Squeak

 There's a line out there that tells you to build a better mousetrap. But why? 

Honestly, Ol' faithful has worked fine for a hundred and fifty years. The simple spring trap has been effective, still snaps mouse necks, still kills em dead, and they haven't figured out how to avoid it. Same trap, same mice, same results. So why change the approach?

I talked about this on Sunday, but I do think that it bears repeating, that sometimes, frequently, the predator / prey arms race doesn't change too terribly much, because certain tactics keep working. The humble mousetrap is simple and effective, and as long as you bait it, mice will keep blundering into it. They want the peanut butter real bad, and will kill themselves to get it. But they don't know that they're stepping into a literal death trap. All they think is "free peanut butter."

Likewise, the temptations of the devil really work that way too. The devil has shown and dangled before you certain temptations, and you keep on going for it. You don't see the consequences, all you see is 'free peanut butter.' And the devil doesn't change his approach much, primarily because he doesn't need to. If it keeps working, why change it? And it does keep working, oh boy does it ever keep working. As faith has become more and more esoteric for people, their understanding of what is or is not sinful, and what does and does not lead to damnation changes, then the trap becomes fuzzier and fuzzier in its consequences. But that doesn't make it any less dangerous. In fact, it's more so. The trap is more effective the less it looks like a trap, and if you can see mice blundering into the same trap even though it's obvious to you, you can see why the devil's traps keep working.

The trap that is set is obvious only to the one that set it; not to the prey. Prey are prey because they blunder into the traps that are set. Spiders' webs, mousetraps, angler fish lures, all these things are painfully obvious to the one setting the trap, but to the one who falls into it, they don't see it as a trap. Instead, they are frequently killed by it.

The thing we have to remember is that the Devil doesn't need to change his tactics because they keep working. We keep going for painfully obvious bait, over and over again, and because it keeps working, the Devil can keep on using it. And he does. And why does it keep on working? Because the temptation is to put to you as a Christian the big question 'did God really say.....?' That question was the one issued to Eve in the garden, and it tweaked a simple reaction in her that it continues to tweak in us. Did God really say to avoid that fruit? Well, she should have responded by saying 'yes he did say that,' and walked on. But she didn't, and she added her own cool fun twist to it. If she would have responded with the word of God, then the problem would have gone away. But she didn't. And nor do we.

Most of the time, we react with our own cool fun opinions about things. We react as though avoiding the trap isn't the issue, the trap not being a trap is the issue. But folks, the trap is going to be a trap whether we want it to be or not. You can't by force of will decide to not be in the trap once it's been sprung on you. You can't elect to not be stuck and just to get free peanut butter out of the deal. And the less you think of the trap as a trap, the more likely you will be to blunder straight into it. 

On your own, you're not going to avoid those traps, And the penalty for slipping into sin is death and damnation. How on earth are you going to avoid that? By relying on God's word? That would work, but you're unlikely to do it. Is the question 'is this in keeping with God's word,' is asked less often than 'is this good for me?' And when the devil tempts you, your response is to say 'does this benefit me? If so, then free peanut butter!'

But you're a Christian. And that means something. And it doesn't mean that you just have to work harder to follow the word of God and avoid the traps. It means you have to understand how the trap works. The cross of Christ was where Jesus took death on and descended into Hell. And when that was done, it wasn't something esoteric that happened, it was practical. He triggered that trap for us. The trap went off, boy did it. Jesus was killed, he descended into hell, and the devil though that he won at that moment. The trap worked. But Jesus rose again, and the trap remained sprung. That means that when you look at the cross, it represents death emptied of its power, and the trap no longer able to kill you. It already did what it was there to do, and can do it no further. The wonder of the work of Jesus is that it defeats death making it so that those who believe in him can't be caught in that trap again, because the trap no longer works. That means that when your sins are on the shoulders of Christ, any time the Devil tries to accuse you based on your falling into his trap, you can remind him that the trap has been sprung already, and the hell that you deserve is the hell that Christ arose from. The trap is sprung, and you get to walk free.

