Power for the Powerless

Introduction

Paul’s closing words in 2 Timothy stand like a beacon at the end of his life: “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

How did Paul reach the point where he could speak with such confidence? The language of racing and fighting successfully suggests a life full of power and success. Before we look more at Paul’s closing words, we turn to the passage from Joel, which gives something that was understood to be basic to the life of Christians in the first church in the book of Acts.

Joel 2:23-32

You know of course that these words are spoken in Acts 2, as describing the followers of Jesus at the Day of Pentecost. But hear them first in their own time and context. The precise dating of Joel’s prophecies is unclear. We read that the prophecies come from Joel: “The word of the Lord that came to Joel son of Pethuel.” And that’s it. No direct statement of when or who was king. The three chapters refer to Judah and Jerusalem, so prophecies spoken first in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. I am assuming that the prophecies were spoken roughly in the middle of Judah’s history separate from Israel, and that the crises that faced the people were the sort of problems that they faced throughout their history—danger from their neighbours, such as Egypt to the south and Syria to the north; and danger from within through religious and political corruption.

God speaks to them through Joel. They are faced with potential destruction—the locusts of chapters 1 and 2. In some way that is not obvious to us, God works through the destruction and against the destroyers. When destruction comes, it proves to be the catalyst for renewal—“rend your hearts and not your garments (2:13)—which leads to God’s Spirit poured out on all people. The presence of the Spirit is the prelude to judgment on the enemies of “Judah and Jerusalem” and the restoration of “Judah and Jerusalem”.

As he describes the blessing of God’s Spirit and the restoration of Judah, Joel uses terms such as “in that day”, “after this”, and “then”—describing a time of God’s blessings that follows God’s judgment. This time has come to refer generally to the eschaton, the end of days when God restores creation and brings in the New Heavens and the New Earth.

So we come to the verses in our text:

23-27: After the judgment, God will restore the people’s fortunes and make God’s person and name central to life in Israel.

28-29: This restoration leads to the full presence of God’s Spirit in all people—old and young, men and women, on all people who serve the Lord.

30-31: This presence of the Spirit will be accompanied by miracles and signs and wonders, bringing in “the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”

32: Then God will save all those who call on God.

God promises Judah God’s Spirit for the last days. The way that this passage is used in Acts 2 builds on the way that Jesus transformed the Jews’ expectation of the Messiah. The Jews expected a political Messiah who would overthrow Rome and lead them to God’s reign through Israel over the whole world. Jesus gave them a dying and rising Messiah. Jesus taught them that God’s reign was within each person and within the new community of the church. Now at Pentecost Peter uses Joel’s words to say that the last days had come. They had entered the time when God reigns on the earth—but that time looked quite different from what they expected.

We also live in the time between the beginning of God’s reign and its coming in fullness. God’s reign began in the church through God’s Spirit available to all people at Pentecost, and God’s reign comes fully in the return of Jesus. We live in this already-not yet time, and we seek to live with the power of God’s Spirit in a world that is often either unaware of God’s reign or actively opposed to it. We need God’s power to survive. A few good miracles and manifestations of the Spirit would encourage us a great deal.

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

Paul also lived in the already-not yet. He could remember when they all thought that Jesus would return really soon—in a few years at most. But the years went by, and by the time he writes in 2 Timothy he is probably about 60 or a little older, near the end of his life. We have two paragraphs from his letter for our text:

6-8: Paul uses the image of a war (I have fought the good fight) and a race (I have finished the course) to say that he has lived faithful to God and to the gospel of God. He has, in Eugene Peterson’s phrase, practised “a long obedience in the same direction.” Now as he waits for his death, he knows that God will receive him into the fullness of God’s reign, which waits for all those who are faithful.

16-18: Then Paul looks towards the immediate threat. I wonder if he was going to be on trial again and thought that this trial would end with his death. If so, he says, he will die victorious through the grace and strength of Christ’s presence.

Synthesis

So back to the question: How could Paul speak with such confidence at the end of his life? Joel promised God’s Spirit for the last days— the already-not yet of God’s Reign. How did Paul live so fully with God’s Spirit? How can we emulate Paul and also live filled with God’s Spirit. For each of us, the last day comes as we approach the end of our own lives. God’s Spirit gives us supernatural power to live in and through situations beyond our control. How can we know this and live fully in the Spirit and power of God?

A Thought from Joel

One might think that Joel describes an unusual threat to Judah’s existence, but in fact this kind of language permeates the prophets and the lives of Israel and Judah. I suggest that the possibility of destruction was Judah’s normal state. Situated on the crossroads of the Middle East, between competing empires from the south and from the north, they lived in many periods of peace, but danger was never far away.

Some countries have been protected from invasion by geographic features—for example, England has been protected by the Sea. Other countries have lived under constant competition from neighbouring empires—such as the way that the Korean peninsula has faced pressure from Japan and China throughout its history. It’s a bit like the way that one plays the game of Risk: Asia and Europe are bad centres to build from in the pursuit of world domination; Australia and South America are much better. The Middle East was like Asia and Europe in Risk—a road for invading armies to march through.

[Disclaimer: This description is my non-specialist impression. If Old Testament scholars tell you I have it all wrong, believe them.]

