From Babel to Pentecost

Welcome to the day of Pentecost

As I said on Sunday morning, you may have missed the fact that it is Pentecost, and that's easy to do. The news cycle moves very quickly these days, especially this last week.  This last week, in case you missed it, people went to space, cities burned down, and there was still a global pandemic claiming thousands of lives.

Did I say this last week?  I meant in the last 24 hours.

The news moves fast right now, and an awful lot of my colleagues who have online services right now were bemoaning the fact that they recorded well in advance, and the news cycle had moved too quickly for what they wanted to talk about to still be topical.  Yes, that's what's happening in our world right now; what you wanted to talk about on Monday may no longer be relevant on Thursday.

But there are two ways of looking at things - You can either try to keep up with things as they come out, and be perfectly up to date, or you can go the other way, and talk about things that are classics, that never go out of style.  Pentecost is that second one.  I know the liturgical colour is red, but Pentecost is evergreen.  It never goes out of style, and never goes out of fashion, all the more right now given that we need the coming of the Holy Spirit, the comforter, more than we ever have.

But I get ahead of myself.  Let me start from scratch. A long long time ago, people built a tower for themselves, with bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar.  They built this tower with its base on the earth, and its top in the heaven.  And the idea was that if you built a tower big enough and tall enough, you could touch the face of God.  Now, you and I both know that if you build a tower up to the heavens, you won't see the living God up there as a man on a cloud.  Most of us have flown in planes far above that height, and all you see up there is sky and clouds, and it's all good.  If you watched Falcon 9 take to the skies yesterday, then you will know that they went far higher than any of us reading this ever had, so the problem wasn't height, per se.  The problem was the desire to get to God through one's own force of will.

This is a story as old as time, really.  The story of people who want to get to God by sheer force of will.  If you've seen the Disney version of Hercules, you'll get the idea that Hercules' horse was Pegasus, made out of a cloud.  However, the real owner of the horse in the myths was Bellerophon, who took the horse up to mount Olympus, to get to the gods by his own will.  And this is something, this hubris, was what Zeus could not abide.  So Zeus sent a small horsefly to bite Pegasus, who reared up, and Bellerophon fell off, and fell all the way down, to die.

There is a sharp and distinct contrast between the time of Babel and the time of Pentecost.  Because at Babel, that was people trying their best to get to the face of God, building and constructing to get there.  But Pentecost is the complete opposite.  The languages of the people were confused, confounded and scattered, as were the people, to make it far more difficult for them to try to get to God's face through sheer force of will.  So, they would never build that tower above the clouds to find God there.  But in Pentecost, instead of being confounded, the languages of the people are heard and understood.  Because this is not a story of people trying to find God through sheer force of will, rather, this is a story of God coming to his people directly, to remain with them forever.

That's a pretty big difference.  In fact, it is a complete reversal of the initial story, climbing to God vs God descending to you.  And that gets to the heart of what makes a Christian a Christian.  We don't believe that we are people who do such a great job that God just has to pay attention to us.  We don't believe that we climb any kind of mountain, build any kind of tower, mount any kind of moral quest, to touch the face of God.  How do any of us encounter God? We encounter Him when he comes to us.  That's a large, but very simply understood difference.  From one direction to another.

And that's great news for a Pentecost in which you're essentially under house arrest.  It's great news for us as Christians who are trapped where we are, who can't get to church or to take the sacraments.  What does it mean for us to be Christians who are alone?  Well, the answer is that we can't be alone.  When Jesus is about to ascend to heaven, he lets his disciples know that he will not leave them alone.  H will not abandon them, quite the opposite.  He will send the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, the Paraclete to the disciples, who will not just live with them, but who will live in them.  As a Christian, especially now, you get to celebrate that God comes to you.  In the manger, at the cross, in the sacrament of the altar, yes, all that, but also through the Holy Spirit, who lives in you. 

As I said on Sunday, this is God showing that he is smarter that you tend to give him credit for sometimes.  If we believed that there was a particular place you had to go to encounter God, and that he would only be present there, then we would be pitied now, of course, because you can't get there right now.  But we believe that Paul, under house arrest, was every bit a Christian, every bit as sanctified as any of the disciples who were in the Temple day and night.  You don't have to go anywhere to find God, but God has to go and find you.

And that's the difference in the Christian faith.  It's a relationship in which God comes to you.  And that's a grander story than a story in which you are trying to find him.  It's a grander story which has far more romance, far more interest than you keeping the odd rule every once in a while.  It's the story of the fire of God descending on people of earth.  What a wonderful story!  And that's the story that you, alone, need to hear more than ever.  There is no such thing as alone as a Christian.  There's no such thing as not able to get to where God is, as a Christian.  In your baptism, the same spirit that rested on Eldad and Medad, or on the disciples, descended to you as well.  And that same spirit lives with you today, when you need Him the most.

Joyous Pentecost indeed.