Follow

 There are all kinds of people who have all kinds of ideas on how best to find God. And the thing is, that they'll by and large give you a list of things to do that are typically non Biblical, and they'll tell you 'just do that, and you'll find God.' But the problem with all of that is that very few people have gone to heaven and ever been seen again. That is, very very few people have been to where God is, and have been seen again. 

And those people didn't tend to leave a whole lot of instructions afterwards. If you want to spend a hot minute thinking about it, Lazarus comes back from the dead, is unwrapped, and is released, and then is seen in the story again but doesn't have any more dialogue. That is, his perspective on death isn't shared with any of the readers. The only one who goes to Heaven, to where God is, and returns and talks about it is Jesus Christ himself. 

The way it works, is that if you have a list of things to do in order to get to God, given to you by well meaning people, those things will always pull you towards that list, and you're going to get into troubles when those are things you're not doing. Sure, the list may seem innocuous, but no matter how small the list is, you're going to find yourself smashing through that problem in morality. I'll explain why I mean.

In Star Trek, there's an episode in which the Enterprise crew goes to a paradise planet, where there are no problems, no issues, and no crime. There's only one rule, the rule changes every once in a while, and if you break the rule, the sentence is death. Of course, Wesley breaks the rule by falling into a flowerbed, and is sentenced to death. "Fortunately" Wesley gets beamed back to the Enterprise, and they all move on, leaving those primitive people to their primitive ways. But it does suggest that the essential core morality of the Bible is predictable, really. That is, it doesn't matter how simple the instructions of God would be, you're still not going to do it. 

I want you to know that the story of Genesis, where God only has one rule for humanity, is the story of people not sticking to that one rule, which wasn't particularly difficult - that is, God says to not eat only one kind of fruit, and people did anyway. Whether or not you think that story literally happened, hopefully you will gather that as far as morality goes, it doesn't matter how simple a task or rule would be, eventually you'd run up against breaking it. 

That's why the 'follow me' mentality has to be configured properly. For to follow Jesus doesn't actually mean that you obey a set of dictats, but rather that over the course of a lifetime, you follow where he would lead. And where might that be?

Paul talks about his own preaching, and he says to the people 'I came to know nothing among you but Christ and Him crucified.' He talks about the cross, about how it is folly to those who are perishing, but to those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God. The cross. The cross. You see, when Jesus is moving about, a generous part of what he wants is for his disciples to literally follow him - to walk where he walks, and to go where he goes. He wants them to follow where he goes in order for them to see what it is that God has in mind for them to do. Yes, he clearly has advice, guidance and so on, but we miss so quickly that his advice is so big as to be laughable - he wants you to pull your eyes out if they lead you to sin, to cut your hands off if they cause you to sin, to give without ever wanting back, all that, and deep down we all know that all of that is true, of course, but when he says 'follow me' he means to follow where he leads, and to see what he does.

He heals the sick, raises the dead, comforts the ill, makes the blind to see and the deaf to hear, multiplies loves and fishes, dies and rises from the dead, and says to you not 'do all this, and you will live,' but instead, 'repent and believe in the Gospel.' That's our work, you know, to repent and believe in the gospel, to see our sin and turn from it, and to believe that our sins can be forgiven. If we follow Christ, we will follow him to the cross, that's where the entire plan of God leads to. God knows that no matter how easy his rules are that we're not going to do them perfectly, so he deigns to call us to follow him so that we can see where Salvation comes from. 

Paul is a teacher and preacher, and he does have things that we should either do or avoid, but he, like all the preachers in scripture, show you your sins not as more things for you to do to find God, but as things that show the grace of God when you come to him for forgiveness. Because that's what the story of the scripture is all about. 