Life today is also full of danger. We look back to the 19^th Century as a time of peace, but it was also a time of empire-building, which was not peaceful to those places brought into the European empires. We may think that the 20^th Century was relatively peaceful, but it saw two world wars, and several other wars (such as in Korea and in Vietnam) that belie any sense that it was really a time of peace. In the first 16 years of the 21^st Century we have seen war in the Middle East and conflicts in various other parts of the world. Violence and conflict are more normal than we might think.

We can add to the dangers of the world arena the stress of daily life. Although we are technologically far more advanced than 100 years ago, we face an epidemic of family problems and personal struggles. Clearly technological progress does not bring us to a state of complete personal and public peace. The number of people looking for ways to die is evidence of the struggle to live that surrounds us.

If the description of impending disaster in Joel is more or less normal, we can guess that the ordinary dangers of life are our path to God’s full presence. God uses the locusts to purge Judah before God can restore Judah. God promises us also that the Holy Spirit will be poured out on us as we face the dangers of life today.

But How?

Sometimes we turn this question of how we receive God’s blessing around. We start asking: How can I get this blessing? How can I gain God’s power? That’s the wrong question—like Simon in Acts 8, who asked Peter to give him the power of the Holy Spirit. When we start asking for power because we want to be powerful, we find that the locusts are waiting for us.

I said earlier that a few good miracles and manifestations of the Spirit would encourage us a great deal. The fact is that we do see manifestations of God’s Spirit. I have not seen many wonders, but I have seen enough to know they are real and that God is at work in our world. I remember when my wife’s parents called us in Zimbabwe, September 1990, to tell us that Dad was dying of cancer. We went home in December and were able to have three months that we could visit Mom and Dad regularly. One day we were talking with my sister, and she told us how in September she had a sense that something in our lives was very wrong and we needed help. So she started praying. It was just at the time that we got the call from Mom and Dad. God gave comfort and strength to deal with the locust of death.

I remember a friend of mine 20 years ago now who sought release from the oppression of an evil spirit. I saw him set free, and six months later he testified that he had found continued freedom of a sort he had never known: That experience was real! Sometimes I think that God showed me God’s power for my friend’s benefit and for my encouragement.

A side note: As the story of Simon in Acts 8 and of the story of the seven sons of Sceva in Acts 19 make the point that we dare not try to take this power for ourselves. Emmanuel Milingo was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Lusaka in the 1970s. He had an extensive healing ministry. Once he was asked how to get the power to heal and cast out demons. He said that you should never seek such power. “Unless the Holy Spirit compels you to do this so that you cannot resist, you should not try it. If you do, the spirits will eat you alive.” [The quote a paraphrase from memory, from The World In Between.]

I could go on, but the theme would be the same: I have seen God’s power at work in various times and places, but God’s Spirit has never been ours to control. God acts as God chooses, and we receive God’s power for living in a dangerous world.

The question, however, will not go away: How? Consider Paul’s example. He began his life pursuing God through the Law. He was a Pharisee, which means that he was “set apart” for the Torah, the Law of God. When Jesus came to him on the Damascus Road, he found a new source of life, and a new pursuit for his life. In Romans 1 Paul says that he is “set apart” for the gospel. That is, where he used to be a Pharisee for the law, he is now a Pharisee for the gospel of God. That is why in Philippians 3 he can still call himself a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He never stopped pursuing God; only the means changed. He allowed Jesus to transform from the inside out through the gospel of grace. Now he pursued God through the gospel of God’s grace.

So when Paul says he has fought the fight and finished the race, he means that he has been faithful to this lifelong pursuit of God. In Philippians 3: 12-14 he puts it this way: “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.”

How do we receive God’s power? By repentance: “Rend your hearts and not your garments.” And by living for God, pursuing God, keeping God in Christ at the centre of all that we think and say and do. I have been doing research on Brethren in Christ World Missions, reading the reports sent home by missionaries in my church 100 years ago. There are many things about these letters that they sent regularly to our church periodical, The Evangelical Visitor. Some are disturbing, such as the relentless reminder of the extent of a casual racism in the conversation of that time. They refer, for example, to the boys that they work with—but those boys were full grown adult men, worthy of the same respect as any other man. Clearly the missionaries loved the people they worked with, but equally clearly they were part of the colonial structure and shared the assumptions of the colonial powers.

At the same time I observe the difficulties and hardships that they took for granted. They walked many miles through the bush to visit the people. They accepted the risk of dying from tropical diseases that were not well understood. At times they put their own lives on the line to save the people they had come to serve. Like us, they were people bound up with the problems and blindness of their time. Like us, they became conduits of God’s power bringing new life when the locusts pass through.

Twelve years ago, veteran CBC journalist Brian Stewart gave the convocation address at Knox College, Toronto. He talked about how he had assumed that the church, so weak and ineffectual, would soon disappear. He told how, over a 40-year career in reporting, he came to realize that the church was filled with an amazing power. He gave several examples, and then said these words:

I rather regret that the term muscular Christianity has gone out of use, because a lot of the Christianity I’ve seen is very hard muscular work, where there’s lots of sweat and dirty hands. The spirit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is alive. Many of us in news crews noticed something else hard to put into words. So often after a day in the field filming volunteers at work, we’d be sitting back over our nightly drink and one of us would say something like: “Strange people those, know what I mean? There’s just something different about them. They’ve got something that we don’t.” I believe that a form of human happiness emerges when based on a flourishing life in which spirit and intellect are used to the full, for the purpose of the good of all. Yes, they seemed to be “flourishing.” C.S. Lewis wrote of Christianity producing “a good infection.” Christian work on the front lines infects those around them, even those who are not Christian, with a sense of Christ’s deep mystery and power. I've felt it. It changes the world. Still.

