shabbat

The seventh day is a day of rest, thus says the Lord.

Great, fantastic, and that's good news even for the heathen and the rascal.  For everyone, no matter your beliefs, no matter what you may think about God, and the Bible, you probably don't mind having a day off.  A day off, a day in which you do no work, it sounds good, doesn't it?  Everyone wants one of those, perhaps more than one.  When you ask people how they're doing, do they say 'busy?' When you ask people how their weekend or their holiday was, do they say 'Not long enough?' 

This is the curse of the modern age, that we are too busy.  It wasn't always like this, but it's sure like this now.  and consider the elements that go into this fiasco.  For us, in the modern age, we have found a problem in which the weekends have all become every bit as busy as the rest of the days midweek.  There are really no other ways that people live these days, they're essentially always trying to move and work within a system that never ever gives up.  They're trying to work with their FOMO, trying to make sure they can cram the maximum into all their time, and they're working as hard as possible to make sure that their time is filled with buying, selling, and greasing the wheels of commerce.

For the merchants don't take a day off.  The merchants don't rest, you know, not on the sabbath or ever.  They are active wherever you are, following after you.  They know you have money, they can smell it, and they're not going to rest until you've given that money up.  They're not going to wait, not going to take it easy, until you've handed over every last penny to them.  And they're not going to want you to take a day off.  Things can't shut down for a day, you've got to buy, sell, and be engaged all day every day.  The ancient Hebrew people had a great way around that, of course, which was a mandated day off, mandated by the Lord their God himself, who told them in Exodus, as well as Deuteronomy, that they were to do all their work in six days, and in that seventh day, they were to do no work at all . No work.  None.  Zippo.  No buying, no selling, no engaging in commerce, no patronizing merchants, none of that at all.  Now, that's a good idea, a day where you have to rest from all that stuff, a day that, at the end of the week you would be mandated to rest, to take it easy, to do no work, that's a great idea.  There was one problem with it though, which is that people got really specific about what a lack of work would be.  For what is a lack of work? It's not enough to say that you shouldn't do any work, because not everyone views work the same way, so the Jews had to end up creating a big long list of what counts as work and what doesn't, and what they did was to set that list of things as a matter of things to be avoided, and they turned the sabbath into a passive experience.  That is, the sabbath observance was about what you didn't do, and not about what you did. It turned the most moral Sabbath into one that you did absolutely nothing whatsoever, in which you stayed in a coma, so nobody could accuse you of working.

And we learned that, and learned it hard.  We all believed in the sabbath so much that the concept of the weekend, of having a day off, became sacred to us.  We believed very hard in the concept of a day off, believe in it so thoroughly that we all internalized it, and grew very attached to time off.  But, the definition of that day as a day off, it became a mandated day off in which nobody was supposed to do any work, but the answer came back, loud and clear 'well then, what are we supposed to do?'  And that's a great question.  For what we had done was to create a vacuum, something that nature abhors.  We made a vacuum, where we weren't doing any work, and then the question came up, of what then should we do?  And people, in their desire to do nothing, and in their forgetting of God, elected to do what they always do, which is to consume, to buy, to brunch and to sport.  But if you're going to brunch and sport, if you're going to shop and peruse, then someone is going to have to sell those things to you.  And if you're going to go out a-brunching, you're going to use your car, and so is your waitress, your chef, and all of a sudden, you're in a world in which it's turning into a day exactly like any other.  You go to the store, buy linens, pick up a hat, go to the market for avocados, all that noise because, well, there are a bunch of things to do because Sunday isn't a Sabbath, it's just a day.

That vacuum has to be filled with something, you know. The people in the Gospel reading were so desperately holding onto the notion of not working, that they didn't realize that we were moving into making a vacuum that would be filled.  For every vacuum is, you know, even the vacuum of space.  And if the vacuum is going to be filled by something eventually, why not have it be filled with the right thing?

Christ, oft accused of being a sabbath breaker, was actually the only one who ever truly kept the Sabbath, you know.  Sure, while he was here on earth, he did wondrous works, healing, cherishing, gathering God's people together on the Sabbath, doing good and not doing evil on the Sabbath, being about the Lord's work, and comforting God's people on the Sabbath, which is wonderful work.  And after accomplishing that, the people looked upon him, and wondered how they might kill him.  They asked this because Christ was about his Father's work, of course, but they wanted to preserve that vacuum, telling themselves that the most important thing was to not work, not to worship God in his fullness, in his grace and in his grandeur.  The Sabbath had to be kept as completely passive, inactive.
So those who wanted to kill him succeeded.  They took him away, and had him crucified.  And Christ called out, loudly and clearly that it was finished, all his work was done.  But Christ had the temerity to not die right away, and the crowd became concerned, worrying that they might have to handle a dead body on the Sabbath, quite forbidden indeed.  So they made sure that Christ was lanced through his side, and that he was fully dead.  They took him down off the cross and ensured that he was buried before the sabbath started.  And Christ rested.

This man accused of being a Sabbath breaker, of taking the sabbath too lightly, he was the only man who had ever fully and completely kept the Sabbath in its entirety.  He quite literally did zero work on that Sabbath way back between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Rather, instead of doing work, he rested from all his labor, from all the work that he had done, from all the work he had completed and finished, which he did.  He rested so well on that Sabbath that he didn't even breathe, not even a heartbeat, not a motion, not a twitch, nothing.  He rested. 

