick story to help illustrate what I’m talking about.

We can see this through the never ending repetition of creeds from mainline denominations.  I believe this, I believe that.  It serves it’s place to be constantly reminded of what you believe, but just because you believe these things doesn’t means that it follows that you live that way.

There was a man who had worked at a factory for twenty years.  Every night when he left the plant, he would push a wheelbarrow full of straw to the guard at the gate.

The guard would look through the straw, and find nothing and pass the man through.

On the day of his retirement the man came to the guard as usual but without the wheelbarrow.

Having become friends over the years, the guard asked him, “Charlie, I’ve seen you walk out of here every night for twenty years. I know you’ve been stealing something. Now that you’re retired, tell me what it is.  It’s driving me crazy.”

Charlie simply smiled and replied, “Okay, wheelbarrows!”

The guards were so focused on the insides of what was in the wheel barrel that they missed the fact that all along what they were looking for is the wheel barrel.  We have done the same thing in the church.  We have focused so much on changing people’s beliefs and trying to help our kids believe the right things that we’ve completely skipped over the fact that people do not do things because they believe things.  So even if your kids believe all the right things when they grow up, this is no guarantee that they will live a certain way.  Oops.  We’ve been looking in all the wrong places to help people discover and experience the kingdom.

When it becomes even more messy is when we consider “faith” as just another kind of belief.  Faith becomes is just holding a certain preposition that you believe firmly in something that lacks sufficient evidence to know for certain.  In Christianity faith now expresses itself as a firm assertion in a certain list of dogmas and statement’s of belief.  This idea of faith though is different.  Remember the brain is split up into two different categories.  We have the side of the brain that makes decisions and choices, and then we have the other side of the brain that explains away and gives reason for things that happen.  When we talk about belief we are just talking about that side of the brain that gives reason for things.  I believe I picked this pair of nylons because I like the colour of them (even though they are identical.)  Belief is only making use of one part of the brain.  Faith however does not work this way.  Faith like Paul explains it is a way of participating in a different kind of reality, one that doesn’t have to do just with beliefs, but the whole person.  For Paul faith is a way of participating in the kingdom of God, or a life with Christ.  He is talking about a different kind of existence not just a different way of thinking.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see
Hebrews 11:1

Here, the writer of Hebrews describes faith as a way of living.  It is an invisible reality that we do not see but one that we live inside of.  It’s a reality that allows our beliefs and our actions actually go hand in hand.  Faith can’t just be believing a certain proposition.  Faith also can’t just be giving food to the poor.  You can’t see it, yet we are sure of it.  Faith is this entrance into a way of life that bridges those two worlds and creates a different way of living in this world.  If you have faith in Christ it means you now see the world through Christ.  If you see the world through Christ, belief and action go together, there is no separating them.  If you just believe Christ died and rose, then you just hold a proposition in your head, but that isn’t faith, that isn’t anything but a belief.  Beliefs by themselves are worthless.  We are called to be people of faith.  People of faith are radically transformed because they see the world through a different set of eyes, they aren’t just a group of people who believe different things.

“The result of such thinking is the affirmation of a faith that permeates all our actions rather than being exhibited only when faced with something we cannot understand, or at some prayer meeting, or in some weekly service to the poor.  Such an expression thus strikes against the very roots of inauthentic resistance and demands a truly radical reconfiguring of our social existence.”
- Peter Rollins

This is why over the last few years I have switched my way of being a pastor.  I no longer desire to change what you believe about anything.  I don’t think beliefs are relevant to how you live.  I do however want to help you change how you see the world. I want to help people change who they are putting their faith in.  I think that is done through faith in Jesus.  The more I can help you and myself see the world through the eyes of Christ, the more I think we will become a community of people whose beliefs line up with our actions.  If we as a community, support each other, can realign our vision to actually see through Christ and not through our own selfish desires then I think we will be on the right track.  Faith in Jesus is not belief in Jesus, faith in Jesus is a complete reordering of our lives so it looks like Jesus and smells like him.

Faith is a lifelong process.  It takes time and it slowly transforms us into the kind of people that we have faith in.  Slowly I am eating better than I used to.  Slowly I’m becoming more peaceful.  Slowly I’m depending on oil less.  Slowly I learn not to oppress slaves around the world.  This change isn’t happening inside of me because I believe that those things are wrong.  This change is happening because I have faith in Jesus and faith changes people.  It aligns those two sections of our brain and makes them more consistent over time.  Only by laying down it all will we actually change, we can’t just change our beliefs.  Paul speaks to this in Romans.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.

What Paul is talking about here is faith.  Understanding ourselves by what God is and what he did for us is faith.  Jesus rose from the grave to give us something to have faith in.  The question that I asked at the beginning of this message, Does Jesus rising again have anything to do with us now? gives us an entirely new way to look at what Jesus’ Resurrection means for us.  It means everything for us.  It changes our beliefs and our actions.  It means that in the places of our lives that our beliefs don’t match our actions, those are the places that we have yet to actually have faith in Jesus for.  It doesn’t mean we don’t believe it, it just means we don’t have trust Jesus is still working on it.  We’d rather see the world in those categories through our own selfish eyes than through Jesus.

Hopefully all of us are seeing the dichotomy between our faith and our actions.  This is a good place to be in.  Being aware of our own contradictions rather than trying to live a false self to uphold some sort of moral trophy to the world.  Maybe we can start to put less stock into our beliefs and more stock into what we are willing to give to Jesus in faith.

Lord forgive us, for we are hypocrites
We believe one thing and do another
We say one thing and never back it up
Our lives are a mess
One contradiction after another

We believe that you died
We believe that you rose
We believe that you will save us
We believe that you reign
We don’t live like you did any of those things
We don’t live like you are doing anything now

We believe we should care for the earth
But we destroy it as soon as we wake up
We believe that we should care for each other
But we hurt each other all day long
We believe that we should be selfless
But we are selfish
We believe that we should help the poor
But we only help ourselves
Our faith is dead
Because our deeds our dead

So God we sit humbly at your feet
Recognizing our inability to live out our beliefs
So we have faith that you are transforming us
We have faith that you have made a way
We enter into your story and let you do the transforming
We place everything before you as an offering
We don’t just want to change what we believe
We want to change how we see

Amen.

Some references of where I pulled from.

http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Wound-Wendell-Berry/dp/0865473587

http://emergingcuriosities.blogspot.com/2008/11/peter-rollins-on-irony.html

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-018.pdf

http://books.google.ca/books?id=osqghBtPbwAC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=peter+rollins+hypocrite&source=bl&ots=cEzBPS2ldR&sig=mMhBRsDkckxoPQS08oXecsE3CtE&hl=en&ei=YAzOTaHZHKXh0QGQ-omYDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg#p/search/0/PWHlvFiv70Q

http://peterrollins.net/?p=2765

http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/

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2. The One About the Two Debtors (A Sermon on Luke 7:36-50)
3. Blessed are the Meek: A Sermon on the Beatitude of Meekness

• I’ll fly away
• Chariot by Page France
• But for you who fear my name by Welcome Wagon

Does anyone know what day it is today?

Today is Palm Sunday. For whatever reason, my childhood was completely absent of things like Lent, Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday and the like. Evangelical churches have generally lost their connection with history and so many of the traditions of the church have been discarded or scoffed at as meaningless rituals. But today is Palm Sunday. So we can either throw it away and pretend that it’s just a nice name for a day, or we can dig a little deeper and try and figure out why we call it that, why the church finds it significant and how it might be important for us today.

John 12
The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,
“Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the king of Israel!”
Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:
“Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion;
see, your king is coming,
seated on a donkey’s colt.
At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.
Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him. So the Pharisees said to one another, “See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”

What the crowds were expecting a normal Passover. Roman governors would come into Jerusalem for Passover, this was a regular custom for them. As they would provide a visible and strong presence of their military to prevent any kind of uprising. This was a time where uprisings and crucifixions were happening all the time. So here you have an entire group of people who are having their major festival and are used to having the governor of the nation that they live in, who is oppressing them, showing up and flaunting his strength and basically saying “you don’t want to mess with me.” Pilate would have shown up into Jerusalem from the west at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. It would have been an exciting, powerful and lavishing experience specially created to impress everyone about their nation’s power. Horses, soldiers, armour, helmets, massive statues, gold would have been marching through the city, all designed to show off power and intimidate anyone who would dare to revolt or challenge the direction of the nation.

Then, on the other side of the city, down from the Mount of Olives, coming from the north, came Jesus. On a donkey. He came from the outcasts, peasants and had his ragamuffin band of disciples with him. Maybe his mother comes with him, or some of the sick people that he healed. Either way. He’s on a donkey. I don’t know how much more hilarious this can get. If Jesus hasn’t made his point thus far that he isn’t here to fight a war, to free from Roman oppression, to kill the enemy, to make a spectacle, to work himself into places of power then we’ve missed what Jesus is doing. This is one of the last ditch efforts that Jesus goes through to announce his upside-down kingdom. While the powers that be, the empire walks into the city powerfully ready to crush anyone that would oppose with their governor riding a strong horse, Jesus comes into town on a donkey with a few friends who are all completely confused and skeptical about what is happening. Horses are for war. Donkeys are for peace. It puts power and peace against each other, but they fight in very different ways.

This was leading up to an accumulation as two kingdom’s come head to head. Two different kings. Two different kingdoms. Two different Saviours. Two different sons of God. The Romans were making a statement, but so was Jesus and by the looks of it, there was people who believed him and were celebrating. As everyone is shouting for joy and shouting “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the king of Israel!” they weren’t just making a statement that they wanted to invite Jesus into their hearts. This was more than a personal cheer. This was political. This was the very uprising that Pilate was there to prevent. Jesus was there announcing a different way of living. A different kingdom to follow. This kingdom was non-violent, peace-seeking, liberating, poor-loving and went after the outcasts. This kingdom stands in direct opposition to Rome and Pilate. This kingdom stood in direct opposition to the power loving Pharisees. Anyone who depended on or loved the empire wanted nothing to do with Jesus. He is not on their side. He is not helping keep them in their places of power and wealth.

Palm Sunday is about this collision. It’s about the colliding of two kingdoms and realizing what side we land on.

