The Fall

Christians don’t take the doctrine of sin seriously enough. We say that we believe in Creation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” We say that we believe in the Fall, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” We say that we believe in sin and redemption: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” 

But somehow we don’t take sin seriously enough. We don’t really believe in the Fall. Except as words on paper or answers to a catechism question. 

Here’s what sparked these thoughts. Every so often one or another of my friends goes off on a rant for or against Climate Change (anthropogenic global warming, if you like). Or on a rant about scientists (untrustworthy). Or on a rant about Christians in Texas pressing to include the Bible’s influence on the US constitution in history texts. 

In the rants a fault line becomes evident: Christians believe (or are thought to believe) that God is in control of this world, so we don’t have to worry about what will happen to it. Non-Christians believe (or are thought to believe) that science is God, and that they will pervert any scientific research in order to get more grant money. Now this is a silly fault line I know. Caricature on caricature, so that neither side can see themselves in the other’s descriptions. 

But the rants sparked a puzzle for me, thinking and living (or trying to) as a Christian. If sin is real, then everything we do is influenced by our pattern of self-will. (By sin, I mean simply that we want to order our lives for our own benefit, with ourselves at the centre, and without reference to God—or anyone else if possible. Sin is finally simply selfishness and pride.) 

Now if sin influences everything we do, why would we expect Republican lawmakers to be any less selfish than Democrat lawmakers? (That’s another part of the caricature: That somehow Republican and conservative equals “Christian” and that Democratic and liberal equals “non-Christian”. Of course that is nonsense. Christians are followers of Christ, not of any party or party line.) 

If selfishness and pride influences everything we do, why would we assume that the business-owners pressing for business-friendly legislation have anyone else’s interests at heart? Why would we assume that my desire for cheaper gas prices at the pump is anything other than simple selfishness? If sin is real? 

The same concern applies to scientists: Certainly we can expect that they will routinely skew results to make themselves look good and benefit themselves. Or would, if they could get away with it. But the scientific community is such that others are ready to pounce on discrepancies and falsehoods. More than any other purely human community, I suspect that scientists compel honesty of each other as a matter of survival. Willful blindness (sin) continues in the whole, but with more checks on it than in many other areas of life. 

That’s the core of my rant. Here’s the application. If God is real, I can have confidence in the future of the planet, which God cares for constantly. But Christian belief is clear in this area: God made us the planet’s gardeners or caretakers. The Fall of humanity from the original Garden includes the Fall of the whole planet: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” 

Is the planet warming because of human activity? If sin is real, it just might be. God tells us that our self-centredness has placed the whole of creation in bondage—the very creation God gave us to be caretakers. God made us gardeners, and we have made trash heaps for ourselves instead. 

Okay, I’m preaching, and my tone is overdone. I’m just trying to take the doctrine of sin seriously and ask what it means for the whole of life. I can listen and learn from anyone who pushes back against my rant.

Confessions of an African Mennonite

Introduction
I am an African Mennonite. It happens that I am also White—my grandparents moved to Zimbabwe in 1921, and my parents moved back to Zambia in 1946. I grew up in Zimbabwe and was baptized into the Brethren in Christ Church (the part of the Mennonite family I come from) in 1964. I went back to Zimbabwe in 1972 as a young man just out of college, and then again from 1988 to 1992 with my family. I have lived in Zambia and Zimbabwe for about 22 years. It is the place I came to faith in Christ and the place where my heart is at home. We have Paraguayan Mennonites and we have Mexican Mennonites in our church—many of us now Canadian. Well, I am an African Mennonite, white skin and all. This morning I speak on behalf of my Mennonite brothers and sisters across Africa. My experience is limited to Zambia and Zimbabwe, and even there I speak from only my perspective; but I will say what I can as clearly and honestly as I can.

Confessions

1) To be an African Mennonite is to come from the largest Mennonite family in the world. A few examples (taken from Mennonite World Conference’s web page):

·         The BIC in Zimbabwe has roughly 50,000 members and the BIC in Zambia roughly 20,000.

·         The Mennonite Church in the Congo (DRC) has about 235,000 members.

·         The Mennonite Church in Ethiopia has almost 240,000 members.

·         Not to mention East Africa (another 100,000)

Compare these numbers to Canada (just under 140,000) and the USA (about 390,000).  There are roughly 530,000 Mennonites in North America and roughly 700,000 in Africa. We are certainly a major part of the Mennonite family.

2) To be an African Mennonite is to be proud of my African heritage. I remember listening to the wife of our bishop in Zimbabwe after she attended Mennonite World Conference in Winnipeg in 1990. She described many good things about Canada and the USA, and then said, “But those poor people. Their old people have to move to special homes because their children cannot take care of them. I am so glad that God has blessed us so much in Zimbabwe that we can take care of our old people until they die!” This sense of community is captured in the well-known proverb: “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” A person is only fully human in and with and through community. 