The suffering

I know you're a Biblical literalist, but if you believe that the Bible is literally true, that every word is truth, then you have to believe in all of it in its entirety.  That is, you are going to have to deal with the fact that, as it says in our reading from Peter today, you will suffer.  That's great news, right?

Well, no, it isn't great news at all.  But something I don't think I explained overly well in the sermon from Sunday is that you will suffer either way.  That is, you will suffer for doing good, I think I explained that fine.  As a Christian, you go out into the world, and the world will resist the faith.  Properly exercised, the faith is something that the world doesn't deal too well with.  The Christian faith preaches self-sacrifice, restraint, living for one another and not being in friendship with the world.  And that is something that the world doesn't do too well with hearing.  The world always resists the faith, whether violently or covertly.  If you go out into the world with the truth of the scriptures, the world will not care for it.

But I don't think I properly explained how it is that you would suffer for turning against Jesus Christ.  And no, it isn't just 'you go to hell for being bad.'  Yes, that's part of it, but it's not all of it.  For if I go to you can advocate only for doing what is good to avoid punishment, I will not be doing the sort of job that I am being asked to do.  That is, if I present to you on the one had the basics of the Christian faith, self-sacrifice, giving up the quick and easy path, foregoing earthly pleasure and so on, and then on the other hand doing what you like in the here and now with the possibility of future punishment in the hereafter, I imagine you would do what most of us would do, which is to be extremely short-sighted, and to figure that we could get away with it for as long as necessary.

But the teachings of Jesus Christ are not just there for you to get into Heaven and avoid Hell (though that is part of it).  But if we believe that he came that we may have life, and have it abundantly, then we can find meaning in the suffering of being a christian vs not being one.  So as a Christian, if you are to live it positively and properly, you will mortify your flesh. There will be suffering of your flesh, where you have to give up what is fun, what is easy, what is satisfying and what is pleasurable.  If you will not and can not, then you will end up falling into worldly things, and following the god in your belly, who is never satisfied and will never clamoring for your attention.  You will suffer from being cut off from the way the world does thing.  You will not be able to participate if everything the world does. In effect, being in the world but not of the world will entail suffering.  It will be unpleasant to be mocked, overlooked and forgotten by the world, especially as social humans.  But the suffering of falling into sin, of falling into worldly things, is suffering from a different direction.  You have to ask a question that if mortifying your flesh causes suffering in one direction, what does indulging it do?

This question is at the core of what sin is, and what a victimless crime is.  Over a long enough period of time, even the church began to say that a sin is only a sin if it hurts someone.  And what that means is that it ignores the words of Romans that tell you that certain sins are sins you commit against yourself.  And what does it mean to sin against yourself?  It means you slowly and gradually become a moral and ethical monster.  And here's where the suffering comes in.

What are monsters in this regard?  And yes, I realize that you may disagree with me.  Monsters are people who will adjust their perspective of what right and wrong are to suit where they are.  This is the beginning of becoming a monster.  This is Dr. Jekyll right as he is drinking the potion which will change him to Mr. Hyde in a moment.  As soon as you view morality as fluid, as something that will adapt itself to you instead of you adapting yourself to something stable, you become the monster in the world.  From that moment on, nothing will be able to stop you from doing what you want to do, because the basis of morality is your own experience.

And this is real suffering, because it is erasure of who you are, and conversion into someone or something else.  You know that part of any sad tragedy where the hero, the chosen one gradually, or rapidly, transforms into a villain? Where their dearly held beliefs begin to crumble and fall apart?  The part where they shift hard away from who they were towards the monster that they will become, based on how things work better for them now than they did before.  And that happens so quickly because the reality is that you want to be good without being made good.  And once you realize that this is a compulsion that we all have, then you have a couple of choices.  Either mortify your flesh, realize that morals are outside yourself and you can be judged accordingly, or double down hard, and go your own way with yourself as the moral centre.  But only one of those paths lead anywhere good.

For if we were able to believe and act as though we were perfectly correct and good, and if everyone else did likewise, what would happen to us?  Exactly what has happened to us.  We would become twisted, angry, vicious and filled with malaise.  We would be warped with misery and discontent.  We would be filled with rage and mistrust with one another, bound by our perpetual desire to be right because we would rather burn it all down, lose touch with one another, have our relationships scatter, we would rather be dead than wrong.  Once you get that all sorted out, then you start to see that the suffering that we make is not just in being a meddler, or a murderer, or a thief or whatever, but in what it does to you and to all of us.  The true suffering sometimes is what we are all living through and what it does to us, to our relationships with God, and with one another.

So that brings up the sufferings of a Christian.  And one of the biggest elements of suffering that exists as a Christian is the nature that you will have to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Christ.  It means not only that there are things you do that you ought not, things you ought not do that you should, but also that acknowledging that is a hurtful, painful thing to do.  It pushes you in ways you don't want to go.  It hurts to look at yourself with honesty, and to deal with the reality of your misdeeds.  And it hurts to go before the throne of almighty God and to say of him and yourself that he must increase, and you must decrease.  That is suffering so stark that very few people will ever engage in it.  But there is nothing else that will lead to a path forward.  Everything else leads to atomization and despair.

