Not peace, but a sword

I know I've talked about this a thousand times, but I think it's still important.  I think it's important because you can have a game show with these rules, and it still apparently works out.

There was a semi-obscure Canadian game show called 'gutterball alley,' in which you bowled, and got money for knocking pins over.  All good so far.  However, it was on the comedy network, so you know there's going to be a gag somewhere, and there surely was. The deal was that you had to play fun games, and the more answers you got right, the more balls you earned to knock pins down.  And one of the games, which was hil-AR-ious, was the game called 'Jesus, Buddha, or Manson.'  The idea was that the hosts would take a quote from one of those figures, and you would have to guess which of them said it.  I wish I could remember more of it, but what I do remember is the quotation that came out, where it said 'Do not think that I came to bring peace.  I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.'  And of course, the contestant answered that it was Charles Manson.

Of course, that quote is from Jesus.  It's from Jesus even though it seems like the least Jesus thing to be said ever, doesn't it?  He's the Prince of Peace!  And as the Prince of Peace, shouldn't he come to bring peace?  Well, you'd think so, but thinking that way doesn't really do peace justice at all.

Peace is a difficult thing.  It's not as easy as you might think, as most moral issues happen to be as well.  Oh, sure, it seems simple in Stuart Little, where the rules boil down to 'Nix on Swiping anything' and 'Absolutely no being mean,' but the rules in real life are quite a bit more complicated than that.  For you and I, when we read these words from Jesus, and the words that surround them, we get disheartened.  We get disheartened in the same way as the rich young ruler who is told to sell his possessions, give the proceeds to the poor, and go follow Christ.  We get real glum when we hear words ilke this, and we deseprately want to excise them from the scriptures.

But we don't have that option.  The words are there in black and white.  Jesus has not come to bring peace, but a sword.  He has not come to bind families together, but to divide them.  He has not come to bring love and joy, but instead division, and hard lessons.  It's a rough go, and most of us don't want to hear that part.  We want peace! We want peace and love! We want Jesus to politely build us up, to make us comfortable, and to help us feel good.  We not only want him to say some good natured platitudes, we expect them.  We sincerely believe that that is what Jesus says, and what he's all about.

But Jesus isn't all about that.  It surprises us when we find that out.  It surprises us, though it really ought not surprise us.  It surprises us because we honestly don't have that much familiarity with what Jesus is all about.

You may have heard of Jesus as the great physician.  I hope you have, otherwise this next bit won't make a whole lot of sense.  But yes, typically, he's seen as the great physician.  The one who offers healing for body and soul.  And in my line of work, occasionally I speak with Physicians, as I do, and one of the best conversations I ever had with one was when I spoke with one of the many Drs. Vuksic, who said this much to me.

'If I were to get diagnosed with cancer, I'd really only have one question for the surgeon.  Can it be cut out?  If yes, then let's move on that right away.  If not, then just make me comfortable.'

It's a heck of a line, really, and it tells us something about the nature of sin, and what Jesus is for.  He is here to remove sin.  That's what he does.  And if he is going to be removing sin, it is going to be difficult, dangerous, and largely unpleasant.  Just like surgery is.  If you have cancer, you can have the question as to whether you can get surgery or not, and that's a good question.  Because if you want the surgeon to bring you peace, she can do that. She can bring peace, and make you as comfy as possible, putting you into palliative care.  There, you will be so innured against sensation that you will be content to lie there, and be at peace and rest.  You will also be dying.

If you have a good surgeon, a skilled surgeon, someone who knows what they are doing, a dedicated physician, someone who can tackle the problems that arise, then you will not want someone who brings peace.  You will want someone who brings a sword.  A scalpel, a dividing instrument that will refiner's fire and fuller's soap.  Something that divides infection from purity, something that splits health and poison, something that reaches into a situation, and knows that the worst thing to do is to bring peace, to make you comfy while you drift into oblivion.  It's a shocking prospect for us to deal with, isn't it?  The prospect that we, if we are to be made comfortable, will be made comfortable in our sins, but that's what we expect of Jesus.  We expect him to just keep us comfy, and to remove our pain, and help us to feel better in what we're already doing.  But he doesn't, and he won't.  All the hard things that he does and says, they're the words of a surgeon who has a diagnosis for us. And that surgeon doesn't just give a diagnosis and walk away, that surgeon has surgery that he wants to do.
remove the toxins from the healthy tissue.  A dentist's drill,