3) At the same time as we rejoice in our heritage, to be an African Mennonite is to be profoundly broken.  This is what most people think of when they think of Africa. That’s why I mentioned my pride in Africa first. We are more than our brokenness; but we cannot escape from our problems. In Zimbabwe about six years ago, the economy had become so bad that prices in the shops doubled from one day to the next. Finally the government abandoned our currency, and today shops use whatever international hard currency the customer has, most often US dollars. 

The roots of such dysfunction include corruption and tyranny. To be an African is to know that my people have done and continue to do such things. As a White Zimbabwean in my roots, I know how the Whites set the stage for the problems of the present government. So deep are our problems that only the gospel of Jesus Christ can bring the depth of change needed to overcome them. 

4) To be an African Mennonite is to know that the whole of life is completely integrated. Physical and spiritual always go together. So we know that when there are physical or political problems, the solutions include the spiritual as well. And we know that when there are spiritual problems, the solution includes physical changes in the way that we live with each other. Life is an integrated whole, not compartmentalized the way that we often do in Canada.

I remember a youth gospel team from Lobengula Church. They travelled into the Matopos to preach to people in the villages. The people refused to listen, saying, "we have to plant our fields!" The young people agreed and helped them cultivate the ground and plant their fields; then the villagers were ready to listen. Life is a whole, physical and spiritual together.

5) To be an African Mennonite is to belong to the larger body of Christ represented in many different churches. When Mennonite World Conference was held in Zimbabwe, we invited the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Matabeleland to greet the assembled body, because we know that Catholics and Mennonites, Methodists and Baptists, Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists, Anglicans and Pentecostals are all part of the body of Christ. 

That same Archbishop visited the University of Winnipeg shortly after Mennonite World Conference, where he was invited to address the university community on the human rights situation in Zimbabwe. I was invited to have lunch with him, and when he learned I was BIC, he said, “I could have been a BIC minister, but the Catholic school was about a mile closer than the BIC school.” As I listened to his presentation after our lunch together, I realized he was right: He could have been a BIC minister! African Mennonites are very much part of the whole church of Jesus Christ. 

6) To be an African Mennonite is to be deeply grateful for God’s work in and through our part of the global Christian family. Just as we connect with other churches in Zimbabwe and the whole of Africa, we connect intentionally with the worldwide Mennonite family. The current president of Mennonite World Conference is Danisa Ndlovu, my bishop from Zimbabwe. Twenty-five years ago, the then bishop from Zimbabwe, Steven Ndlovu (no relation to Danisa) was the Vice-President of MWC. We are proud to be Mennonites, at the same time as we are one part of the whole Christian family. 

7) Perhaps most importantly, to be an African Mennonite is to be deeply committed to following Christ in this world. Because we live in a broken world, we carry our cross daily, even as Jesus called us to do. Although we have not always lived up to it, our commitment to peace and justice is firm and unwavering, rooted in the very nature of the Christ who saved us. 

Bishop Danisa Ndlovu has written up the story of his own father’s death. As he visited his father in the hospital, where he lay dying from wounds inflicted by Mugabe’s soldiers during the early 1980s, Ndlovu tells how he was filled with a desire for revenge on his father’s tormentors. His father, lying on his deathbed, managed to whisper his last words to Dan, “Don’t, Dan. Don’t.” Don’t hate; love. Don’t seek revenge; seek peace and justice. Don’t be overcome by evil; overcome evil with good. 

Often we have failed; the stories of our failures are there. But at our best, we witness to the power of God to transform everyone. Africa gave me my own gift when we left Zimbabwe in 1992. I was struggling to come to terms with leaving, as I attended my last conference at Wanezi. Shadrack Maloka preached the closing sermon at the conference, calling on us to follow God’s will in our lives always. Then he started to sing, “Mayenziwe intando yakho.” Soon the whole congregation was singing with him, and I sang along: “Let your will be done.” Africa’s parting gift to me was to embrace God’s will on that day and always, so that I am grateful beyond words to God for his good gifts to me through my life as a White African Mennonite.

Bees Won’t Stay by a House Where There’s Hating

Texts
Revelation 7:9-17—The Great Multitude in White Robes
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12—The Beatitudes

Introduction

These are familiar passages. I have worked with them often enough before, and I am sometimes tempted to think that I know what they are saying. But in fact in every new reading we hear God speaking in new ways, so we walk through the passages together in order to see where they take us.

Revelation

Revelation 7 is one my favourite chapters. As the angel shows John the truth behind the daily events he knows in the world around him, we get a glimpse of where history is going. In Genesis we see the way that God scatters the nations and then begins to work in one people (Abraham and his children) on behalf of all peoples (Genesis 11-12). Pentecost shows the grace that was present in the destruction of Babel, gathering people together and revealing the gospel to them each in their own language. But it is left for John to portray the full glory of Babel restored:

⁹ After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰ And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” 

This is a wonderful picture, although the elder’s explanation of the vision reminds us of the suffering they experienced in their lives:

These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. ¹⁵ Therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. ¹⁶ Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat. ¹⁷ For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

We have here both the glory that waits for us, and the pain within which we live. For John’s audience, this was the torment of bitter persecution. Christians were led into the arena and given a choice: Sacrifice to Caesar and say, “Caesar is Lord”, or die. One such was an old man named Polycarp. On account of his advanced age, the officials did not want to kill him and pleaded with him to renounce his allegiance to Jesus. He replied with these words (as told by F.F. Bruce), “The old man made his noble confession: ‘Eighty-six years have I served Him, and He has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my Saviour and King?’” He was burned at the stake.