Q: What is the difference between the two kingdoms? What kingdom are we part of? Which side of the city do you feel like you would be on?

Jesus finally does lead his disciples into Jerusalem. Still yet, many of his followers didn’t get it. Even his own disciples didn’t get it. Remember, his followers thought they were walking into a fight of sorts. They were following a Saviour, someone who was going to free them from Roman oppression. Jesus coming into the city was symbolic. In a way he was stating his kingship. I can kind of picture what is happening on this day. You have a lot of Jews who are milling around and they are sick and tired of being oppressed and seeing Rome flaunt their power. So they jump behind anyone who looks like they are going to stand up to this power play. In this case it just happens to be Jesus. They will look past the whole donkey fiasco and that there doesn’t seem to be any weapons, after all, God has done it before without weapons. So they follow him blindly half expecting a fight, half expecting a miracle, either way they are following him because he offers freedom. Finally someone to stand up to the powers, someone to put them in their place.

So what does Jesus do? He bypasses the Roman parade completely, ignores the other power and starts attacking the temple. If he knew what he was doing, he would have went and confronted the Romans and told them to leave. But he didn’t, he goes and starts making enemies with his own people. He attacks the temple, the Pharisees and all the systems that were in place in the Jewish culture. The only life that the people following him would have known, that’s what he attacks. This is like me running as the Green Party, a party that doesn’t get any votes and only has a few supporters and then when I finally get up to the podium to make my speech I don’t say anything about my opponents and just rip into the whole structure of the Green Party. It’s backwards. In everything he did he was giving a big middle finger to the way that the temple worked whether it be rebuilding it in three days (even though it took them years upon years), healing people outside of their rituals or driving out the money changers (who happened to be known to collaborate quite conveniently with the Romans).

Jesus is coming in alone on this one. Not only does he stand in direct opposition to the way of the empire and Pilate and come in peace. He calls out the very people that are part of his history and tells them that they are no different. They play the same games but just hide the antics with a religious mask.

Q: Why did Jesus not attack Rome and Pilate? Why did he seem to only have things against his own people and the way they ran things?

Palm Sunday is not a day of triumph for Jesus, it was a day of temptation. Temptation that ties all the way back to Jesus wandering in the dessert. It was the temptation to act on the demands of the people, even when they seemed legitimate to me the kind if Messiah and Saviour that people were hoping for. It was the temptation to control the situation and give himself power. They had anticipation, hope in Jesus to free them and be the kind of Messiah they wanted.

So Jesus marches into Jerusalem like a king, never confronts the Roman authority, goes to the temple, looks around and then leaves.

Jesus didn’t give them anything he wanted. Jesus came and completely dashed the hopes of everyone who had certain expectations of who he should be and what he should do. He does not install himself as king, he just heads outside of the city and hangs out with some friends. He then pronounces judgment on the temple and Jerusalem. The cheers we read before were the cheers of a crowds who thought God was coming to give them what they wanted, satisfy their needs. The crowds slowly go quiet because Jesus isn’t coming through for them as much as they thought he should.

He isn’t here to just give us what we want, take us away and solve all our problems. No. Anyone who thinks that. Anyone who rejoices with this kind of focus is bound to be upset, is bound to crucify. Christ came to dash our hopes and realign our lives better with what God’s promises, not our wants. We are set free from our childish hopes and longings and our selfish and misguided direction. He isn’t just another pawn of our selfish longings. He is calling us to live radically different. To change our direction entirely, not just get a new leader to help them win at what they are already doing. So I want us to sing some different songs this morning. Songs that better symbolize what Christ was doing. Christ was on his way to die and he was inviting all his followers to go with him. I thought that we would kind of shape this morning’s service to go through the ups n downs of the emotions of the crowds that would have followed Jesus. So the first songs we we sung were rejoicing songs of victory, we win, we are right, we come out on top, we don’t have to worry anymore because Jesus saved the day. They are all fine and dandy when understood in context but they are very easily manipulated to mean something else. Very quickly we can make it about what we get, how much money and power we have and how God obviously wants us to have all this. So as we come off this high of singing praises to Jesus, let us follow the direction of where Jesus actually went after the crowds sang songs to him.

Then we sang these three songs.

• Causes me to Tremble (Were you There)
• Up on a Mountain by Welcome Wagon
• He never said a mumblin word by Welcome Wagon

John 19

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face.
Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews gathered there, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.” When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”
As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”
But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.”
The Jewish leaders insisted, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.”
When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid, and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come from?” he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”
Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the Jewish leaders kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”
When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement. It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon.
“Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews.
But they shouted, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!”
“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.
“We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.
Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.

Jesus hints a lot that he is going to die. No one believes him. That’s just a ridiculous proposition. The messiah, dying? What? But when people start to get the idea that maybe he is actually not going to do anything. Maybe this is another failed Messiah. Maybe this guy just got our hopes up, because he hasn’t done anything for me. There is still Romans around. Besides, it’s not that bad living with the Romans, they are the strongest and the biggest and they keep us safe and comfortable. We can’t complain that much. Wow. What a switch from hailing Jesus as King to the last lines of this verse.

Q: When in your life have you seen that you’ve stopped following Jesus life these crowds? Any personal examples of when you’ve gone from cheering for his team to wanting him to die?

This is the lesson of Palm Sunday, which will hopefully prepare us for Good Friday. Christ did not come to give us what we want. Christ came to die, and we are to die with him. If we have certain expectations about our faith, this church, our God and they aren’t met then we will be like the Jews in this case and turn on him instantly. To a point where the church becomes indistinguishable from the world. They both want the same thing, and they thought Jesus was going to give it, so that’s why they followed him.

“The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.”
- N.T. Wright

God’s new world looks different. It does not parade around on horses of power and flaunt its wealth in the faith of its enemies. It does not move forward in violence and stop on those in its way. He hasn’t rescued us from our oppressors. God’s new world that we are invited into is a world where we can live oppressed and yet still be free. In God’s kingdom that is unveiled in Christ we live a life where peace, love, grace and forgiveness are our markers. Eventually, these kinds of qualities, lead to death. Death is the life that Christ invites us into. Death to an old way of doing things. Death to our own wants. Death to our selfishness. If we don’t want to die, and the crowd here did not want to, then we will eventually crucify Jesus with the rest of them. If you don’t want to die, then you will inevitably kill. It’s easy to want to be on the winning team and hoop and holler when Jesus walks into town like a king and you think he’s going to come out on top. Most of us would get on his side. It’s a different game when he doesn’t follow your rules and then starts attacking your way of living and ripping into your traditions and comfortable lifestyle. No wonder he got crucified.

Many of us want to be on the winning team, but do we really want to live the kind of life that is demanded from us? When Peter Rollins was asked if he believed in the Resurrection, this was his answer.

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what s
ome people may think…
I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.

- Peter Rollins

Palm Sunday leaves us with a choice. Right before us we see both kingdoms, and we can choose which one we will follow. We can choose the powerful, wealthy, controlling way and try and conform Jesus into our will so that we get what we want and he blesses every decision that we make. Or we can choose the way of death. Death to ourselves, death to our selfishness. What will it be? Depending on what we choose will determine the kind of significance that Good Friday will have for us. It is either frustrating because Jesus’ death means that you didn’t get what you want, he didn’t take away that sickness, he didn’t get you that job, he didn’t make you happy, he didn’t heal your marriage, he didn’t fix your kids. Or it can be a known and accepted direction. You buy following Jesus know that death is inevitable. Good Friday is no surprise. It comes as a relief because you know you need to die anyway.  So I want to end by reading this prayer I wrote.  The prayer follows the shifting of the crowds and helps us relate to what they were going through.

Today we remember when you walked into Jerusalem on a donkey. We get excited because in many ways this means we have won. This is a sign of victory and you are our king. So we yell with the crowds ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ and ‘Blessed is the King of Israel.’ You came to crush our enemies and validate our lives and our longings. We are there with them watching Jesus ride in on a donkey and completely missing the point of the entire charade. Jesus is our King and finally everything we hoped for and he is riding in and taking a hold of that title.
Lord, we wait in expectation with the crowds.
God, we have been longing for so long.

The donkey. The outcasts. The prostitutes. The disciples. The shepherds. The tax collectors. We see it all. We see the spectacle. We just don’t get it. We don’t get your stories. We don’t get your grand illustration. But we join in with the crowds and lay the palm branches anyway. Everyone tells us you are the one to free us. Our parents raised us to believe you are the one that will finally fulfill our yearnings. We wish you would move forward but you keep stopping to have conversations with weird people. Move along Jesus, you have work to do. Address the powers. Remove Pilate from his powerful throne. Free us.
Lord, we expect big things.
God, we hold our breath.

Now you are really throwing us off. Why didn’t you go to address Pilate? Why haven’t you gotten yourself a horse by now? Why are the Roman soldiers still here? Also, can you take it easy on this whole criticizing the temple thing? Our ancestors built that with their bear hands and it took them years. Stop pretending you aren’t that big of a deal, as if you are just going to go off in a corner and die and not tell anyone. It was frustrating when instead of taking your rightful place as king you went off into the fields and hung out with your friends instead. We feel like you aren’t taking this as seriously as you should be. It’s making us a bit angry.
Lord, please hurry up, we can’t wait much longer.
God, we are really starting to question this whole thing.

Now we are among the crowd and you are up in front, still not saying much. So you know what. Screw it. You didn’t do what you said you would do. You didn’t save us. You didn’t free us. We are still here and now you have become an outlaw. You’d be better off dead. You’ve built up everyone’s hopes and now they are dashed. I don’t want to follow you into this. I don’t want to change what I’m doing day in and day out. I just want to be saved. And you didn’t do it. You deserve to be crucified.
Lord, we’ve given up on you.
God, enough is enough.

Now may you go in the uneasy peace of knowing that the way of Jesus, is hard and not that attractive.  Yes we can cheer that Jesus is coming to be king, but to do that he must die, and we must follow him there.  So that is where we will meet next, on Good Friday, the inevitable end the journey that begun today on his march into Jerusalem on a young donkey.