And by resting, he fulfilled, he completed the Sabbath, and he gave his people a new day for worship. The first day of the week, the Sunday, the Lord's day. The day not when you are commanded to do nothing, but rather the day in which you are impelled and compelled to remember the work that Christ did on that day.  He rose from the dead that day, the Sunday, the most important event that has ever happened, the greatest thing that has ever been done, the most world-altering thing that has been done, and you and I get to come together to commemorate that every Sunday.  To remember that if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  Your job on Sunday isn't to keep a vacuum for the sake of just a day off, trust me, the merchants will get a hold of you one way or another.  But they can't get a hold of you if you are filling that time with something else - with prayer, praise, rejoicing, and celebrating the victory of Christ over death and the grave.  You're celebrating that great victory of Jesus of Nazareth over death, where he finished all his work by sundown on Friday, rested on Saturday, and rose back from the grave on the Sunday.  The Lord of the Sabbath fulfilled the Sabbath in a way that you and I would be incapable of doing.  He is truly the Lord of the Sabbath.  Listen to him on the day he has given you.  Fill your morning with his prayer and preaching, grow in your faith, push back against that vacuum that is there, and fill it with grace and truth.

I promise, the brunch will still be there when you're done.

Trinity

We said the Athanasian Creed on Sunday.  Guess what? Everyone survived. 

I know, it's the long creed, and with it being the long creed, everyone sort of rolls their eyes when it comes up.  The creed? No thanks, that seems like a lot of work.  It ends up being like the terms and conditions that we all agree to a hundred times a year, when a piece of software, or an app asks for our permission for everything before we're allowed to install it.  And when that happens, boy oh boy, do people go off sideways on it. 

When Mark Zuckerberg was being questioned about things, he mentioned, sensibly enough, that you can choose to make things private on Facebook.  You can decide at any point to make things private, and to choose who you share information with.  But people just sort of chose to send their information out to all sorts of companies, all sorts of Russians, because they chose not to look too deeply into the terms and conditions that they agreed to.  And the Creed, well, it's no different, not really.  The creed, the Athanasian creed is the sort of thing that nobody really wants to get too deeply into.  Nobody really wants to go through it, just skip it, and let me agree already!  But the issue is that, as too many people found out, that those things you click on actually affect things.  They affect who has access to your information, who can see what you do, who can take your information and use it for themselves, that kind of thing.  Knowing the terms and conditions, knowing what it is that you agree to, that's a really important thing to get figured out.

Now, in the case of the Athanasian Creed, think of it like those terms and conditions that you skip just to say agree.  It's actually really important to know what it is that you're agreeing to.  You need to be well aware of what it is that you're signing on to, otherwise, you're going to find yourself in a situation in which you're going to agree to a bunch of bad stuff that you don't really want to agree to. And there's the problem. 

So as a Christian, what do you agree with? You agree with the concept of the Trinity. According to the Athanasian creed, you have to hold to that creed whole and inviolable, without it you cannot be saved.  This is a matter that you really do have to consider very carefully, more than just allowing access to your contact list and profile picture to the 'which hamburger are you' quiz.  It's a matter of salvation and damnation, and it's going to be complicated.  The whole reason that it is going to be complicated is because it's real.  This is how the Triune God actually works.  As C S Lewis says, the religions of milk and water are the fake ones, the simple ones.  And the more you understand about the God of the Bible, the more complicated He is.  The more you look into the God of the scriptures, the more you realize that he's bigger than you give him credit for.  As a child, you understand Jesus as looking like a consumptive girl, holding sheep or playing with model airplanes, or whatever there is on that line.  But beyond that, who is this man?  Well, to get to the bottom of things, you have to start at the top. 

You have to understand yourself not just as a mass of chemicals, not as a mass of electricity and carbon, but as a created being.  Something made and formed and fashioned by God, hand designed by him as we were in the Garden with our first parents.  The first man, Adam, became a living being when he was assembled of the dust of the ground, of carbon, of nitrogen, of the base elements, and God breathed into his nostrils the breath, the spirit of life.  And Adam became a living being.  All good news so far.  But there is a double birth there, both of the dust, and of the breath.  The dust only gets you so far, and that's the part that after sin, we inherit from our parents. The dust, the carbon, the breakdown, the decay.  When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be born again, and Nicodemas asks him if he can possibly return to his mother's womb and be born one more time, Jesus tells him that you can't just repeat what has already happened.  To go through a natural birth again, to go through the process of being a baby again, being born one more time, that doesn't do anything except to place you back in the flesh again.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, after all, but the spirit gives birth to the spirit.  And if you're counting on flesh to give birth to the flesh, well, consider a pre-breathed Adam.  Just dust, which is what we pass on from parent to child.  So, we need to consider the new birth that Jesus talks about, the new birth of water and the spirit.  The new birth that is given to us not by a father's will, nor by flesh and blood, but by God.  The same birth that Jesus had.

Jesus is the one, the only one in all of creation to get this done, to have a different origin, to be born differently.  He's the only one to have been born of a human mother and not of a father's will.  He is the only one who has not inherited the dust alone, but who has also inherited that breath of God, that spirit, and who is conceived of God's will and not man's.  Because he is not the man of dust, he is not bound by the same decay as the rest of us, and if we are going to transcend that same decay, that same rot, that same unpleasantness, we are going to have to transcend it through an outside force.

