A little while

Waiting is bad.

If there's one thing we all universally know it's that we hate waiting.  If this wobsite took a while to load, then there's a good chance that you got anxious and jittery, because you had no desire to wait. 
We hate waiting in line, hate waiting for the internet, and we especially hate waiting in traffic.  One of the worst things about travelling is the standing about and waiting in line for things to progress through the torturously slow lines, waiting to be searched, waiting to get on the plane, waiting to get off the plane, wait wait wait.  It gets compounded, of course, when you have smaller people with you, who have zero perspective on what a little while is.

For me, a little while can be as long as a few years.  I think about my time spent in the city of champions, and I would refer to that as a little while.  I would feel as though I lived there for a little while, though it was three years in a row.  Now, for my younger son, a little while isn' three years.  That's almost his entire lifespan.  It doesn't count as a little while when it's that long.  I bring this up because in the scriptures, Jesus talks about his death and his resurrection, and tells his disciples that in a little while they will no longer see him, and then in a little while they would see him again.  And that sounds like a good thing, to be sure, that there would only be a little while until they saw him again, but the disciples didn't have the benefit of eternity.  They didn't have the same persepctive of time that Jesus did.

So what happens when Jesus dies?  Well, reality matters.  Reality matters, and as the shepherd is struck, the sheep scatter.  They scatter and they run, dashing away to safety, to hiding, back to obscurity.  Now that Jesus is gone, keep your head down, and don't rock the boat.  And speaking of boats, go back to them.  Get back to fishing, get back to your life, make catches, haul those fish on board, and don't cause any metaphorical ripples in the water.  Jesus spoke a number of times about how he had to die, and about how he was going to rise again, and the disciples, well, they heard his words, but then the real world got in the way, and they sort of forgot to keep hold of that word.  In other words, they heard what Christ had said, and they considered their own lives that they could see around them, and promptly decided that the one was more pressing than the other.

This is how we operate, you understand.  This is how the good people of the world operate, how they get things done.  For we, people of the book, people of the cross, people of the Gospel, we've heard the words of Jesus for decades by now, surely.  But even though we've heard the words of Jesus, we have it in our minds that those words ultimately don't count for anything too important.  They aren't all that binding to us when faced with the reality of the world around us.  Oh, sure, Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, but what if the guy is being really mean to us? Jesus tells us to love our enemies, but what if they're intolerable, and insist on putting us down at every opportunity.  Jesus tells us to give to any who would ask of us, but surely he doesn't want us to become suckers, right?

This is where the disciples were, too, you know.  They were told by Jesus that he would die, and would rise again, and the disciples were happy to believe him when he said that, until such a time as they saw it happen.  Then, their faith in his words was tested, and fell apart.  Just like us.  Reality matters, and like the disciples, for us it matters more than the faith we've been given.  When you read this, please don't shrink, or hide from this, and insist that you don't do this, because if you didn't then there would be no sin in you. And if you say you have you sin, you decieve yourself, not God.  The great thing about the disciples scattering, about them not believing that the resurrection would happen, about them not understanding what Jesus meant when he said 'a little while,' is that the discples, the closest inner circle of followers of Jesus, the OGs, they fell apart like we do.  This is a matter of prime importance, of realizing that we have the same problem that the disciples did, in staring down what we see around us, and holding fast to the promise and law of God in the midst of it.

The reading that we had from Revelation stands at the heart of all of this.  The reading from Revelation is the end of everything, the time in which all the sadness and hurt is gone, when every tear has been wiped from every eye. when the people of God have been raised from the dead, there is a new heaven and a new earth, when everything is exactly as it should be, that's what we are presented with at the end of Revelation, and staring at that causes us to ask when it is going to happen.  And the answer is, according to God, in a little while.

When is that?  Nobody knows.  How can God say that it's a little while?  Because it is, for him.  For us, it is forever.  The people of God have lived and died for centuries waiting for Jesus to return, and he still as of yet has not.  We are still waiting for him to arrive and to put everything right as he has so promised to do.  And this little while, with us living in the last days, could last a long time.  How could God consider this to be a little while?  Well, we think about the end of the book of Job, where God talks to Job, who rightly has questions about why his life has been in the toilet lately, and says this to him.

The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, 'who is this

that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?  

Gird up thy loins like a man, for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Declare if thou hast understanding.  Who hath laid the measures therof, if thou knowest?

Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened, or who laid the corner stone thereof?  

God goes on like this for a while (several chapters, actually), with the understanding that though Job is seeking answers, he can't quite get to the perspective that God would require for discussion.  In other words, if you don't have God's perspective on eternity, then you're probably not going to understand what he means when he says 'a little while.'  Just like my children can't understand that for me, a little while can be ten minutes, or several years.