Related posts:

1. Upcoming Young Adult Worship Nights
2. Pentecost Sunday
3. Pastors: Sunday Production Coordinators

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

In a lot of ways I do look at theStory as my joy and crown. I believe that in this room exists a community that has the potential to really be a force for good in this city. In fact, I don’t know if there is any other hope that small communities who are dedicated to the task of the Kingdom of God for this world. It’s why I love the church, it’s why I love this community. I love all the individuals here, I love the families, I take pride when you succeed and I get excited when you thrive.

The word crown that Paul here is using is like a trophy of sorts. He’s not talking about a hat that a king would wear but that of a runner that would wear it after winning a big race that he’s been preparing for all of his life. This is where Paul finds his trophy. Nowadays you ask someone what their pride and joy are in life, the one thing that they brag about and it is usually their house, their car, their new church building, their jobs, their kids. For Paul, it is his community. It makes me wonder, who are we so deeply invested in and connected with in this community that we could call them our pride and joy? Who else in this community do we wear like a trophy and we get excited about them when they thrive and succeed in the world? Are we the kind of community that holds each other as our joy and crown? This is why we called this series “Friends to Swear By.” To Paul, the church is to create an environment of friends to swear by, the kind of friends that you wear as a crown.

Remember, Paul is trying to help shape the perspective of the Philippian church in a specific way, in a way that can we can rejoice through hardship, make sense of suffering, and love our brother. He tells us over and over again that followers of Christ look a certain way, they think a certain way and he’s been trying to help us look and think like they do. Paul uses the word mindset a number of times in Philippians because that is what he is trying to shape. If he can shape their outlook and mind about the world and Jesus then everything else will follow. This was a quote from a few weeks ago.

To perceive this, however, the Philippians and we will need to become practiced at reading the drama of salvation properly. They also need to act in specific ways, as outlined before in Philippians. Thus, a proper reading of the economy of salvation will enable them to situate themselves within that drama in the appropriate ways so that they will live, and continue to live, as “friends” of the cross…Paul’s attention and affections are redirected so that he comes to understand God and God’s ways with the world in profoundly different ways.
- Stephen Fowl

Paul is attempting to help us fit ourselves into God’s plan of salvation and the world and help us see where we fit. He hopes that his joy and crown will do the same, and that together as friends they can become friends of the cross. Philippians is a book dedicated to that task. So as we here at theStory finish unpacking Philippians and we also have just spent a considerable amount of time deciding on some of the direction of this church, may we keep what we have learned in mind. Our decisions should reflect God’s ongoing drama of salvation and not simply be symptoms of our love of self. Quarrels that are unresolved. Judgmental attitudes toward people we don’t understand. The refusal to forgive. The apathy toward change. These are all signs that we do not understand what God is doing and why we are here. But as we begin to make each other our joy and crown and start to care about each other to a point where we actually take pride in one another, then we will begin to understand what Paul is doing. Paul seemed to have run into a few people as well like this as well as we come to the end of letter Paul speaks directly to them.

I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

There has been falling outs in this community before. Someone hurts someone else. It happens. It can’t not happen. Nevertheless, I think Paul has set the record pretty straight that he sees the community in unity as central to our stance before God. How we stand before God is directly related to how we stand in relation to others, especially in our community. So Paul here is obviously addressing some sort of broken relationship in the community and he doesn’t want to just ignore it. He refers back to what he mentioned in chapter 2 and tells them to be like-minded. He’s not just telling them to be friends again and want to like each other, rather he’s trying to get them to listen to what he’s been saying all along and change their perspective on what is important. That is, he wants them to start acting like Christians act. He wants them to start displaying the virtues and habits that Christians should display. They should do this because they both at least agree that they have a connection in Christ. If they can’t let go of their pride long enough to fix what is broken in their relationship then it flows over into their relationship with Christ, and eventually the entire communities relationship with Christ.

Notice how Paul doesn’t take sides. This isn’t about helping someone win, this is again, about seeing the entire perspective of the gospel. For Paul, everything is connected. He’s pleading that this relationship be reconciled because everything effects everything. He says earlier, that in Christ all things hold together. There is no way that this community can keep on living, can keep on rejoicing if there is this kind of dissension in a community. Everything is connected. This means that they can’t talk behind each other’s back. This means they find pride in putting someone else down. It’s all connected. It’s not just about a disagreement, it’s about all things. So Paul pleads that it stops and is sorted out.

I like what Paul is doing here because he isn’t simply asking people to be perfect. He hasn’t said to stop sinning. This hasn’t been his aim at all in Philippians. Rather he is encouraging characteristics of what Jesus’ followers look like. The commitment to the hard work of confession, seeking and offering forgiveness and reconciliation. This is what Christians do everywhere. If we can’t do it amongst ourselves than we cannot do it with God or the world. Again, Paul isn’t reprimanding them because they didn’t get along. He doesn’t even really care about the reason as to why they have fallen apart. He doesn’t care. They must be reconciled. He must expect that these people know how to forgive and reconcile, he seems to have a ‘guy’ there that will help them sort out their differences and he is letting them know that the health of a community rests on their reconciliation.

Paul then goes from this very specific circumstance into a more broad encouragement to the entire community.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Of course Paul keeps telling us to rejoice, he hasn’t stopped telling us to rejoice, he’s a never ending broken record of repeating the same thing over and over again. But there is something more going on than simply Paul telling us how to act. He’s told us already that our wealth and joy is found by being part of a community that are ruled by a different Lord than that of Caesar. So when Paul is speaking of rejoicing he certainly isn’t talking about the kind of happiness that the world celebrates. He doesn’t mean do whatever it takes so you can be happy. He’s not talking about this random emotional response because you’ve set your life up to take care of yourself. He’s talking about joy as a

…response formed only in those who can read the economy of God’s activity in particular ways and act in conformity with that unfolding story. Joy is the appropriate response when one rightly perceives the unfolding of God’s drama of salvation even in the midst of suffering and opposition.
- Stephen Fowl

The word rejoice throughout Philippians is the Greek word that means ‘gift.’ This isn’t a forced emotion that you make yourself feel when bad things happen. To rejoice literally means to be aware of gift. The gift of breath. Gift of life. Gift of love. Gift of getting up. Life is a gift. To rejoice means to be aware of this gift. It’s about waking up to the reality around us. The reality is life is good because Jesus has reconciled us to the Father and he is making all things new. With all this rejoice talk we begin to think that Paul just wants us to fake being happy. So because some dude died on a cross a few thousand years ago I’m supposed to suck up all sorrow in my life and put a fake smile on my face. This isn’t what Paul is talking about. When Paul tells the Philippians to rejoice he is saying “WAKE UP,” look at the world around you, stop sleeping, everything is a gift, see what God has done and is up to. This type of rejoicing is a disciplined alertness not a fleeting emotion. You learn to perceive things differently that run counter to the way the world thinks. The world tells us that when things don’t go our way (and they weren’t for Paul, remember he’s an apostle, in prison, doing the opposite of what he should have been doing) that we should whine and complain until that isn’t so. Paul on the other hand has gone through a kind of formation that allows him to see the world through a different lens. This is the kind of joy that has been forged in the furnace of suffering. Wake Up and Be Aware of the Gifts All Around!

To be a Christian, you must perceive things in very specific ways. Where you don’t already look at the world this way, you must discipline yourself so you do. This is what it means to follow Christ. Paul is not talking about happiness. The things that Paul has told us to rejoice in are the sorts of things that would make most people miserable and possibly ruin relationships. This means that rejoicing isn’t just an emotional response to a situation, rather it is a disciplined formation of our ways of thinking and acting in the world. Remember when we spoke about the disciplines? We discipline ourselves to we can actually live in the freedom that Christ promises. Just like a professional musician needs to discipline themselves so they can experience the freedom of their instrument, we need to discipline ourselves to experience the freedom of our lives. Joy is a by product of us being able to recognize what God is up to around us even in the worst of circumstances. Our joy won’t be an achievement but rather re-aligning our perspective so that we can recognize God’s purposes and presence around us. Rejoicing isn’t just an emotion, rejoicing is a decision that we have made of a specific kind of attitude we have towards life by being formed in the way of Christ.

Q: What kind of things can you do to discipline yourself so that you become more capable of rejoicing?

Then Paul tells us not to be anxious, but rather, as an alternative to being anxious, be in prayer. This is an interesting contrast because prayer is an act of submission, not an act of control. Rather than telling them to get their act together and stop being anxious, he again is trying to help them realign their perspective to point their minds to someone who can give them freedom. Prayer puts us in our place. Anxiety can only be freed by giving up on yourself as a way to be able to remove anxiety. So you pray. You pray because prayer is an act of dependence on God and not yourself. You don’t pray to get rid of anxiety, but by praying and depending on God for everything, anxiety disappears. It’s the peace of God that is an alternative to anxiety. It surpasses our understanding and our control of a situation. They aren’t called simply to have peace, they are offered peace and they can accept it. Peace is not something that comes easy. We end up having a dependence on ourselves, our own successes and our own ability to give ourselves freedom, but it create anxiety. The peace of God comes to those that receive it, and that allow their dependence on God to be great than their dependence on themselves. You accept and experience this peace through prayer, an acknowledgment that you need God and you depend on him, because you can’t do it yourself.

Throughout the epistle Paul’s aim has been to form the Philippians’ habits of thinking, perceiving, and acting in a particular way, a way appropriate to those who are in Christ. Having one’s thoughts and hearts in Christ will generate a pattern of thought and action that will be distinctly different from (and often opposed to) the lives, expectations, and perceptions of those whose political allegiance is not to Christ. Paul’s assertion here at the end of the epistle that the peace of God will protect their thoughts and hearts stands in sharp contrast to the coercive force which guards the citizens of Philippi in the name of the Rome. That peace can never be a true peace because it is not founded in the God of peace.
- Stephen Fowl

There is something that we need to be careful in what Paul is doing with his last line. Paul says this

And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I find this problematic because Paul sounds like he is saying that the things we know and understand through the Peace of God, others will not know and understand. This peace will also guard our hearts and minds from incompatible ways of thinking. This becomes an issue because this almost seems like brainwashing to me. Think about this. If we have a peace that surpasses understanding, how will we have discussions or converse with those that don’t have this peace? When I was in Aruba, I was constantly running into these people that would consider themselves Conservative republicans. They were not the smartest people, in fact I would have called them quite ignorant. Yet everything they spoke about anything politics, they would speak about the liberal democrat world as a bunch of lunatics. Now to other Republicans these people I ran into would be perfect exemplary people in what is right and truthful. They think democrats are crazy. Then go and talk to some democrats and very quickly you will start to hear how annoyed and how much they hate conservatives. They both think each other is wrong. They both think each other is crazy. They both think the other side is stubborn or deceived or unreasonable and that the way they think and act in the world is the right way. So is Paul just saying that this reality is going to exist? That there will be people that think you are crazy but it doesn’t really matter? How are we ever to know that we are the crazy ones? Let me show you a video of someone that I think is completely crazy, ignorant and deceived. It’s also pretty hilarious.