For you see, there's a choice.  In any surgical situation, you as the patient have the right to refuse care.  If the surgeon comes to you and says 'we have aggressive cancer, but we've gotten to it before it spreads.  We can do surgery tomorrow and then you'll have a long recovery, but you will be completely cured,' you do have the option to refuse.  You can say 'no thanks.  That seems like a lot of work.  I'll just keep my illness, just make me comfy.' You can always choose that approach.  You can choose to just be comfy until you die.  Or you can trust the surgeon and his advice, and know that he has your best interests at heart.  You don't want a surgeon who is going to bring peace.  You want a surgeon who is going to bring a sword, who will carve your sin out of you, and save you from it.  This is a core Christian teaching, and one that is so important that I will say it again.  Knowing you have a problem isn't enough.  And you can't fix the problem you have.  This is what Jesus is for, to use his skill and his grace to remove your sin from you, divide it as far as east is from the west, and to set you up as a redeemed child of God.

That's what you want.  And the only way you would not want Jesus to bring a sword is if you don't know what he's all about in the first place.

PJ.

The wagers of sin

I talked about Pascal's wager in church on Sunday, and here's what Emo Phillips said about it.  

Emo Philips regularly tours the nation's comedy clubs, and recently released a CD titled Emo.

The Onion: Is there a God?

Emo Philips: Well, the God question, you can never know for sure. 'Cause let's say you died, and you're in heaven for, like, 600 trillion years. There still might be an announcement over the PA system, "Well, everyone, this is the best we could do. Sorry, we gave it a good go, you know, but we're imperfect." Mortal beings always need faith that God exists, that a perfect God exists. Like [mathematician Blaise] Pascal said, do you choose to believe, or do you choose not to believe? If you choose to believe, you have nothing to lose, but if you choose not to believe, what are you really going to get? That's Pascal's Wager, and that should be taught in kindergarten.

Pascal's wager.  Should be taught in Kindergarten.  Not sure if I believe that we should be teaching it to the tiny tinies, but Pascal's wager is a relatively important thing to get straight in your head.  For you see, it's not what you think it is, not really.  Most of us think it revolves around the idea that if you believe in God, and are right, you get eternal paradise, and if you believe in God and you're wrong nothing happens.  But if you disbelieve in God and you're wrong, it's eternal hellfire, and if you disbelieve in God and you're right, nothing happens.  But that's not the whole story.  

Consider this - that there are still consequences to belief.  Jesus goes over them in the Gospel reading for Sunday, in which he says in Matthew chapter 10:

Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father 

his child, and children will rise against parents and have them

put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name's sake.

Matthew 10:21-22a

Okay, so it's not a zero wager there.  There will be some costs involved, sometimes fatal costs.  There will be potential deaths involved, and at the lightest, seemingly, you will be hated by all.  Jeremiah finds similar circumstances affecting him in the Old Testament reading:

I have become a laughingstock all the day; 

everyone mocks me...

The word of the Lord has become for me a reproach

and derision all day long.

Jeremiah 20:7,8

There are prices to be paid for discipleship.  It isn't free.  But what hangs in the balance?  For you see, we have gotten too lax and carefree with the concept of death.  Medical science has advanced to such a degree that we can keep people hanging on forever in their sickness and illness.  People are living longer than ever before.  Life is expensive, and really good here.  You may not believe it, but in your life, you are living at the absolute top of the game.  The world isn't fair, and in your case, it's unfair in your favor.  You have everything you could possibly desire, hot and cold running water, injections so you won't get diseases, sewage that flows away from your house instead of into it, sizzling steaks and creamy cakes, you have everything you want in your entire life, up to and including boredom.  Things are so good that you can get bored in this paradise.  So it's easy for us to think that the costs of discipleship mentioned above are too high.  Who wants to be killed when life here is so good?  And it doesn't even have to be death, you know.  The parts of Jeremiah that talk about being a laughingstock and all that, who wants that?  You want to be seen as an important member of the community, you want respect, admiration, you want to climb the ladder socially, and you're certainly not going to do that by telling people that internet pornography isn't the best thing on planet earth.  And so most of us have gotten to the point about God where we are neither hot nor cold about him.  We are just sort of in the middle.  If people ask us about Him, we get non-committal, hem and haw for a while, and don't say much of any real substance, because we really don't want to be outed as rather strange.  