A good infection of power for the powerless—not just for those who go overseas or engage in extraordinary work, but for all those who follow Christ and keep their eyes on him to the end of their lives. Then they, and we, can say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day – and not only to me, but also to all who long for his appearing.”

Grace Bible Church

23 October 2016

Bike Memories

I have a black leather jacket. Got it second hand from my brother-in-law. I like my jacket. The only problem is that sometimes I have trouble finding it on the coat rack at church among all the other black leather jackets. Recently Lois took a picture of me as we drove south to Bemidji, Minnesota. My friends thought that the jacket needed a bike—a Harley or Yamaha or something. I started remembering my very limited experience riding a motorcycle.

I went out to Zimbabwe in January 1972, after finishing an English degree at Messiah College. I went to Matopo Secondary School with my English degree and was assigned to teach Chemistry and Biology. Not a good idea. Two weeks later the school authorities transferred me to Mathematics and English, a much better fit. (In spite of my mathematical inadequacies, I grasped the algebra and geometry well enough to enjoy teaching it.)

[The pictures are of me in front of the house in which I lived, called "Phumula". The black and white shows me at the time of this story. The colour comes from our family trip to Africa in 2003.]

I had no transport of my own at Matopo, so one of the 1-Ws in Zimbabwe stopped by to visit me. He was headed back to the States and had a motorcycle he wanted to sell. Something like 100 cc (whatever that means). I knew nothing about motorcycles; I still know nothing. I googled “100 cc motorcycles” and found this entry: “We all know for a fact that 100cc commuter motorcycles dominate the Indian two-wheeler market, but did you know that they make up for over 60% of the total sales volume? We check out the top ten best-selling 100cc motorcycles in India, to see what makes them so popular!” So I guess that it’s a basic motorcycle, ideal for a 22-year old young man posted to a school 25 miles from the nearest city.

First my friend told me how wonderful motorcycles were through stories about trips around the country. He told how he and two friends and had managed to ride between three donkeys walking across the road. Donkeys are wonderfully predictable—they don’t change what they’re doing for anyone, least of all for cyclists. He told of all the wonderful accidents he and his friends had been in, or almost been in. Finally he handed me the keys (at least I think there were keys) and let me take it for a quick ride down the road.

I started off the dirt road from Matopo, headed down towards Mtshabezi at a sedate 30 miles an hour. As I reached the end of the Matopo Mission property, the road plunged down a steep hill made entirely of granite. I have driven that road more than once, but never on a cycle. My comfortable 30 mph began to feel far too fast, and I barely managed to come to stop before heading down the steep hill and adding to my friend’s store of accident stories.

That is as close as I came to ever owning a motorcycle. A few minutes later I was back at the house and handed him the keys. I bought a bicycle instead.

Communion and Community

Introduction to Corinthians

This morning we are preparing to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Usually we do so as part of our Thanksgiving service, which we held last Sunday. This year we are taking communion during next Sunday’s installation service for Victor. 1 Corinthians 11 is a text we often use to get ready for communion, and I will use it again today.

We read about the beginning of the Corinthian churches in Acts 18. In the previous chapters Paul had preached in Philippi and Thessalonica, where he came under vigorous persecution, including imprisonment. Then he had gone on to Athens, where he gained a hearing on Mars Hill, but was laughed at by most of those listening. Given the events leading up to his entry into Corinth, the way he describes his coming in 1 Corinthians 2 makes sense: “³ I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. …” Paul seems so convinced in his preaching and writing that we might wonder how he could say, “I came to you with great fear and trembling,” but his fear makes sense at this stage of his preaching mission. In the event, he stayed for a year and a half (Acts 18¹¹) and his preaching led to the beginning of a significant church in Corinth.

Corinth was a city near the southern tip of Greece, a port city that rivalled Athens, which was about 50 miles further east. It was known for its sexual immorality, although some of that reputation may have come from Athenians who were jealous of Corinth. As a major port of the ancient world, you can be sure that its reputation was at least partly earned, and that it was a cosmopolitan city full of many religions and temples.

The Corinthian Church

One of my questions as I prepared was: How important was this church that Paul planted? In the first chapter of this letter Paul says, “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” Sometimes we read this to mean that the church consisted entirely of poor people. That’s not quite what Paul said: “Not many of you were wise … influential … noble.” So some were. In the Corinthian church there was a layering of social and economic classes, which becomes an important point in the passage that we read.

How many were in this church? The commentators I read agree that the church met in people’s homes, which limited the size of any one group to about 30 or 40 people. They normally met around a meal in their host’s home, with the wealthier people sitting at the table and lower-class people crowding in around the outside of the room. If there were a total of 10 homes that people could meet in, we have a church of 300 to 400. Paul does not tell us, so we can only speculate.