The Old Testament reading has Isaiah understanding his sinfulness, and being forgiven of it by an outside act of God; he understood himself as a sinful man, as a man of uncleanness, as a man of sinful words and deeds, and was forgiven of his sin by the Lord his God through an external act.  There was no penance, no sacrifice, it was the work of God to make him clean.  This works for Isaiah, and it works for us too.  Salvation is outside us, it is alien, it is not of our own, it belongs to God.  He works for it, and bestows it to us.  That is the work of Christ who shed his blood for us on the cross, who died on the tree of Calvary, who had water and blood proceeding from his side when it was pierced by the lance of St. Longinus, when that happened, he bestowed righteousness, inheritance of the Spirit, of glory, to all the faithful. 

And this is where the Holy Spirit comes in.  The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.  For outside of his work, this is all theoretical.  Outside of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, this all seems like so much nice dialogue, doesn't it?  You're a child of dust, which you see every day all around you, both within you and in other people.  You're a child of dust, you get things wrong, and no matte what you do, you can't seem to get away from the dustiness of things.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, and your flesh was given and handed to you by your parents who are as sinful as you are.  They didn't want to, they didn't mean to, but that's what happens.  You get all the problems that they have, and you can't inherit anything but what they give.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, and if you want a new birth, you are going to have to look a little further afield than just the flesh.  Being born of your mother again wouldn't do much of anything, it would just lead to the same results.  If we're going to look for different results, which we should, it's going to have to be a whole new direction.  It's going to have to be a new birth. The dust of the earth, and the breath, the spirit of God.  And that's the Holy Spirit's job in your baptism. 

In baptism, you have one moment, one time, one place to point to, and to say that this is the moment when the Lord your God washed you clean of your sins, gave you a new birth of water and the spirit, called you by name, and made you his own.  And when we're talking about Trinity, when we're talking about the work of the Holy Trinity, that's what we're talking about, the Holy Trinity that came together in your baptism, which is the absolute best way to understand the Trinity at all.  You understand it best through how it relates to you.  You understand at that moment, that salvific moment of baptism, that God the Father who created you, who created the water, who created the atoms that make all of you and the rest of creation up, that God knew that you were made of dust, and knew that you had inherited all the concupiscence that your parents could give you.  He knew that no matter how many generation would come and go, none of them would ever be able to be born of anything but dust, being born of a father's will and flesh and blood as they are.  So, his word took on flesh, and dwelt among us.  The aspect of God that was not born of a father's will not born of the flesh, but who combined the dust of the earth, the elements of humanity with the word of God in human form, lived and dwelt among us, and finally shed his blood for our sins.  And after that blood was shed, the next phase could begin.  The next phase of the water and the spirit, the new birth that Jesus told Nicodemus about, and the one Nicodemus had a hard time understanding.  If you're going to see the kingdom of God, it's going to have to be with better than the dust of the earth.  It's going to have to be the new birth, not of a father's will, not of flesh and blood, but through the water and the spirit.  that's the work of the Holy Spirit, the sanctifier, the one who is the the work of God in you.  He has made you a temple of God, not made with human hands, but set apart by God himself.  And in your baptism, you have the sign, the mark of God calling you by name, setting you apart, and adopting you into his family.  The best picture you have of any of this, honestly, is the baptism of Christ, where you have Jesus in the water, God's voice from the sky, and the spirit of God descending like a dove.  This is all good, and it is exactly what is mirrored in your baptism as well.  The one who created the body, the one who redeemed the body, the one who sanctified the body, all that working together in that one moment.

This is Grace's font here in Regina. I highly encourage you to visit their church, and hear their preaching.

If you want to understand the trinity, don't think about water and steam and ice, don't think about an egg, don't think about an apple, think about baptism.  Your baptism, not someone else's.  Think about your baptism, your  adoption into God's family, the new birth of water and the spirit that you received.  Think about God the Father as the one who created you, God the son who in space and time shed his blood for your salvation, and God the Holy Spirit, who was bestowed on you in and through baptism, and that works much better.  It works better because it's not an illustration, it's not a parable, it's not a metaphor.  It's your baptism.  And it works.

Cretans and Arabians

Where is the mission field?

We normally think of it as a long way away, right?  The mission field is over there, somewhere, in deepest darkest Africa, or in China, or in Dubai, something like that.  That's all well and good, of course, but it sort of prompts another sort of question, which is that if the mission field is over there somewhere, then what's the deal with those countries that we think of as being the mission field sending missionaries over here?

Well, the United States is both a top mission origin, as well as a top mission recipient.  This is because the nations that we think of as being part of the mission field may take their faith a lot more seriously than we do over here, and they act accordingly.  They see the nations in North America, Europe, Australia, and realize that they have a great and abundant need to bring the Gospel to them, as these nations, formerly heavily Christian nations, are now in decline.  And that brings us to Pentecost, the day in which the Holy Spirit was poured out on the chosen disciples,and allowed them to be heard and understood in the languages of the world, in the languages of the medes, persians, elamites, and all those things.  We read that passage in church on Sunday, and we think to ourselves, 'wow, what a great moment, where all those people could hear the mighty works of God directly to them.  The disciples sure were able to spread out with the precious Gospel of Jesus Christ at that moment.'

Yes and no.