And this, my chums, is where things fall apart for us.  We have forgotten what's at stake here.  When Jesus speaks, as he does in the Gospel reading, he tells his disciples

So everyone who acknowledges me before me, I will also

acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven.  But whoever

denies me before me, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

Matthew 10:32-33

That should give us cause for concern.  It should give us a bit of a tremble and a shiver.  Because we haven't always been the best at representing Christ.  We get vague about our beliefs, we get mumbly about what we think and hold true, we answer with a lack of specifics, and in general we do our best to not be too specific about our faith in Christ and him crucified.  We end up being lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, and therefore, as God says in Revelation 3:16, he will spit us out.  We have turned the wager on its head, to understand that there are only costs to discipleship, but no benefits.

Funerals, and times like them, though, that all changes.  When there is disaster, when there is disease, when time begins to run out, as it has done for all people throughout all the world, then we have a chance to seriously look at what the cost is next to the potential rewards.  In the time of Jesus, those who followed him knew that death was never too far away.  And faith in Christ and professing his name seemed to make sure that death was going to come a lot sooner.  And yet, and yet, what was offered was so rich and full, what was offered was so powerful and great, that when they counted the cost, they realized that it was worth it. Life everlasting, paradise in eternity with God, won by his blood on the cross, was such a prize that it was deemed to be worth the struggle, and worth the effort.

And when you fail at representing Christ?  You will.  You will fear the mocking and reproach, you will fear the scorn and derision.  You will deny Jesus like Peter did, you will be neither hot nor cold on the issue, you will stare at the floor and not make waves, you will get vague and uncomfortable, and you will purposefully not say something even when things seem important.  And it is for that that Jesus died.

Do not forget that the Christian faith isn't about how well you represent Jesus.  It's not about you making yourself the best ambassador for Jesus that you possibly can, because your salvation doesn't rest on it.  Your salvation rests on Jesus and his work on the cross.  If Peter could be forgiven for his denial of Christ, if Peter who publicly denied Jesus three times, under the watchful eye of Jesus himself, could be forgiven, then you can too.  Because the Christian faith isn't about you doing your best and being judged on it, it's not about you making sure that you made the right bet, that you gambled and wagered on what was right all along, but that Jesus bet it all on you.  He bet everything that he had on you, you were the prize to be won.  He bet everything, his clothes, his friends, his comfort, his life, on you.  And he won.  That was the deal behind everything.  Jesus knew, was well aware the entire time, that you weren't going to make the choice for him the entire time.  He knows that you aren't stronger or better or more faithful than Peter or Jeremiah, and he's prepared for that.  His work is not about making you better or more faithful, his work is about forgiving you, knowing that you can't handle the debt required, he handles it for you.  That's the deal, it's always been the deal, that The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Father's day. Featuring both kinds of Fathers.

Did you notice that Father's day and Trinity Sunday fell on the same day this year?  Doubtlessly you did if you were at church on Sunday, because I took the time to mention it.  I took the time to mention it because of the heavy heavy reading we had from the Old Testament yesterday.  It was the creation account from the very beginning of Genesis, beginning, with, of course, 'In the Beginning.'  Good start.  And unlike the Star Wars movies, it actually begins at the beginning, because there is nothing whatsoever before it.  In the beginning, there was nothing, and then there was something.

These days, that gets explained as the 'big bang,' the best idea that scientists have for the creation of the universe that we currently find ourselves in.  This idea was proposed in 1927, by Georges LeMaitre, and his hypothesis pointed to the possibility that there was essentially a beginning to the
universe.  This flew in the face of the steady state hypothesis, which told us that the universe had always been here and was always going to be here.  The Big Bang proffered a view that the universe had a beginning, was expanding, and would ultimately have an end.

And this falls, honestly, pretty well in line with the Biblical cosmology too.  First there was nothing, then there was something.  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  There was nothing, and then there was something.  But this isn't the end of the story, though we think that perhaps it is.

For you see, if you're reading this, there's a good chance you understand Father's day a bit differently than you might have when you were a child.  As First Corinthians says, when I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, but when I became a man, I put childish things behind me. If you're old enough to pay for your own internet bill to read this blog posting, then you'll have a totally new understanding and appreciation of what your father had to go through to provide you with the many and various things that you need to survive.  It's an old Chris Rock bit, where mothers get immediate feedback for cooking dinner, cleaning stuff up, but nobody says to dad when he gets home 'gee, Dad, it sure is easy sleeping with all this heat in the house.  It sure is easy to do my homework with all this light!"  It's a strange case, obviously, with the father going to work, and coming back home, and the kids not seeing the connection between the two things.  What connection does the dad going to work have with the lights being on and the power continuing to run.  And it's the same with us.  We get that God created the heavens and the earth, but we don't necessarily get his continuned activity, both in sustaining creation, and in his role in saving us from our sins.