Paul is concerned with the life of this church, gathered in people’s homes. Chloe may have been one of the homeowners and church leaders (1:11). Crispus and Gaius (1:14) may also be such household leaders. Perhaps Stephanas is another (16:15). You note the mention of Aquila and Priscilla in 16:19, which shows the pattern of such household meeting in a neighbouring city, probably the city in which Paul is writing the letter. We know from Acts 18 that Priscilla and Aquila also lived in Corinth when Paul came there and hosted a house church there as well.

Our Passage

So we come to 1 Corinthians 11. This is a letter. We have a particular problem reading someone else’s mail. It would help greatly if we had the letter that the Corinthians sent, to which Paul is replying. We don’t, so we have to guess at the situations in Corinth, based on the answers that Paul gives to their questions.

You can read the letter as a whole, with a good commentary at your elbow, in order to see the issues in it more fully. One of these issues was the way that they celebrated communion, which is the passage we read earlier. Here is a brief description of what Paul says.

The Corinthian church was divided—not just by meeting in different homes, which was not a problem, but far more by leadership struggles (chapter 1) and by social class (our passage). So Paul says, “I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it.” The qualifier “to some extent” is a bit sarcastic. Paul means, “I know you are!”

Paul wrote strongly against such division in chapter 1:

¹⁰ I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought. ¹¹ My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. ¹² What I mean is this: one of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’

¹³ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptised in the name of Paul? ¹⁴ I thank God that I did not baptise any of you except Crispus and Gaius, ¹⁵ so no one can say that you were baptised in my name. ¹⁶ (Yes, I also baptised the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptised anyone else.) ¹⁷ For Christ did not send me to baptise, but to preach the gospel – not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

Now again in chapter 11 Paul returns to this theme of division, except that this time it shows up as a class division. Some of the Corinthians had money, and they brought good food and drink to their Sunday meal in the house church. Some of them were poor, and they brought a poor family’s food and drink—not much! This meal was the context within which the church celebrated the Lord’s Supper. They ate their meal together, and then broke bread and drank wine in memory of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

By the way, such discrimination was normal in Greco-Roman society. The people of Corinth saw such actions all the time. Paul’s point is that they should be different: a new people, the Body of Christ.

Paul contrasts their practice (in which one person goes hungry while another wealthier brother gets drunk) with what should happen. He quotes the words that we often use when we take communion, beginning with the words, “I received from the Lord what I passed on to you.” This is a technical phrase that shows us the importance of the formula that follows: “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me. … This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

This celebration does two things: One, it remembers Christ’s death until he returns, so it reminds us both of the salvation that comes to us on the cross and of the goal of history in the return of Christ. All of our lives are re-oriented to these fundamental realities: Jesus is our Saviour—he has saved us from “sin, death, and hell”, and Jesus is our lord—we live our lives for him until we die or he returns.

Two, this celebration affirms our essential unity. By reminding us that we are united in Christ, not divided in Christ, Paul ties together communion and community. Division, in Paul’s thinking, is sin. By “division” I do not mean the existence of several different house churches. As a practical matter we meet in different groups, but all Christians form one church. There is only one church of Jesus Christ. There is only one body of Christ in this world. Each congregation may meet alone, but we all belong together. Social or theological division in this context (the practice of the Lord’s Supper) is simply wrong.

Division is something deeper than simply the fact of having several groups. In Chapter 1, division was seen in the way that each group elevated itself and put others down.

•          “We come from Paul! You don’t have a spiritual father; we do!”
•          “Ah, but we learned from Peter and he represents the first church in Jerusalem. We are better than you!”
•          “You poor Paulians and Peterites! Have you heard Apollos preach? There is a man of God, truly educated and sophisticated—someone who can reach this cosmopolitan city if anyone can!”
•          Finally, the Christ-party speaks; “None of you know anything. We know Christ! We have the way! We are the true church, not you.”

In chapter 11 division showed itself through class divisions, based on social and economic status. This was a problem in various places, as James’ shows us (James 23:1-4):

My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favouritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’ but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there’ or ‘Sit on the floor by my feet,’ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?

It is this idea of “judges with evil thoughts” that lies at the heart of division. Division is not simply separating into more than one group. Division is judging the person from whom one separates. Paul suggests that this spirit of division is at the root of other problems that the Corinthians have experienced. We do not need to draw a straight line from sin to misfortune to see the truth of his statement.

I have heard this passage preached as a call to examine oneself for all kinds of secret sins. That goes beyond what Paul is saying. The act of taking communion in an unworthy manner (verses 27-29) refers specifically to the way that the Corinthians were abusing each other at the table. In a sense, all of us always take communion “unworthily”. No one here can ever say, “I deserve this grace from God.” Grace is always undeserved. Rather, it is taking communion together, being reminded that we are a redeemed people, and that we are one body of Christ—it is this celebration of communion that reminds us of the One who makes us righteous. God comes to us because we are sinners, to redeem and transform us.

