Check stop

 Advent is a curious season, where we think about and ponder not just the baby in the manger, but the Advent of this current time in the world as well. For we are Advent people forever, from the time of the ascension of our Lord until today, we have been people who have been awaiting the second, final Advent, when the King shall return.

One of the more notable aspects of the Christian faith in its development is the curious nature of the disciples, from the moment of the Ascension, looking forward to the return of Christ immediately. It's curious because we are two thousand years on, and being two thousand years on, you'd assume that the disciples would be operating in a frame of mind where they would have known that they'd have more time. You'd think that if Jesus was well aware that he'd be away for a couple thousand years, that he would have mentioned as much. But the disciples, and every generation since, have been living assuming that the return of Jesus is immediate, and that they are in that second Advent right now.

And up until now, they've all been wrong. 

Or have they?

As I said, it's a curious thing to be thinking about a second Advent, to be pondering the return of Christ and to be wrong time after time. You'd think that we would sort of chuckle at their credulity, to think about how they could have thought so much differently, but if they had thought differently, then they would have behaved differently too. We don't give enough credit to our beliefs, our thoughts, and how they inform how we live and operate, but they do. They clearly do. And if you believe, sincerely, that God will return imminently, then you will by definition behave differently than if you believed otherwise. If you believed that there was a ticking clock about everything you do, that you have limited time to get things done, that God has given you a commission and that you still have work to do to live into it, then you may very well be motivated to do it. This tracks with other kinds of things as well - if you believed that a health inspector may show up at any moment, and you believe that he could be there soon, then you'll be motivated to keep your kitchen in a reasonable state constantly. If you believe that your boss might stop by the office imminently, then you'll make sure that everything is running smoothly and is in good order. If you don't know when your wife is coming home, then you're going to want to run the dishwasher now, not leave it until much much later. 

The disciples who believed that Christ was due to return imminently were wrong about the timescale, sure, but they were right about what to do, which is ultimately more important. Right motivation, wrong timeline, but that ends up being greater overall. Why did they work so hard on behalf of the will and work of God, unless they believed that there was a lot of work to get done, and not a lot of time in which to do it.

You'd think that if someone believed that the end of the world was right there, then they would shrug, do their best to have as much fun as possible, and ride it all out. And that would be true if there was no heaven, no hell, none of it. May as well get a bucket of KFC and have fun. But if you believe that there is a heaven, and there is a hell, then you have work to do because the people you see around you will go to one or the other. It's a curious thing indeed that the disciples were more motivated rather than less, but to quote CS Lewis, those who do the best work in this world almost always seem to be the ones who think most seriously about the next.

So, as I said on Sunday morning, you can be wrong while also being right. What they told us in school was the only subject that you could have an objectively wrong answer on was math, everything else was on some kind of gradient. But when you get out into life, you find out that it's entirely possible to be right and wrong simultaneously. Lots of people are a lot of the time. Almost all conflicts are based around people doing bad things for reasonable reasons. It's not as though your enemies at home or abroad are pantomime villains just trying to be evil for evil's sake. They're by and large trying to be safe or comfortable, or well fed or whatever, and they just have the wrong way of going about it. In the case of the disciples, they're right and wrong at the same time. That is, they were wrong about the timescale of the return of Christ, but right about the fact that he was going to return, and that they should behave accordingly. 

Picture it like this: Outside of New Year's, there's a real slim chance that there's going to be a checkstop on the road. It can happen, but it's unlikely. Given that a checkstop for drunk driving is statistically very unlikely, should you drive drunk assuming that you're not going to get caught? Well, probably not, right? You're almost certainly not going to get randomly pulled over and breathalyzed, but that doesn't mean that driving drunk is a good idea. So, you can avoid drinking and driving to avoid the checkstop, get home, and say 'darn, I shouldn't have bothered being sober. There wasn't even a checkstop on the way home.' No. There wasn't. You were wrong about expecting a checkstop, but right about sober driving. 

And that's us as Christians. We are encouraged by scripture to live into each day as though the return of Christ was inevitable, and imminent. We will likely be wrong, people have been wrong about it for 2000 odd years. But though they've been wrong about the timeline, they've been right it what it makes them do. On New year's you know for sure you're going to have a checkstop on the way home, so you for sure act accordingly. No driving if you've been drinking. But you should be driving home every time like that. No exceptions. And though the return of Christ may be thousands of years away, you should still be living as though he were to return tomorrow. You would be repentant, yes? You'd be thinking of the people around you as eternal. You'd grasp onto the immediacy of the work to be done, and not put it off for forever. And that would likely mean that you'd be right by being wrong. Which is, for us, the best way to be motivated and to behave. 

Buried

 The parable of the talents, as I may have mentioned before, is so deeply ingrained into our collective psyche, that the use of the word 'talent' to mean skill or ability came directly from this parable. Before this, talent referred to a weight. 

A talent weighs 129 pounds,14 ounces. Pretty heavy if you think about it. And that's a weight of a precious metal. Imagine the level of trust you would have to have in someone to give them 5 talents of almost anything. In Canadian dollars, a talent of copper is valued at $655.90 . 5 talents of copper is worth $3,279.50. That's a lot of money, and that's not a particularly valuable metal. Silver will clock you at almost $62 thousand dollars per talent, gold at $3.7 million. Per talent. This is a lot to invest, no matter how you slice it. The man going on a journey is entrusting his servants with a lot. An awful lot. 

The expectation from the master is that the servants would, you know, do something with the resources with which they were entrusted. The idea is not that they should sit around and be idle with it, but rather that there is work to be done and that the talents they were given should be put to good use. 

But that's a lot of money to be playing around with, especially when it isn't yours. Investing always carries risk. I know you have to have money to make money, economics 101, but truly investing in a proposition that can go down is risky. And if you're playing with money you can't afford to lose, can you afford to risk it? That's the question that all the servants had to ask themselves, and 2 out of 3 decided to take the chance. They rolled the dice, made investments, and not just recouped the money, but essentially doubled it. That's what the master had in mind. But when he comes to the third one, the one who was given the least, that third one took the resources and buried them. That way, when the master comes back, he'll get back exactly what he put in.