Now I can assure you, if you sit down with Kirk Cameron or Ray Comfort, they have come to some terms with some kind of peace that obviously surpasses human understanding. I have no idea how anything he is saying makes any sense. Yet they believe this whole-hearted. In fact they have dedicated their entire lives to this kind of evangelism in trying to win people over to the Christian faith through these kinds of one-off logical explanations of how God works.  I think they are nuts. I also think though that they have some sort of peace in their hearts. I do not think that this is the kind of peace that Paul is talking about. The peace that Paul is talking about here is not the kind of peace that assures you that you are right and everyone else is wrong. That isn’t peace, that is arrogance and pride. Paul has been setting us up all along to understand the kind of peace that God offers. And Paul continues to explain..,

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

In the video, these guys have created an entire life of trying to convince other people that they are right. Their peace is found in being right, and convincing other people that they are right. Paul uses his language carefully. He isn’t telling us what is true, and what is noble and what is right. He just says whatever these things are. He recognizes that these adjectives are very subjective. He acknowledged this before when he referred to the dissension between the two women before. He obviously thinks there is a different between truth and falsity, and right and wrong, he’s just not telling us what they are, or what he thinks they are in this case. Peace from God isn’t found in being right and everyone else being wrong. The book of Philippians, what we have spent learning and reading over the last few months, provides us with a system in which we can make these kind of discerning decisions together as a community. Paul has told us to pray, in an act of showing our dependence on God. We are to act on the things we have learned, in other words actually live what we have seen and learned. We learn to rejoice. We discipline our perspective to keep God’s entire story in reach. We learn to rejoice while suffering. When your life becomes Christ-focused unto his death and resurrection, then we begin to have a proper perspective and ability on making judgments on what these pure, truthful, noble and right things are. And which we will soon find out, these things are not the same things as the dominant culture in which we find ourselves.

Q: What does the peace of God look like for you?

Paul is also not giving us a list of things not to do. This is not an attempt to rid us all of moral corruption and all the bad behaviours that we have. Rather, he is taking a different approach. He wants us to be morally excellent. He wants us to be a community that stands as an alternative to the culture around us. Not just a community that toots the horn of whatever our culture thinks is excellent, but a community that determines what is excellent for a world that is Christs.

This implies that if Christians order their common life in a manner worthy of the gospel, if they master the convictions and practices appropriate to life in Christ, they will be able to discern what is truly excellent. Thus, it would appear that the ability to make sustained discriminations between excellence and its simulacra depends on the presence and good working of a community whose common life is appropriate to the gospel of Christ.
- Stephen Fowl

I want to be this kind of community whose common life is appropriate to the gospel of Christ. I think we here this morning are capable of this. I think that as we start to be shaped by this kind of perspective that Paul encourages us to have we can get closer to learning what it means to rejoice. We can start to better understand what it means to see each other as our joy and crown. We can start to learn to dwell on these true, good and just things. We can start to truly experience the peace of God. Let’s pray together.

Related posts:

1. One Step Self Help Program – A Sermon On Philippians 1:12-26
2. Changing Perspective To Understand God’s Unfolding Drama Of Salvation – A Sermon on Philippians 3:1-11
3. Wake up at Church

We are going to do the first half of Philippians 3 this morning.  Paul is starting to sound like a broken record.  He keeps telling us to rejoice.

Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you.

We get it already.  We get that Paul is happier than us and that we aren’t as happy.  We get that he just wants us to look at everything differently so we can keep rejoicing.  He says he is doing it to safeguard us.  I don’t know about you, but when someone keeps telling me to be happy over and over again it makes me more angry.  Maybe there is something to his persistence?  What we do know is that a big part of this letter is about how Paul is trying to explain his way through his perspective on the world and encourage the Philippian church to do the same.  We talked about this last month a bit.  Remember, Paul has changed his entire perspective so that even when the worst things are happening to him, he is able to rejoice.  He has shifted his perspective from seeing all the bad stuff that is happening to him and everything now goes through the filter of the gospel.  He now cares about the gospel.  He cares about how people find themselves in the story of God’s good news.  Outside of that, nothing else matters.  Paul almost seems giddy about it.  Of course it is no problem for him to keep mentioning it, it’s all he can think about, it’s all he cares about.  Let’s keep going.

Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh.   For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— though I myself have reasons for such confidence.

So let me tell you a story about my life that might help give some context to what is happening here.  Back in about grade ten I started spending a lot of time with a guy who was nothing like me.  He was one of those non-Christian kids who didn’t observe any of my morals or rituals and my way of life.  I was a church kid.  I didn’t drink, swear or sleep around.  I went to church every single week.  This guy drank, swore, and slept around.  He didn’t go to church every week.  Then something happened though.  Over time this guy started getting more into this Jesus guy and eventually a year later decided that he wanted to follow Jesus.  He did the whole go up to the front thing and say a dedication prayer and he committed his life to following Jesus.  So here we were, one year later, and he is now following Jesus.

Over time as this guy started coming to church he started having all sorts of people coming up to him and telling him different things.  Hey man, great that your a Christian and all, but listen, if you really want to be a Christian, if you want to be close with God, you have to stop swearing, drinking on weekends, sleeping around, doing drugs, being loud and annoying, and you have to start reading your bible, praying every day and coming to church a bit earlier.  He was volunteering at a drop-in center and he got asked to leave because he was swearing around the kids.  I remember the skepticism of people in looking at him and telling me that he wasn’t a Christian because he still did these wrong things.  I remember being told about all the hoops he had to jump through if he really wanted to have a relationship with God.  They kept telling him that he had to do this, stop doing that if he ever wanted to be a true Christian.  According to them, this guy needed to act exactly like them, have the same morals as them for his faith in Christ to be complete.  One place even told him that unless he spoke in tongues than he couldn’t be in leadership.  There was this sense that there was another level of spirituality he needed to reach before he was truly who he said he was.

So let’s give some background on what Paul is doing here.  Paul is in a similar situation.  There is two types of people that would be good to highlight.  There were good Jewish Christians.  They were familiar with the scriptures, and they were familiar with the idea of a messiah coming to bring salvation to Israel.  They saw Jesus as that Messiah and they were from Philippi.  Then there was Gentile Christians.  They hadn’t grown up with all the stories from the Torah like Noah, David and Moses.  They follow Jesus now, but they didn’t come to know him through the Jewish story.  So what had happened is there was this group of Jewish Christians who would go around to all these churches everywhere and find the Gentile Christians and say: “Oh it is great that you are following Jesus, welcome on board, it’s good to have you here.  Have you been circumcised yet?” The obvious response is that they haven’t, because it’s not something that Gentiles did.  So these Jewish Christians would tell them that they had to get snipped and after that then they would be able to be with God.  So you have this group of Christians telling other Christians what more steps they have to take so that they can be true Christians.  So in a way, they’ve created two tiers of Christians.  There are the Jewish Christians who have done all the right things, right rituals so that they can be with God.  Then there is also the Gentile Christians who have no idea about any of that stuff, all they know is that they like this Jesus guy and they want to follow him.  So the Jewish Christians wanted the Gentiles to basically become Jews in order for them to complete their faith in Christ.  Paul addresses this issue elsewhere, such as in the book of Galatians, where he basically tells them to back off and stop making following Jesus into a cultural change because Jesus transcends cultural boundaries.

So when Paul says to watch out for these dogs, the evildoers, the mutilators of the flesh, these are the people he is talking about.  He is talking about those who have hidden rules on those that want to follow Jesus.  Jesus came to free people, not bind them up with better morals.  The evildoers he is talking about are not the the people doing morally wrong acts.  The evildoers are those that heep burdens of guilt on people.  The evildoers are ones that make it seem like salvation can only be had through their ability to perform good morals, and not through Jesus alone.  They thought salvation was still through following the Torah, obeying the rules of the law.  We are used to this flipping of language by now after reading the parables.  So here we are again.  The evildoers aren’t so much the ones that we think are evil because of all the bad things they do.  The evildoers are the ones who tell people that they have to be good to know God.  To Paul, that is evil.  What Pharisees used to call unclean people was the greek word for dogs.  What does Paul call them? Dogs.  Paul is playing with the same words that Jesus did.  He takes words that religious people would use to call them wrong, evil or unclean and then flips them and says “whatever you say bounces off them and sticks on you.”

Though I myself have reasons for such confidence. If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

So back to my friend from earlier.  I think I literally had this conversation with him.  If my friend is the Gentile in this story, then I am the Jew.  I was a perfect Christian kid.  My morals were outstanding.  I didn’t do any of the things he did.  I was generally a nice person, I helped people.  I didn’t drink, I was still a virgin, I didn’t use bad language.  Everything that was expected of a Christian; I was.  I was so sure about my morals and my life that I would argue my teachers in high school over all sorts of things, trying to show how they were wrong in what they were teaching.  I remember one class and we were supposed to write an essay on one of the first situations that arose when a gay couple was going to go to prom.  I ripped into it pretty hard.  I told her, in front of the whole class, that it was ridiculous that she would make us write about such horrible things and that homosexuality was wrong and she had no right to accept that way of living.  I was hardcore and shameless.  I loved the debate and putting people on the spot to show them how their morals were wrong and how if they wanted to live right, or proper, then they would believe in my morals.