Application

We are going through deep waters in our congregation, and we must take seriously what has been happening among us. Let me oversimplify in order to make my point. We have divided over a number of issues. To disagree is not sin, nor does separation necessarily mean division, but division may result. I assume that all of us have been seeking God’s will and are trying to be faithful in the issues that face us. Some see the danger of agreeing to what they believe is sin. To do so would make them also guilty. They cannot do it. Others see the danger of rejecting marginalized people, which would also be sin. They cannot take that step. But here is the problem. In our efforts to do what we believe God wants us to do, we have fallen into division. This spirit of judgment has not been on one side or the other, but on both sides. I am not interested in deciding who has been more guilty. In my own thinking we have done all of this together.

You see our problem: In the effort to avoid one sin we have fallen into another. In my reading of the New Testament, the call to unity is one of the strongest themes of all. In John 13, Jesus makes mutual love the mark of the Christian. In John 17 Jesus prays and asks for Christian unity as the decisive argument that God is real and that Jesus is the Son of God. In Ephesians 4, Paul states forcefully that there is only one body. In 1 Corinthians 1 he asks, “Is Christ divided?” The answer is, “No! Christ can never be divided, nor can the body of Christ, which is the church.”

I want to ask you each to do something over the next several weeks. Ask of yourself, “Did I say something to hurt a brother or sister?” Then find that sister or brother and make things right between you. Don’t try to undo the past. We can’t. Don’t think that we can put everything back together. We can’t. But we can make sure that true organic Christian unity is restored, even as we move in different directions. You may ask yourself in this process of self-examination: “Did someone hurt me? Do I feel judged?” Then go and talk with that brother or sister and make things right. I am referring now to things that really were said, not to thoughts we may have had or emotions that flow. You may wonder if you need to tell someone, “I thought bad things about you.” If you only thought them, don’t start saying them now!

Conclusion

Next Sunday we take communion. Some of you may say, “I can’t. I have been hurt too badly.” If your conscience forbids you, listen to your conscience. Even if our conscience is mistaken, it is the medium by which God speaks to us. But I would add something: If you think you need to be truly worthy to take communion, you may as well give up now. We are all unworthy. Our sin at that point becomes one of hypocrisy if we think that we are righteous. Communion invitations get at this truth in different ways. Here is one such invitation:

Come to this table, not because you must but because you may, not because you are strong but because you are weak. Come not because any goodness of your own gives you the right to come, but because you need mercy and help. Come because you love the Lord a little and would like to love him more. Come, because he loved you and gave himself for you. Come and meet the risen Christ for we are his body.

We need mercy and help in our life together, so I invite you to prepare yourself for communion next Sunday. If you can, make things right with people around you this week. If you can’t get it done this week—perhaps some conversations are too difficult to have now—then take communion as part of your preparation to talk to those you must speak with. Don’t delay those conversations too long, or they will submerge and infect your life from beneath, but don’t hurry them either. Take the time you need to become fully the body of Christ again.

I have started this process for myself. I invite you to join me. Don’t try to do it for anyone else. We don’t examine each other; we examine ourselves and move towards fuller communion with all of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

9 October 2016

Text: 1 Corinthians 11: 17-34

Correcting an abuse of the Lord’s Supper

¹⁷ In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. ¹⁸ In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. ¹⁹ No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. ²⁰ So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, ²¹ for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk. ²² Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!

²³ For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: the Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ ²⁵ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ ²⁶ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

²⁷ So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸ Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. ²⁹ For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.³⁰ That is why many among you are weak and ill, and a number of you have fallen asleep. ³¹ But if we were more discerning with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such judgment. ³² Nevertheless, when we are judged in this way by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be finally condemned with the world.

³³ So then, my brothers and sisters, when you gather to eat, you should all eat together. ³⁴ Anyone who is hungry should eat something at home, so that when you meet together it may not result in judgment.

And when I come I will give further instructions.

Reading the Church's Bible, 2

Why Should We Even Read the Bible?

Introduction: The Question

Last week we talked about why we read the Bible—“why” in the sense of “for what purpose”? I suggested (based on Jesus’ words in John 5) that the Scriptures are intended to bring us to God through the person of Jesus Christ. I added (based on Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 3) that they are also intended to teach us how to live as God’s people. We can see these two purposes for reading Scripture in the Great Commission (Matthew 28): Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations”, baptizing those who come to faith in Christ and teaching them to obey all that Jesus has told us to do. The Scripture bring us to Jesus in conversion and then helps us to grow spiritually as followers of Jesus.

Many people around us, however, have a more basic objection. They wonder why we should read the Bible at all. The Bible was written over a period of about a thousand years, finishing about 1,900 years ago. What can such an old book have to say to us today? It was written by people in very different cultures from ours, in very different times from ours. Many people around us think the Bible is simply irrelevant. Why should we even read it at all, let alone make it our guide for faith and life?

Towards an Answer

To read the Bible with the eyes of faith requires an encounter with Christ. God saves us by grace through faith, and in faith we begin to read the Bible and find God there. This is not something that one can prove with human reason. We cannot say to people, “Here are the reasons,” and prove to them with human logic that this book is God’s Word for us today.