I mean, yes, because of course the Gospel did spread rapidly at that point and went global very very rapidly, of course, but here's a key feature that you may very well have forgotten, which was that although the message of the disciples moved out with shocking speed from Jerusalem, and to all Judea, and to the ends of the earth, it wasn't as though the disciples were multilingual, and the twelve of them moved all through the entire earth spreading the Gospel.  Rather, the New Testament was written in Greek, first and foremost.  It was written in Greek so that it could move as rapidly as possible through the ancient known world, so that people all over the empire, from one end to the other, would be able to read the mighty works of God, and then be able to translate that into their own languages, to communicate the works of God to those who are close to them, near and dear to them.  Most people then, if they weren't monolingual in the lingua franca, were bilingual with the lingua franca and a mother tongue.  The lingua franca at the time being Greek.  The lingua franca today is English.  English is the language of the internet, the language of global commerce, the language of facebook and netflix, the language of amazon and myspace, if you know English, the internet opens up to you.  If you don't know English, it's a good idea to learn.  That's all. 

So the idea that you should learn mandarin or Cantonese, that you should learn how to speak Hindi or Arabic before you could do any kind of evangelism, that idea blows right out when you consider that the disciples were unicultural, they were people all from a very similar, if not identical background, and even after Pentecost, they didn't go from place to place speaking in multiple languages.  They went to their own, and continued to spread out all over the place, but they were primarily engaged in speaking, at least at the beginning to their own.  And that's where you come in. 

The story of Pentecost isn't a story about how the disciples kept on speaking multiple languages and then left their nation behind, rather it is a glimpse of the global reach that the Gospel was to enjoy.  The global reach that the Gospel would have, where it would travel to every corner of the globe, to be seen by all sorts of people all over the place and to be heard by all the people of the earth. Good news, to be sure, and good news for all the people to hear.  But you may look at the situation that you're in, and say 'but here we are, in a country where the Christian faith is on the decline, so perhaps we should just focus on sending missionaries elsewhere.'  You could be excused for thinking that, given that China is on schedule for being the most Christian country in the world probably in your own lifetime.  Their congregations are on the rise, and ours are on the decline . Surely, it's time to send missionaries over there, so that we can grow the church in its new home.  Well, if you think like that, then I want to bring up the Old Testament reading for you.  Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones.  Ezekiel, who went to the valley of dry bones, where the Lord spoke to him, and told him to prophesy to the bones, which Ezekiel dutifully did, even though Ezekiel knows what bones are all about.  He is well aware that bones that are very dry don't live.  But he played along, prophesied to the bones, and they came together with a great rattling sound, bone to bone.  And then, as they had flesh and sinews on them, but no breath in them, God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath, which he did, and the breath came into them, and they stood, a great army.  That was the nation of Israel, and it's the church of Christ, too.  I know what you're going to say about evangelism, which is that we had a good run here in the west, but we had our moment and it's all done now.  The christian centre has moved to the global south, to China, to India, to Nigeria, and we are in decline.  But your job as Pentecost people is to continue to prophesy to the bones that you see.  To see a world where the hope is cut off, where the bones are very dry, and to prophesy to those bones and to speak the word of God to them.  The word of God that is the only thing that can move from death to life, from decline to acceleration, from waning to forward motion.  The word of God that is lively and active, that can accomplish great and powerful things, that word of God, prophesy even to the bones that you see, for the word of God does not return to him void, you know.  When you hear of the story of Pentecost, how the disciples were able to be heard in all sorts of languages in all sorts of spaces, where the disciples were able to be heard and understood in all sorts of tongues thanks to the Holy Spirit's indwelling, count yourself lucky that one of the languages in which the Gospel was heard was English.  And English, which didn't even exist at the time, is now a language in which the Gospel is freely and fully heard, and you as a person who speaks English, who knows the power of the Gospel, who knows that the world desperately needs to hear a message of life instead of death, of purpose instead of meaninglesness, of passion instead of boredom, of vigor instead of vanishing, you have a responsibility to continue that Pentecost work today.  Do I sincerely believe that you are going to go out and evangelize China? No, I sure don't but don't worry, the Chinese have got that in check.  But perhaps, if you expect this nation to continue to be one in which the Gospel is heard as well as preached, there's only one language you need to know, and that's the one you already speak.  If you want things to stay the same where you are, you can't leave them alone .

Where do you live?

If the power goes out at home, what do you do, and where do you go?

Now, if you're like the rest of us, you sort of wait for the power to come back on, but there's a thing that happens, which is that if all the power goes out, and you're left in the darkness, you don't just sort of curl up and wait, you probably go to bed, and rest up for a night.  You can do this because you know your house well enough to not have to hide in the darkness and wait for the morning.  If the lights go out, it's inconvenient, but it's not a deal breaker as far as living your life.  That you can do whether or not the lights are on.  You can be fine with that all the time, because you're not a stranger in your own home, and you know it better than you think you do.  I would wager that even if you couldn't tell me how many stairs go down to the basement in your own home, you could manage your stairs even blindfolded, because even if you don't know it, your brain does. 

This is because you're not a stranger in that space.  You spend every day there, you move in and out of that space with ease and rapidity.  You have molded that space to your desires, and you can move effortlessly through it, with very few problems beyond the odd stubbed toe, that sort of thing. 