So Paul gets to this point in his conversation and basically gives the same rigmarole as me.  He says listen, in every single moral standard there is, I win.  He’s not saying this to be prideful, he’s saying it to make a point.  This guy in terms of decisions to be holy and set apart and in terms of luck of the draw in how he was born, was perfect in every sense.  Paul had it together.  If anyone was going to take pride in who he was, or how moral he was, it would be Paul.  Paul was so hardcore that he actually used to kill Christians because he thought they were wrong.  He’s not telling this because he felt bad about killing people, he telling us because he needs to show us how hardcore he really was.  He believed in what he believed so much that he gave up his entire life and dedicated it to making sure people knew and believed how he understood God’s story.  Paul was under the impression, like all Pharisees, that the law could be fully kept.  So that’s what he did; he kept it.

Now Paul is referring to some things in this passage that might not make a lot of sense.  So let’s get a little refresher shall we, more specifically why are we talking about circumcision.  Circumcision was a Jewish ritual.  Ancient cultures, and still some cultures today, like Israel always had symbolic gestures that they would do to set apart themselves to show the entrance into a community or to show a seriousness to show an identification with a kind of people.  This is a tribal identity that people who had their kids circumcised were basically saying that they were raising them with this tribe.  Their kids were growing up with this kind of identity because as the world was falling apart they were to be part of a tribe that was to help and love all the other tribes.   This is a very significant thing.  It was odd, but this was what happened.   Anyone who didn’t grow up in a culture of circumcision would find this to be a very odd practice.  There are still other very odd initiations, coming of age traditions and right of passages in the world today and from ancient communities from around Israel.

For instance one group South Pacific Vanuatu, the Vanuatu people do this tradition called land diving.

Suicidally brave men jump from makeshift rickety towers as high as 100 feet up in the air with vines tied around their ankles. Land diving is kind of a multipurpose ritual: a rite of passage, a way to appease the gods to ensure a good yam harvest, and now, a tourist attraction.  So it’s like bungee jumping – big deal, you think. Well, actually it’s a little bit more complicated than that. The whole point of land diving is that the jumper’s head touch the ground. But obviously if you’re the jumper, you’d want that to be as briefly done as possible: if your head doesn’t touch the ground, then it’ll be a bad yam harvest. If your head touch too much ground, the yam will be blessed but you’ll die. The difference between a good jump and a fatal one is about 4 inches of vine. It’s no surprise then, that a jumper is allowed to say anything he wants to anyone before the jump and not be held responsible for his words.

Or there is one where these boys take on something called crocodile scars where they are cut hundreds of time up and down their back.  You can see why they call it crocodile scars because it gives them a look of the back of a crocodile.  I won’t show you the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc9dGK8ketg) but it was one of the more disgusting things I’ve seen.  The boy is held down by their uncle and over the course of a day they are cut extremely deep all day long.  Then they are put in these smoke rooms so the get infected and scar up better over a few weeks.

There are lots of others, such as putting your hands in these crazy gloves with ants that sting 100 times worse than a wasp, or cow jumping where if you don’t make it then you never become a man, adolescent circumcision (this gets really gross) or blood letting through their throats, nose and tongue.  I tell you all these stories, because I really do think that circumcision probably fits somewhere in there.  The medical benefits are scarce and it’s much more of a tradition than a moral thing.  Circumcision is a symbol of a certain tribe.

Basically all humans are born with something that physcologist call an egocentric way of life.  In other words.  All they can do is think about themselves.  Life revolves around them.  They need external sources to survive and we coddle and nurture them so they are raised.  Now as parents one of our main jobs is helping them become less ego centric and more ethno centric.  Meaning that they start to not just think about themselves and their own good anymore, but they start to have their lives for the purpose of their tribes (whether that be their family, church, culture etc.).  As parents our goal is to help move children from being ego-centric to ethno-centric.  But then what happens when an entire tribe has gone off in the wrong direction.  What happens when the ethno centric way of living is actually bad for other tribes?  What do we do in Germany 1938 when an entire tribe started taking out other tribes.  So now, as parents, and as the church the goal is to help move people not just from ego-centric to ethno-centric but from ethno-centric to world-centric.  So that the person who was raised in 1938 Germany just doesn’t look out for the good of their own tribe, but the good of the entire world.  This is what the entire Christian story is based on.  We go from Adam to Abraham to Jesus and we see how God eventually brought humans to care about themselves to caring about their families to caring about all the nations.  Eventually Abraham was the beginning of a world-centric worldview.

So what we have in these verses with Paul is that there is a group of Jewish Christians who have taken their tribal and ethno centric symbolic gestures and tried to force them into a story that only has room for a world-centric faith.  They would go around and tell these Gentile Christians that they had do perform certain tribal rituals in order for them to be fully identified with God and the Christian Faith.

Q: What kind of ethno-centric or ego-centric traditions do we have or that are out there that we expect people to do or conform to in order for them to be identified truly as a Christian or as part of our tribe?

(prosperity gospel – ego-centric, story of my friend, ethno-centric)

So these are the kinds of people Paul is talking about.  These are the dogs, the evildoers, these are the ones that we should beware of.  This is not where God’s unfolding plan of salvation for the world happens.  Done are the ways of ethno-centric laws such as the Torah for granting passage for salvation.  Jesus came to bring a new world-centric way of living.  So Paul takes his entire ethno-centric way of life and puts it on display and then throws it out the window.  It is useless to him now, at least in terms of God and salvation is concerned.  Paul continues on this line of thinking.

He says beware of that dog that tells you that your church is better, your right, your more responsible, your more right that everyone else, you care about people more, your way is better than everyone else.  Beware of the evildoer that tells you to put your own tribe, culture and society ahead of everyone else and not worry about the,  Beware of the mutilator of the flesh that let’s you think any moral will save you.  This is a message for me I need to hear on a daily basis.  My inclination is to think that all my stupid ideas are the right ideas and that everyone needs to follow me, or they are wrong, or they can’t really know Christ.  Beware of me when I sound like that.  Let’s listen to Paul here and beware of anyone who tells us that salvation can come from any place, any moral or right choice, any ritual or tradition.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

Paul is on the same kick here.  Remember he is no longer talking from a ego-centric point of view.  He has moved to making his own story, and his tribes story fit into God’s story.  We can believe that because of what we talked about a few weeks ago.  He’s in jail, and nothing is really going well for him, yet he is still telling us to rejoice, because all he really cares about is the gospel advancing to the world.  So it is this perspective.  This shift of thinking that allows him to write words like this.  All these other ways of thinking, and all the things he gained through thinking this way are considered worthless to him now.  He’s looking at the world from a new perspective.  The language he is using here is actually financial terms of ‘assets’ and ‘liabilities.’ What was once an asset, is now seen as a liability to him.  The things haven’t actually changed.  He still has been snipped.  What has changed is his perspective, not his circumstances.  This is what he book of Philippians is about.  It is about changing our perspective to look at the world through God’s grandoise story of salvation for the world rather than looking at it through our short-reaching imaginations of individual happiness.

It depends on learning to perceive things from a perspective in Christ. This is a habit that had to be formed in Paul. Moreover, he wants the Philippians to have similar perceptual habits formed in them. Paul’s account of himself and his circumstances has multiple aims. First and most straightforwardly, he wants the Philippians to see him in a particular way. Second, and more importantly for the long-term health of the Philippian congregation, Paul displays the perceptual habits, skills, and ways of life that allow him to fit himself into the ongoing drama of God’s salvation. These are the habits, skills, and ways of life he desires to see formed in the Philippians. Indeed, this is in large part what he means in 2:5 when he urges the Philippians to adopt the particular pattern of practical reasoning appropriate to those in Christ.  It is not simply the case that Christ has altered Paul’s perceptions about his past achievements.  Rather, Paul is narrating himself into the story of salvation that begins, climaxes, and will end with Christ.
- Stephen Fowl

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

For the last part that we are going to do this morning.  Paul has helped us see how his perspective has shifted and now he says that he wants to know Christ and then tacks on this statement about suffering and becoming like him in his death and resurrection.  This is really what the Christian life is all about.  Participating with Christ in his death.  Paul has been able to shift his perspective so well, that all his suffering and eventual death still fit into the unfolding story that God is up to.  Should we be able to develop similar abilities for doing the same thing with our lives, we too will have the resources for making the suffering that comes our way as the result of our commitments to Christ make sense.

To perceive this, however, the Philippians and we will need to become practiced at reading the drama of salvation properly. They also need to act in specific ways, as outlined before in Philippians.  Thus, a proper reading of the economy of salvation will enable them to situate themselves within that drama in the appropriate ways so that they will live, and continue to live, as “friends” of the cross…Paul’s attention and affections are redirected so that he comes to understand God and God’s ways with the world in profoundly different ways.
- Stephen Fowl

I want to end with this letter.  There is a few guys that looked to find the place in the world that was most desperately in need of God’s love.  They decided that the porn industry was that place.  So they packed up their lives and their families, wives and kids, and moved to the hub of the porn industry and started a church.  It is called XXX Church.  Rob Bell read this letter and I just couldn’t help but share it with you as well.  This letter was written by the organizer of the big gay sex expo that happens every year.  The XXX Church guys go and setup a booth with big signs that say Jesus Loves Porn Stars with an agenda to spread the love of Jesus and God’s story to those that they think haven’t heard it enough or have never heard it.

Your crew was incredibly friendly and welcoming and willing to speak with anyone and everyone. We even gave them stage time in a prime slot to promote your message. Your exposure was at it’s peak with attendees at that time because it was our fashion show time slot. All eyes were on them and I said to your guy, (I can’t remember his name sorry) that I will give them stage time as long as he doesn’t get up and say “God hates gays” or anything. And he quickly assured me that you guys were not there with a message of saving our lost condemned souls, but rather to spread God’s love. That stuck with me because religious organizations preach that only God is the true judge, yet have no problem protesting a funeral of a murdered hate crime victim for being gay. I’d say that is the ultimate form of judgement upon another human being.
Your message that he loves everyone and the fact that your determination to spread that word even in what i’m sure was the craziest and weirdest event and location your crew has witnessed shows me that you guys are doing a great and selfless thing. We would love to have you guys back next year! Please keep doing what you are doing.