Ultimately, the question comes down, as it typically does, to trust.  That God has made promises, and we are people who are living in those promises.  We are people who are living in trust and hope that Jesus will do what he promised to do, that he will put right the things he promised to put right, and see through what has to be seen through.  He will do what is required, when the time is right.  When will that be?  In a little while.  We base our trust on his words that he said 

Let not your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.

In my father's house are many mansions.  If it were not so, I would have told you.

In other words, he's been trustworthy and true so far, he's told us the truth about life, about faith, about good and evil, right and wrong, if he's been trustworthy and true this whole time, perhaps we can take him seriously when he talks about eternity and everlasting life, and the purpose behind his work.  Yes, the world will get in the way for us, as it did for the disciples too.  But when Jesus talks, he says to us to fear not, for he, he himself, has overcome the world.  

Bland

I'm going to date myself pretty hard here, but I tend to like to refer back to the Matrix as a pretty hot cultural reference.  I think that it's pretty up to date.  It isn't, mind you.  The Matrix was a long long time ago now, so long ago that we are dealing with flip phones as a pretty neat thing.  Now, if you haven't seen the film lately, you can be forgiven for not remembering the issue of tasty wheat.  Tasty wheat is a way of talking about food in the Matrix, a food that they all ate while in the simulation, but not outside it, obviously.  And they talk about all the various kinds of foods that they ate in the simulation, and what they tasted like, all the while eating the slop that they have to eat now, given that there is nothing left for them to consume.  All they have is the sort of amino acid, single cell protein thing that they can eat which has everything the body needs except flavour.

Now, I bring this up partially because I still feel as thoug the Matrix is a fresh happening film, but secondly because it reminds me of eating hospital food forever.  If you know hospital food, you'll know that it has one major thing about it that overshadows everything else, and that is that nobody likes it.  There are some exceptions, but pretty much everyone else is opposed to hospital chow, and all for the same reason.  Now, as you may know, I like spicy hot food, my wife likes sweet foods, the
kids enjoy mac and cheese, that's all good, and you can all pretty well find people who will fall in line with any of those tastes, some more than others.  Some people like salty snacks, some people like sweet snacks, all that stuff, but there is pretty much nobody who likes bland snacks.

And there's the rub.

The reason that even globally almost nobody likes hospital food is because of its inherent blandness.  There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing right with it either.  It's  designed to be as inoffensive as possible, but that's its fatal flaw.  There's nothing in there to like.  There's nothing in this kind of food for anyone to like, so even though it's inoffensive, there's nothing there to set people on fire either.

Now, you can understand the reason for the Hospital to do this, because they have a lot of people to feed in a given day, and feeding them is going to be a big project, a big job, and you can't make food that will fit the tastes of all the people all the time.  So given that you can't meet those needs, then the next best thing you can do is to make the entire thing super duper bland, so that it never affects anyone negatively.  Now, my goodness, that works for the hospital because you're only going to be there for about three days, but we have a desire to do this with a bunch of things, including but not limited to the Gospel as well.  With the Gospel, you have something that you're trying to bring to the entire world, to an entire collection of people who aren't on the same page, and in doing so, you're going to end up with an issue where you are going to try to 'hospital food' the Gospel.  That is, you know that not everyone is in the same space about everything, and so we want to file off all the rough edges, sand them down, and make the pill a little less jagged, and a lot easier to swallow.

This desire is what drove St. Peter, when he went to go and bring the Gospel to the Jews.  This was his province, and in going out to those people who were keeping kosher, keeping the sabbath, all that, he wanted to make Jesus and his gospel as soft a landing as he possibly could.  And so, when he approached the Jews, he told them that since they had been keeping kosher this whole time, and they thought that it was important to keep kosher, then it was absolutely a requirement of the Christian faith to keep Kosher.  And to be circumcized.  And to keep the sabbath.  And basically to be fully and completely Jewish.  I can get what Peter wanted to do, he wanted to make the Gospel as easy to hear and to understand as possible, but in doing so, he empited it of what it was all about.  What makes Jesus so important, obviously, is his fulfilling of the law, and his accomplishing all things perfectly, thus being the full and complete sacrifice for our sins.  In doing so, he freed his people from the burden of keeping kosher, and of being bound to all the Old Covenant laws.  But Peter, for all his good intentions, was essentially telling the good people of the New Testament that what was most important was for them to keep doing what they were doing, and not to change anything.