The longer you abide in a space, the easier it is to get around in it, and after a while, you have a connection to the place that you don't even need to see it anymore.  In the Gospel reading, Jesus tells us that we are to abide in God's love.  And abiding in God's love is a matter of working out what God's love actually is, before you can start to live there.  Think of it like knowing what your address is, knowing where you live, and all that, before you can claim to live there.  And people who have a passing idea about God's love don't actually abide in it.  They visit it, sure, like a hotel, but think about a hotel, about how a hotel works, or a showhome, that kind of thing.  Those places are there as spaces in which everyone can see themselves, places in which absolutely anyone can picture themselves staying for a while, but not living.  Your house, your actual home, is formed and molded around you, molded to your life, your needs, your desires, the way you move through your day.  People visit God's love in that way, expecting it to be like a hotel room or a showhome, looking like it could apply to anyone, but actually applying to nobody.  If you actually abide in God's love, though, you will find that it definitely applies to real people. And once you understand that it applies to real people, then you will also understand that it applies to you.

That's part of the reason why you should read the Old Testament, you know.  If you read through the Old Testament, you will get a feeling for what God's love actually is, and it's not generic, not bland.  It's specific, because it applies to people, and that's the history of Israel.  God's love is active, it is vibrant, and it applies directly to people, to human beings, and it isn't always what you want, you know. Honestly, you probably don't want anyone to really genuinely love you actively; you want people to love you passively.  Passive love is a love in which you are loved through a lack of correction: if someone loved you, they'd leave you alone, wouldn't bother you anymore.  When we're teenagers, we want our parents to love us passively, not actively.  We want them to love us by leaving us alone, baking us casseroles, but not actually engaging with wanting us to be different than we currently are.  We want them to feed, house, and clothe us, but not to move beyond that at all.  But the love of God isn't a passive love, it's an active love, that wants you to be different than you are.  It wants you to be different, to move beyond where you are and what you are up to.  The love of God that we abide in is the one in which he tells us to love one another actively, as he loves us actively.  This brings us up against Matthew 25, in which the passive love, the laid back going nowhere love, that love is what leads to you being on the left, with the goats.  It's what leads to you being cut off from the paradise prepared from the foundation of the world, given that you had a thousand opportunities to do the right thing, to choose to accomplish what is good and proper, and chose not to do it, believing that the best love you can offer to the world is passive, does not insist on itself, does not try to hard nor go too far, but just doesn't interfere.

To love one another as Christ loves us is to lay down our lives for one another, to seek to serve, to do what we can to ensure the life of our neighbor is preserved, to see the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the naked, and to look out for all their needs, that sort of thing.  That's what Christ did, to move through the world, ministering to those who were around him, those who need healing and peace, who need to be raised from the dead and to have their sins forgiven, all those things are what Christ did, and did tirelessly.  And I would ask you if you love people like that? Do you love people in the way the Christ loves you, giving himself up for you? Do you give your life to others an hour, a minute at a time? Are these things that you do constantly, or do you avoid those things and think about your time, your resources as being phenomenally important all the time?  Do you give of yourself tirelessly as Jesus did, or do you squeeze charity and mercy in and around all the other important things you have to do in a day?

There's a real chance that you're nowhere near as active in your love for the poor, for the miserable, for the needy who surround you as you believe other people should be, and this is where the rubber hits the road for the Christian faith.  Most people would change their definition of what is good based on what they are doing already - if you're doing it, then it's good.  But the Christian definition isn't based on you being good by definition, but rather it is based on the goodness of Christ.  He wants you to love others as he has loved you, which is tiring, and exhausting to say the least.  But there is one other key way in which he loved you, and it's what you need to know the most about.  Not just what he did in service to people, but in forgiveness for when they did not.  And this is so key  that it can't be overstated.  When Jesus tells you what you need to do, and you know that it is right from the beginning, you need to ask yourself why you don't do it.  Is it right, and if it is right, is it important?  If the answer to both of those questions is yes, which it is, then you have to deal with the reality that you are not doing these things that you think all people should do.  And if this is the case, and the commands of Jesus are good, then you have to repent, and be forgiven.  And if you can be forgiven, then you can forgive others as well.  You aren't going to serve other people perfectly, the way Christ does, you're not going to love others perfectly as Christ loves you, but you can forgive them, as Christ has forgiven you.  And here's something strange that you need to think about.

To love one another as Christ loves you means you have to abide in Christ's love to understand how he loves you. How does he love you, fellow Christian?  The same way he loves me, which is that he forgives me.  And to forgive me, he had to lay down his life on the cross, to suffer the spear and the nails, the crown of thorns and the inevitable death.  This is the cost of your forgiveness, and this is how Christ's love is exhibited to you in the here and now.  And as it is exhibited to you in this way in the here and now, this is how you are to love one another.  But make no mistake, to love one another as Christ loves you, to forgive one another as Christ has forgiven you, that hurts, and it will absolutely require you to lay down your life for those people. To hold onto a grudge, that's the easy part.  To forgive, to renew a relationship, that requires you to lay down your life day by day.  It requires you to in a sense let go of your own desires, your own will, and to seriously contemplate that God's will for you is of vital importance.  He wants you to give yourself up, and in doing so, you will understand something that you forgot a long time ago.  That there is a lot in you that needs to be forgiven, to be absolved, and when you know that,  and how much it took to forgive you, then you may very well begin to understand how you love one another.  Forgiving them as Christ forgave you.

True vines, false prophecies.

I am the vine, says Jesus of Nazareth, and ye are the branches.  Without me, ye can do nothing.

This is a heck of a reading, and it's a reading that it would do us good to remember, recognize, and contemplate.  For in this reading we hear the reality of how deep the connection with God goes.  Here's what I mean.