I read you this letter because I think that it’s a perfect example of what it looks like to live out intentionally what Paul is talking about here.  The pornography culture while may completely offend us is no match for the love of Christ, so much so that these two family men have set up camp in the middle of their culture with God’s message of salvation, for even them….for even us.  They aren’t knit picking at every single thing that morally offends them, and they aren’t even trying to change their culture.  They are just sharing God’s story in the midst of it.

This is the kind of perspective that Paul sets up for us in this letter.  All the things that we think God cares about, like not swearing, going to church, tithing 10%, and all of our cultural traditions that we have all mean nothing to our salvation.  They mean nothing to the story of God.  All the bad things that happen are nothing when it comes to the good news of what God is doing in the world.  All the good things you have done, I’ll the perfect 10’s you’ve achieved in your good Christian life are nothing more than a pile of shit compared to being found in Christ.  Now that we have some context, let’s read the Message Version to help it sink in a bit deeper, and then we’ll pray.

And that’s about it, friends. Be glad in God! I don’t mind repeating what I have written in earlier letters, and I hope you don’t mind hearing it again. Better safe than sorry—so here goes.
Steer clear of the barking dogs, those religious busybodies, all bark and no bite. All they’re interested in is appearances—knife-happy circumcisers, I call them. The real believers are the ones the Spirit of God leads to work away at this ministry, filling the air with Christ’s praise as we do it. We couldn’t carry this off by our own efforts, and we know it—even though we can list what many might think are impressive credentials. You know my pedigree: a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth day; an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin; a strict and devout adherent to God’s law; a fiery defender of the purity of my religion, even to the point of persecuting the church; a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s law Book.
The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant—dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him. I didn’t want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ—God’s righteousness.
I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.

May we have perspective
And count our accomplishments not

May we understand your story
And count our failures not

May we see your unfolding plan
And be found firmly within it

May we participate in your redemption
And be redeemed ourselves

May we rejoice
And keep on rejoicing

May we embrace you
As you embrace us

May we give up everything
And suffer and die with you

Amen.

Related posts:

1. One Step Self Help Program – A Sermon On Philippians 1:12-26
2. Wake Up and Be Aware – A Sermon on Philippians 4:2-9
3. Bible- Errors and Gods

I’m trying to imagine what this women’s house must have been like.  I can picture kind of this middle aged women who just had a ton of energy that just loved to see good things happen.  Like the Treehouse across the street maybe?  Anything that she had was open for use to whomever.  Imagine a house like this.  Imagine the life that would have been pouring from this house.  This is a house where churches literally start from.  Where good ideas are brewing and people were probably sleeping all over the floors.  I imagine it kind of like being the house where Facebook started out of.  I don’t know if you’ve seen The Social Network, but the movie is about how one of the biggest tech companies in the world started out.  A chunk of the movie was played out in this house that Mark Zuckerburg was barely able to rent.  People were just there because there was an energy about the house.  Good things were happening.  Parties were happening.  Anyone with a good idea was itching to be there because this is where good ideas started to take root.  There is nothing more encouraging being in a house with a group of people that understand you, give you a place to rest your head and are teaming up with each other to see each other’s ideas happen.  This was Lydia’s house.  This was a house that was bursting at the seems with potential and good ideas.

This is where the church in Philippi started.  It’s kind of exciting, I want theStory’d building and my home to be places like this.  This is where truth is sought and pursued after and people have given their entire lives to moving this truth forward.  It’s no wonder a church, of people radically committed to selling all their stuff, living simply and being disciples of Jesus started in a place like this.  It was a breeding ground for this kind of activity.  A church like this makes dents and makes quite a few enemies with most people in the city.  See Philippi was a unique city.  Philippi owed its existence as a Roman colony to the grace of the first Roman Emperor.  The city was always to be devoted to the emperor.  So by the time we read Philippians, the regular words for the emperor were Kyrios and Soter (Lord and Saviour.)  All public events in Philippi would have been in honour of the empire, and Nero was called Lord and Saviour.

So in a world where this is the reality.  A little house down by the river brooding with excitement and potential about things that are completely opposite of what the entire city believes.  The entire hope and faith of a city was put in the emperor and this house is trying to start a movement of people that didn’t believe that and thought Jesus was instead, a guy that they crucified years back. If you were a believer in Christ, than you could not be a full hearted believer in Rome, and that made you the enemy.  Can you comprehend why this house wasn’t just a regular house?  This is a big deal.  This is treason.  Everything they said and believed and were promoting were opposite to the truths that this city based it’s existence on.  It’s from Philippi that Paul and Silas ended up in jail for casting out the demon out of a little girl.  Philippi was not a city that enjoyed democracy of thought, and was willing to persecute and jail anyone that tried to promote any other truth.

Paul and Silas eventually get freed from jail and he begins his journey around starting churches and telling people about the good news.  He eventually gets jailed again in the mothership in Rome.  He’s kept a good relationship with the church in Philippi thus far as they are the only church that has actually sent him money to keep up the good work that he was doing.  So he sends them a letter because they’ve been so helpful and he has a special place in his heart for them.  So while Paul is sitting in Jail, under the thumb of the Emperor, he writes the letter to the Philippians.  It’s a prison letter.  It’s a letter written while he’s undergoing horrible pain and suffering.

Joe spent last week warming us up to the greeting of this letter and what Paul was up to, so we’re going to jump in half way through Philippians.  Letters such as these were commonplace in letters of friendship where they inform recipients of their situation.  They even learned to write them in school.   Letters back then would have been more like Christmas cards.  I have a friend who gets a Christmas card from someone close to them every single year and the card is usually a list of all the things that they have purchased that year and how happy they are with their new cottage and vehicles.  Then it lists all the accomplishments of their kids and how awesome they are.  They may give a short list of some of the things they want.  Then they say Merry Christmas.  We usually sit around and get a good laugh at the card as this family brags about their accomplishments and all the things happening in their lives.  This is more what letters of friendship would have consisted of back in these times.  The letter to Philippians is a bit different though, because Paul is doing a bit more than just informing them about what is happening, he’s attempting to do something else.

Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel.  As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ.  And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.

It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. The latter do so out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel.  The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.  But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.

Yes, and I will continue to rejoice,  for I know that through your prayers and God’s provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance.  I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith,  so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me.

- Philippians 1:12-26

This Paul guy is something else.  He’s in jail and he comes across like this.  The main theme of this entire letter is that of rejoicing and the gospel.  What?  We don’t really know what to do with this guy.  It almost sounds fake.  The only thing we do when someone doesn’t go our way is complain and whine and want something different.  This guy has been completely destroyed, and he still rejoices.  So why?  What has happened to Paul that has enabled him to sustain this kind of attitude in even the worst of situations.  The Letter to the Philippians gives us some insight into his brain a little bit to understand what is going on.

Paul is writing to a group of people that may now or later go through the same kind of trials that he is facing now.  This letter is written out of compassion and to give a broader perspective of the world, his and their suffering and the gospel.

In this section of chapter 1, Paul talks a lot about the “gospel” or the “good news.”  In fact Paul barely talks about himself, everything he says seems to be about this good news.  The good news has so deeply penetrated his life that it is now directing his emotions towards things that happen to him by other people.

Thus, the most significant aspect of this passage is its demonstration of Paul’s ability to see his circumstances in a particular way. Paul has developed the skill of accounting for his situation in such a way that he is able to see God at work and to see the gospel advancing in the midst of what others (perhaps others in Philippi) might have viewed as disastrous and humiliating circumstances.

- Stephen E. Fowl

Paul has developed the ability to see his current situation a specific way, and this way of seeing his situations and the world enables him to live in specific ways.  So this letter is a way that Paul is trying to help the Philippians develop similar patterns of perspective and judgment for themselves.  This is a perspective on the world that anyone suffering needs to hear and work towards, but it doesn’t come easy.  So let’s talk about this a little bit shall we?  After reading Paul’s letter and perspective.  What do you think he’s doing here?  What is his perspective?  What seems to motivate him?  Let’s pick apart his letter a bit here and see if we can come up with a better understanding about what really drives Paul.

Q: What motivates Paul?  Why does it motivate him?  Does the same thing motivate us?  Why/Why not?

Paul’s letter is not about him, or for him or about complaining about his situation, what he’s doing is showing the Philippians how even the worst things can happen and yet its OK, life will still move on, and actually it’s not just OK, it’s awesome, because God is up to something and he’s still doing it and he’s got it under control.  Paul’s letter, and it seems as if Paul’s life is entirely consumed by “the gospel.”  In a city where everyone is used to the “gospel of Caesar” Paul is proclaiming and getting his fuel by a completely different bit of good news.  This good news is so powerful that it overcomes the bad news of being in jail, being beaten and nothing working in your life here and now.

Paul is not just telling people how hard his life is.  He’s not just saying “hey look everyone, I’m in jail, pity me.”  Rather he is trying to help shape the way that bad news is looked at.  He’s presenting a pattern and a perspective that should characterize anyone that is in Christ.  Many of us get completely down, frustrated, allow our emotions to take us over because of our circumstances.  Paul gives us a look at what it looks like to be in the absolute worst of all situations and have better control of our emotions.  He isn’t insensitive, and telling us to just suck it up.  Rather what he is saying with these verses is that we need to change our perspective.  This letter is not about Paul and his hardships.  This letter is about the gospel, and how everything, especially his hardships fit into God’s good news.

This is the kicker.  It’s not about Paul.  None of this is about him.  All his own ideas of what is important.  All his needs to be safe and cared for all fall short of what the gospel is all about.

It turns out, however, that these things are only indirectly about Paul. Clearly, here, as in many other places in the epistles, Paul and his story are integrated so thoroughly into the story of Christ that it becomes difficult to separate the two. Paul has learned to see that his circumstances are part of this larger ongoing story. Hence, in talking about himself he quite naturally ends up talking about the progress of that story. If one sees the aim of the life of discipleship as growing into ever deeper communion with the triune God and with others, then one of the things that contemporary Christians can learn from Paul is this habit of being able to narrate the story both of one’s past and one’s present circumstances from the perspective of those who have learned their place in Christ’s ongoing story.