Now, here's the issue. It is the temptation in the heart of us all to take the talent and bury it. And I'm not talking about money anymore. I'm talking about the things God has entrusted you with. Believe it or not, and I hope you do, you are made completely unique. That is, there has never been another you, nor will there be another one. You are one of a kind. And just like a talent is a weight measurement without any clear composition of material, so too could a talent that you have be anything. But God has entrusted everyone with a talent, you know. Absolutely everyone. All of us have at least one talent that God, in his ineffable wisdom, has entrusted us. He has given you and only you the makeup that forms you into who you are, and he has given that to you for a reason. 

Think about the nature of humanity according to Scripture - You are God's workmanship, created by him to do good works, which he has prepared in advance for you to do. You have been put into this world with the talents that you've got in order that you might do something with them. But the thing is, by and large, we don't think about our talents as being worth very much, or being very useful. There are people all around you who have skills, talents, abilities far more than you could ever possibly hope to keep up with, and they're real useful. The five talents, the two talents, they have a lot they can do, and are doing. And then there's you. One talent. It's not worth much. What are you supposed to do with that? Just take it and bury it? Probably. 

But the thing is that that talent has been entrusted to you for a reason. Because you are the only one who can do anything with it. Nobody else can use your skills or talents, nobody else can do anything with what has been entrusted to you. It's been entrusted to you, you know. Something amazing that happens with us as Christians, is that we have been uniquely equipped and placed to minister to and to work with matters of eternity. The people who you deal with on a regular basis are eternal, they are people for whom Christ died. Therefore, by definition, what you do with them matters. It's of eternal consequence. And what that means is that you have been given time and space in which to operate and to engage in matters that are of crucial importance to you and to them. 

yeah, but what's the point?

 I try my best to not spend more time traveling to a place than I'm going to spend at the place. Like if you're going to drive to Saskatoon from here, you'd better spend more than 6 hours in Saskatoon, otherwise what's the point? It becomes a sink, and I'd rather not drive all the way to Saskatoon, eat at Fuddrucker's, then drive back. Harder and harder to justify all the time.

Now, let's say that it's a sink proposition, but involving earth itself. Imagine if you knew for absolute certain, no doubt whatsoever, that there was an asteroid approaching earth that we could collectively do nothing about. No last minute reprieve, no space cowboys, no Armageddon, no nothing. Just the knowledge that things were going to wrap up in about a week and a half. What do you do? 

Well, the first thing people would do would be to stop planning for the future. All done with that. No planting, no watering, no gardening, nothing. People would probably spend all the money in their bank accounts, but who would be around to take the money? People would spend time with family and friends as much as possible, but why bother being kind and generous to strangers? May as well eat all the fatty and salty food you want, given that your waistline is about to get atomized. And so on and so on. 

If you knew for sure that the entire world and all human beings who had ever lived were just going to get fossilized, then why bother being brave or noble or helpful or charitable or any of it? If you don't believe that there is a God or paradise or anything, then it wouldn't make sense to do any of that at all. Because as time grows short, you may as well focus more and more on yourself, and tickle that lizard brain with whatever you can. Drink, do drugs, and the fewer and fewer long term consequences that there are, the less it's going to matter. That's why very very few last meals that prisoners order are healthy. May as well get a giant bucket of Kentucky fried chicken, if there's not going to be a tomorrow to worry about. 

But for the Christian, the outlook changes completely. If you know that time is running out, then you have a limited time indeed to do anything good. Not that paradise will be bad, you understand - it'll be paradise. By definition. But if it's paradise, then your bravery and generosity will not be needed. Not that they're not good things, but they're good in opposition to the badness that we have here on earth. If you believe in paradise as a place where the tears are wiped away from every eye and the sun will not strike you by day nor the moon by night, all that, then you won't have to take care of people in the same way you do here. Here is where you have to be good and generous, here is where you have to do what is right and true. Here is where your neighbor needs your help because here is where he is cold, lonely and miserable. He won't be in paradise. But he is here. 

If you knew for sure that Christ was going to return in a week, you would, hopefully, be all the busier leading up to that than you would otherwise, because he both commands it, and because this is a limited time affair. Heaven is forever, but your opportunity to be brave or noble or to sacrifice yourself or anything like that is really quite limited. Hebrews 10 discusses how we should encourage each other towards good deeds, and to not neglect meeting together especially now as the day of his return is drawing near. That was two thousand years ago. Christ still hasn't returned. Does that mean that Paul, Peter, James and John were all wrong in assuming that the return of Christ was imminent? Or does it mean that all Christians must live as though the return of Christ was right around the corner. 

If we believed that the return of Christ was both soon and inevitable, then we would likely behave differently. Spread the gospel more, be more charitable to people, work harder to feed and clothe people before judgment day and the end of everything. In both scenarios (asteroid and return of Christ) the world ends and it's all over. But for the Christian, even if the world blinks out of existence, the people that inhabited it are still around, and are, in fact, eternal. 

The world's gonna end either way. You know it and I know it. And you have a couple of ways that you can look at that information. Either the world ends and everything you did was completely inconsequential, or the world ends and how you treated people is of desperate, eternal consequence. Surprisingly enough, even people who have no faith in God tend to behave more towards the latter being true than the former. It's probably a good idea every once in a while to think about why that is. 

New Coke

 Remember New Coke?

I would imagine that more of us remember the idea of New Coke more than remember New Coke. That is, certain things seep into consciousness so that you 'remember' them whether you remember them or not. Books and movies work like that too, certain books are things that we all feel like we've read since they're so culturally prevalent. Movies too. You don't need to see 'the sound of music' or 'star wars' at this point to have seen them, if you see what I mean.