At the same time, our faith in God is a reasonable faith, and trusting the Bible is consistent with human reason. We would expect this to be true, since God made human reason. Here is a beginning step, then, towards believing in Christian faith by reading the Bible. In the passage that we read, Paul makes it clear that the centre of Christian faith is the person of Jesus Christ—Jesus lived in Palestine, Jesus died on the cross, Jesus rose from the dead. This is where our faith begins. Paul argues in the rest of the chapter that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the founding truth of Christian faith. If the resurrection did not happen, he says, our faith is misplaced and “we are of all people most miserable” (vv 14, 17). But, Paul says, Jesus did rise from the dead, so that our faith is true (v 20).

This is the key point. Dead people do not rise to new life. We know that, and the early church knew that too. Sometimes people think that the first Christians were just naïve and did not really understand that resurrections don’t happen. But of course they knew well that this event was not normal. That is one reason that they found the appearance of a healthy, glowing Jesus, full of life before their eyes over a period of 40 days, to be so amazing.

So if it is true that Jesus rose from the dead, we have something quite unique in history, something that changes everything that we think we know from nature and human reason.

I often quote C.S. Lewis in my sermons. Lewis was one of the greatest Christian writers of the 20^th century. As you may know, however, he was an atheist before he was a Christian. Born in 1898 in Belfast in an Anglican family, he lost his mother to cancer when he was 10 years old. His father sent him off to boarding schools in England, where for a variety of reasons he became an atheist. He fought in World War One (which reinforced his atheism), and after the war attended Oxford University. After he graduated he found work at Oxford as a tutor in Philosophy, and then as a professor in Medieval English Literature in 1925.

His life at Oxford included friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a convinced Christian and Roman Catholic. Along with various other influences, their conversations and arguments opened Lewis up to the possibility that Christian faith is true. As began to read the Bible again, he realized that, if the resurrection of Jesus were true, then the Bible as a whole is true and God himself is real. He resisted accepting the resurrection because he saw where the logic of the resurrection would take him.

One day he was talking with a friend, an atheist (I think he was himself a professor of history at Oxford) who unintentionally helped Lewis move closer to Christian faith. Here is how Lewis describes it in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not—as I would still have put it—“safe,” where could I turn? Was there then no escape?

There were other factors in Lewis’ conversion—especially his friendship with Christians and the discovery that the authors he liked best were all Christians. But this realization that historical evidence was on the side of the resurrection was an important piece. This is not of course hard proof that God exists, but once one accepts the reality of the resurrection of Jesus, then the door is open to faith in Jesus as God’s incarnate Son.

So How Do We Read?

Once we decide that we can and should read the Bible, we have the further question of how to read the Bible. This question requires a further series of sessions on its own, so I make only a few brief comments. I note two basic ways: critical reading and devotional reading. By critical reading I mean trying to understand what the original authors meant. By devotional reading I mean listening to Scripture seeking to hear God’s Spirit speak to us directly.

Critical Reading

Critical reading is necessary whenever we preach or teach from the Bible. If we want to apply what the biblical authors say to our own lives, we must know what they intended to say to their audience. We must know what the passage meant in its own literary and historical context before we can hear it speak clearly to our own time. Sometimes we want to derive rules for living directly from the Bible without paying attention to these critical questions, but of course we must study the original setting to know what was being said.

A good resource if you want to go into more depth for critical reading is a book by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart titled How to Read the Bible for all Its Worth. Fee and Stuart give good insight into the various kinds of literature in the Bible. We have letters and poetry, stories and history, legal material and parables, gospels and apocalypses. We read each of these differently. For example, poetry and law are quite different, and we do not read poetry like law, or law like poetry. We learn to read the gospels in paragraphs, not verses, looking for each complete episode as the writer puts it together. We learn to read letters as what we call “occasional documents”—something written for a specific occasion. We don’t have time to explore these different kinds of literature this morning. It is enough to note that we should know what we are reading before we are sure we know what it says.

Sometimes we refer to the unchanging nature of God’s Word. As we read the Bible, we see many things that are different from our time, so we may wonder how we can talk about God’s word forever true. We recognize, then, that what does not change is the principles that are being expressed in different situations. For example, 1 Corinthians 11 tells us that women should cover their heads in church. If we read this as a simple instruction, we miss the principle that Paul is applying. In Corinth there was a lot of disorder when Christians met together. In chapters 11 to 14 Paul deals with communion meals, with head coverings, with tongues and interpretation in worship, with prophecies, and with spiritual gifts. He concludes these chapters by reminding his readers that God is a God of order (which we know from many other places in Scripture). His concern with the various instructions about speaking in tongues and covering one’s head and so on all have to do with this principle: That order in church life reflects and demonstrates the presence of God’s Shalom.

There is more in these chapters than just this principle, but you see the idea. The principles undergirding all of Scripture are principles that are true always. So critical reading helps us find these principles by helping us understand the passages in their original context.

Devotional Reading

Critical reading can also be devotional. That is, as we seek to hear God’s Word clearly in its own context, the experience draws us closer to God. But we can also read the Bible devotionally without always asking what the original language said or what the historical context was. For example, I have heard many people appeal to the verse from 2 Chronicles 7: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Now reading this verse critically we observe the context in Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, and the fact that the prayer refers to an extended drought within the Promised Land. It fits into a cycle of grace and disobedience as part of the Deuteronomic promises.