Baptism now saves you

 The notion that baptism now saves you should be a relatively non-controversial take. It should be, but it isn't, shockingly enough. Even though it's scriptural, people still have a hard time with it. Baptism now saves you? But what about, but what about, but what about....

Sure. But the thing about baptism saving you is that you, as the individual Christian, have needs. That is, you need certain things from this experience, and the thing you need most is certainty. When the days get short, and the chips are down, you're going to need something more concrete than just having had the right opinions. Sure, any of us can have the right opinions, and frequently do, but I ask you a question: If everyone wanted peace the way they say they wanted peace, why don't we have peace. Everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, making sure the sick can be well, supplying clean water, and so on and so on, but all sorts of places have major gaps in their availability of supplies, overall. The desire is there, but the follow through - very lacking. All sorts of things get in the way, things like self interest, like self motivation, and so on, all those things tend to conflict with the desire to actually effect peace, stability, environmental care, etc. We have the right idea, everyone's in theory interested in clean air and water, peace on earth, arms reduction, and so on, where's it at?

This is the problem with the intersection of opinion and reality. That is, you can have all the right ideas in the world, but without any concrete action, it's just that. Opinion. The book of James is notoriously Damning on this prospect, in that it not only talks about faith without works being dead, which it does, but also talks about how if you see someone who is hungry and cold, and you say to him 'go on your way, be warm and well fed,' but do nothing, of what good is your faith? That's us on a big scale, we have all the right opinions, say the right things, but don't quite finish the job. And we have to finish the job, you know. Without that, the opinion isn't worth too much.

If you understand that there is a gulf between your opinions and your actions, and that your actions are not only worth more than your opinions, but by many orders of magnitude, then you can understand that about your faith as well. Sure, you have the right opinions about what should be done, and how your faith should be lived out, but the inadequacy of being able to pull that off is a bit of an issue. You know the commandments, you know the laws of God, you don't do it, and then you read James, who says that your faith without works is dead, and that starts to play havoc with you. After all, how many times have you walked past the poor, sidestepped the hungry, and skipped merrily beyond the ailing? If you as a Christian who believe that the poor should be assisted, the hungry fed and the naked clothed, and then you understand that you are a long way away from having done that, then what on earth do you do with the dissonance in your own lives?

This is why we have baptism. And this is why the statement 'baptism now saves you' is so important for the Christian. That is, if you're hoping to be saved, to move into the transcendent and meet the divine, then you're going to want something a lot more concrete than just having the right opinions, especially given that James (and Christ, really) have told you that you can't just be secure in those opinions without action. If action is required for your salvation, something beyond what you can do or are doing, don't you wish that there was some action that you could find?

Well, let's talk about straws, plastic and oceans. Here in the great nation of Canada, we have largely excised plastic straws from common usage, and we've replaced them with paper straws that don't work. I don't care if they're a good idea, they don't work. Fine fine, but here's the deal: No matter how many plastic straws we ban, the major problem isn't here - it's elsewhere. 

Yes, almost all the plastic waste on earth comes from 10 rivers. And those are all in Asia and Africa. Canada doesn't factor in. Now, that's not an excuse to do nothing, of course, but to solve the problem is going to require action on a larger magnitude than you can do, by someone who isn't you. Essentially, that's the baptism issue. If the issue of your salvation is going to work out, then you're going to have to have someone who isn't you do something orders of magnitude larger than you can do. You not using straws is small, and doesn't seem to do much. But if plastic was cleaned out of the Pearl or Amur rivers, now we're talking. You need someone to work that salvation out for you, but because it's not something you're doing, you need something concrete to show that it is done. Enter baptism. Where God reached into history and washed you clean of your sins. 