- Stephen E. Fowl

Paul lives what it means to give his entire life over to God.  All of our measly attempts pale in comparison.  Paul can’t help to talk about God’s story, cause it’s all he cares about.   We complain about where we go to a service on Sunday mornings.  We are in a completely different realm.  We allowed our involvement in God’s to be reduced to showing up somewhere once a week and then making sure you don’t do any bad things.  If we are to take to heart what Paul is saying here, then our entire lives become characterized by God’s story, not our own.  Everything.  Our plans start to become God’s plans.  If we try to stick to our own plans about what our lives are supposed to look like and all the goals we set for each other then we will constantly live in disappointment because they aren’t working out.  But if our entire lives are consumed up in loving, proclaiming and spreading the gospel, then it’s hard to get down on that.  We start to see the story from the same perspective as Paul, someone who could put his needs aside for the purpose of the good news.  Everything he did was never for his own advancement, but for the gospel.

When life becomes about the gospel.  Our anxiety and our burdens begin to lift.  This letter that Paul is writing is teaching and showing the Philippians what it looks like to be relieved of anxiety.  In a way this is a type of self-help letter.  There isn’t seven steps to being happy.  This is one step to find true joy.  One step.  Let the gospel become your life.

Paul is in jail, his life is completely ruined and still all he can talk about is the gospel.  Anxiety comes when you don’t get your own way.  Paul’s way is that the gospel is being proclaimed so he is still happy.  The self help program doesn’t tell you how to get your own way, it says change your ways.    Listen to how he is talking in this section again.

It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. The latter do so out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel.  The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.  But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.

- Philippians 1:15-18

Paul cares so much about the gospel and it being furthered that he can put aside selfish motives as to why people are doing it.  Him being in jail really has no direct relation to his emotion and what he cares about because the work is still being done, even if it’s not in a way that he agrees with or likes.  So while the motives are important, he points that out, they aren’t nearly as primary as that the gospel is being proclaimed at all.  He doesn’t want to wait around until everyones motives are pure.  Paul is convinced that God has got these things covered.  Paul is able to see that the kingdom really is spreading when he goes to sleep like we talked about in the parables.  The gospel spreads whether he is part of it or not, God is advancing the gospel.  Someone said that an apostle in prison is like having a pianists having his hands tied behind his back.  How can he possibly continue the work that he’s supposed to do?  So while logic says that even the gospel would have been stopped, Paul knows different, he knows that it’s not his responsibility and he just cares that it’s getting done.  In fact, God is advancing the gospel in ways that would normally cause the gospel to be hindered.

“One can easily imagine several ways in which the gospel might have been hindered in the light of Paul’s chains. Instead, it has “advanced.” Interestingly, this sentence does not identify the agent advancing the gospel. Paul does not claim to have advanced it himself. Indeed, what progress has been made occurs despite his circumstances. Presumably, the implied agent here is God. Thus, although most people in Paul’s world would assume that imprisonment would inhibit the spread of the gospel, God has, nevertheless, caused the gospel to be advanced.”
- Stephen E. Fowl

“The motives of the preachers, while important, seem secondary to the act of proclamation. It appears that Paul pragmatically prefers to see the gospel preached than to wait until everybody’s motives are pure. I do not think Paul sees the choice in quite this way. Ultimately, because Paul is convinced that God is directing both his personal circumstances and the more general spread of the gospel, he need not be overly concerned about the motives of any particular set of preachers. Paul is able to see that, despite appearances and contrary to expectations, God is advancing the gospel. Rather than expressing a preference for preaching from selfish motives over no preaching at all, this phrase is an expression of faith in God’s providential oversight of the gospel’s progress.“
- Stephen E. Fowl

God is the agent who advances the gospel and forms Paul in such a way as to see progress in circumstances that might lead others to see God’s purposes as being frustrated.  Paul’s view of God’s providence leads him to fit himself and his various circumstances into a larger on-going story of God’s unfolding economy of salvation. Paul’s sense of himself now attains its coherence and intelligibility from being part of the larger movement of God’s economy of salvation. The crucified and risen Christ provides both the central point for the drama of God’s salvation and central focus for Paul’s own life.   Paul’s is a self in which God is at the center, ordering and opening courses of action in the light of the ends and purposes of God’s economy of salvation. Instead of controlling and directing circumstances, the primary tasks for these theologically de-centered selves have to do with perceiving the movements of this larger drama into which they have been drawn and appropriately fitting themselves into that drama in word and deed.
- Stephen E. Fowl

Everything we do, needs to fit itself into God’s unfolding economy of salvation; the good news.  The way we parent, go to school, go to work, be in relationship…everything.  If it doesn’t fit, if it’s our own selfish agenda about how we want to live so we can be happy, then we will become anxious, we will become insane in trying to protect what we have built up.  The cycle is obvious.  To live lives where we can rejoice non-stop is to live lives that are not dictated by our own selfish desires.  If we want to stop being stressed out, if we want to stop being anxious about everything that happens or doesn’t happen, if we want to stop buying to numb our unhappiness, if we want to stop, then we must redirect our entire lives to be about the gospel.  The gospel is not about us, it’s about God.  The gospel is about what God has done and is still doing in the world.  If we want to live lives that are free, joyous and peaceful then I we need to align them with this gospel.  Any attempt to find these virtues in ourselves and our own pursuits will end in vain.

We all have consumed our lives by the most unnecessary things and products and rituals that only serve to make us care way too much about ourselves.   Whether it be running to pills, the TV, Facebook, anger, drinking, we all depend on something to fulfill our appetite for peace.  Whether we obsess about the success of our kids, our ideas that never happen, our successes or failures, we all create alternative realities depending on them for happiness.  We all try to make ourselves happy and fulfill the desires that we come up with.  Our lives are dictated by that kind of empty practice.  Paul is suggesting something else.  He writes a letter of friendship, where you would normally talk about all the things good or bad happening in your life.  Instead of listing off the things he wants or circumstances he wants changed, he has a completely different perspective.  Everything that is happening is for the gospel or because of the gospel.  If bad things are happening, at least the gospel is being advanced.  Really who cares if bad things are happening, his one little life has such little meaning to the entirety of the gospel, so let’s stop talking about him….let’s look at the gospel.  Paul suggests through his life that fulfillment can be found in dying to your desires.  Joy can be found in aligning your desires with the gospel, not anything else.

Listen, I understand that the things I am saying are a little overbearing.  This is especially true for a people like us who are so caught up in our own lives that the thought of even giving a few hours for the sake of the gospel a week is hard to fathom.  However, just because it’s hard for us, doesn’t make it not true or not the right direction for us.  We all do it.  This is difficult, especially because of how far along we are.  However we need to change.  This is our role as the church.

The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God. It calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations, and all human lives. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.
- Leslie Newbigin

As the church, we work together to attempt at live this way.  As the church, we learn to align ourselves up with the advancement of the gospel, not our own ideas and selfish desires.  This isn’t easy but it is our plight. It’s a simple one step self help program.  Stop caring about the program and dedicate your life to the gospel, whose steps are already laid out for us.   If we don’t want to do it, then we shouldn’t call ourselves the church.  So as the church this morning what I thought we would do is together speak to where we fall short.  I want together to repent of our false loyalties and ask for forgiveness for when we’ve put our ourselves ahead of the gospel.  So we’ll just pray popcorn style, and I’ll ask you just to keep it short.  Repent for where you or we have remained hardened and not proclaimed the gospel.  Acknowledge the parts of our lives where we have forsaken our role as the church.

God, we ask for forgiveness, we repent
For complaining about our trivial circumstances
For caring about our own needs before others
For ceasing to be the church and a sign of your news

For depending on ourselves for fulfillment
For depending on our purchases for peace
For depending on money for security

May we seek to advance the gospel
May we seek to understand the gospel
May we seek to proclaim the gospel
In all streams of our life
As individuals and as your church
Amen.

Related posts:

1. Wake Up and Be Aware – A Sermon on Philippians 4:2-9
2. I’ll Step on Your Head (Sermon at Jr. High Retreat)
3. Changing Perspective To Understand God’s Unfolding Drama Of Salvation – A Sermon on Philippians 3:1-11

This is a different kind of RSVP, it’s not just a form you fill out to let him know your coming.  Generally maybe we have thought to RSVP to God’s birth announcement of Christ it was just a decision card that we filled out when we were a kid to follow Christ?  Or maybe the RSVP is making sure that you show up at church every Sunday?  Maybe it’s just re-dedicating your life verbally and confessing with your mouth?  God makes an announcement, he is sending his son in the form of a vulnerable baby child and that child is going to be the hope of the nations.  He is going to inaugurate a new way of living, a new kingdom that has different values, and he wants to invite everyone.  So we are left with the announcement of what is going to happen.  Two thousand years later we are still left with the invitation, but we’ve reduced the RSVP to a prayer that we say that we think gets us into heaven.  Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that.  It’s been two thousand years for starters, and Jesus has come and gone, and there is really no sign of this promise and announcement coming to complete fulfillment.  We’ve been waiting and waiting, and in the meantime we’ve done a lot of stupid things.  The church however has setup this time in our calendar to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  It’s not just one day that we celebrate, its an entire month leading up to the birth of Jesus.

“… the [liturgical] year opens with Advent, the season that teaches us to wait for what is beyond the obvious. It trains us to see what is behind the apparent. Advent makes us look for God in all those places we have, until now, ignored.”
- Joan Chittister

The church has set us up to experience symbolically the wait that we are all waiting for, for Christ’s second coming and the final restoration of all things.   Advent means waiting, so its kind of easy to talk about waiting and what waiting looks like and how we should wait, which we will get to.  How though is only part of what is happening.  The other half is asking the question, which we will do first, why are we waiting or what are we waiting for?

Q: What are we waiting for?  Why are we waiting?

The way we answer these questions drastically shapes the way that we live and how we act day to day.  Let’s say, like for a majority of my teenage years, we were waiting for the rapture to happen.  So we were waiting for the day that God takes away all the Christians to heaven and let’s the earth fall apart and disintegrate and destroy itself while we sit safely in heaven with Jesus.  If this is our ultimate hope, then that ends up meaning a lot for how we live our life now.  We don’t really care about anything presently, do we?  We don’t care if the earth is ravaged because it’s going to anyway, we don’t care about helping those in need because God is going to do it later anyway.  We just don’t care about violence, because the world is ending in violence when God destroys everything with his wrath on all those bad people.  So if we are waiting for God to come, take away all the Christians and destroy the earth with fire, then we are going to live in a way that supports all those assumptions.  The way we wait will be dictated by the violence, exclusivity and wrath of God.   So its important that we know what we are waiting for.