We do not suffer this kind of persecution. Indeed, there is a general feeling in our culture that no one should ever suffer. Often we hear someone who has walked through great loss say something like this: “We need to take steps so that no one ever has to face what we have experienced again.” I appreciate the compassion of such people, and they have done great good in our lives. But there is a basic problem in what they say: Life is such that we will always suffer pain and loss. Indeed, pain and loss are vehicles through which God brings us grace and strength.

1 John 3

Turn to John’s letters. You know that these letters are concerned to show that true Christian faith is fully in Jesus, the Son of God. The way that John begins the first letter, deliberately echoing John 1, shows his concern to lift up Jesus. The way that he does so focusses especially on God’s love, so that the verse, “God is love” is found in John’s letters. The verses we read express John’s thoughts well.

In these verses, John lifts up a series of ideas that lead to glory.

·         God’s incredible love for us is visible in our identity: “children of God.”

·         This identity places us at odds with the world. This recalls John’s consistent position that “the world” means “whatever in this world is opposed to God”. Because it is in continued opposition to God, the world—seen also in the cultures in which we live—also is against us.

·         Being children of God means that we become like God.

·         We are not always like him now because “we see in a mirror darkly”, but when he appears we will be like him fully, because we will see him clearly.

·         This hope leads us to seek purification, cleansing now, to be like him. 

Purification requires pain. It is hard to take the impurities out of metal, and requires great heat and purification. It is hard to train the athlete to reach the highest levels, and requires great stress and the pain of strict training. It is hard to purify our very selves, and requires the presence of Christ leading us through the training grounds of this life. 

Matthew 5

So we come to the beatitudes.

³ Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

⁵ Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

⁷ Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

¹² Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. 

We will not go into these in any depth, except to note the inversion of all that we might expect. The source of power is weakness. The place we find joy is mourning. The righteous are those who know their spiritual poverty. Most importantly, the source of peace and joy and greatest blessing is the experience of persecution. We come closest to God when we are forced to hold this world lightly and accept our inevitable movement beyond this world. In short, the path to experience the power and glory and greatness of God is to embrace the weakness and fragility of the cross. 

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

A Christian Peacemakers’ Team member recently was present near the battlefront, as American air power drove back the forces of IS(IS) from the Azridis and Christians huddled together in the mountains near Kurdistan. He observed his own internal conflict at rejoicing over the success of a military response to the devastating fighting in Iraq and Syria. It is deeply ingrained in us that violence in the right cause is good. We respond to pain by fighting. 

But even in this situation, where violence is most easily justified as response to evil on a scale we rarely see, even in this case we see the limits of our ability to fix what is wrong in our world by fighting it. Consider the actions of the Islamic State. In the years following Desert Storm, the forerunner of the present Islamic State had trouble gaining traction in Iraq, especially as many of its leaders were killed in continued fighting. One result was an influx of new leaders in about 2010, so that now the primary people who have led the current fighting are old officers from the Iraq military. In a sense they are secular Muslims who are using a militant movement to pursue their own agenda of revenge against the West. 

The truth is that you can never bring lasting peace by crushing someone. The seeds of World War 2 were sown by World War 1. The second war in Iraq (Desert Storm) grew out of the first invasion of Iraq more than 20 years ago. Repeatedly we experience the way that violence gives birth to violence. 

The same pattern is true on a personal level. You know the pattern that people have often observed: the boss at work shouts at an employee; the employee goes home and argues with his/her spouse; the spouse turns the bad feelings into excessive discipline of a child; the child kicks the family dog; and so it goes. Similarly we notice the way that abused children grow into adults who abuse others. Violence gives birth to violence. As a beekeeper in a story I’m reading puts it, “Bees won’t stay by a house where there’s hating.” 

We want peace and harmony. We like the song:

I’d like to build a world a home and furnish it with love.

Grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves.

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

I’d like to hold it in my arms, and keep it company.

I’d like to see the world for once all standing hand in hand,

And hear them echo through the hills for peace throughout the land.

It’s somewhat clichéd, but we want peace and harmony. The passages we read show us the way. The way to peace and harmony, the way to the world that we want is following Jesus on a path of persecution and hardship. The way to peace is to accept violence without returning it or passing it on. This is hard to do! 

The Path of Peace

In Revelation 7, those who stand before God in victory are those who accepted the violence of this world into themselves. In 1 John 3, those who become like God are those who keep their eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and imitate him. In Matthew 5, God’s blessing comes to those who embrace the peace and love of Christ, even when the world is against them. 