The suffering of bringing your sins to Christ openly and painfully is also what permits anything to change for the better.  But you won't avoid suffering.  One way or another, there will be suffering.  You will either be more conformed to God, or more conformed to the Devil . Both entail and contain suffering.  I can understand your desire to avoid suffering, but it isn't in the cards.  Having your sins forgiven is painful, but is far better than letting your sins control you.

But.....why?

A young mind is full of childlike innocence and wondrous curiosity about the world around them . Dropped into a world that is large, and beyond their control, a young person, a child, a toddler, will have to get everything they need to know from their parents, family, teachers, pastors, and so on.  And when they ask questions about why the world is the way it is, they will frequently be met with an answer that is hopefully tailored for their age.  Why do birds fly south for the winter?  Because it gets too cold for them in Saskatchewan.  But then, more often than not, when the answer has been given and processed, there is a follow up question.  And that follow up question can last for innumerable rounds.  The follow up round is almost always this:  "But...why?"

That question can last for a thousand years, really, but it does address a significant point for the person who is asking it.  Whether they be little or adult-sized, people usually need to know the reason for why things are happening.  And that's a good thing, you know.  It's a good thing to learn why it is that you do what you do, otherwise bad things tend to happen.  I am drawn at this time to thinking about the shifting sands of the rules surrounding quarantine.  As certain parts of the economy and services open back up again, we are left scratching our heads as to what is safe, and what is not.  That is, why are golf courses safe, but playgrounds are not?  Why is it safe to eat a plate of spaghetti from Jolibee's but not a plate of spaghetti at your Grandma's house?  Those are great questions, and there need to be reasons for them, otherwise there will be bad results.

What do I mean by bad results?  I mean that you can keep people isolated in their homes, staying far apart from one another out of sheer force of will for a while, but not forever.  And eventually, people will pop their heads back up out of their burrows, and look around again, seeking freedom.  And unless you have given them a good reason to stay isolated, they won't.  Sure, you can close shops, restaurants, bars and hairdressers, but what you can't close are each other's houses, and if people want to get together, they will.  They'll do this because people are ultimately self policing.  It's sort of like back in the middle ages in which you could, through force of arms, government, and threats of burning, you could compel people into orthodoxy, but they are ultimately self-policing, and once the threats wane, people will buck the orthodox faith unless they've seen a very good reason to stay with it.  And if you were counting on threats only, threats and punishment, then you'd better hope that your power and influence never wane, because as soon as they do, people will leave.  This is what happens in homes as well, that unless your teenager feels a need in themselves to clean their rooms, eat healthy meals, and be responsible, you can make them do it while they're under your roof, but once they leave, if you didn't convince them that these things were in their best interest, then they won't bother continuing it for the future.

So, if that is the case, and we understand that it is the case, what do we do about being a Christian in the here and now?  Because in Peter, he says to us 'always stand ready to give a reason for the hope that dwells within you.'  Which we should.  Your job as a Christian is to wrestle with God for as long as it takes for you to understand why his word says what it says.  And that's hard to do.  It's harder to do than you think it is, because more often than not, unless you know what Jesus Christ has come to do, you will tend to do the opposite.  You will tend to, by and large, kick back against that simple issue, and will say instead that your job is to conform the word of God to yourself, rather than confirming yourself to God.  But if you trust who God is and what he is all about, then you will understand what is actually being communicated to you.

When Paul is in the Areopagus, the people can tell that he is giving them something new.  This new thing that Paul is bringing to them is the opposite of what all the other faiths, all the other idols that they can see.  There was an altar, a shrine to an unknown god in Athens for a good reason, because any god that requires you to be good enough will always be unknown.  It will be unknown because it will shift and turn all over the place.  It will shift and turn based on those who are currently interpreting it.  The standards of said god will always move and turn and shift and slide around based on who is looking at it and talking about it at any given moment.  And that is how you can tell you're worshiping an idol, because it happens to line up with what you think on pretty much everything.  When the faith you follow is looking for a perfect person, and those requirements happen to line up with exactly where you are, then you're worshiping an idol. And that idol will always shift its standards because while you are looking at it, it will line up with you, but when the next person stares into that same abyss, it will line up with them. And that's why it doesn't work.

The reason this happens is because we know that we are supposed to be good. We are supposed to be good, moral, ethical people who do the right thing, who behave in a way that God and man hold up as good, but we also know that the world is a busted, broken place full of bad news and bad people.  How to square that circle?  Usually in the assumption that people should be more like us, behave themselves, and everything would be fine if we did.  But the Christian faith tells you a truth, a new truth that the people of the Areopagus were shocked to hear, and which modern ears still find shocking to hear too - that you aren't as good as you think you are.  You need a savior.  What God wants to tell you is not the simple message that you'd expect and that you hear from Twitter these days, that 'you need to be better.'  No, the message of the Christian faith is to say that God is here to forgive you.