Growing up, we all had the idea of forgiving sins as a matter of God choosing to overlook our sins, of him knowing our sin, and claiming that it didn't matter, or wasn't important.  And we could see essentially no correlation between his death on the cross and the love of God.  They existed in two completely different universes.  God was a guy who made stuff, and then Jesus was a nice guy, nicer than God, who ran into some trouble and got nailed to something.  And that's that.

But as you grow, as you mature, you start to understand that the love of God isn't a theoretical thing that only exists in the land of vapour and ghosts.  It's a real, practical, hands on issue.  It exists, it is real, and it was shown in the person of Jesus Christ on the cross.

When you grow up, when you put childish things behind you, you realize that your father was working his whole life, probably at a job he hated, to provide for you and your siblings, to make sure that you could have food, heat, gas in the car, clothing, and all those sundries that you think are so disposible.  All of those have a real, discernible cost.  And your father (probably) has to pay it.

Think upon it this way.  Your sin has a real discernible cost too.  The wages of sin, says the Bible, is death.  And you are being asked to pay it.  That's the bill that is coming due for your activities.  You took on the payment plan on that one, you took on more than you could afford, and now all the bills are coming due at the same time.  And what does your dad do when you're running out of cash, even as an adult, what does he do when you're about to run completely out of cash and the wolf is at the door, and all those financial decisions that you've made over the years are crashing in, and your dad reaches out, and pays it.  That's what he does.  Whether as adults or chilren, fathers have a habit of paying for the things that their children end up with, paying for their childrens' mistakes.  It's what happens.  They have the resources, so they end up paying the fare.

This is what God did for us.  He took the weight of our sin upon himself, and paid the price on the cross.  And it wasn't free.  It didn't just happen.  It wasn't easy or pleasant.  It was burdensome, difficult, dangerous and costly.  It cost him his own life, and he paid it for you, knowing that he had enough resources, and you didn't.

The many and various things that your father gave to you weren't free.   It wasn't cheap or easy, it wasn't a matter of him going to work because he wanted to necessarily, but because he loved you, and wanted to provide for you, and likely still does.  And all this sacrifice that our earthly father do for us is a mirror of the sacrifice that our Heavenly Father does for us too.  This is why Jesus tells us to pray by talking to 'Our Father.'  Jesus teaches in Parables, he uses what is known to us to explain and to express what is unknown, and unknowable.  When he talks about God as our father, he knows that in our earthly fathers we see the best possible representation of how God is with us.  He creates, sustains, guides and encourages, and when it is time for us to be bailed out of a situation that we can't possibly pay or work our way out of ourselves, he pays the price, and pays for it himself.

Happy Father's day to all the dads out there.  Keep on doing what you do.

PJ.

The Cost of Pentecost

I'm back from vaca/convention.  Did you miss me?  Don't all speak up at once.

One of the Sundays that I was gone for was this most recent Sunday, the day of Pentecost.  Which I am sorry that I missed, because I like Pentecost.  Not just for the obvious reasons that it's one of the high holy days of the year, not just because it's one of the days that we celebrate the working of the Holy Spirit in the world, but for reasons that are integral to our identity as protestant Christians in the here and now.  I'll explain.

The message of the Christian faith has always, perpetually, been one of the movement of God towards people.  It's been a message of the distance between God and humanity, and Him trying to close that gap.  You see, the difference between our faith and what we would expect, is that it's not a story of you trying desperately, against all odds, to reach God.  We think it would be, of course.  We expect that it would be, because that's the plucky underdog story that we all want to have, and to experience.  We want it to be a voyage of self-discovery, a journey in which we climb up a mountain, Moses-style, and see the face of God.

But that, that isn't Christianity.  Not really.  That's more akin to a Greek mythology understanding of how the gods work.  An understanding that there is a mountain, and that you can climb that mountain, and get all the way up there and there see the Lord your God face to face.  It's that understanding, that idea of God, that lead Nikita Krusch

ev to say these words about Yuri Gagarin about his orbit above the earth as the first man in space:

"Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any God there."