Even those who are committed to peace can be surprisingly militant. Recently I wrote a review of a book in which an OT scholar named Eric Seibert works with OT passages that embrace violence. He argues that we need to read such passages resistantly and not accept their call to violence. While affirming his basic thoughts, I wondered what grounds we use to evaluate these problem passages. This past week I received a response to my review. The responder basically questioned my own commitment to peace so vigorously that I felt attacked. Even we who are committed to peace can sometimes be combative. 

I want to be careful in my response to follow the path of peace. I want to curb my own tendency to fight or run away. I want to engage in a lifestyle that embraces the way of Jesus. I know myself well enough to be quite sure that I do not and cannot live this way consistently. So I look back to the passages. 

Revelation 7 encourages me to embrace conflict in my life with the presence of Christ, whether it goes well or not.

1 John 3 reminds me that I can live with God’s love when others speak or act against me only by keeping my heart and mind fixed firmly on Jesus.

Matthew 5 makes clear that the life God blesses flows out of engagement with God.

Even more than I want to follow the way of peace, I want to follow Christ. Only as I am filled with the Spirit of Christ, am I able to walk in the way of Christ. 

Conclusion

Today is All Saints’ Day. I think of the saints throughout time and around the world. I think of my bishop (Dan) from the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe. In the 1980s Zimbabwe went through a time of real trouble. It was after their Liberation Struggle, to gain their freedom as a country, had ended; but the new government chose to inflict violence on those who had not voted for them. As part of this crackdown soldiers were posted in the area where Dan’s parents lived. His father owned a store there, but a curfew made it impossible for him to restock his shelves. Then one day some soldiers came by and demanded beer from him. He had none. So they filled his mouth with bottle caps and beat him around the mouth with their rifle butts. Because of the curfew his family was not able to take him from their home to the hospital for several weeks. By the time they were able to move him, gangrenous sores were eating away his mouth, and in fact he died in the hospital from the results of his injuries. Dan was finally able to visit his father in the hospital, and he told me that he was filled with rage against the soldiers who had beaten his father so badly. “I imagined myself standing with a machine gun and lining their children up against a wall and gunning them all down.” His father could hardly speak, but saw the anger in his son’s eyes and recognized the revenge he wanted to take. He spoke his last words to his son: “Don’t, Dan. Don’t” 

Don’t hate. Love.

Don’t kill. Give life.

Don’t return violence for violence, but accept even other people’s pain into yourself, seeking the peace of Christ for them and for yourself.

 

I know that this counsel is idealistic, and the experience of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria shows how difficult it is to live a life of peace. I do not try to reconcile these problems, but simply affirm my desire to embrace the triumph of suffering we find in Jesus. At the end of all things I want to be in that wonderful multicultural crowd singing before the throne of God.

Looking for God? Jesus!

Texts
Deuteronomy 34:1-12
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
Sermon in a Sentence: Jesus is the key who brings together judgment and love into a coherent whole.

Introduction

Last week I said that God is good, and that God is incredibly patient and kind towards us. I did not spend any time making the case for God, but simply assumed our common faith as Christians. This morning I want to make one small part of the case to believe. The basic argument is that we meet God in the person of Jesus. Walk through our passages with me to see the case we can make. 

Deuteronomy 34

On the face of it, Deuteronomy retells the story of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, giving us a second telling of the Law (hence the name: Deutero Nomos). More precisely, the whole book is set in the days before the Children of Israel enter the Promised Land. Following a series of cursings pronounced on those who disobey God and blessings on those obey God, the Israelites are given the choice to choose life—that is to choose God and live. 

Then God takes Moses up on to a mountain, where he sees the land in which the people will live, but which he will not enter himself. Here in our passage, we have his obituary:

⁷ Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. ⁸ The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over. ⁹ … ¹⁰ Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, ¹¹ who did all those signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt – to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. ¹² For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.

Since then no prophet has risen like Moses: This came to be one of the defining characteristics of the expected Messiah; that the Messiah would be the prophet like Moses—“whom the Lord knew face to face, who did signs and wonders.” You can file this information for when we come to the Gospel passage. 

1 Thessalonians 2

In 1 Thessalonians Paul recalls the founding of the church in Thessalonica (recorded in Acts 17). Following beating and imprisonment in Philippi (which led to the conversion of their jailer and the beginning of a church in Philippi), Paul and Silas and their companions came to Thessalonica. When Paul’s opponents found out where he was, they tried to capture him, but only succeeded in causing trouble for Jason and his friends. Luke tells the story:

⁶ But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the city officials, shouting: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, ⁷ and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” ⁸ When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil. ⁹ Then they put Jason and the others on bail and let them go.

No wonder Paul describes their memories (1⁶): “You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit.” 

In chapter 2, then, Paul tells why he performed the actions he did (vv 3 and 8): “we dared to tell you his gospel in the face of strong opposition, for the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you.  … So we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well.” 

The gospel of God stands at the heart of all Paul’s actions, the gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. In the story told in Acts 16 to 18, where this account comes from, Paul’s preaching always told about the cross of Jesus, and about the resurrection of Jesus. This then brings us to the Gospel reading. 