That's why Paul is well suited to bring this message to people.  Paul is uniquely well suited for this role because, according to the scriptures, he is someone who prided himself on his place in the world, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, blameless, zealous in his persecution of the church, that kind of thing.  But he counted it all to be rubbish because of the revelation of Christ and Christ's simple message - all that righteousness is malleable, and ultimately counts for nothing, because of the fact that our view of right and wrong, good and evil that just happens to line up with where we are standing right now is false and twisted.  To have a truly objective view of right and wrong or good and evil, you would have to face the uncomfortable truth that the things you do that profit you, when viewed from the outside, are often bad themselves.  And that's what Paul worked out.

His message to the people he was talking to was that Paul did understand the reason for the hope that dwelt within him - that Jesus Christ died to save sinners, of which he was the chief.  Paul didn't hide his sin, cloak it or dissemble it.  Rather, he brought it forward and told the world that sin was the reason for Christ.  Not his lofty morality, his good behavior, or his good deeds, but his sin.  That was why Christ came, lived and died.  And the encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, his time spent with Ananias and the other disciples at Damascus, helped Paul to understand that his understanding of his own place in the universe was at best rubbish.  But in Christ, there is forgiveness, grace, and salvation.

So, Paul comes into the Areopagus, and into our world, with a new teaching, telling and proclaiming that he is far from perfect, and in fact, has not come to bring a new moral teaching on how to be good.  That is for the mass of idols out there.  No, Paul is there to bring a new message - that Jesus Christ came to save everyone, including but not limited to Paul himself, an ardent, fierce persecutor of the church.  And knowing that, the message becomes something that all of us can learn and hold fast to.  Jesus saves no matter how sinful.  Jesus saves no matter how far gone.  Jesus goes after the one, leaving the ninety-nine.  Jesus understand that there is none righteous, no not one. And once we understand that about our faith, we can understand that we are saved through his Grace.  What a comforting message, and one that is best sent out by Paul, who understood that better than almost everyone else.  Jesus died to save sinners, who would no longer have to hide their sin, but to understand that knowing how many sins Christ forgives, leads them to better love his grace.

They hated him because he told the truth

There's an internet meme out there of a Chick Tract.  If you know what Chick Tracts are, great, if not, I'll try to fill you in. They were insanely popular tracts that were all about various spiritual matters from a Christian, specifically protestant, perspective.  And these tracts were given out for halloween, given to university students, left at bus stations, that kind of thing, and usually had some kind of alarmist message: Someone goes to a party, folks there are playing with a Ouija board, said protagonist plays along, ends up getting scared, runs out of the house, gets hit by a car, goes to hell.  Tale as old as time.

And these alarmist tracts have made up memes, and one of the most popular ones right now is this one, where it is Jesus confronting people, and his speech bubble could be, well, pretty much anything.

There are lots more like this, I'm not going to bother finding them all for you.  Just know that they're out there, folks, and you can view them at your leisure.  But buried in the memes is a glimmer of truth, which is that people hated Jesus because he told them the truth.  Now, what you have to remember about Jesus Christ is that he was put to death, and was put to death not for being too milquetoast, you know.  He was put to death because he told the truth, and the truth was hard to hear for his original audience, and for us as well.  If you want a real idea of how pronounced that actually is, then witness the dispute that happened between the people and Stephen.  Stephen, the deacon, filled with the Holy Spirit, went and represented the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people who had been involved in killing Jesus.  But it's not as though they had only been involved in killing Jesus, you know.  Something that you can easily forget about the scriptures is that they're not a big long story about people getting things right over and over again.  The Bible doesn't do the whole white hat thing, giving you heroes who are flawless and great and can do what they want on account of being the handsomest people in the plot.  No, the Bible gives you a real story of real people.  And as you know from your own life, real people aren't perfect.  All the stories that the good people of Israel had been telling themselves had been stories where they'd been lionizing themselves by lionizing their histories.  Their ancestors had obviously been chosen by God based purely on how wonderful they were, and that would obviously spill over to them as well.  But Stephen breaks it down for them in exhaustive detail, beginning with Abraham, and going through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, and tells the people that they are every bit as culpable as all their ancestors in resisting the word of God.  This is key, especially when presented to a people who would fully believe that their birthright is magic, which it isn't .  And when Stephen speaks to them, he lets them know that as their ancestors killed the prophets sent to them, so too did they kill the Son of God and King of Glory himself, Jesus Christ.  And when they said this, they had a sad reaction.