If you know nothing whatsoever about gardening, if you know nothing about the state of the soil, what you ought to know is a lesson from the dandelions, which is that if you're planning on getting rid of you dandelions, you're not going to get too far by just plucking the surface stuff.  You can pull the leaves, the flowers, all of that, but if you do only that, you can expect the dandelion to come back, right in that same spot.  Inexorably, you can and you will find the dandelion coming back right there. How does that magic happen? How does the dandelion grow back right in that spot?  Likely because you're not getting the root.  And the root of a dandelion is a real problem.

The important part of the dandelion is going to be under the surface, and you should know that.  You should know that the root is likely far far bigger than the surface of the plant.  Knowing this should help you to understand why it is that the vine and the branches that Jesus talks about is such a big deal.  You can be small brained, and think of the vine and the branches as being part of one another, and that the branches do not differ in any real way from the vine, but if you want to get big brained, then you'll have to understand what it is that the vine actually does.  And the most important part of the vine is the part that you can't see.  The part that goes under the surface, the part that brings the nutrients, the water, the life for the plant out of the soil, and the part that the plant absolutely can't survive without.  But we feel as though what we can see is the most important part, and we tend to think that the branches can exist perfectly happily without the vine.

The way I talked about this on Sunday was in terms of grapes.  And I do want to talk more about grapes in the here and now. Because grapes, those are something that we all know about, and we all know how grapes show up to us, and in our clamshell punnets.  That is, when you get grapes, if you get grapes from where I get grapes, you get them attached to stalks.  If you want to eat those grapes, you have to pull them off the stalk, either one by one or a few at a time, but as you eat, only the stalk will be left.  That stalk that is left over stops producing grapes.  Once that stalk has been plucked from the vine, it has produced its last grape.  It's done as of that moment.  That's why when you bring grapes home, eat them, and stare at the stalk, it doesn't make any more grapes, and if you want more grapes, you have to go back to where grapes are found.   That makes sense, right?  Nobody expects that a dried out grape stalk would make more grapes, right? 

Then why do we expect to keep on bearing fruit when we're cut off from God?

It's a genuinely good question, and one that shows all kinds of real world practical stuff in the scriptures.  One of the best is the story of Samson from the Old Testament.  Samson is someone that you know of, right? Samson, he of the great strength and raw power, Samson who killed people with his bare hands, with the jawbone of a donkey, who tied foxes together, all that.  Samson with the hair.  On the surface, it looks like a story of magical hair, that long hair = strength, and short hair = weakness.  That looks like the story, but it isn't actually that story at all.  It's a bigger story of someone who had been called upon to judge Israel, who had been appointed by God to perform a role, and a duty, but who turned his back on that role consistently over a long period of time.  His faith, his devotion to God didn't die all in one shot, but bit by bit, a piece at a time.  Think of it like twisting a branch or a flower, that it doesn't pop off all at once, but if you twist it a little at a time, it eventually gives up, and breaks away.  Then the wilting.  Then the death. He drank to excess, dealt with corpses, got into the ladies; piece by piece he abandoned his faith, his commitment, his vows, concluding with his hair, the last vestige of his vows to God being abandoned and cast aside.  And then he ends up surprised when he is as weak as any other man.

No kidding you're as weak as any other man.  How on earth did that happen?  How on earth did that tragedy occur, where you systematically turned your back on God, the source of your strength, that you cut yourself off from the roots, from the nutrients, from the might that had supplied you with iron and fire from your life?  How could this tragedy have happened?  Well, how does it happen with us? 

Think of the church that functionally cuts itself off from God, that takes away a piece at a time until there is nothing left.  Think of the person who pulls themselves back from all their history with their Lord, who pulls themselves back from the stability of their base, from their history, from their roots, and expect to still bear fruit?  There will be no fruit.  It isn't going to happen.  The fruit that God wants you to bear: Love, joy, peace, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control, those things go away when you're cut off from the source.  And I know that there's a meme out there that tells you that you can be good without God, but you know what that is, don't you?

False prophecy.

You're not likely to get a false prophet telling you to worship Baal, or Asherah, but you will certainly find false prophets who will tell you quite happily to ditch God, to cut yourselves off from that vine, and who will tell you that literally nothing will change after you do.  That's what false prophecy looks like, and the false prophet that we can think about the most here is Delilah.  You know, that Delilah, the one who decided to tell Samson to cut his hair because she was being bought off?  Her false prophecy was based not about telling Samson to worship her Gods, but instead of that telling him to turn his back on his own God.  To turn away from his savior, to turn away from his vows, and to surrender his will to hers. Which he did.  The one that told him through manipulation and seduction to listen to her, to do what she wanted him to do, and to believe that he could be strong without God, which he believed.  He was then taken away, blinded, and made to grind grain in the mills of the Philistines.

When Samson regains his strength, which he does, I want to emphasize once again that this isn't the story about magic hair.  Instead, it's a story of faith lost, and faith regained.  It's a story of Samson turning from God, departing from him, being cut off, and desiccated, and while he was in prison, while he had time to think, while he had time to consider his actions, he got to think that he wasn't bearing the fruit he used to.  He wasn't strong and powerful, he wasn't able, he couldn't do anything by himself.  And while he is in prison, he calls out to God, and prays to him "Sovereign Lord, remember me again.  O God, please strengthen me just one more time."  He's not counting on his strength by himself, but rather is relying heavily on God, realizing that being cut off from the roots, from the vine, had done nothing for him.