And that's our approach these days too.  When we bring the Gospel message out to the world, we are keen to say to the audience that they should keep on doing whatever they're doing, and faith in Christ is something that just sort of slots in around where you already are.  Though this is well intentioned, it falls down on the problem that Christ our Lord, he has come to change people.  He has come to make us perfect as our heavenly father is perfect.

That brings us to the problem of the Good Shepherd.  The central problem and conundrum of the Good Shepherd is that he exists to tend sheep.  That's what he's all about.  He came to call his sheep by name, to bring them into his fold, to cherish them with his love, and to guide them always.  And why do the sheep need this?  Because sheep are notoriously bad at making good decisions, and will tend to wander far far way from safety.  They'll follow each other, even into danger, because they need to follow something.  They crave it.  On their own, they are defenseless in the face of a cruel
and uncaring world.  That's the major problem that faces us as sheep, you know.  The fact when we end up in troubles, it's almost always because we have made decision that have brought us into those difficulties.  We are the architects of our own disaster, we are the masters of our own destiny, and we tend to follow each other to destruction, into dreadful decisions and situations that hurt us and damage us, because we are prone to wander, and we can't take care of ourselves.

Nobody wants to hear that about themselves.  Nobody wants to think of themselves as sheep, as herd animals that wander all over the place.  We all want to think of ourselves as being bold and confident, as being people who can figure our lives out, who can wander away from the shepherd, and follow other sheep, because they know where they're going, right?  And somehow, we are perpeturally surprised when we wander into the jaws of waiting wolves.  What good does it do to tell someone to keep on going the way they're going, to not change a thing, if they're moving rapidly towards complete destruction and ruin?

Well, here we are.  Here we are, and we are moving towards the truth of the Gospel, and that's what Paul brings forth in the reading from Acts from Sunday.  He says quite clearly that he is interested in not shrinking from the full Gospel, not hiding from what it actually says, but in bringing it forward in its fullness.  I know it's tempting to bring the Gospel to people as though it doesn't say what it says, to tell them that it doesn't matter if they sue each other, or if they hate their neighbors who were asking for it anyway; we want to tell people that it doesn't matter if they live their lives in sullen anger and fear, as long as they add Jesus as a rider at the end of that, then it's all good.

But it isn't. The fullness of the Gospel tells us that we are sheep, and we are in need of a shepherd.  It tells us that we have wandered far away from where we know we should be. It tells us that we are likely the authors of our own destruction, and that we will perpetually follow those who seem to know where they're going even though they're no smarter than us.  It tells us that we're a long way away from being perfect, and that we hurt others by what we do.

In other words, it tells us the truth.

So what we need to do more of is to be in the business not of conforming Christ to people, but in conforming people to Christ.  I talked about the tasteless hospital food right off the hop, and it's worth considering here once again - that what we find is if we make the Gospel message bland and palatable for everyone, it will be loved and cherished by nobody.  The Gospel fullness, that we are weak sinners who need salvation, that we are people who require help and aid, that Gospel message is one that if you present it to people, they may not believe it, but they ought to at least see in it something worth believing.  They may look at it and wish they believed.

And that's the beginning of faith. The barrier that a great number of people have is that they've been given a version of the faith that says nothing whatsoever, that cannot move them, tastes like nothing, and that they spit out because it is neither hot nor cold.  We ought not be surprised that people reject this crude image of Christian faith, but it is up to us to replace it with what the Christian faith actually is. 


“It is the dogma that is the drama -- not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death -- but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster

Butt out and call it even.

As I said in church this morning, I'm a dreadful fisherman.  Really bad.  And the thing I don't get about it is that I can't tell what it would take to be a good fisherman.  Honestly, I can't pick up the differences between good fishing and bad, and that's the problem.  I'm sitting next to a capable fisherman, and gosh, it looks like I'm doing the exact same thing, but she's pulling fish after fish out of the lake, and I'm sitting there with a hook deep in the lake doing nothing whatsoever.  What on EARTH is the difference?  I can't figure it out!

Now, me being a garbage fisherman is good for the fish, of course, but it's bad for me as a sport fisherman.  If I go out fishing, it's like golf, where I'm happy to mess up all day, and I realize that I'm never going to get any better.  But this would all change were I to walk out on a pier, and start giving advice to people who are really good at fishing.  They would be perfectly entitled to look at me all strange, and say 'you don't know anything about fishing.  Why don't you sit down over there, and I'll handle the fishing, and you can do all the, you know, religious stuff.'