They stopped their ears, and rushed at him, ran him outside and stoned him to death.  This is a very different reaction to that of the crowd at Pentecost.  When Peter preaches at Pentecost, and reminds the crowd that they crucified the Lord and Messiah, they were cut to the heart, asked what they should do, and were baptized.  Stephen's crowd went the other way, and killed the one speaking to them.  But that didn't change the content of the message that was taught, nor its veracity.  In other words, the word was still good, was still true, no matter how the people reacted to it.

And this is what we mean when we talk about spiritual milk.  That is, we need to deal with the fact that the absolute basic content of the Christian faith truly can be condensed down to John 3:16 - For God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.  That passage is spiritual milk, the basics, the cornerstone of the Christian faith, without which nothing else can or does make sense.  If you approach the Christian faith with the idea that you are in some way different than a sinner, or that God owes you anything, if you approach the Christian faith with the idea that it is about creating justice here on earth, or a utopia within the kindom, then Christ will remain a stumbling block for you always.  He will always be a stumbling block for you because what he does it to forgive sins, which implies that there are sins to be forgiven.  But if you go through the scriptures, to the history of all the people whom you look up to and realize that they are, in fact, sinners, but sinners whom God loved, then you can also realize that maybe God can love you as well, a sinner though you be.

But that's not what we want to do.  What we want to do is to legislate all that sin away, to blot it out and to imagine that we actually don't have it.  And we will go so far as to turn away from all the prophets in the scriptures, all the messengers and emissaries of God who will let us know that we do, in fact, have that sin.  But we are not just being lectured and hectored, we are being brought, through repentance, to faith in Jesus Christ, the one at the right hand of God, who is the way, the truth and the life.

Hopefully, you can see how important this is.  If you were required to believe in your own goodness, eventually, in order to deal with the dissonance that would create, you would have to kill those who point out to you that you're not as perfect as you think you are.  It's either that, or sink into despair.  But if your righteousness depends on God himself, not on you, then you can realize that Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Peter, John and Stephen are all sinners, but sinners who believed in the work of God to forgive the sins they had. This is testimony that is so powerful that one of the men who assisted in the killing of Stephen came to faith in Jesus Christ as the one who forgives, and helped to explain the concept of grace to all of us.  It's a wonderful thing to see happen, for Grace to be so important to someone that they will help all of us sinners to understand, through several letters, that Jesus comes to forgive sins. The real sins that we have.  Don't stop your ears to that message, and don't hate Jesus, or the disciples for telling you the truth.  You will only end up stumbling over Christ instead of embracing that cornerstone, and that foundation.

Good and bad

It's a nice day, right?

That is, a nice day, by definition, signifies that they're not all like this.  There are nasty days, overcast, rainy, or, here on the prairies, freezing cold.  Things are not always great, even in California, you can still be rained out or too cold or whatever there.  It's not as though it's always 75 degrees there.  And every time someone calls a day 'beautiful' or 'nice' or 'great' or whatever, you know that not all days are like that.  A good dinner implies that there are bad dinners to have.  A nice day implies that some days are miserable.  A small catechism implies a large one, and a good shepherd implies that there are bad shepherds out there somewhere.

As there are.  Now, what you probably already know is that there are a lot of parts of the Bible that nobody knows, but parts that everyone knows.  And when I talk to the recently bereaved about Biblical verses that they would like to have as part of a funeral service, they will frequently mention two of them.  John 3:16 and Psalm 23.  Those two passages have gotten such immense market penetration that people will default to them over and over again.  In fact, even if you know nothing else from the Bible, you'll know those.  And so it may come as some surprise to a lot of us that such a well known passage, such a comforting passage, referenced by Christ would garner ill will.  Which it does, and lots of it.

Our Gospel reading from today is one many that garners disapproval from those who are there to witness it firsthand.  The audience that Jesus is speaking to here get angry, angry enough to kill.  They pick up rocks to throw at him, to stone him to death, because he has called himself the Good Shepherd.  This should strike us as strange, given that we love the Good Shepherd, right?  How could someone not like the passage about the Good Shepherd?  Well known, well loved, comforting and faithful, the passage has formed the backbone for what a lot of people know about the scriptures for a long time. And yet, and yet, the people to whom Christ speaks are furious enough with him to kill.

Why is that?  Well, for two reasons.  First of all, as I mentioned right at the beginning, talking about a Good Shepherd implies, and implies heavily that not all shepherds are good.  Some are bad.  Some are downright rotten.  Now, as Christians, we tend to view shepherds through the lens of Jesus Christ, but the people of Israel at the time of Christ would have been more mindful of a passage from Ezekiel 34.  And that passage talks about how there are bad shepherds indeed, and they will be deposed from being shepherds eventually by God himself. God has seen the injustice, he has heard the calls from his sheep for justice, restoration, and clean pastures.  And God is rightly displeased with the poor quality of leadership from those who are bad shepherds indeed.  Something happens when Jesus speaks to an audience like this, which is that they gather that he is speaking about them.  This passage is no exception.  When they pick up stones to throw at him, they do so partially because he has spoken these words against them.  He is speaking about bad shepherds because there has been some very bad shepherding going on for quite a while.  Shepherds who have been living out what was described Ezekiel.  Shepherds who were taking the sheep under their charge to very bad pastureland.  They were leading them astray, fleecing them, and extorting them.  All the ways in which the people of Israel were laboring under the edicts and weight that the Pharisees had placed upon them are seen clearly in the New Testament.  It all became about keeping rules, following specifics, straining out gnats while the scribes swallowed camels, that sort of thing.  And it muddied the water, fleeced and killed the sheep and made them miserable, held under a heavy yoke.