Now, we are living in a world where people fall away from God all the time, where branches are constantly being cut off, where people are not bearing fruit now, nor are likely to in the future.  But we are people who believe intensely in a God of forgiveness.  Until the branches are burned, there is a real possibility that there is some amazing work that this gardener can do.  This amazing work is highlighted in Romans chapter 11, where it says "'Well,' you may say, 'those branches were broken off to make room for me. '  Yes, but remember, those branches were broken off because they didn't believe in Christ, and you are there because you do believe.  So don't think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen.  For if God did not spare the original branches, he won't spare you either.  Notice how God is both kind and severe.  He is severe towards those who disobeyed, but kind to you if you continue to trust in his kindness.  But if you stop trusting, you also will be cut off.  And if the people of Israel turn from their unbelief, they will be grafted back in again, for God has the power to graft them back into the tree...So if God was willing to do something contrary to nature by grafting you into his cultivated tree, he will be far more eager to graft the original branches back into the tree where they belong."

That tells you what you need to know.  The good news, the wonderful news of forgiveness, of grace, is that even if you cut yourself off, even if you bear no fruit, even if you're doing nothing whatsoever with the gifts you have been given, there is still a chance for repentance, for belief, and for being grafted right back in again.  It's amazing work, grafting, where you can take a branch and make it part of the plant, but it can be done, and does get done.  Just like with Samson, cut off and then grafted back in, the people of this world can do much the same, simply by saying the truth of the situation:

Lord, I believe.  Help thou my unbelief.  Lord I am cut off, graft me back in.

Shepherds

It was Good Shepherd Sunday this last week at not just our church, but all the churches, and the thing is, you can't talk about one shepherd without talking about another.  That is, you can't talk properly about the Good Shepherd, and his attributes, without talking about some other shepherd, you know.  Jesus tells us what it means to be the Good Shepherd, and this is what he says:

I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  

For this reason, the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again.

No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have authority to lay it down, and 

I have authority to take it up again.  This charge I have received from my Father.

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, lays down his life for the sheep.  This is the core belief of the Christian faith, you know.  This is the core, essential crux of the Christian faith, that Jesus died for the sins of the world, rose again, and is coming again.  This is what the Christian faith is all about, you know.  The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Well and good, of course, but we need to contrast this with another shepherd from the Bible, and if you're looking for another shepherd, heck, if you're looking for another king, you're looking for King David.

King David, a man after God's own heart, king David, a man that God anointed as king over all of Israel, King David was the one that ended up famously in an affair with Bathsheba.  Now, if you know your scripture, you will know that David and Bathsheba conceived a son in their sin, a baby, and the arrival of this baby was the reason that Uriah, Bathsheba's late husband, had to die.  You can cover up an affair by sneaking around, but babies really reduce your stealth, and Uriah is a man of the world, and he can count to 9.  He's well aware of how long a baby takes to gestate in a human female, and he would be aware that if he wasn't around nine months ago, there are some shenanigans afoot.

   

So, because David conceived a baby with Bathsheba, and a baby seriously impedes stealth, then the only way out of this, according to David, was to kill Uriah off.  Uriah dies, David marries Bathsheba, they have their son in wedlock, and it's all nice and legal.  But the sin came to fruition, and as it does, brings forth death.  The death of Uriah, and also, the death that was foretold by the prophet Nathan, the death of the child.  The child was sick, the death was foretold, and David was fasting day and night, refusing to bathe, refusing to change clothes, and praying night and day that this child might be spared.

And the child was not spared.

This unnamed child perished.  And so did another child of David's though this guy had a name: Absalom.  I talk a bit about Absalom, because his story, and more than that, David's reaction to his story is important to what we are talking about with the Good Shepherd.  Absalom was leading a rebellion against his father David, and the rebellion started to fall apart. And as the rebellion fell apart, Absalom was fleeing the conflict, and got caught in a tree, presumably by his mop of hair, and was killed dangling from a tree.  When David heard of that news, he was in anguish, and called out in a loud voice "O Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, if only I had died instead of you!" 

But you didn't, did you David?  You didn't because you couldn't.  You couldn't because nobody asked you, the lives of your children weren't given, they were taken, and nobody asked you if it was okay.  Nobody cleared it with you, nobody checked if you wanted to give your life in exchange for either of those children.  Their lives were taken, and you didn't get a say.  You would have laid down your life for the sheep, but you didn't have the chance or the opportunity to do so.

And that's where the Good Shepherd kicks in.  The Good Shepherd, who is known by his attribute of laying down his life for the sheep.  When Jesus says that he is the Good Shepherd, he is separating himself from us, by showing us that he does what we cannot.  He comes into the equation when we do not, and he meets the standards that we are unable to.  Think about David again for a second, and his reaction to Absalom being killed.  David who cried out with a loud voice wishing that he would have been killed instead of his son, but he didn't get the choice, didn't get the option.  Nobody asked him if he wanted to exchange his life for Absalom's, it just happened.  And for us, as people who are living in the shadow of real world events, real deaths, real calamities, real moments in which we wish we could have helped, could have swapped our lives for those lost, we realize that we don't have the choice, don't get the choice, we don't have the option, and lives will be lost without anyone asking for our input.  You may want to do that swap, to exchange, but you won't be asked.  