That's the sort of attitude that we'd expect from the disciples of Christ, who were professional fishermen.  Peter, Andrew, James and John, they fished for a living.  They lived and died on the seas, on their catch that they could bring in.  They were people who were beyond the hobby fishing that we typically do, the angling that we get up to, and were men who lived salt and sand, brine and fish, bringing in catches every day in order to sell them and survive.  I know the bumper sticker that says that a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work, but when they're one and the same, you can't claim that anymore.  There is no hobby fishing.  If you go out fishing, and catch nothing, you don't just pack up your cooler and go home.  You starve. 

Given that this is the case, Peter and the disciples, in their trips out fishing, must have been reasonable at the craft, else they would have been forced to stop some time ago.  Forced by hunger and failure.  But, they seem to have figured it out okay, or at least well enough to continue for the forseeable future.  And continue they did.  So when they went out fishing, catching nothing was problematic.  Unusual, and problematic.  Jesus, then, appears on the shore, and tells them to let down their nets once more, to which they respond that they've been doing this stuff all night, and haven't caught anything, but why not let their nets down and see what happens.

The attitude of telling God to butt out of what we're doing is not a new one.  Most of us in the modern age have so thoroughly compartmentalized our lives that we now sincerely believe that our faith has little to no bearing on our everyday lives.  That is, what we believe doesn't affect in any way, shape or form our lives on a daily basis.  We have a bunch of things that happen in our daily lives, and though the scriptures speak at great length about that type of situation, we treat it as though God couldn't possibly know what we're into, what our lives are all about, so we'd rather church stayed at church, and life stayed where we live.  But the scriptures have a great deal to say about how we live.  They have a lot to say about how we live, and how we operate.  Everything in our lives has hints and tips on how to do things from the Bible, and they're not hard to figure out.  When Jesus gives to us the golden rule, he tells us that we should do for others as we would have them do for us, and that's really simple.  Let that principle guide you, and you'll be in great shape, obviously.  But we, as humans, though we know this to be true, we're bad at doing it.

That should be no surprise.  Go ahead and check through the Bible, and you'll see dozens of stories of people hearing what God wants them to do, and purposefully not doing it.  Look at Naaman the Syrian bathing in the Jordan, look at Jonah being told to go to Nineveh, look at Moses being told to hold his staff over a rock, all these things should show you that people have been abundantly told by God what they should do, but they almost always say to him and about him, that they know much better than he does.  Come on, God, you don't know anything about my life or what I'm all about.  You just stay over there, and do religious things, but don't tell me how to treat people, how to conduct business, how to act at work or at home, or anything else.  But without all that, what is left?  What is it for? 

Jesus is not interested in staying in a box on a shelf, and being a compartmentalized part of your life.  He's interested in all of it.  He's interested in you, not in part of you or just you while you're at church.  He's interested in the whole thing.  And this is where we realize that the tips and tricks, the advice on what we ought to do, how we ought to behave, what we should be doing daily, that's all found in the scriptures.  Not in specifics, but in broad brush strokes, large enough to last all the way through human nature.  

It's an old problem, as old as people and their interaction with God, as old as the Garden where Adam and Eve were given only one thing that they weren't allowed to do, and they decided to do it anyway.  People perpetually saying that they know better than the Lord their God what they should be doing, and that he doesn't know what we're dealing with.  But that's the greatness of Christianity, which is that it is incarnational.  All Christianity is incarnational Christianity, and what sets the faith apart from everything else is the incarnation of Christ, God in flesh.  And his presence in the world showed
that he wasn't isolated to the Temple, that he wasn't stuck in the synagogues waiting for people to come to him, but he went to them.  He went to them where they were, and blessed them in what they were doing.  This is the trouble with being a Christian, is that God blesses your vocation, your job, your family, your home, but that means that he, his word, and his influence spill over to there too.  You can't switch this off, but he won't switch that off either.  He wants to bless your life, to go where you go, to be part of your life, and to go before you always.  There is nowhere you can go that you won't find him, because he has made everything, and then lived all the way through it.  He was born into a family, blessing families.  He showed the holiness of work by working as a carpenter, serving people through the work of his hands.  He both went to the temple and away from it, he went to that place and then went back home to live with his family, with his disciples, and his friends.  To tell God that he should just stick to his temple and not interfere with the rest of everything is to miss the point of the incarnation altogether.  It's more that just a faith where you go to where God lives and find him there, but rather the faith where God goes to where you are, and stays there always.  If you can switch him off, then you're not really coming to grips with who God is and what he's all about.  He lived, loved, grew, taught, preached, shared, died, and even descended into hell, before ascending into heaven, showing us that there is nowhere that we can go that he won't be. 

I did not know you

One of the more troubling things that you find in the scriptures is the presence of a dark warning from Jesus Christ about the afterlife.  For you see, we have a way of looking at our faith as a form of fire insurance, looking at it as a way of avoiding damnation, as a sort of 'you never know' kind of thing, where you have the kids 'done' just to be sure.  Just in case.