And New Coke fits that bill too. New Coke was when the coca-cola corporation reformulated their, uh, formula, in order that they may compete better with pepsi and associated drinks. The formula was altered to be New Coke, and was instantly hated by the public. It was so hated that the old coke formula came back, and was rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic. And New Coke wouldn't be seen again until its relaunch in 2019 as a Stranger Things tie-in novelty. It actually sold briskly due to the nostalgia factor.

I bring up New Coke because it was, and is, a cautionary tale. Coca-Cola is the number one selling soft drink in every country in the world apart from Scotland. There, they drink Irn Bru. So if Coca-Cola is so popular, if everyone seeeeeeems to like it okay, then what is the benefit to changing the formula. Or, to put it another way, what would the possible benefit be of changing it?

Let's talk about God's holy church: God's church is something that, like Coca-Cola, cannot be improved by adding anything or reworking the formula. You're not going to make Coke, or Ghostbusters, or Psycho, or the scriptures any better by adding your cool new spin to it. All it's going to do is to make things worse. But over time, the church, as it tends to do, added more and more to life and doctrine. And when it did, it made things worse. Demonstrably. 

Here's my go to point - celibate clergy. Now, if you were to ask a Roman Catholic, they'd say that Saint Peter, Simon Peter, was the first pope. They would also say that Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and especially the Pope, are supposed to be celibate. But Peter was absolutely married. Jesus healed his mother-in-law, Paul wrote about how Christians have the right to a believing spouse, as Peter did. So why can clergy not be married? New Coke. We know what the scriptures said, we just want to add something to it, and by doing so, make it worse. Roman Catholics may disagree with me, but I would posit that bucking the trend that Saint Peter first exemplified has brought nothing but trouble into the church. Why are you doing it? Did Christ give direct instruction for clergy to remain unwed? Did God reveal it in scripture? Did Paul write on the topic favourably? Quite the opposite, actually. So why do you feel the need to New Coke it?

Frequently, what I tend to find is that the arguments people have against the church are arguments largely against what we did to it, not what the content of the scriptures actually are. Or, to talk about my rather tortured metaphor, people dislike New Coke, they all do, but not Coca-Cola Classic. 

The rush to return to Coca-Cola Classic was because everyone hated New Coke. And the Protestant Reformation was a return to Church, Scripture Classic. What Martin Luther brought forward wasn't anything new, quite the opposite. He just wanted to go back to what already worked, what was positive, what was of God, and to abandon all the changes that really didn't work. It's not going forward, it's going backwards.

 And when we talk about the spirit of the reformation still now, part of what we're doing is to discuss the necessity to have every generation pull the scriptures back from where they've been concealed by us, and to discover it anew. Not by looking at the doctrine and adding new spin to it, but in doing the phenomenal nature of pulling the word of God forward, and finding it again. That's the reformation spirit - finding out how good Coca-Cola Classic was from the beginning.

Grace

What I like about the scriptures is that they're inflexible in what they say. There's something about the Lord Christ, which is that he doesn't walk anything back. Nothing at all. Unlike the rest of us, he says what he says and stands by it hard. He isn't the type to say what he says and then walk it back and apologize. Instead, he says what he says and leaves us with it.

This is unlike everything else that we have. Consider the constitution of the United States, a country in which I don't live. That constitution was written by the men of the day, some of whom owned human beings. It seems so foreign to us now that the nation to our south was one where humans could be owned, but that was outlawed by a constitutional amendment, the 13th one, in 1865. That was where the US Government declared that owning people was to be, from now on, illegal in the United States. 

This is a matter of some interest because the constitution of that country, and most others, is a document like magic mud - both solid and liquid depending on what's happening to it. It's set, but malleable.  But it can be changed, if people move on, then you're going to be in a world in which the way in which things were done no longer helps, you know? If this were impossible, then people who owned people a long time ago would be able to have their actions define the future in perpetuity. If you're an American citizen, you don't have to let what people did a long time ago dictate what you are allowed to do now, you can say that things change, and you can walk stuff back.

But Christ doesn't. His words stand, no matter what we do or say or believe. For the words of Christ, and the words of scripture which are the same thing, don't change based on how much we change or develop. And that's hard for us to get our heads around. Usually, we change laws and so on to fit what we're doing right now, or what we want to be doing at any given moment. Usually something becomes moral once we begin doing it, and things that were outlawed for a long time can become permitted in a moment.  But we don't get to change the Bible, nor the words of Jesus Christ. Those things stay the same in season and out of season. And that means that we get to choose what to do with passages like we had on Sunday, where we hear about how we are to treat one another. Now this was in Paul's letter to the Romans, and the romans had some pretty unusual ideas according to us, things like using urine as mouthwash, and feeding the dead.  You'd think with a society that wacky, that you could by and large ignore most of what they say about life and such. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. 

As a Christian today, you're living a couple of thousand years after Paul wrote his words, but most people would find it hard to argue too much with his words today. In reality, not much has changed in the two thousand years since he wrote them. That is, we don't feed the dead a lot these days, and we tend to use scope or whatever, but the material function of humanity is much the same as it always has been. You have friends, you have enemies, you have to navigate a world in which you have both at the same time. Not everyone is going to like you too much, you're not going to like everyone, and you're going to have to deal with that fact, like it or not. 

By and large, we believe that we are supposed to be good and kind. And that's a thing that gets said a lot, a sentiment expressed constantly, and if it were the case that we were supposed to be good and kind, and everyone believed in us being good and kind, why are things in the state that they're in? All we're doing is saying be good, be better and so on, but we can rarely pull that trick off. Rather, we all have the best of intentions, but something gets in the way - that thing tends to be other people. L'enfer c'est les autres, as Sartre would say, or in English, Hell is other people. The main difficulty in being good, kind and better is that you're going to run into real human beings. And those human beings tend to want to do things that you don't want them to do. If you could be good in a vacuum, if you could love in a vacuum without having to be good to people, or to be kind to people, you'd be set. But people aren't like bricks or butter or anything - they're people. And most of our rhetoric is about being nice without any practical advice on how to pull that off. Which means that by and large, we have an idea where we should be better, yes, and then when we can't because people are rotten and seek their own way, then we default to treating them as toxic people, and avoiding them. Cut that negativity out of your life!