Now, I know what anyone would say, which is that getting a quick dunk doesn't seem to do too much, right? We're talking salvation and damnation, shouldn't it be a bigger deal? And the answer is Naaman the Syrian. That great general who had leprosy, and who sought help from God's prophets. He was told to dip himself in the Jordan seven times, and complained about that task. "Aren't there better and grander rivers in our country?" he asked. And the response he got was essentially, 'If God asked you to do something hard, you would have done it, so why buck at an easy thing to do?" An easy thing that is so easy because God does all the work. Sure, it's small, but it has to be, because it has to be so straightforward, to use such common materials, that we have been using the same thing for thousands of years. No matter how much technology advances, or where we live, we're going to need water daily. Same sins, same water, same forgiveness, same grace, same God. 

One Lord, one faith, one baptism. Which now saves you.

 

Setup and payoff

Let's talk about my favourite kind of films just for a second.

Horror movies.

Yes, I know I know, these sinful things, but I like them for a few reasons. First of all, they're the only genre of movie that discusses the supernatural with any degree of seriousness. There can be demons, necromancy, devil worship, possession, witches, sorcerers, and all these things are treated with utmost seriousness. Secondly, they are the movie genre that treats violence with its necessary impact. Aside from the saw movies, if there's violence happening onscreen, unlike in action movies, you feel bad, scared, like you would if there was actual violence happening in front of you. 

But with all these supernatural issues, you have to set up how to deal with them. In an action movie, the solution to the problem seems to be 'use gun on man', but horror movies set up other expectations. You have to use a silver bullet on the werewolf, a wooden stake on a vampire, shoot zombies in the head, that kind of thing. If you feed a mogwai after midnight, it turns into a gremlin. This is all simple enough, and unlike in an action movie, you need some setup before the payoff. It would be strange if the setup was that vampires had to be hit with a wooden stake through the heart, then the end of the movie just had you stabbing them to death. It would be unusual if you set up that a silver bullet had to be used on a werewolf, but at the end of the movie you just ran it over with a car. And not even a rolls royce silver ghost, either.

The setup is what makes the payoff work. The payoff doesn't work in a vacuum. Unless you know that the vampire has to be killed with a wooden stake, it won't make any sense to just not shoot him, you know? And in the scriptures, you have a very very long setup. Thousands of years, in fact. In the Old Testament, there was a lot of prophecy about what it would be when the messiah arrived on the scene. And this setup, as I say, was thousands of years in the making. For thousands of years, the people of Israel would have been hearing and reading these words. The words about the messiah would have been clear and things that the Hebrews would have been expecting to see for a long long time. In fact, that's why the Christ was sent to Israel at all - because of the setup. 

You see, we happen to have access to the whole story already, the finished book. And we, in the church, don't tend to read through the Bible chronologically. So that means that we end up in a world where we don't give a lot of time to the setup and payoff, though we really should. The reason we should be taking this seriously is that the Old Testament spends a lot of time, and spills a lot of ink, on the topic of God. Who he is, and what he does. What his attributes are, and what falls within his purview. The Old Testament is crammed full of stories about God's activity, showing what is his responsibility, and demonstrating clearly the things that only he can do. 

And that's the setup, right? Say what you will about the Disciples, but they were not blindly credulous, you know. The Life of Brian bit doesn't hold water, when you consider that the people of that time followed leaders, sure, followed after strong men, followed the advice and guidance of prophets, but didn't consider them as gods. That really did set them apart from the rest of the world at the time. All sorts of people all over the world would elevate their leaders, prophets, kings and generals to being gods. Really only Israel didn't. Israel had a situation where they had a setup - only God can create, only God can forgive, only God can have power over the seas, over life and death, and then Jesus shows all those things. 

Setup and payoff, right? And the setup of the virgin giving birth to a child, and calling him Immanuel, is shown in Christ. It's not about predictions and prophecy so much as it is about spending hundreds of years telling a particular people who God is, and what he is like, then when God steps into the world, he does those things. He shows himself to be God, and if you know the setup, unmistakably so.

Vampire - Wooden stake

Zombie - destroy brain

Werewolf- silver bullet

God - Power over life and death, creation and salvation.