Matthew 22

The Gospel reading takes place as the climax to a series of questions with which the Jewish leaders tried to trap Jesus. This time they try to embroil him in an ongoing rabbinical discussion on the meaning of the law, so one asks him: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” It’s a good question, one which the rabbis debated back and forth. Jesus’ answer places him squarely in one group of rabbis who saw the answer in just this way, but Jesus has a different agenda than they do. 

So he asks them a question: “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They reply immediately, “The Son of David.” Then Jesus quotes Psalm 110, used by the Children of Israel to inaugurate a new king in the line of David. And he twists their tail with the question: “How can David call his own Son ‘Lord’?” The implication is that the Messiah is truly the Son of God. They get the point and abandon the debate. We don’t hear from the Jewish leaders again until chapter 26, where they plot the death of Jesus. 

The Question

The question that Jesus raises echoes in our ears and hearts today. Whose son is the Messiah? Who is the Messiah? Is he simply David’s Son, a Jewish ruler to throw out the Romans? Or is he God’s Son, the Saviour of the World, the One in whom God comes to his creation uniquely and for all time? That would indeed be a prophet like Moses, so close to God that he can say, “I and my father are one.” That would indeed be one who could inspire the Thessalonian Christians to endure bitter persecution, finding life beyond any torment the authorities could bring. 

Who is the Messiah? He is Jesus? Who is Jesus? He is the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. But knowing him as such is harder today than ever. How do we process these questions today? This is a hard one. The Bible seems really remote to many people. These passages we read were written between 2000 and 2600 years ago, at a guess. When Matthew describes these encounters Jesus had with the Jewish leaders, we may reasonably wonder what that could have to do with us. In the short time available this morning, I can’t hope to make the case for Jesus fully, but I can hint at it.

 

The World Needs More than We Have

This past week we had a chapel speaker who described his own faith journey from rejecting religion entirely to being a committed follower of Jesus. He told us how he partied every night while an engineering student at University of Waterloo. He told us how he ended up on Christmas Eve 1991 lying in an Emergency Unit at the hospital, with his insides hammered from constant binge drinking. As he lay there, he wondered, “There has to be more to life than this. There has to be more to life than senseless partying and spending Christmas Eve alone in the hospital.” 

Where do you look for more? A growing group of people hold out the answer of atheism, saying that there is no God and that this world is all we have. It’s a pretty bleak answer, and prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins are pressed into strange statements about the origin of life in order to hold on to it. As our speaker told us in chapel, people who set faith against reason and claim to be atheist usually are addicted to themselves. There are honest atheists, who seek to follow the evidence wherever it leads. But I think of Anthony Flew, the most prominent atheist philosopher in the 20^th Century. In his last years he concluded that there must be a God, and stated that there really is no other way to explain the reality we live in. 

If atheism is often a cover for our addiction to self, perhaps there are other alternatives. I find myself looking at their founders.

Hinduism and its Children

The great religions of Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on) present one option. It is enough here to say that neither Gautama Buddha, nor the Mahavira, nor the founder of the Sikh faith, nor any other great leader in these religions claimed to be one with God. The claims Jesus makes for himself are quite unique.

Islam and Judaism

No Jewish leader would have dared to claim what Jesus claimed for himself; still less would Mohammed have claimed to be one with God. I remember the way my teacher of world religions (Matt Zahniser) put it. Matt told us that the great religions of Asia see all reality as one. We are one with God in a sense, because we emanate from God. We flow out of God and back into God. They are, as he put it, incredibly intimate religions; they assume we can be intimate with God, but they lose the greatness of God. If human evil is simply an expression of God, we live in a pretty bleak world. 

Matt went on to say that the great monotheistic religions of the world see the greatness of the Creator, separate from his creation, which God will judge at the end of time. In them God is Ultimate. God is great! God is beyond us, beyond our comprehension. This picture preserves the goodness and greatness of God from human evil; but it also makes it hard to come close to God. 

Jesus

Then there is Jesus, God come in human form, God the Father who speaks as the Lord to God the Son, the one who lived and died and rose in human history. Matt said to us, “You see what happens? Jesus is God, the Ultimate; and Jesus, the little baby, is God. The Intimate. He is the intimate ultimate—or the ultimate intimate. The only question is: Is this all true? 

The Importance of History

I get the difficulty. The OT and NT range between two and three thousand years old. What could all of this really old stuff have to do with our lives? Without exploring them further, I have to say simply that the age of the documents is a red herring. The question is: Did Jesus really come from God? Paul’s conviction that Jesus really was “in very nature God” derives from his conviction that Jesus who was crucified also rose from the dead. If the documents that describe the resurrection are reliable, then we have to work out the implications. 

C.S. Lewis has observed (I don’t remember where) that a basic part of his own movement to Christian faith was a comment from a non-Christian historian at Oxford University, who said to him in casual conversation that the NT documents were as historically reliable as the best documents of that time for Greek or Roman history. Lewis saw the implication. If these stories are telling the truth, then a man who claimed to be God was executed and then rose from the dead. The only way to explain this, if the accounts are telling the truth, is that God has entered human experience. How long ago is irrelevant for such a wonder! 