So what that does is to reduce our human being interaction into a very small world. Love people, but only those who are safe to love, and that's a problem, because nobody is safe to love, really. And then we have as our capacity only to love those who we haven't found out are scumbags yet. But we will. Over a long enough period of time, everyone will let you down and disappoint you, if you eventually let them. The only ones who won't are the ones who die before you can find out. But everyone else, from the people with whom you live to the people in your neighborhood, will bother and upset you. Will you cut them down, or will you be good to them.

Ah, but you don't feel like being good to them, do you? They're toxic and bad and narcissistic and whatever else the buzzwords to describe sin are. Well and good, and that's extremely true. But what do you do with them if God tells you to love them? Well, Paul tells you what to do - 'If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he's thirsty, give him to drink. In doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head.' Friend, you're called to love those who are difficult to love. Sometimes you'll feel like it, and then it's really easy for you to be good to them. Sometimes you won't want to, and then you can be encouraged by God to heap burning coals on their heads like scripture tells you to. 

But you know that you're supposed to be good to one another. The world tells you to be kind, Christ tells you to be good, and though it's hard, you are called to love your enemies. How do you begin to grapple with that? To understand the level of grace that was given to you in Christ. That is, if you understand properly what was given to you through Christ, then you'll be far more willing to be good to those around you. It's hard for us to love one another if we believe that we are good, and that when things don't go well, they're the problem of everyone around us. But if we understand ourselves as forgiven people of grace, then it's far far easier to love those who are hard to love. Because you understand yourself as hard to love too. You can find yourself as someone who is loved by God in spite of your self obsession, not because of it. And once you get that, then other people are far harder to fight on that topic.

Sow what?

 The parable of the sower is one of those interesting parables which you don't have to work too hard to interpret. Why, you may ask? Because unlike a lot of other parables, the interpretation is in the text. It's one of those passages where the meaning isn't up to a whole lot of quibbling. The text tells you what the text is about.

So why do we act as though the text is complicated?

We do this because we do not wish for the text to mean what it says. This is part of what it means when Jesus says 'anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.' As children, when God forbids, we fearfully consider the consequences of breaking his word. When God commands, we consider what he prompts us to do, and try to act accordingly. And when God tells you what his parables mean, children tend to take that meaning as it is printed. But eventually you grow up, you put childish things away, and you begin to look at the scriptures in a new light. 

And what you find yourself doing is being too smart for the scriptures to mean what they say. You do the thing where you say 'oh gosh. Jesus Can't POSSIBLY have meant that.' You reasons for doing so are rarely because you've gotten deep into the text. Your reasons are almost always that Jesus tells you not to do what you want to do, and therefore you have a choice. Change what you do, or try to change what Jesus says. As children, we are encouraged to change our behavior. As adults, we tend to change what Jesus said. That's the automatic response.

So when it comes to the parable of the sower, it clearly says that some of the ground is inhospitable to the seed that is scattered. Some of the ground is too trodden down, or full of weeds, or rocky or what have you. Jesus bothers to explain why that is, what those various things mean, but it seems strange for us to say that all this ground is clearly hospitable to germination. It isn't.

It's very difficult to be universalist when considering this readings, given that some of the soil just isn't conducive for the growth of the seed that is scattered. Jesus clearly says that there are people, that there is soil, that will not be up for the word of God to take root and grow. You can wish that wasn't true, and I wish it wasn't true either. But that doesn't stop it from being there. 

So what to do? I'm not prepared to surrender the point, given that I know that "God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." If that's the case, then what do we do with the unfertile ground?

Think about any field you've ever seen, either one that is filled with crops and is being fruitful, or one that is lying fallow for a while. Think of your garden outside of your house, or even something as simple as a window box. Think of it, and ask yourself how maintenance free it actually is. Is that space something that can be left completely alone? Or is it something that requires work? And even more than that, is work that has to be done on that garden plot something that you do once only, or do you have to do it multiple times? 

If you weed your garden plot, you don't just weed it once ever. And you can't respond to criticisms of weeds being in your plot by saying 'I weeded it last year!' Weeds come back. New stones get revealed. The quality of the soil ebbs and flows, but cannot be left to its own devices. Bad soil must be improved. Good soil must be maintained. 

Anyone who would read the parable and say that it is unfair, given how there seems to be some soil that is good and some bad, seems to forget that Christ is not just an arbiter of right and wrong. His primary work is not judge, but redeemer, and sanctifier. It's not as though he arrives on the earth as he who scatters the word then leaves the soil to its own devices. He's not just the sower. He's the gardener too.

We see in another parable how there is a question about a tree that is not bearing any fruit. The request from the landowner is to chop it down - why should it use up the ground? But the gardener doesn't spring into action and chop the tree down, no no. Instead, he says 'let's tend it, let's water it, let's fertilize it, and give it another year.' 

In the divine service, part of what happens is that we confess, and are forgiven. And we're confessing our cares, our worries, our lack of depth or seriousness, that kind of thing. And Christ forgives. He makes new. He breaks up the path, picks the rocks, pulls the weeds, all that sort of thing. You're not good soil based on you hearing the word, you are made and kept as good soil by the work of Christ. That's his work, friends, that's what he does. To scatter the seed, and tend the soil. Sure, it goes bad, goes fallow, but that's why we go back and confess over and over again. To be restored. 

Who is the Trinity?

 Who is God?

A classic question, and one that the Christian answers (hopefully) by saying that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity. Yes, that's a correct answer, but it's also a slightly confusing answer for someone who didn't grow up swimming in that water.