So what is advent and what is all this waiting about?  Advent for me for a long time has been the waiting for Christ’s return and setting all things to right.  It’s trusting in his promise that he is going to do what he said.  It is receiving the grace to know that I cannot save the world but I can participate with God in his salvation of all things.  After talking with Chris this week, I think my understanding of Advent is growing.  I see advent as more of a solidarity with the church over the last two thousands years in living in the tension of the kingdom being now and not yet.  We live knowing that the kingdom is alive here and now.  We know its spreading.  We see it integrated with everything.  We desperately try to live as part of this kingdom because it helps us feel human and helps us be who we were created to be.  This kingdom came when Jesus was born, when the announcement was made.  In the same breath though, we live in this awkward tension of the kingdom still not being fully realized.  We still see hate and violence everywhere.  We still see such obvious examples that the world is not right.  So there is tension there.  The world is supposed to be one way, but it isn’t.  The way the world should be is out there and its making ground, but so is the way the world shouldn’t be.  We live in the uneasy tension of the kingdom being fully present and nowhere to be found.  So we wait.  We wait for the kingdom to be fully realized, we wait for the kingdom to be fully here.

We wait.  We learn what it looks like to wait.  We learn to wait.  Here is what Jesus says about waiting…

Luke 12:35-48
“Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night or toward daybreak. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
Peter asked, “Lord, are you telling this parable to us, or to everyone?”
The Lord answered, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. Truly I tell you, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose the servant says to himself, ‘My master is taking a long time in coming,’ and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers.

The story of Jesus, and the announcement of Jesus demands an RSVP.  It’s an invite and its still calling us to answer.  Many of us have mistaken the RSVP as some passive thing you do once and say yes I am in.  Jesus had something else in mind though.  Jesus compares the RSVP process to servants waiting for their master to come home.  Jesus takes waiting seriously. These servants respond by their waiting and waiting seems to be synonymous with watching and preparing for the arrival.  Waiting in this case, with Jesus, is not some passive understanding that something is going to happen one day.  This is an aggressive waiting that takes over our entire life, preparing ourselves and preparing our environment for the coming of our Master.  Let me give you some perspective on what this waiting looks like.

My friend, who most of you know, Charity, ever since I have known her has been wanting a family.  She finally married the man of her dreams and got pregnant soon after.  So now she has nine months and she finally gets what she has been waiting for.  Charity was the most active waiter I have ever seen in my life.  The day she found out she was pregnant she was at the midwives office booking appointments.  She was taking prenatal yoga three times a week.  She was reading books. She was making decisions and planning how things were going to happen on the day of her birth and for the future once her life would change.  Her entire life for nine months revolved around her waiting.  She was the most active person I knew at the time, and oddly enough, it was all because she was waiting.  Her idea of waiting had nothing to do with a one time decision to have a baby, it had nothing to do with deciding she actually wanted the baby.  Her idea was waiting was full of action, preparing and getting ready for the baby.  Her idea was hoping that while she didn’t even know the gender, that the baby would be healthy and beautiful.  A lot of her plans had to do with the day of the birth, but really this was more about being prepared for how her life was going to change, priorities were going to change and life was going to be a lot different.

There is two things that happened while she waited that I think we can learn from as Christians while we wait, especially during this season of Advent.
1. Active Waiting
2. Hopeful Waiting

“Our waiting is always shaped by alertness to the Word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to address us. The question is, are we home? Are we at our address, ready to respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together, to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why the Book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the Word so that the Word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.”
- Henri Nouwen

Are we ready?  Is our house ready?  What are we doing?  The scriptures are full of this language of waiting, and it doesn’t mean to just sit around and impatiently wait for something.   This isn’t just about being aware, this is about ordering our lives so its consistent with what is coming and what is real.  This is why we spend so much time explaining and helping you imagine what the kingdom looks like.  We are to be actively participating and bringing this kingdom to earth while we wait.  If we don’t know what it looks like, then we will think waiting just means going somewhere on a Sunday and doing the good religious thing until something like the rapture happens.  Our waiting now has become a waiting of something to happen so we can get out of here.  It’s an escapist theology of rapture or of leaving this earth.  When that happens we end up being devoid of responsibility or action while we sit around and “wait” for something to happen.

Waiting this way is about waiting as a community.  Creating the right environment for our waiting to manifest itself into active participation.

The second type of waiting that this is is hopeful waiting.  This isn’t wishful waiting.  Wishes are when you wait for something specific and then when you don’t get it you get depressed.  Wishful waiting is like trying to control the future.  Rather, the kind of waiting doing is a hopeful waiting.  Hopeful waiting is open-ended and its left in the control of the one who made the promise.  Hopeful waiting is not concrete.  Its why we have such a hard time waiting.  We tie our waiting in with our wishes for how things should happen, rather than tying it into the promises that tell what will happen.  Hope is always open ended.
Wishful waiting is about getting your way and what you can get out of it.  Hopeful waiting is allowing your life to be shaped by promises that are soon to be fulfilled.  Wishful waiting gets you real impatient real fast because you are getting what you expect.  Hopeful waiting is patiently living as if it already happened because one day, it will happen.

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”
- Simon Weil

Q: How do we actively wait for Christ now?

We are waiting with a hopeful expectation.  Yet, there is something unique about hopeful waiting rather than wishful waiting.  Many times when we wait in hopeful expectation, we are handed what we did not expect.  We expect Christ to come, and we expect God to move, but he often does this in very unexpected ways.  They expected a messiah, and a ruler, and a king, and they got one but he came as a baby and then got crucified.  Opening ourselves up to this type of unexpected delight is the kind of waiting that we are engaged in.  When a pregnant women waits in expectation for her birth, she starts to grow outwardly large.  Her body starts to change and prepare itself, while the promise inside of her starts to press up against her belly push up against it revealing its anticipation to the world.  It’s this something new that we are waiting for.  In the same kind of expectation.

We wait alongside of Israel, we wait alongside of the Prophets, and we wait alongside of the church as we wait for God to do something new in us and bring about fully his new creation all the while living out these values now.  Advent is about forcing our individual selfish schedules into the larger schedule of God’s plan.  It forces us to acknowledge what we are actually waiting and longing for.  The same longing we have for things to be set right is the same longing that Israel had for Jesus to show up.  It came unexpectedly, it came as a baby, but it came.  Now we wait again, longing for the second coming.  For the kingdom to come fully.

Blessed is the slave whom his master will find working when he arrives.  Let’s not be idle.  Let’s be active.  Already about the masters work.  Constantly advancing the his kingdom while we wait for him to make the final move.  Let us be a pregnant community just bursting forth preparing every possible way for promise to be fulfilled.  We aren’t preparing because the promise won’t happen if we don’t.  We are preparing because we want to be prepared. We prepare for the same reasons a mother prepares to have her child.   We want to be ready.  we want to fully experience everything there is about it.   We don’t want to be asleep.  While we wait let us be sensitive to the signs and the movements of the promise.  Jesus’ followers had to change and be shaped by the promise because no one was ever expecting the promise to come as a baby to a random women in a manger with a bunch of animals around and then who eventually gets crucified on the cross.  They were attentive to the movements and what was happening around them so they could change their understanding to see where God was moving and what he was doing.   Their waiting consisted of them listening and being aware of how they should live.

The same message is found amongst John the Baptist and Jesus in waiting for their Messiah.  “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.”  This is how we wait.  We repent.  This isn’t a call for all those who have said some prayer of repentance to tell everyone else who hasn’t to say they are sorry for all they’ve done wrong.  Its a call to join in with the church in waiting for Christ to make all things new.  It’s a call to radically shift the focus of life and start living as if you were already a new creation.  This isn’t just a guilt thing.  It’s not even a thing we say.  Repentance is a way of waiting actively with our lives and turning into a direction that fulfills the kingdom that is spoken of.  Repentance happens when communities of people take what was once a negative, hateful and death-dealing way to live and turn it around so they are positive, loving and life-giving.  When Jesus says repent, he is saying that our entire lives should match up to this kingdom that is here and now.  Everything, every single part of it.  Waiting is about living a life in line with the kingdom, otherwise known as a repentant life.

So while we live in this tension of restoration being now and not yet, we live as if it is already now, while we wait for it to be fully realized.  We live in hope not wishful thinking, that Christ will come back and make all things right.  In the meantime, we wait and live as if it was already right.  I realize that is a contradiction if you analyze this too deeply, but this is the tension and paradox that we are called into as Christians.  We wait, but live as if it’s already happened.

“Advent asks us to deal with the basics of our relationship to God through Jesus Christ.  Do I really believe in Christ?  Have I put my hope and trust in Him?  Do I see the future through the eyes of the one who came to redeem the world from the power of evil?  Is there a longing within me for him to be formed within, to take up residence in my personal life, in my home, and in my vocation?  These are not easy questions to answer.  They require meditation, intention, and above all, a commitment that remains steadfast.  But if we would break away from a spiritual life growing cold and a Christ who is becoming distant, we must be attentive to our spiritual discipline and long for God to break in on us with new life.  When we do this, we experience the true meaning of Advent Spirituality.”
- Robert Webber

God, Let us wait well
While we wait, we will restore with you
While we wait, we will redeem with you
While we wait, we are transformed by you

Jesus, Let us wait well
While we wait, we hope for your presence
While we wait, we pray for peace in tension
While we wait, we hope for change around and in us

God, Let us wait well
While we wait, let us remember your promise
While we wait, let us remember those who have waited before
While we wait, let us remember you wait with us

Jesus, Let us wait well
While we wait, may we beat swords into plowshares
While we wait, may we love where there is hate
While we wait, may we live as if the wait is over

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2. Building Houses and Planting Gardens: A Sermon on Jeremiah 29
3. One Step Self Help Program – A Sermon On Philippians 1:12-26