If the setup and payoff are there, then you don't have to believe it, but you at least have to see that the story is consistent.

cut it down

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, especially in early Advent. As GK Chesterton put it, the accusation is almost always that Jesus had a simple religion of peace and love, and that the church corrupted it over time to be something hurtful and judgmental. When in reality, the opposite is the truth.  The church endeavors to be as forgiving and welcoming and tolerant of almost everything as possible, meanwhile it hides and conceals any time that Jesus may be slightly wrathful. The church conceals or downplays the anger in the Temple and the whips and shouting. The church doesn't dwell on the wrath directed at the "brood of vipers". So much easier to just discuss the nice parts of Scripture, where Jesus has the little children come to him, etc.

But Christ is wild and untamed, and refuses to be boxed in by us, and the God of the scriptures is being discussed in no uncertain terms by John the Baptist in the Gospel reading for today. Here we are in the Gospel, and John is being approached by a generous number of people who are repenting, and being baptized. All good so far. But there are some from the Pharisees and Sadducees who are coming to see the baptism as well. And that's when John lays into them.

You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come? So starts John's address to the people who have come to witness the baptism, and we immediately take notice. For John, the wild man of the wilderness, demands attention. True, you could look at him in his locust-eating, Camel-hair wearing way, and dismiss him as a madman, but he doesn't talk like a madman. He talks like one who is obsessed. 

So let's talk about 'geek culture' for a moment. Yes, it's a bit more mainstream than it used to be, but I still think it works. So geek culture works like this, that the individual geeks or geekettes would be single-minded about their hobby, be it video games, art films, whatever, and would be so obsessed that they would abjure any grooming or niceties. That's about it. And when it comes to John, he is single-minded in his purpose to the point that the message of Jesus Christ is all he's interested in. He doesn't have time for niceties, greetings, politeness, nothing like that. He's really really into the Gospel, to the point where everything else seems like nothing. He's not going to put himself together, go through the rigmarole  of greetings, small talk, being presentable, nothing like that. He's going hard on the kingdom.

And boy is he ever. Man, We have a church, bills and all that here at the church. I can't go off like John goes off, and truly, when he goes off, he goes so hard that he goes to jail and gets killed. Every once in a while you see someone with nothing to lose, and John is one of those guys. Locusts, wild honey, and spitting straight truth. He fires at the crowds and holds nothing back whatsoever - Christ's winnowing fork is in his hands, he will gather the wheat into his barn but he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Unquenchable fire? That's a lot. It's a lot to take in as people who assume that the concept of hell is rather out of date now, and that we don't have to worry about it. Well, apparently we do, because John certainly talks about it in.....glowing terms (glowing like an ember). 

The question that goes before the Christian, then, is to ask if John is right. Is John accurate in this, or is he wrong? It's almost always dangerous to put yourself in the position of assuming that you know far far better than John does. Oh sure, the Elijah who is to come, the greatest on earth, the one who was such a big deal that people assumed that Jesus was the second coming of him, you know better than that guy? Realistically, the story of the Bible works very well when it is allowed to speak for itself, far less well when we speak over it. If you're going to interrupt John and tell him, and by extension God, that there is no fire, no damnation, no wrath, none of that, then you have to make the rest of the story make sense. You have to understand that John feels as though the arrival of Christ is a big deal. When he points to Jesus and say 'behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,' there's a reason why it's a big deal. If all that stuff about the axe being at the root of the trees, the wrath to come, unquenchable fire, if that's all wrong and stupid, then why is it a big deal that Jesus is born? Why is it such a big deal that John would point to him and say 'behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?" Why is Christmas a big deal if we're not getting something very very important?

For any of you who are frightened and troubled by the words of John, ponder this: You can dismiss him out of hand as a crazy person, someone who is just a nutcase. But he sure doesn't sound like it. He sounds deadly serious, and is very convincing even now. You can talk over him, but the rest of scripture seems to agree, and you do too, if you're honest with yourself.