What I mean by that is that a fish doesn't know it's wet. And a lifelong Christian doesn't know that he or she is a Christian. They know that they're a Christian, yes, obviously, but they don't conceive properly of a universe where Christian principles aren't taken for granted. Thus, they sort of sputter when asked to explain the Trinity. Three in one and one in three, yes, but what does that mean? It's very difficult for anyone to explain this without using analogies that fall apart. The shamrock, the egg, the person who can be at the same time father son and employee, all that. They all break down, because, well, the Trinity is something completely external to us. Not just external to us, external to the observable universe.

Given that the Trinity is external to us, and to the universe, the most useful place to start talking about it is where it intersects with the reality that we can observe. And what is that most pronounced space? 

Who is God?

Well, who are you?

You're someone who exists, if you're reading this. If you're looking at this page, we can agree that you're here. And thanks for reading, by the way. So how'd you get here? One may say that we are a product of our times, we're a product of things that happened by accident, whatever. Whether you believe that we are a product of natural processes, or a product of God's infinite creation process, you're here. Now, in the church, we would say that we were made, and made by God. We tend to respond well to the notion that we were created by the majesty of God. too. There is a principle in philosophy called the 'anthropic principle.' It simply suggests that not only does the universe exist, but that we are in a position to see, observe, and catalogue it. Something happened.

Something. Could be anything, but at this point, given a lack of abiogenesis, a lack of proof of aliens from space seeding life and so on, given the lack of anything like that, the proposition of creation by the Lord God makes as much sense as anything else, so why not? We would say we are created, we would say that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. That's good so far. If you're here, let's just say that the something that brought you here could be God. Why not. 

So you were made. But something went wrong. You were made with a conscience, a moral compass if you will. And forgetting the Bible, or your religion or anything like that, just your own standards of how people should behave, you break those standards that you would set for other people fairly regularly. That is, you know what you should do, and you don't do it. Even according to your own principles. And you also have things that you should do that you aren't. On a regular basis. Again, according to your own principles. That's a problem for the long term, as well as the short. And if you don't believe me, then go out into the world and witness a world full of graffiti and locked doors and security systems and guards designed to keep things on lockdown because, well, people can't be trusted. Good thing too, because if people were allowed free roam to look at and take whatever they wanted, well, they'd take everything. And you know this, given that you lock your house and car and garage and bicycle and everything else. You don't leave any of those things unsupervised, because you know that someone would take them. The people that might take them aren't monsters though. They are thieves, but they don't think of themselves as being bad people. Think of the thief on the cross, who insisted that Jesus should save himself and them. And understand that in the same way as these people don't think of themselves as bad people, so too do you not think of yourself as a bad person. You were short with your wife, but you're not an angry person. You didn't return that wallet, but finders keepers. You scanned the nectarines as though they were bananas at WalMart, but they factor that sort of thing into the prices right? 

But those are all things you wouldn't want someone to do to you. Those are things that you would be very offended if they happened to you. You'd be affronted, bothered and angry. As you should be. But those things that you do are transgressing the moral law of the universe, of God, and of your own standards. That's the bad news. But you have a curious way of thinking of yourself - you don't behave the way people should behave, but you think of yourself as being a basically good person. The only way to square that circle is to release the misdeeds you've done, so that although you do bad things, you can still be seen to be a good person. Which is how you see yourself, and how you want to be seen by everyone. You're a person who has been made, and now you're a person who has done bad things but is still a good person. That's the work of the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, the word of God made flesh. The word of God that takes the law of God, and gives you his salvation. 

But of course, that's all esoteric philosophy right? The problem by and large with philosophy is that it exists in textbooks and theory. It's not really all that practical, or to quote Aliens 'it's very pretty, but it doesn't really get us anywhere now does it?' The human condition is by default to be 'spiritual but not religious.' That is, to have an idea about a God out there somewhere, but to have no real conception of him as a person or as personal. But through the Holy Spirit, you can actually believe. You can believe the most important words that are spoken in scripture, in the liturgy, certainly by your pastor "For You." Without that work of the Holy Spirit, the Bible's just a book, God is unknown and it's all closed down. But you're probably a person who believes, so there's something that happened to make that book real, those words real, all that. And that's the work of the Holy Spirit.

So who is God? Who are you? You're someone who has been created, was redeemed, and believes in that. If you wonder about the Trinity being too complicated, don't start with God. Start with you.

Like a roaring lion

Not too terribly long ago, a YouGov poll came out which asked the big questions. It asked, reasonably enough, which of the following animals you think you could beat in a fight.  An unarmed fight, Mano a Mano, so to speak. The animals are : Kangaroo, Eagle, Grizzly Bear, Wolf, Lion, gorilla, chimpanzee, king cobra, elephant, crocodile, goose, rat, house cat, medium sized dog, large dog. As you may guess, most people were confident in their chances against a rat. That size difference would come into play really early, I guess. But things fall apart a bit as you continue to read, where you find that 61% of American men think they could beat a goose (still believable), 30% of American men think they could beat an eagle (highly unlikely), and 17% of American men think they could beat a chimpanzee. Unarmed.

No you can't.

Those 17% of men are delusional. There isn't one man in a thousand, possibly one man in a million who would stand a chance against a chimpanzee unarmed. The injuries they cause are immediate and horrific, and anyone thinking that he can just go toe to toe with one is delusional. Shockingly, only 14% of men believe they could beat a kangaroo, which is odd, given that we have literal video evidence of a regular guy winning in a fist fight with a Kangaroo, and as far as I can tell, no evidence whatsoever of a human being winning a bare knuckle brawl against a chimpanzee. 

So what would lead these gentlemen to this conclusion? Truly, a lack of humility. You overestimate your abilities, and you way way underestimate the abilities of a chimpanzee, which is perfectly capable of tying your neck in a knot. I'm not even going to include a link to chimpanzee caused injuries, but they're not pretty.