And so when Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd, he is pointing the difference out between what he does vs what they do, and they know it.  They're well aware of what he's saying; that they are seeking obedience to rules, and Christ is offering grace.  Every time Christ loosens bonds, discusses grace, tells people that God is working on their behalf, every time that happens, they bristle, mainly because as long as God is in a box, and they have the key, then everyone will be dependent on them to navigate the divine.  How can you have forgiveness of sins, how can you be in God's good graces, how can you ensure that you are a beloved child of God unless the gatekeepers, the shepherds tell you that it is all possible. And if they're bad shepherds, they will fleece and steal more than they will support and sustain.

But there is another thing that bothered the original audience, and it was that Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd.  And in calling himself the Good Shepherd, he was, in part, referencing another part of Ezekiel 34 - the part where God says that he himself will be the shepherd of his sheep.  He is going to take over, to be the shepherd, to be the one in charge, to lead the sheep directly.  And in calling himself the Good Shepherd, Jesus is absolutely calling himself God - further followed up by him saying 'I and the father are one.'  People picked up stones to throw at him, for sure, in anger that Jesus would dare to equivocate himself with God.  And you know, people still will. 

The Good Shepherd still leads us, if we listen to his voice.  And what he leads us to is forgiveness of our sins.  That's what he leads us towards, rightness with God through his cross.  And that's still something we resist.  We resist it now because we are people who are livid with the idea of being sheep, and where the shepherd leads.  We don't like the idea that we are sheep, you know, because we like the idea that we are smart, capable people who don't need no shepherd.  We are skilled, capable, confident people who can quite happily chart our own path, and follow our own edicts.  But that's the sort of thing that would lead us to massive problems, as it did way back in the book of Genesis.  We don't like the idea that God might have to protect us from ourselves, because we don't like the idea that we are sheep in the first place.  Even if we think we may need to be protected from outside forces, we sure don't like the idea that we might need to be protected from ourselves. 

And there's another problem, and that problem is at the heart of the problem with the Christian condition today - and that is that the essential core of the faith is the forgiveness of sins, which implies that there are sins to be forgiven. And what that means is that we are going to be looking at our relationship with God a bit differently. Not as friends, not as pals, and not as though he owes us any answers. We are going to have to look at it as a sheep / shepherd relationship.  That is, he is the shepherd, we are the sheep, and we are errant and wandering sheep indeed.  We have no time for his rules, though they are good for us.  And we rebel constantly.  The average person knows that they have a need to be right with God and with one another, and where they break down in their lives is to make the endless mistake of thinking that the need to be right can be resolved by anything but grace.  Go ahead, flip through the sad catalog of Christian beliefs, and you'll find yourself staring at all sorts of shepherds who are leading their flocks away from what God says, and towards what is comforting and safe - the redefinition of sins leading to a lack of sinfulness completely.  It is as though we figured we could, by fiat, legislate sins away.  Which is what they were doing back in the time of Christ.

But know the voice of the shepherd.  Hear his voice.  He is trying to lead you, so don't fight him when you don't like the direction he is going.  To follow another voice is to follow a thief and a robber, one who will lead you astray, and will kill and fleece.  If anyone is trying to tell you that you're not really a sinner, and you don't really have anything to repent of, that person is desperately trying to lead you away from Christ the Good Shepherd, and is leading you to perdition.  It's a hard thing to do, to be a sheep, to know you're a sheep, and to know that you've got astray.  It's a hurtful thing to take that hard look at yourself, and see that you've been following wicked and sinful people, but it is a necessary condition.  Only through a look at the worst can you see your need for Grace.  Only by actually seeing your sinfulness can you see what it is the Good Shepherd does.

So listen to his voice.  Be aware of what he says.  Recall his words and listen to them carefully, and the more you listen to him, the better you'll be at following him.  And where he leads is not the weight of legalism, nor is it the dust of condoning - where he leads is to grace, sins recognized and forgiven, and then how sweet the grass and clear the water of that pasture.