So What?

The arguments on both sides of these questions require developing in much greater depth. Let me assume for this morning that the Christian answer is right and that Jesus is precisely who he claims to be: the Son of God, one with the Father. What difference does this make? 

Human history is headed somewhere. Our lives mean something.

If Hinduism is true, the basic meaning of life is: Live the best way that you can, and you may return in a better state in the next life.

If Atheism is true, you may as well enjoy yourself as much as you like, because you really are the only god—and therefore the only goal—that you have. 

But if Jesus is the source of life and goal of life, then we listen to Jesus to know how to live. In the chapters that follow Jesus gives some clear ideas: Live for God and live for others; live in the fear of the Lord with no fear of other human authorities. We look for the ways that people have become separated from God—like our chapel speaker laid up in Emergency on Christmas Eve—and seek to reconcile them with God, to show them Jesus, to be Jesus with them and for them. 

Consider doctors and nurses fighting the Ebola virus in West Africa. As those who come from North America return home, some people accuse them of being selfish because they endanger us in North America. How short-sighted and selfish a response! But completely understandable if God is not among us in Christ, and finally in each other. 

I remember an old TV show on Sundays—Hymn Sing! Many who are part of this church helped to bring hymns to the whole country as an expression of their love for God, come to us in the person of Jesus. 

I think of people who work in Winnipeg’s North End to change social structures that help to keep people in poverty and despair—as their expression of love for the Jesus who lived and died and rose for us in our own brokenness and pain. 

I think also, ruefully, of several weeks ago when I failed to live in the light of the risen Christ. I was on my way to Toronto on Air Canada, and as we waited to board the plane I felt more and more impatient. The official holding us back from boarding called one group, then another, as the rest of us “champed at the bit”. When he finally set us free to board the plane, I put on my strongest face of disapproval. We don’t need words to show when we’re upset! As he checked my boarding pass and I went on past him, he said, “You’re welcome!” Clearly he had read my expression all too well. 

As I went on up the passage to the plane a song from our church came unbidden to me, “May the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ dwell in you, and whatever you say and whatever you do, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead and gave us new life in him.” I wanted to run back and say, “I’m sorry!” But too late. The passage was full behind me, and I went on into the plane with the song sounding softly in my ears, rebuking me. 

If this Gospel is true, then we learn to say that Jesus is Lord, and Jesus directs every step. “The Lord said to my Lord”: People in that day said that Caesar was Lord; the Jews held on to their own God; but Jesus goes beyond both. Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. If you want to find God in this messed up broken world, look to Jesus. When you find Jesus, you find God.

Life without God? Impossible!

Texts: Exodus 33:12-23 (Moses and the Glory of the Lord); 1 Thessalonians 1 (Thanksgiving for the Thessalonians’ Faith); and Matthew 22: 15-22 (Paying the poll-tax to Caesar)

 

Sermon in a Sentence: God seeks patiently endlessly to draw us back to himself and remake us in his image.

 

The Problem: A Question of Authority

You know the gospel text well enough. The series of challenges that start here develop the question that the Jewish leaders ask Jesus in chapter 21: “²³ Jesus entered the temple courts, and, while he was teaching, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him. ‘By what authority are you doing these things?’ they asked. ‘And who gave you this authority?’” Jesus would not answer him, but replied with his own question and with parables, which the leaders recognized would undermine their authority; and they ramp up their campaign against him.

 

So they ask him whether or not they should pay tax to the Roman Empire. Taxes were no more popular in Jesus’ day than they are now. If Jesus says, “Yes”, the crowd will object; if Jesus says, “No”, the Roman government will object.

 

Instead Jesus asks to see the coin used to pay the tax. When they observe Caesar’s image and inscription on the coin, he defuses their question with the saying: “Give back to Caesar’s what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.” Rather than speaking about taxes—which he relativizes with this saying: pay taxes because they really are not that important—rather than speaking about taxes, he shifts the question to a new question: “What belongs to God?”

I note in passing that we could use this question to explore a two kingdoms theology: We live in the realm of God’s reign, and we live in the realm of human authorities. So we ask what activities belong in which realm. Such explorations are interesting, but irrelevant to Jesus’ words here. Jesus’ concern is with the reign of God.

 

This question, as in all the exchanges throughout Matthew 21 and 22, reveals the essential problem with the Jewish leaders: Their authority had come to replace God’s authority, and Jesus is calling them back to God. To see how he does so with this epigram, turn to the two Scriptures that preceded the Gospel reading in our service this morning.

 

Exodus 33

To hear these verses from Exodus 33, we need to review briefly the life of Moses to this point.

Chapter 2: Born to a “Levite woman”; hidden at home for three months, then placed in a papyrus basket [ark] in the Nile River, where Pharaoh’s daughter found him. She raised him as her own, with his birth mother caring for him, and adopted him as her son (v. 10). When he grew to manhood, he killed an Egyptian who was whipping a Hebrew slave, and ended up fleeing into the desert, where he lived with Jethro and married J’s daughter, Zipporah. They had a son, Gershom [“a stranger here”].