In that survey, 8% of american men and 2% of British men believe that they could beat a lion in an unarmed fight. That number is really zero percent. But you know who would be happy with that overconfidence? The lion would. 

Truly, the lion would relish the idea of easily killed food showing up and posturing, trying to start something. The lion would be thrilled if you showed up and started swinging at it. After all, most prey runs, hides, swims or flies away, and the lion has to chase it. Most prey has worked out by now that a lion will make you go away pretty quickly, and you don't really want to try tangling with it. But that 8% is a godsend. A very tasty godsend. 

We are enjoined by the reading from 1 Peter to humble ourselves, and to be realistic with ourselves. We are told to humble ourselves in the presence of the great shepherd of the sheep, for good reason. The reason given is that there is a roaring lion prowling around seeking whom he may devour. Friend, do you fancy your chances in an unarmed fight against a roaring lion? Sure, you don't. Hopefully you're not in that 8%. Hopefully you're in the 92% of people who know that a lion would devastate you very very quickly indeed. That's why you take precautions, of being where lions aren't, of avoiding them and arming yourself. That's why you, if you were to be in the area where they are, would travel with someone experienced and armed themselves. If you go out into the savanna with chest puffed out daring the lion to fight you, it'll destroy you right away. 

If you know that about the lions, you should also know that about the devil. The devil is a roaring lion, prowling around, seeking whom he may devour. He's very interested in dragging you away, and removing all trace of you. If you are full of yourself, if you believe that you are the 8%, the devil is happy for you to try your luck. And I would wager that the numbers for people who believe that they could take on the devil is far far higher than those who believe they could take on a lion. Lion numbers are 8%, devil numbers have got to be around 40%, or even higher. Humans vs the prince of darkness, and humans believe that  they can win. Part of the reason that church attendance is down, that observance is reduced, is because people legitimately don't believe that there is a risk. They believe that they can overcome the devil and all his works and all his ways with their own force of will. 

But a great deal of what we acknowledge is that from the beginning until now, the serpent, the dragon, the lion are things that overwhelm us when we fight them alone. When it's just us, with our plucky attitudes and dismissal of any danger at all, we get destroyed rapidly. And that hubris and overconfidence is what the devil wants. What he doesn't want is for you to be careful, cautious, prudent, and humble. He doesn't want you humbling yourself and being obedient to the great shepherd of the sheep. He would much rather that you trust you own strength. But humble yourself, understand who you are, who the devil is, and who Christ is, and you will find yourself, rapidly, in a space of protection. Why do we get baptized, why do we take the Lord's Supper, why are we in worship at all except to acknowledge that we are people who cannot free ourselves, who cannot protect ourselves, and who are incapable of fighting against the one who wants to destroy us. But Jesus has overcome the devil already. He insists on calling himself the shepherd because he knows how much we need his help and assistance, and how helpless we are on our own. But with Christ, with his weapons and experience, with his skill and strength, we can make a stand against the evil one. 

Rank communism

When our reading from Acts comes up, as it does every few years, it's time to talk about communism. For when you read through the pericopes from Acts, communism rears its red head. 

Now, there are a lot (and I do mean a lot) of generally conservative Christians who will be opposed to communism in all its forms, which is a big ask, given what is contained within the readings. When it says that the disciples were distributing all the proceeds of all the property that people had as any had need, it's hard for anyone to say that the principle 'from each according to his ability, to each according to its needs' is against God and scripture. It's not. Like it's really not. But if you have a knee-jerk reaction against communism, you'll find that you're rejecting, you know, something that the disciples directly did in scripture. The foundation of the community that the disciples led in the first century was communistic, plain and simple. You may not like the label, but it was exactly that.

So why does communism fail, if it's in scripture, and is part of the first community of believers? Well, it's all about the base assumptions, and we'll move on from there.

You essentially have to start out from realistic principles before you can go any further.  If you don't, then you literally can propose a universe in which chimpanzees will be likely to be observant communists. Which they won't. They'll be far more likely to be good cannibals than good communists. But they won't all work, combine all their resources and so on and so on. It won't come together. If we're going to look at communism, and to discuss why it won't work, the reason for it is that it's based on a lack of understanding in human nature. The idea was that people would work, and work collectively for the good of everyone, and would be content to socialize profits and so on. But any conception of communism sort of falls apart at the first hurdle of human nature. 

In the church, we understand that human beings are by nature sinful and unclean. That is, they cannot be trusted to share and distribute properly without the idea that they might very well steal and keep for themselves. The essential problem with communism isn't that the individual workers would be bad at being communists - in many ways they'd be okay. If you're working in a factory, it doesn't matter to you too much who owns it. But the real rot settles in at the top. 

The criticism of communism from the 20th century and beyond was always that those on the top, the commissars, the politburo, would always have a world that was unequal to the max. All animals, as they say, are equal, but some are more equal than others. The ordinary soviet was expected to be a good hard worker, and expected to give his labor to the society and so on, but those in charge would get awfully comfy. It became very quickly caviar and champagne for the politburo on the top, but nothing but grinding labor and breadlines for those on the bottom, and that didn't change much over the course of the soviet union. Essentially, if you're counting on someone to distribute goods and resources equitably, you're going to have to count on them to be good, well meaning people. Which they probably aren't. 

That's not fair. They probably start out with the absolute best of intentions, but the world has a habit of getting in the way. And what that means is that things start out well enough, but when you give people power and authority over others, there's a good chance that they'll fall apart, as they do. They literally can't be trusted not to take all those goods and services, and funnel them to themselves. 

The only real prescription is to understand from the beginning that even the people who you have in charge to help out with everything won't be doing a very trustworthy job with it. You have to start understand that literally everyone is a flawed human who is essentially up to no good.

Once you figure that out, then everything else makes more sense. If communism is built up off of the idea that a utopia is possible, and that you will one day not have the poor with you, then you'll be disappointed very rapidly, given how the ideals run smack into the reality of humanity. Your utopia runs aground because it doesn't deal with the harsh world of humans as they are.