Or you can listen to him. When he says of Christ 'he must increase, and I must decrease,' that's exactly what happens. The increase of Christ is that he is the lamb of God. Enough to take those warnings from John and swallow them up in victory.

Corporate and personal

 There's a board game that I got for my birthday the year before last, called Nemesis. You don't have to know too much about it, save that it is one of those secret role games. At the start of the game, everyone appears as though they're on the same team, but as the game develops, people may or may not stay on that team. You are dealt two objective cards at the start of the game, and when you discover your first alien, you have to ditch one of those two objectives, and keep the other, thereby deciding which of those objectives is going to be how you win.

The objectives are divided into two categories: Personal and corporate. One of those will be a thing that you have to do for your own personal wellbeing, and the other is what you do for the bigger picture; for the team, for the company, for whatever. 

Now, I bring this up to you because of the interesting apocalypse that Jesus brings up in the Gospel reading - he moves from talking to the daughters of Jerusalem, to talking to the thieves on the cross. And that move is a move from a corporate apocalypse to a personal one. That corporate apocalypse is the apocalypse where everything ends. The sky rolls back like a scroll, the sun is like sackcloth, and the moon as blood. Dogs and cats living together in peace and harmony, mass hysteria. That's the one that you think of when you think of apocalypse, right? How Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead. Everything finishes and wraps up, and it's all over. That's the corporate apocalypse, because it hits everyone, all at once, and nobody is spared.

Of course, there is a personal apocalypse too, you know. And the reading that we had from Sunday is jarring that way - the two thieves on the cross are not exactly all that concerned at that moment about the corporate apocalypse. It's not a big deal for you to work through exactly when the end of all things is going to roll around, if you're going to be dead in a few hours anyway. That is, unless the entire apocalypse is going to happen in the next 90 minutes, it's not going to matter too much. Jesus essentially gets two requests from the two men. The one says to him 'if you're the son of God, take yourself off this cross, and take us down with you.' Now, that's a request to get off the cross, yes, but to step back into the world that is leading you back to the same place. By stepping back into the world, you're not avoiding the personal apocalypse forever; you're delaying it for a while. There's a zero percent chance that stepping down off that cross grants you immortality permanently. But, that fear of the personal apocalypse is enough to drive you off that cross, and back into the world. In other words, you're not ready to die, but honestly, when will you be?

What's the right time for you, in your opinion. What's the right time for you to wrap it all up, to say 'yes, I'm good now. That's enough time. It's enough time with my family and friends, I've seen all I want to see, I think I'm good now.' Sadly, the one thief wanted to delay the personal apocalypse, but of course, even if you do, the corporate one is coming for you.

But what the other thief is asking for is a removal from the system altogether. He's well aware that escaping the apocalypse on the cross is not an escape forever, but just a delay. The fun is going to find you eventually anyway. There's no long term escape, nothing permanent while you're still in the system. Instead, he asked Jesus to remember him, when He comes into His kingdom. That request is one to not just get you off the cross for a few years, but to get you out of the problem permanently, eternally. 

I'm going to go back to this scene from the movie Tremors. The cast are in a bad state, and are going to have to get out of it by throwing a bomb the way they want to run. But they only have one more bomb, enough to get them to the rocks that they were sitting on, but not enough to get them to safety. The conversation between them was that even if they could get back to the rocks, they'd die of thirst in three days. You're going to have to come up with a better solution than that.

Ultimately, if you're looking to avoid the apocalypse completely, not just delay it for a while, you're going to look to not just get back to the rocks, but to make the problem to away altogether by killing the graboids. If you're looking to avoid being lost eternally, you're going to look towards Jesus bringing you into his kingdom, where rust and rot don't corrupt or destroy. Where the scarcity of this life is not something that can eat in. Where the apocalypse won't despoil nor ruin. If you're going to escape, you're going to have to escape completely.