Chapter 3: While he is tending Jethro’s flocks, he comes to Mount Horeb—the mountain of God, where he sees a burning bush. There he encounters Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who sends him back to Egypt as a reluctant saviour for the Children of Israel.

 

In the chapters that follow we have the delivery from Egypt, led by Moses and Aaron—the plagues; the crossing of the Sea; Wanderings in the Sinai Wilderness; Manna and Quail and water from the rock; and finally they return to the mountain of God, here called Mount Sinai.

 

In chapters 20 to 31 Moses and Joshua ascend the mountain, and Moses receives the Law—the Ten Words (20) and various laws to help the people live as God’s holy and priestly kingdom (20-31). Finally we come to the present scene.

 

In chapter 32 Moses comes down from the mountain and finds the Children of Israel worshipping the golden calf, which Aaron had made for them. Punishment falls on them and God threatens first to destroy them, and then to abandon them. Our chapter contains Moses’ intercession for the rebels.

Verses 1-10: Go with us! No! Please!

Verse 11: The Lord spoke with Moses face to face, as a man speaks with a friend.

Verse 13: “Teach me your ways.”

Verses 14-18: Go with us! I will (17). Show me your glory! (18)

Verses 19-23: Agreed, but only my back.

 

You see, Moses knew that life without God is impossible. Without God we die. If you had said to him, “Give to God what belongs to God”, he would have said, “That is everything! That is life itself!”

 

1 Thessalonians 1

Look now at Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians with me.

Verse 1: Greeting—Paul’s standard greeting to fellow believers.

Verses 2-3: Thanksgiving—Again, Paul’s standard expression of gratitude for God’s work in their lives.

Verses 4-11: Paul recalls the way that the gospel came to the Thessalonians (see Acts 17)—in persecution, centred on Jesus the Messiah, crucified and risen.

 

For us this morning, especially verses 6 and 7: You imitated us and the Lord, and so became a model for all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.

Who did Paul imitate? Christ! (1 Corinthians 11:1, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.”)

Who did Paul want to know and be like? Christ! (Philippians 3:10-11)

Who do we imitate? Christ! We want to know Christ and be like Christ.

 

Bring this to bear on the question: What belongs to God? God, who comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ, is the centre of our lives. Everything comes to us from him and belongs to him. What do we “render” to God? Our very lives. Our self-identity. All that makes you and me who and what we are.

 

Like Moses, like Paul, like the Thessalonians, we seek to see God and know God and become like him. Guess what! God wants the same for us. We desire God because God draws us to himself. Moses sought to see God’s glory because God drew him to himself. One of my deepest beliefs is that God works endlessly, patiently to draw us to himself and make us like Christ.

 

A Story

Let me tell you a story. Two years ago an OM worker named Mike came into my class on Missions Strategies and talked about the kinds of ministries that he does in various parts of the world. At the end of the class he asked us to pray for his father, who was near the end of his life but still did not know the Lord. Mike had been visiting him and wanted to encourage him again to turn to God before the end.

 

Two weeks ago Mike came into my class again and told us more stories about his work in various parts of the world. It was good, exciting stuff, but I had a more important question. At the end of the class, I asked him about his father. Mike lit up. “He died a few months ago, but the last 30 days of his life he was a changed man. An old minister finally got through to him, and that old minister reaped where so many others had planted and watered. So Dad knew a joy in his final days that he had never known through his life.”

 

I think that story about Mike’s father tells us all about God’s love and patience and care. God loves us, and God works in our lives until the day we die drawing us to himself.

 

My Own Experience

I have told my story before and will repeat it only briefly now. I remember clearly a deep encounter with God when I was 24, and then God’s presence working within over the next 30+ years. Then about five and a half years ago through a time of personal darkness, and in a series of dreams, I found that God had been waiting for a little over 34 years to finish what he began in me back in 1974. You see, God is patient and loving and kind, and God waited for the right moment to finish that piece of work. Truth: God’s not done working in me yet!

 

Conclusion

This is not a theodicy—an explanation for the hard things that come in our lives. Last week, as I visited my father in Pennsylvania, I visited also a High School friend who is slowly dying of ALS. I don’t know and cannot explain why Jeff’s life should end in this way. My reflections on these Scriptures are not meant to answer the mysteries of life and death.

 

Rather they are a simple affirmation that God is good, that God loves us, that God works patiently, endlessly, to draw us back to himself and remake us in his image. I think of the Russian Mennonites, singing “In the rifted rock I’m resting”, as they experienced bitter persecution leading up to their emigration to North and South America. They sang of God’s love and care while they suffered, not because all was pleasant in their lives.

 

So when Jesus tells us to return to God what belongs to God, we give him ourselves and rejoice. Hear the way that the writer of Chronicles tells it, in 2 Chronicles 7, when Solomon dedicates the temple:

¹ When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. ² The priests could not enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it. ³ When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshipped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying, “He is good; his love endures for ever.”