Yeah.  Because you can't climb that mountain.  Because it's not a real mountain.  and even stretching this metaphor out as far as we can, viewing even space and orbit as a mountain, you can't climb that high.  It's not possible.  Because God isn't accessible in that way.  If you will, for a second, go with me into this journey in which it's a one way street.  There is a great chasm fixed between these things, and you can't voyage freely between them.

So, what's to be done?  Well, quite the opposite of what had happened up until that time.  Think of the people of God, and who they were back then.  In the Roman empire, the Hebrews were sensibly called Hebrews because they spoke Hebrew.  I know, crazy, right? But this is a thing!  How do you get to be a responsible adult in the eyes of the congregation?  Through the Bar Mitzvah, which involves reading of the Torah in Hebrew, or at the very least pronouncing the blessing in Hebrew.  How do you become a Muslim?  By pronouncing the Shahada in Arabic.  That's all you have to do to convert to Islam.   And for the initial Christian community, that was still a fundamental break that they had, in which they were Christians, sure, but Christians still in a very set apart way, so that in order to worship their God, you were going to have to eat their food, speak their language, and so on.  This was a major dispute and discussion amongst that earliest group of Christians.

Until pentecost.  Pentecost is where that all got flipped on its head.  It got flipped upside down.  In the festival of Pentecost, you have the first real, genuine understanding of how significant the incarnation of Jesus actually is.  It's not just a teacher coming to his pupils to explain how to be nice to each other, and it's not just a matter of Jesus blessing his people, it's a matter of God coming into this world, with all its languages, all its people, and being a blessing to all of them.

All the people who were there that day, ard the disciples speaking in their own language.
Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Lybia near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts, Cretans and Arabs. And Pentecost is still a rallying cry for us in the here and now.  It's still a matter for us to consider, for us to work with, because we, we who are Protestant Christians, have to continue to live out the Pentecost message.  Even when we don't want to.  Because my gosh, we don't want to.

Now, you can possibly make the case for us continuing to translate the Bible into a wide variety of languages (as we ought), or about how we should offer German services, or whatever (as we ought), but it's about the essence of the culture of our churches, and about the culture of our worship.  For you see, what we say to people who are wandering around, who are seeking spiritual fulfillment, is that they must integrate themselves into our church culture, our language, our way of doing things.  We tell them, not in outright words, but in how we show ourselves, that folks need to conform themselves to what we're doing, even if it's non-Biblical.  Even if it's just the culture of this particular place, even if it's the beat of the music, or organ vs guitar
, or coffee after the service vs during the service, any of these things, it comes down to us insisting that the outside world has to conform to our culture in order to be a part of what we do.

And that just straight up isn't right.  Although a lot of the early disciples had in mind that their food, their language, their way of looking at the world was right, and that other people from outside their experience were going to have to fit into that in order to approach the throne of the Living God.  But the whole point of the incarnation of Jesus was that he came into the world and met people where they were.  He learned the language of the people he was with.  He ate their food.  He worked for them in their world.  He became in every way (except sin, obvy) like them, and made the God, the up high on the mountain God, the far off unapproachable God, all of a sudden easy to find and easy to see.  And his humanity makes the unknowable knowable.  With every word he says, with every action he takes, he emphasizes the nature of what by definition must happen, that God comes to his people, no matter who they are.  No matter how filthy the world is, no matter how broken down it is, no matter how full it is of wildly imperfect people, it's the world that God came to redeem.

So what's our job?  Preach the word in season and out of season, and to make the word of God as accessible, as straightforward as possible for everyone.  It's about not putting up additional barriers around this word of God, it's about not making it more difficult for people who are outside, about not hiding this under a bushel, but allowing it to shine.  And each time we insist on someone getting to our level before they're allowed in the door, it's one more bushel on top of the lamp.  Or, in a sense, it's us pulling down the blinds of our house, and saying that the light is only for us who are already inside.

It's so wonderful that the story of Easter naturally lends itself to the story of Pentecost.  They're all connected.  The people living in darkness have seen a great light.  It's up to us, as people living in the light of the empty tomb, to not build boxes and scaffolds around the tomb and charge admission, and only if you're from a certain place, and all that.  It's about pulling down all the layers added up over time, and letting the incarnate Christ speak in words of power that are still for today.

PJ.