This brings us, as things tend to do, to the calamities we see around us.  First and foremost in the minds of local Sask people right now is the bus crash in Humboldt.  The bus crash where lives were snuffed out in a moment, in an instant, and nobody asked the parents of those boys permission, nobody asked if the parents wanted to make an exchange, which they probably would have, given the choice.  But they didn't get the choice.  The parents of the boys on that bus would likely echo the words that David said, wanting to die instead of their sons, but nobody asked, and you don't get to make that exchange.  The only one who gets to is the Good Shepherd himself.

The Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.  The Good shepherd who has the authority to lay down his life, and the authority to take it back up again.  Parents don't have the authority to lay down their lives for their children; they can't get sick for them, they can't get into a crash instead of them . They cant undergo surgery for them, all that sort of thing.  They don't have that authority to lay down their lives, and they sure don't have the authority to take their lives back up again.  That's the province of Jesus of Nazareth, the Good Shepherd.  The only one who gets to voluntarily lay down his life for the sheep, and the only one who gets to voluntarily take it back up again.

David, upon hearing about the death of his son that he had with Bathsheba, got up, washed, ate, and worshiped the Lord. When his advisers asked him about it, he said 'when the child was still alive, I fasted, mourned, and hoped that his life would be spared.  But now that he is dead, what can I do?  I can't bring him back again, but I will go to him one day.'  David's faith is a good lesson to learn from, where he knew that he couldn't die in the place of his son, as he had no authority to lay down his life for his son.  He couldn't bring his son back from death, as he had no authority to take his life back up again.  This is why David, and the rest of us, absolutely need and require the Good Shepherd, the one who can do all those things that through a haze of tears and mourning, that we wish we could do.

Filet o fish

In the Gospel reading we had from Sunday, Jesus ate some fish.

This seems like a fairly straightforward thing to talk about, doesn't it? A little detail, Jesus ate some fish, no problem there.  But thinking about who the disciples thought Jesus was when he returned from the dead and who he actually is, well, it got me thinking about some famous movie ghosts who occupy different sides of the eating conundrum.  Here's a clip from Ghostbusters. You know, the good one.

Here's slimer, which is his colloquial name.  In the movie, he's never actually called slimer, and goes by either 'onionhead' or 'ugly little spud.'   Either way, he's a ghost, something from the ether, and unlike most ghosts, he loves to snack.  He loves to eat, loves to consume, and in the movie, if the little spud is in a scene, he's going to be eating.  Hot dogs, fries, whatever, and given that he's a ghost, he doesn't have to watch his weight.  He doesn't have to watch what he eats, given that he can't pile on the pounds, what with being a ghost and all.  But the funny thing about the movie Ghostbusters (aside from all the dialogue) is that the 'ghosts' don't really seem to be ghosts at all.  They are paranormal, but they have more in common with demons than they do with ghosts of people who died.  And onion head over here, he seems to bear that out, what with his drinking and smoking and choking down food, he doesn't seem to be too shy in the eating department.  But there's another famous movie ghost that I want to contrast this with, which is from Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a movie I didn't like much, but here it is.

That's captain Barbossa giving a much more realistic view of ghosts and food.  Not that you can eat whatever you want and never gain weight, but rather that you can't eat anymore, because you're insubstantial.  You don't have a body, flesh and blood, you're a ghost, and ghosts don't eat.  Ghosts lack things like tastebuds, tummies, and intestines with which to digest.  They're dead, they're all messed up..  

And this is why Jesus eating fish is as important as it is.  When the disciples see Jesus, they get concerned, they get perplexed, worried, and say 'it is a ghost!'  Sure, that's a realistic conclusion, based on every single fact that any of us have ever known, which is that dead people have no motivation, and they don't do anything.  They just lie there, and they sure don't come back into your house and ask for catering.  But Jesus did. Saying not only 'see my hands and my feet,' but also 'do you have anything to eat?'  So they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he ate it in their presence.


Now, you do need to think about what you believe in as a Christian, and what that actually means.  For an essential, core belief that we have as Christians, which comes up in the creed, is that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian church, the commuion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.  Etc.  The resurrection of the body is key, it is absolutely key to all of this, and you know this from your daily life.  It's one thing to treat death in the way the average western human does, to say of your dearly departed individuals that they are always with you in your dreams, that they are ghosts or spirits, that they are memories and so on, but those things are ephemeral, and don't really say anything of any real value.  Nothing with the actual weight and importance, with the heft and stature of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. 

He isn't a ghost, he isn't a spectre or a spirit, he's not a wandering sheet, or anything insubstantial, he's a real human being.  He takes up space, he walks and talks, he eats and breathes, which he does in the presence of his disciples.  He's not a ghost, which is something that has all the form of a person but none of the substance.  He's both.  And if you think of your loved one who have died in the faith, do you want them to be a spectre or a ghost? Do you want them to be insubstantial and incorporeal? For the pirates in the first pirates of the Caribbean movie, they were torn between two existences, which was that one the one side, they would be everlasting, but as everlasting creatures, they could not enjoy anything on earth; food or drink, sunshine or relationships, the curse was a waking hell for it was forever yet all they wanted was for it to end.  If you have a loved one, or even you yourself, and you're thinking about life in the world to come, do you want to be insubstantial, or do you want to be substantial? Do you want to be corporeal, or do you want to be incorporeal? Do you want to be able to see and associate with, and to love your family, or do you want to be swatting at ghosts forever?

The resurrection of the body, as part of the creed, is actually one of the most important parts of it as far as what we are hoping for, and Jesus manifested that brilliantly in that room, and as usual, it comes down to an order of fish.