Reading devotionally, however, we hear it speak to our own fears for our own country at critical moments in our history. It is dangerous to build doctrine on devotional reading, because we may misread the verse in its original context. At the same time, God does speak directly to us through devotional reading, and God wants us to listen for his voice as we read our Bibles regularly. This kind of reading is an act of and aid to faith. In devotional reading we do not come to the Bible with questions of historicity or accuracy or anything else. We come rather as part of our relationship with God, desiring deeply to hear God’s voice.

I suspect that the kind of conflict we have been experiencing may either separate us from reading the Bible simply to hear God’s voice, or it may drive us back to the Bible because we realize that we are in crisis. I pray that it drives us back to the Bible and back to God.

Richard Foster tells a story that describes what I mean. It appears in his book, Finding the Heart’s True Home, in a chapter on what he calls “meditative prayer”. I have given this example before, but it shows what I am talking about more clearly than anything else I can think of.

Allow me to tell you the story of Jim Smith, a former student of mine. … Jim went on to do graduate work …. By the second year, however, he was struggling to maintain his spiritual life, and so he decided to take a private retreat. He arrived at the retreat house and was introduced to the brother who was to be his spiritual director ….

The brother gave Jim only one assignment: to meditate on the story of the Annunciation in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. That was it. …. For the first couple of hours he sliced and diced the passage as any good exegete would do, coming up with several useful insights that could fit into future sermons. The rest of the day was spent in thumb-twiddling silence.

The next day Jim met with the brother to discuss his spiritual life. … Jim shared his insights, hoping they would impress the monk. They didn’t. … “Well, there is more than just finding out what it says and what it means. There are also questions, like what did it say to you? Were you struck by anything? And most important, did you experience God in your reading?” The brother assigned Jim the same text for that entire day. All day Jim tried doing what his spiritual director had instructed, but he failed repeatedly … and still it was lifeless. Jim felt he would go deaf from the silence.

The next day they met again. In despair Jim told the brother that he simply could not do what was being asked of him. [The brother replied,] “You’re trying too hard, Jim. You’re trying to control God. Go back to this passage and this time be open to receive whatever God has for you. Don’t manipulate God; just receive. Communion with him isn’t something you institute. … All I want you to do is create the conditions: open your Bible, read it slowly, listen to it, and reflect on it.”

Jim went back to his room and began reading. …. By noon he shouted to the ceiling, “I give up! You win!” …. He slumped over the desk and began weeping. A short time later he picked up his Bible and glanced over the text once again. The words were familiar but somehow different. His mind and heart were supple. The opening words of Mary’s response became his words: “Let it be to me…let it be to me.” The words rang round and round in his head. Then God spoke. It was as if a window suddenly had been thrown open and God wanted to talk friend to friend. What followed was a dialogue about the story in Luke, about God, about Mary, about Jim. The Spirit took Jim down deep into Mary’s feelings, Mary’s doubts, Mary’s fears, Mary’s incredible faith-filled response. It was, of course, also a journey into Jim’s feelings and fears and doubts, as the Spirit in healing love and gentle compassion touched the broken memories of his past. Though Jim could barely believe it, the angel’s word to Mary seemed to be a word for him as well: “You have found favor with God.” Mary’s perplexed query was also Jim’s question: “How can this be?” And yet it was so, and Jim wept in the arms of a God of grace and mercy. …. They talked about this—God and Jim—what might be, what could be. Jim took a prayer walk with God, watching the sun play hide and seek behind the large oak trees to the west. By the time the sun had slipped below the horizon, he was able to utter the prayer of Mary as his own: “Let it be to me according to your word.” Jim had just lost control of his life, and in the same moment had found it!

Conclusion

We must read critically: The original meaning is essential to understanding how Jesus calls us to live today, and the principles that God’s people applied in their lives still live for us today. We build church doctrine on critical reading of the Scripture. This is a task that we engage in together as the community of faith. There is space at the table for experts and non-experts, people who have studied Greek and Hebrew and those who know only English (not even French or German!), people who have read the Bible many times and those who are just beginning. We all work together at the task of hearing God speak to use.

We must also read devotionally: God wants to speak to us deep within where no one else sees. This is a task we can do together and on our own. When you have many people in the church who grew up in Christian faith, the danger is that we may live on the memory of past encounters with God and lose sight of the Risen Christ within our own lives. Then the passage we read at the beginning speaks to us anew: Jesus lived; Jesus died; Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the apostles and the disciples … and last of all has appeared also to us, even though we were born too late to see him on this earth. We see Jesus again, on our knees and in our homes, praying and reading and asking God to touch our hearts.

Different people have different passages that speak most clearly to them. For me it is verses about the cross, and especially about how Jesus bore the cross for us and how he calls us to bear the cross for him. For each of you there are other passages we can share with each other as we encourage each other to walk faithfully with Jesus. In our darkness and fear we turn again to God’s Word and ask God to bring us back to Jesus.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

25 September 2016

Text: 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11

The Resurrection of Christ

15 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

Reading the Church’s Bible, 1

Introduction

One of the issues our congregation is dealing with is the basic question: How does the Bible function in our lives? The “Confession of Faith in Mennonite Perspective” gives this summary statement about the Bible:

We believe that all Scripture is inspired by God through the Holy Spirit for instruction in salvation and training in righteousness. We accept the Scriptures as the Word of God and as the fully reliable and trustworthy standard for Christian faith and life. Led by the Holy Spirit in the church, we interpret Scripture in harmony with Jesus Christ.