But there's a problem with that, and that is that it's not how it works.  The warning from Jesus is that not everyone who says 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven.  That's troubling for us, because we assume that we are a sure thing as soon as we get baptized, confirmed, whatever, then you're done.  But you're not done.  Jesus tells us that if we deny him before men, he will deny us before his father in heaven, and that's hard to hear.  It's hard to hear, because most of us have had that experience at some time or another, of denying Christ, whether actively or passively.  We've had the experience of encountering a situation which would be made slightly more awkward by mentioning or discussing our faith, and we caved.  We have almost all done this.  Either we didn't speak up when we could have, or we admitted to things that aren't true, or whatever we did to try to smooth over the situation that we found ourselves into.  If you have ever done that, if you've ever just let something go, or acted quiet when religion came up, or said that you weren't all that into Jesus when the opportunity came up, think on these words from Jesus.

If you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father who is in Heaven.

Hard words.  Hard words, made harder by the fact that they're in the confirmation liturgy.  These words are spoken to the young people in our congregation, and they are young people who, as they mature, as they go to parties and soirees, they will deny Christ whether actively or passively.

How do I know?  I know because they're human beings, and they don't outrank the disciples as far as holiness goes.  And the disciples, as soon as there was a cost to following Christ, caved as well.

The situation that the disciples found themselves in was that Jesus had been taken away, and was going to be crucified. He was nailed to a cross, left to die, and stabbed with a spear designed to end human life efficiently and brutally.  Jesus had bled out, and there was no life left in him.  They took him down from the cross, and buried him, and upon that happening, the disciples deserted, ran away, and hid.  They treated their faith as we do when it becomes uncomfortable to mention.  We hide it.  We hide it behind locked doors, free and comfortable to practice it when it's just us, but quite disturbed to do so when we're surrounded by people who may not agree with us.  We are embarrased by our faith, treating it like a girlfriend or boyfriend that we're ashamed of.  We're happy to call him or her up in the middle of the night, but we don't want anyone to see us together. 

Jesus, though, is quite serious when he says that if we deny him before men, he will deny us before our father who is in heaven, and that should trouble us.  It should trouble and bother us, because whom among us can honestly say that we have never denied Christ, have never fled from our responsibilities, have never turned from what he says and commands for the purpose of saving face.  We do all the time. It's who we are.  We like to keep our heads down as the disciples did, because if we speak up about our faith, then we may very well have something to lose.  There will be a cost to speaking up about our belief.  Peter found that out, when he promised, swore up and down, that he would never leave nor forsake Jesus, and yet immediately upon being called upon to back that up, folded instantly.  There was a cost, and Peter was unwilling to pay it.  If you're going to posit yourself as a great bastion of faith, who has never denied Christ, who has never turned your back on him and shrugged when asked, then you have put yourself above St. Peter and the rest of the disciples who, upon learning that there was a cost, were unwilling to pay, and fled.

So, what's to be done?  Are you sure you're not going to be denied before your father in heaven?  Have you fled and denied Christ?  Are you, and can you be 100% sure that Jesus, based on what you've done, will loudly and boldly announce you before his father?  Are you sure? 

And that gets to the heart of what the Christian faith is really all about, and that is certainty.  The way that Jesus did things here on earth was designed to give us certainty, to make us sure about what is going on based on what he does for us.  Why do we have baptism?  Why do we have the Lord's Supper?  We have these things because we need a sign, a physical sign of what Christ has done for us.  We need and crave that certainty.  Why do we have the vacant cross and the empty tomb?  because we need to see the reality of grace and resurrection in action.  We are frail people who, even in the presence of God, get nervous and frightened, who are concerned and perturbed by the way the world goes.  we are frightened and weak willed, and get really bothered by the cost that the Christian faith asks.  But the wondrous thing that Easter teaches us is that it's not about us.  If it were about us, then we'd be in a lot of trouble.  We'd be stuck in that perpetual loop, where we promise lifelong commitment to Jesus, fail, get disheartened, reflect on how far we've gone wrong, and then try to vault back into his esteem.  Complicated, and likely leading to frustration and despair.  But it's not about us, it's all about Him.  Our commitment is frail, his is great.  The disciples turned and fled, denied him, ran away naked if they had to, they deserted him and abandoned him, and yet Christ's commitment to them as secure.  He was nailed to the cross, dying for the sins of the whole world, including, but not limited to, those who had denied and deserted him. 

This is what the scriptures mean, and this is what we take heart in, when we hear them say

'Though we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.'