Reform

 Back in the 1990s, there was a political party in this great nation of ours called the Reform Party, brought to you by Preston Manning. Of course, I didn't understand much about politics back then, still don't to be honest, but I was aware of it as a political force. That party long ago merged with other right of centre parties, but it still seems like it's around, like a movement in your peripheral vision. Gone when you look straight at it, but almost visible in the background.

Reform for us in the church, though, always brings up Reformation, which is the festival that defines us as Lutheran Christians. For Luther did not seek or want to bring about a new faith, a new religion or anything like that, he sought to reform what was already there. And in reforming it, it was an effort to save and rescue what was good, and to abandon what had gone bad. And you know, you can get a lot more done that way than by pretending that everything is all good all the time.

For if you pretend that something is all good and needs no help, then you're going to find out very rapidly that the rot is going to spread. Unchecked problems lead to more problems, you know, and the more unchecked the problems are, the more of a problem they're going to be. Rot is rarely confined, you know. Decay does not understand limits. Once rot and heresy and false teaching begin to appear, they don't tend to leave on their own accord. Pretending that there are no problems to be addressed leads to the rot spreading and growing, and a reformation requires an admission that things are not the way they should be. 

A long long time ago, in web 1.0, there was a website that I went to called dieoff. It is long since gone now, partially because its prediction of the end of the world by 2010 did not manifest in the slightest. But the quote that the website presented was this one from Thomas Hardy 

We have to be prepared to look at the worst if we are to go towards the better. And in the case of Dr. Luther, it was an examination of the worst, to look fully at the rot that had gotten in in order to come out on the other side better. What was the worst? The church had lurched into non-Biblical teaching. And that church had to be reformed, not eliminated or forgotten. What was bad had to be removed, in order that what was good could be retained. And this process of reformation is a bigger picture of what happens in the individual Christian. For we, for the most part, do not live our lives strictly according to Biblical teaching, though we should. We do not do only what the Bible requires nor suggests. Instead, we frequently go against the word of God. We do what pleases us. As Christians, we should live according to the principles of scripture, but elect not to. And every week, we traipse back to the sanctuary of God's house, and make a simple demand - as the church was reformed, so too ought we to be. We have had a look at the worst, our scheming, gossip, unclean living and so on. We have had a deep glimpse at the rot, and you know what, we don't like it. That's why we come to church and say to God fully and clearly 'yeah, I did some things I don't like and am not proud of.' And that's when God, the real one, forgives those sins, strips them away, and leaves you behind.

Back in the days of dieoff, I was actually frightened by the concept of forgiveness of sins. Really. What I was frightened about was the notion that Jesus would actually take my sins away, as far as the east was from the west, and that I would get Ookpiked. In case you don't know, from Dennis Lee's book 'Alligator Pie,' there was a poem about the Ookpik, and it goes thusly.

Ookpik

An Ookpik is nothing but hair.
If you shave him, he isn't there.

He's never locked in the zoo.
He lives in a warm igloo.

He can whistle and dance on the walls.
He can dance on Niagra Falls.

He has nothing at all on his mind.
If you scratch him, he wags his behind.

He dances from morning to night.
Then he blinks. that turns out the light.

That concept of there being nothing left once the shaving was done was how I thought about my sin. If Jesus can take it away, and he does, then what's left? Is there anything left at all? And when Luther and his contemporaries looked at the church at the time, a similar thought must have occurred to them - if we remove all the rot and disaster, what's left? What's left indeed. But they did, and when they did, they discovered that there is still beauty, truth, joy and wonder left. What was there from the first place, brought out from underneath all the rot and decay, and presented as it should have been from the beginning.

You too, if you are to be reformed, once all the rot is gone, the sin and shame, is there anything left? You bet there is. And what's left is you, the You that God shed his blood to redeem.