But the scriptures do. Which is why the Bible, and the disciples, will tell you that it's very unlikely indeed that people will do things out of the goodness of their hearts. People are sinful, and that's why they need the governance that they get. They literally cannot be relied on to do the right thing, which is a fact of life, and the sooner we work that out, the sooner we can get past the communism vs capitalism idea, and get back to the idea from scripture: that you are called upon to do what you have to do with those who are around you. In reality, the Christian faith is less concerned with capitalism vs communism, and more concerned with what you do as an individual person. That is, you have a chance in this world to do the right thing, to be a neighbor to those who are directly around you. At any moment you have been placed in an environment where helpful, important things are right in front of you to do, and you can do them, or not. But you know that it's not up to the politburo or the commissars to take care of all utopia for you, but rather for you to step boldly into the world that you have been placed into. Whether a communist or capitalist society, your neighbor will need you regardless. Don't wait for all things to be made right. If you believe that resources should be distributed, you have resources to distribute. If you believe that the poor should be fed, you have food. If you believe that things should be more equitable, then make things more equitable .If you don't want that to be your problem, then you'll understand how the very very rich feel. But they have the same responsibility that you do, just on a larger scale. To provide for the needs that they see.

Come out

 I heard a sermon about the raising of Lazarus that talked about how even though Jesus of Nazareth called Lazarus out of the tomb, Lazarus still had to decide how to react to such a command.

Which is wrong.  I'll explain why.

I'd wager that you haven't heard of this movie outside of me talking about it, but there was a movie from the 1980s called 'return to horror high.' This movie had in it a very young George Clooney who, before he was a big star, got written out of the film first. The film is all about the making of a film, a film within a film, as it were. In this film, while the cast are being horribly murdered, the cast are still trying to make a movie, and do so with the usual director / cast interplay. And this interplay is at its most interesting in a discussion between the director and a cast member who is portraying a corpse in the scene.

Corpse: What's my motivation in this scene?

Director (Exasperated): You're dead. Dead people have no motivation. They don't do anything! They just lie there!

Fin.

I'm sure I have now spoken more about 'return to horror high' more than any of the cast or crew in the last two decades. But be that as it may, the content of the conversation is very important to talk about Lazarus in relation to it. What do dead people do? Nothing. They don't do anything. Importantly, they have no motivation. When we talk about Lazarus and his decision to respond to the call of Jesus, you have to think about his status as a corpse before we think about anything else. If he is incapable of motivation on account of being dead, then he is also incapable of responding to any kind of call. Go ahead, give commands to the pork chops on your table, and see what transpires. Pretty much nothing, right? Being dead meat, they don't get to decide how to respond to your commands. In order for the decision to be made, the individual must first be able to decide, which necessitates them being alive in the first place. In other words, you're going to have to be alive to make any choices, including the choice to listen to Christ or not. He literally can't make any decisions about how to react to Jesus before Jesus makes a key decision for him - to make him alive. 

That is the choice upon which every other choice depends, and in reality, it is the choice that none of us can make. Oh sure, we can decide to stay alive, to avoid death and thereby to continue making choices, but the choice to be alive is a choice that only someone else can make for us. In the first birth, that was our parents, as we were all born by the will of parents, but in the case of the second birth (being born again), it's of the will of God. You see, the scriptures talk about us as being dead in our trespasses, and there being no health in us. That may seem like bad news, but it's surprisingly good news. 

It's good news because it takes the responsibility for salvation away from you and your responses, and places it where it belongs. With God. The Lord doesn't have a reasoned discussion with Lazarus, allowing him to decide where he falls on the life or death equation, rather Jesus grants him life, and then all further decisions from Christ will proceed from that one. When we're talking about our Christian life, we're talking about a life that begins with Baptism, with us being called out of our death in trespasses and to new life in Christ. Once we have been awakened to Christ, then any excellent decision we make can flow from that first one. Not without it. Any decision that we can make that is good and God pleasing flows from that in the same way as Lazarus walking from the tomb is predicated on being alive in the first place. 

Once you work that out, then the grace of God carries a lot of weight - it is the difference between death and life, you know. The reality is that you're not going to make a lot of decisions if you're dead, and you're not going to make a lot of decisions for Christ if you're dead in your trespasses. That's why Jesus calls it a new birth, being born again. That means that your life in Christ is his will not yours. So you don't have to worry about if you did it right, or decided correctly. You did not choose him, he chose you. That's why the rest of the decisions you can possibly make all flow from that. 

Adding

 Okay, remember how I mentioned Pierre Berton's 'the comfortable pew' on Sunday? If you don't remember that, I'd like to mention that in his recollection of what he didn't like about going to church as a child was that he was hungry in church. Not that unusual, of course, but what was unusual was that he was hungry because he wasn't allowed to eat anything before he had Holy Communion that day. That is, Holy Communion had to be the first thing to pass his lips that day. 

Okay, but why?

Who asked you to do that? It wasn't God, you know. And so too, we have seen twitter users recently claiming that for Lent they're going to stop using twitter, and then when they inevitably get on and tweet more than they ever did before, they remind everyone that lent isn't about giving something up, guys. It's about spiritual discipline, and so on and so on.

Okay, but why? And who asked you to give up twitter? Or anything?

The thing is, as a Christian, you have to think about what it is Paul wrote in our Epistle reading from Sunday - you have to discern what is pleasing to God. It's tough to do, you know, to work out what it is that God wants, and it's all the harder when you are listening to two voices on the topic. And it's not necessarily the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. In fact, frequently, it's God on one shoulder, and you on the other. You may very well conflict with God based not on what the devil wants, but based on what you want. And that's tougher. 

By and large, that gets so conflated that you end up evangelizing not with the pure Christian gospel, but instead the Gospel as filtered through you. And that ends up being a major problem, given that you are going to present to the world a Christian faith that is very particular to yourself, and likely not as particular for the person to whom you are presenting it. And that makes it a very difficult sell. The reason it's such a hard sell is that if the faith that you are bringing to someone is the faith about you not the faith about Christ, then you're asking people to believe in the idol that you've made for yourself.