Dry Bones

For what it's worth, I love the reading of Ezekiel at the valley of dry bones.  I've loved this reading for a number of reasons, partially because of the existence of a short story I read back when I was a teenager.  It was a story that I think was called 'deathflash,' but I could be wrong.  In the story, a teenage girl, for in these stories it is always a teenage girl, is stalked relentlessly by a dark being who keeps on growing stronger by absorbing the 'deathflash' from things that die.  Starting small with animals, and growing on to humans, the dark presence grows by eating the lifeforce that comes from things as they die.  All fine so far.  But as the story progresses, and the girl has seen more and more, she asks her science professor about what the dark entity was eating.  She does so by saying something like :

'If the class hamster dies, could we bring it back to life again?'
'Well, no, because the cells break down, and the metabolism stops, leading to a lack of life.'
'Okay, but if we could start the metabolism back up and fix the cells?'
'If I could do that, I'd be accepting my Nobel prize right now.  But even if I could put the cells back together, and get the heart pumping again, and get the metabolism running, even if I could do all of that, something would still be gone, some aspect of life that you can't get back.'

That quote has stuck with me for at least two decades, possibly three.  I've been thinking about it through the lens of the story of the valley of dry bones.  For in this story, where the bones are very dry, and they are put back together, bone to bone, and sinew and flesh covers them, all that happens, and they stand there, but without breath in them.  That lack of breath is something extremely important to the Christian worldview, a worldview of life which goes beyond just a body.  Life which has a body, and a rational soul. From the beginning, when God made Adam, he formed him out of the dust, out of the base elements of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.  Something other than skin and bone animates us.  There is something deeper that is more than the sum of our biology.

And the readings from Sunday deal with that.  The readings from Sunday talk about how there is death, and it shows the separation between the body and the soul.  When Ezekiel surveys the valley of dry bones, he remarks that they are very dry. Any semblance of life that was in there is long gone now.  The bones are scattered throughout the valley, and death lives there now.  Anything that was alive is long gone.  This reading comes up in the doldrums of lent.  Lent has always done this - it is always longer than we want it to be.  You can tell this, because as you know, the first week of Lent is the easiest.  We can always handle Wednesday to Saturday, right?  But as time goes on, Lent gets less and less fun.  What started out as a fun little diversion becomes a grind that never seems to let up.  Once again, that's with a normal lent.

This Lent isn't a normal Lent.  This lent is a tiresome grind.  Sure, it seemed fun at first to just stay in, hunker down, and watch Netflix.  But as you've noticed so far, it's not fun anymore.  Being apart from other people is a grind. Being left alone with your thoughts is no fun.  The things that you want to do, you can't do, and you're driven apart from essentially everyone and everything you know.  It's not fun anymore.  And that's why you need to hear this message of hope.  You're doing what I'm doing, right?  Staring out at the valley of dry bones.  You're staring at more and more bad news every day, looking out at the misery and collapse that is growing worldwide.  Those numbers keep on going up, and the human cost keeps on rising.  And you can easily feel as though you're at the valley of dry bones or the tomb of a friend - your hope is cut off, and things seem like they'll stay dead forever.  But as I said, these readings have a message of hope, and it's right when we need it.

If we have ever needed a message of life, of hope, of this not being the end of all things, that time is now.  We need a message where God tells us that he is the Lord of everything, that he is not bound by the events and circumstances that we get trapped in.  When he asks us 'can these bones live?' even though we want to respond by saying 'no' the correct answer is 'Lord, you know.'  Lord, only you know if these dry bones can live.  Only you know if these bones that were alive, are now dead and dry and buried can walk again.  And the reality of death is firm in these passages.  Death is real, grief is real too.  This isn't a matter of stoicism and detachment, even Christ himself weeps at the tomb of Lazarus out of grief on account of his love for Lazarus.  The death is so real that the bones are dried out and the corpses have begun to stink.  This is real, this is death, this is grief. 

But Christ doesn't just share in our grief, he moves us through it.  In this time of sadness and despair, when so much is out of reach and everything is so much harder, you need this message of hope.  You need to hear an account where there is a promise made to you.  You need to hear that God doesn't just shrug when things fall apart and collapse.  He's there to move you through this time.  And every lent that you have lived through has been a preparation for this time.  Every lent you have moved through in your life, every penitent season of fasting, deprivation and withdrawal has prepared you for this.  Because you know what comes next.

Maybe the world is not used to fasting and solemnity at this time of year.  But you are.  Maybe the world hasn't sat down to think about what it would mean to go without something for a month and a half.  But you have.  And think about what it is that gets you through every single Lent:  the joy of assembly at Easter, when everything is back to the way it should be, when the words of the Gospels tell of the empty tomb, and the joy that brings.  Knowing that death is not the end, and that the dry bones and dead bodies can once again live.  Dead cells living again.  Bones coming together, flesh covering them, and breath entering them.

This is what you need to hear.  The fasting isn't over yet, the separation will keep going for a while. But we are a people of hope, and always have been. Lent is a wonderful tool for this, and this message of hope of our readings today is a powerful reminder of that.  Even in Lent, we are Easter people.  Even in lent, our hope endures.

Darkness and light

Folks, you've never had a lent like this.