I wish I could see God’s glory so clearly, so that as the old hymn has it, “May they forget the channel [you and me], seeing only him.”

 

You see, without God, life is impossible. Without God, there is no life. And with God, death itself will die.

Reading the Bible: The Church's Bible

From Lissa Wray Beal’s course on “Reading the Church’s Bible”:

Margaret Silf [tells] a story about a salad bowl. She tells of a friend’s induction [as a minister] and of the feast that followed. The members of the congregation tucked into the feast, and soon hardly anything was left … except for a large bowl of rice salad. Eventually she realized why: someone had forgotten to put a serving spoon in the dish. … This course is designed to provide a good spoon to begin (or continue!) the feast on scripture, which continually renews and satisfies our appetite. 

So this morning I want to help us understand how to read the Bible, our Bible, the church’s Bible. 

I begin with the kind of “principles of interpretation” that we used to always mention. They are still true, but secondary to the main point (which follows).

—  Type of language: Pay attention to whether a passage is ordinary speech or sarcasm or metaphor or exaggeration, etc. Such as Jesus, “Take the log out of your own eye.”

—  Type of genre: Observe whether you are reading poetry, or theological history (not the same as reading a newspaper), or parable, etc.

—  The plain meaning whenever possible: Don’t use “interpretation” to twist the passage into what you want.

—  Interpret Scripture with Scripture: Paul says in 1 Cor 14 that women should keep silence in church, but in 1 Cor 11 he says that they should wear a covering on their heads a sign of their authority to pray and prophesy (preach) in church. Listening to the whole of Scripture saves us from many problems.

—  Context, context, context! Cultural context, historical context, literary context.

—  And so on. 

We can learn from some of our Anabaptist cousins, in this case the Brethren in Christ. From a 1986 consultation on a BIC way to interpret Scripture:

—  NT interprets OT: “The New is in the Old contained; the Old is by the New explained.”

—  Both centre on Jesus: The disciples reinterpreted everything they knew about Scripture in the light of the amazing discovery that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God.

—  Pure heart and mind: If you are in rebellion against God, you won’t understand God’s Word Written.

—  Commitment to obey: In order to understand, you must be ready to obey what you hear God say.

—  Read in community: No “private interpretation” (an extension of 2 Peter 1:20f). 

But more important than all of these, and more important than others that we could mention, is the foundational principle: The Bible is first of all a story. In her syllabus for the course, Reading the Church’s Bible, Lissa Wray Beal quotes from Bartholomew and Goheen:

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits—theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore its divine author’s intention to shape our lives through its story. All human societies live out of some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and give shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. … If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture.” 

We read Psalm 78 to begin with. Like Nehemiah in his prayer (Nehemiah 9) and Stephen in his defense before the Sanhedrin (Acts 7) this psalm tells the story of God’s people—excerpted from the great story of creation and fall to redemption in the Christ-event. So the most important thing is that the Bible is the story!

—  Read the Bible as a story!

—  Genesis to Revelation: the story of “God’s Mighty Saving Acts”

—  Genesis: the problem: God made us—we pushed him out of our lives

—  The rest of the Bible: the story of how God tries to get back into our lives

—  A story with a difference: IT’S TRUE!

But, you may ask, “Is not the Bible full of promises of hope and directions to follow?” Certainly. Psalm 78 says to tell the story so that the children yet to be born will follow God, so that they will know his promises and obey his commands. But promises and directions are like the bacon in a wonderful casserole. No matter how much you like bacon, you don’t pick out only the bacon and leave the rest, and then say you have eaten the whole meal. Some might actually do this, but they would be wrong about nutrition, and if you do it with the Bible you miss the best thing of all, the way that God wants to transform you with divine reality. 

You see, the Bible is a story with a difference. There are many stories out there—Game of Thrones; Downton Abbey; LOTR; The Matrix; Doctor Who—but the Bible has something more. It is true! Rooted in history, but truer at even deeper levels than history: The Bible tells us the truth about God and all humanity. It is the story of salvation history, what G.E. Wright calls “the mighty saving acts of God”. 

The key to this story is Jesus. The whole Bible intends to bring you to Jesus, to “the human face of God”. In the garden the first human pair pushed God out of their lives. The rest of the Bible tells the story of how God seeks to get back into our lives, culminating in Jesus, the Messiah. So 1 Cor 15: I passed on to you what I received as of first importance: and then Paul tells the story of Jesus. 

A few weeks ago a couple named Peter and Liz stayed with us. We learned a bit of Peter’s story—from a Christian home, attending a Christian college, then he started reading the story of Jesus and met Jesus in a new and powerful way. He changed direction to follow God’s call, eventually graduating from college and going to Chicago to live in an intentional Christian community. Now they live in London, England, in an apartment complex with Bangladeshi families, building bridges between Christians and Muslims, being Christ to their neighbours. When Peter met Jesus as he read the gospels, Jesus transformed him completely. 

The Bible seeks to bring us first of all to Jesus. When we meet Jesus, he changes us forever!