It's so easy to fall into as well, these extra steps that seem so good and so necessary. Don't drink any wine, don't dance, no playing cards, no staying out too late, no dating, all this stuff that seems so good and helpful but in reality is a barrier to the faith. You will find, over and over again, that people will disagree not so much with the faith of the scriptures, but with the extra steps that you show to them. You will show them that Jesus loves them, he cares for them, he dies to forgive their sins, but then you add to it with your cool fun political takes that don't belong. And that's the hard part. It's hard to admit sometimes that the thing you add is what actually subtracts from the appeal, but we all have to understand that sometimes things are just right, and that if you add anything to it, it can only get worse.

This is evident in film, of course, where you have a classic film, like Ghostbusters or Psycho or whatever, and someone decides to remake it. Some films are so good that nothing can be added to them without making them worse. The only question in making those films is to ask 'if it is different, then your changes made it worse. If it is the same, your film was unnecessary.' Even the original filmmakers come back and work on their projects again, if the project was any good in the first place, it will almost always turn out worse.

Part of what you have to understand, and it's hard, is that you are an ambassador of Christ. You are there to represent him as your savior. And if you represent him as your savior but with certain strings attached, all you'll do is to hold him back. You won't make it good or better for everyone if the Lord exclusively works within your paradigm. Instead, you will present to them a very small God indeed. A God that is exclusive to you.

One of the things that the Israelites learned was that unlike the nations around them who worshiped very small gods, the Israelites worshiped a God who seemed to know that other nations existed. A God who made moral pronouncements that affected the nation within as well as the nations without. A God who was truly and genuinely concerned about the welfare not just of one people, but of all people. And every time they tried to put strings on that, the story got worse, the same that we do. But God does call them back, to repentance, to clarity, and to his word, so that they can see that in its purity, the grace of God is sufficient.

It's all been done

 Yeah, today we have John 3:16. It's one of those readings that, as a pastor, you sort of dread, because what kind of new and fun spin can you put on John 3:16? What more are you going to say about the reading that pretty much everyone knows to death? In reality, there's not too much you can do with it, you know? Not much that you can say that everyone doesn't already know about. This isn't an obscure story about a judge who accidentally promised to kill his daughter, or a story about a king being so fat that when he got stabbed in the bathroom, his fat closed over the dagger. No, this is John 3:16, the 'Bible in a nutshell.' Everyone knows it. It's on tea towels, stickers, hats and jelly bracelets. You can find it on absolutely everything, and it's the one verse that everyone seems to know. 

But let's take a quick peek at how it shows up in the overall readings for Sunday. Because the readings have Abram being called by God, and being told that God was going to make of him a great nation, and that his descendants would be like the sand on the beach or the stars in the sky. All good news so far. And Abram, as an old man, does eventually have a couple of kids. Ishmael, and Isaac. Through Isaac comes the lineage of Israel, and eventually the birth of Jesus Christ, the messiah. That means that the words that God spoke came through, that through Abram all the would would be blessed.

But spare a thought for your friend and mine Nicodemus. We like to get a bit smug about this, as people who live in a baptism world, but it's easy for us to look at Nicodemus who asks a reasonable question like he's just a bozo. He asks 'how can a man be born again? Can he go back into his mother's womb when he is old?' Ha ha, doesn't he know about baptism? 

Well, no. 

Not only does he not know about baptism, which he doesn't, but he also has a realistic reaction. Think about the crowds gathered around Jesus who say 'we are children of Abraham, and we have never been slaves to anyone.' Think about the accusations towards Peter in the New Testament, that he ate with gentiles. The people of Israel were set apart by God for a reason. They were set apart to ensure that they would not mingle with the Gentiles. Not just as a matter of decorum, but as a matter of holiness. The people of Israel saw themselves as distinct, and not just worthy due to their faith, but due to their genes. They could trace their line back to Abraham, and so when they thought of themselves, it was as being of the house of Israel conferred special status according to the flesh that spilled over into the spirit. Paul puts it this way:

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

When Paul writes this, he is tapping into a reality, you know. A reality that the people of Israel assumed was 100% there. Because of passages that talked about Abram's seed being a very big deal according to God, the people of Israel assumed that their lineage was evidence of being blessed and chosen by God. This has continued to this day with the phenomenon of secular Jews, who identify as Jews, though not believing in God at all. Because of the ethnic and cultural aspects of Judaism, it is possible for someone born to a Jewish mother to be considered as fully Jewish whether or not they even believe that God exists.  So what does that mean? It means that due to a lack of defined faith being required, just as God breathed life into Adam, he would be able to raise up from the stones children for Abraham. And Nicodemus, who knows that Jesus is 'from God' as he says, he's going to want to work out which is the right house and line to be born in. From his perspective, it makes perfect sense. God has blessed the world through one family, but Jesus says you have to be born again. How you gonna pull that trick off when it's clearly too late for you, as you had one shot to be born, and you were born wrong.

But there is a new birth. Every bit as valid as the first, but the new birth is one that absolutely anyone can partake in. There is still a family, you know, and the family of Abram is still the one through which all the world will be blessed. But there is an important, non-genetic component that goes along with this.

Abram believed, and God credited it to him as righteousness.

So let's say that's true. Which is more important after all? Is the story of the Bible a story in which God just happens to like one group of people more than literally anyone else? Is it the story of God arbitrarily choosing one people and saying to them and of them 'these are my people and I love them best' the same way you would do with a dog? Or is it the story of God saving the entire world, and wanting all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth?  It seems that it's a key aspect of the teaching of Christ that you have to be born again, not born of the flesh, which you have been, but born of the spirit. Born not into a family of skin and bone, but born into a family of faith, where you believe and it gets credited to you as righteousness. 

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.