For a long time in the church's history, Lent was a time of severe deprivation.  No wine, olive oil, meat or sugar.  No eggs, no dairy, everything was pulled back.  In these last days, though, we tend to want to just give up a little bit.  Just a smidge.  Just a touch.  Give up facebook or twitter, give up chocolate or sweets, but apart from that, business as usual. Well not this year.  This year it's all gone, pretty much your entire life.  For the first time, maybe ever for you, you can't just go to the store and get what you want.  either the store is closed, or what you want is out of stock.  You have given up your weekly coffee shop, your trip to the salon, and the nail studio.  You've had to give up contact with family and friends, beer after work and trips to the gym.  It has all gone.

G
O
N
E.

That's tough to hear.  It's tough to hear and to contemplate the idea that you're going to be without things as usual.  And for a lot of us, we may get to thinking that maybe it would be better to have not had these things than to leave them now.  But that's off on the wrong foot.  'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, you know.  But how best do we navigate this long dusk, this twilight?  How do we move through what is seen by most of us as this night that we are in right now?

Well, it's lent.  And if it's lent, you get to think about what it has been like for the church for thousands of years for Lent.  One of the first pieces of evidence for giving something up for Lent goes back to AD 203, where St. Irenaeus wrote to Pope Victor I that there was a dispute between the eastern and western churches as to how long the fast should last, and ended the letter by saying "Such variation in the observance did not originate in our own day, but very much earlier, in the time of our forefathers.

Isn't that a trip, that back in 203 people were talking about Christian practices that were happening in the days of their forefathers?  So the church has been fasting for a long time, and gradually, our fasting has gotten weaker and weaker, until today, when you're giving up everything, and are being defined by what you're not doing, rather than by what you are.  And that's new for us.  We're not used to it.  And this is where the man born blind from our reading comes into it.

This man born blind is identified by the disciples, singled out, pointed to, and they say to Jesus 'who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?'  And for us, this is where we are at right now.  Like that man born blind, we are defined by what we don't have, by what we can't do.  We are defined by what cannot happen, by what cannot be done.  We, in this time of quarantine, see ourselves as limited, and constrained.  And stories of healing are especially important for us to hear now.  They're important for us to hear because of what they represent.

Jesus doesn't just heal people because he's a nice guy, or because he wants to improve the condition of the humans of earth.  Rather, every healing, every miracle is a reversal of the curse that humans were under from the time of Adam and Eve onwards.  When Adam and Eve were justly barred from paradise, the darkness began.  Sin entered the world, through sin, death, and the light that they had seen in the Garden was gone.  There was sin, there was death, there was disease.  Viruses and bacteria began to attack, and decay broke in.  From that point onwards, nothing would work the way it should, and things would fall apart.  You are here.

And when the disciples ask who sinned, Jesus responds 'Neither this man no his parents sinned, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.  We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.  Night is coming when no one can work.'  This is a chance for the work of God to be evident.  When Jesus heals the man born blind, there is unbelievable gratitude, given that this man returns to a normal that he didn't know existed.  He didn't know what sight was, not really, and got to see for the first time thanks to the grace of God.  In Lent right now, you know what you want to get back to, more than ever.  But what you may have forgotten is the bigger picture of Lent and Easter altogether.  You likely have forgotten about the great Lent that we are in right now, and the great Easter that awaits.

This time is a time of fasting and deprivation, more than you'd expected I'm sure.  But it will end.  Every Lent ends, and I want you to think very hard about what all the Easters have been like for you . You know that feeling when you walk back into church after Good Friday, once the church is bedecked in white and the hymns of praise ring out?  You know that feeling where the joy is palpable, where it's all you can do to keep from embracing those around you?  You know that feeling that comes from singing "I know that my Redeemer lives" loud and excitedly, knowing what this season means?

Now imagine what it will be like to be back in worship with the full family of God, standing shoulder to shoulder with those whom you love? That's the day you want to wake up to.  Will it happen here? I'm not sure. I hope so, but it's in God's hands.  But you're not worshiping a God who exists and works only in this world.  You're worshiping a God who is active in eternity.  You're worshiping a God who is in control of the entirety of heaven and earth, who stands outside the turmoil that breaks us and the tumults that trouble us.  And if you read through the scriptures beginning to end, you will find that they end the same way they begin.  They end with human beings getting back to normal, living in the day of God, standing shoulder to shoulder in praise and thanksgiving again, following the resurrection.  In the true and everlasting Easter.  They get back to the state that humans were in from the beginning.

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared.  And the sea was also gone.  And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.  I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying 'God's home is now among his people!  He will live with them, and they will be his people, God himself will be their God.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.  All these things are gone forever."

That's not anything new, novel or different.  That's back to the way things should have been from the beginning.  When Lent ends and Easter begins, it's a foretaste of how things should be forever, and always should have been.  Think closely on this during this time of fasting and deprivation.  And when Easter hits, whether here or in the Easter to come, rejoice over what Christ has done, not just beating blindness in one man, but beating death for us all.