A clear statement, but we may still wonder what it means. This morning I want to reflect on Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 3 and Jesus’ words in John 5. We could call this a consideration of Scriptural authority, or a reflection on the nature of the Bible. I have chosen to call it, “Reading the Church’s Bible” (after a course title at Providence Seminary).

Jesus

I start with John chapter 5. Jesus had healed an invalid lying beside the pool of Bethesda. This person had been an invalid for 38 years and was lying beside the pool hoping to get in “when the water was stirred” (verse 7). The episode closes with Jesus’ words, “Pick up your mat and walk” (verse 9). Because this healing took place on the Sabbath, some Jewish leaders asked him what he thought he was doing carrying his mat around—an action against the rules for keeping the Sabbath holy (verse 10). The resulting interaction led them to Jesus, and they started to attack him (verse 16).

Jesus said that his authority to heal and to forgive sins came from his Father, that is, from God (verses 17). The Jewish leaders realized that Jesus was claiming equality with God (verse 18), so that they “tried all the more to kill him.” Verses 19 to 47 give Jesus’ responses to their attacks on him. He observed that there were several testimonies to his identity as the Son of God: John the Baptist was one; his miracles of healing and forgiveness were another; the Scriptures themselves were another. In this context then we hear Jesus say, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

Some people read this statement to mean that the Scriptures do not give life. I don’t think that is what Jesus is saying. I think he is saying rather: “You’re right—the Scriptures bring you to life; but if you were really studying the Scriptures you would realize that I am Life.” Later in John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). So the Bible is not our Life, but it brings us to Jesus, who is our Life. Without the Bible we have only our subjective experience of God’s presence, and Scripture shows us a more objective picture of who God is, as revealed in Jesus.

This is an important point, because the conversations we have been having in our church have an impact on our spiritual life with Christ. We pray earnestly, and we want to do God’s will, but we may find ourselves feeling the hurt of all that has been said and done. Our relationship with Jesus may suffer. When we feel the darkness of this world, we turn again to Scripture, not so that we can prove that we are right or that someone else is wrong, but so that Scripture can take us back to God, who comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We read the Bible in order to meet Jesus.

Paul

The letters to Timothy were written late in Paul’s life. The verses we read give us almost his last will and testament. (Consider the 4: 6-8, which follows: “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”)

Now Paul would not have said that reading the Bible was the centre of the Christian life. He expresses the centre of his own life elsewhere, for example in Romans 1:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

From a more extensive passage (2 Corinthians 5: 11-21), in which Paul describes his passion for the gospel, I note especially the following:

… Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. … All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the [ministry and message] of reconciliation…. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

The gospel of God, the ministry and message of reconciliation: This is the centre of Paul’s message and of Paul’s life. So then why does he refer to the Scriptures in 2 Timothy 3? For the same reason that Jesus did in John 5. The Scriptures reveal God and God’s will for our lives. The Scriptures describe the gospel of God and give content to the ministry and message of reconciliation.

I want to focus now on the words he writes to Timothy in verses 14-17:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

Timothy had studied the Scriptures from his childhood. He knew the Bible stories. He knew what we call the Old Testament thoroughly. Paul encourages him to continue such careful study, because the Scriptures make one “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (Do you hear the echo of Jesus’ words in John 5?) Then Paul describes the Scriptures more thoroughly.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

You see, then, what the Bible is for. (Note that we extrapolate from Paul’s description of the Hebrew Scriptures to the Bible as a whole). It is for “teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness”, that is, it is useful for what we might call disciple-making. You remember that the Great Commission does not deal only with conversion (“baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”), but also with nurture (“teaching them to obey everything I [Jesus] have commanded you.” So the Bible is intended to bring us to Jesus, and to teach us how to live as God’s children (as followers of Jesus).

Sometimes we look at the Bible as a manual of instructions for the situations we face in life. I have a manual in the glove compartment of my car. It is useful for a Toyota Corolla, but if you have a Ford Fusion, it won’t help you as much. The problem with manuals is that they work for one specific situation. The Bible is much more than a manual. The Bible describes itself as the Scriptures that introduce us to Jesus and to the good news that in Jesus God has reconciled the world to himself. As we walk with Jesus and read the Bible, we learn more and more about how Jesus wants us to live in this world.

A Simple Point and a Problem

All of this is fairly obvious, I think. Next week I will talk about the different kinds of writing that we find in the Bible—from songs to laws, from love letters to practical letters, from gospels to apocalypses. Today I want to note just one thing about all of this: The Bible is true. That is what Paul means when he says that the Scriptures are “God-breathed”. The Bible says what God wants it to say. This is a simple point, but sometimes it trips us up.

The problem is that we read the Bible as though it speaks with one voice throughout. The Bible brings us the Word of God from a wide variety of human authors. Peter says this about Paul (2 Peter 2: 16): “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” Peter and Paul write quite differently, because they are different people. Similarly in the Gospels Luke writes a more educated Greek and John writes a simple Greek. The Scriptures are “God-breathed”, but they speak with human voices. Jesus is God’s Word—fully human and fully divine. So also the Bible is God’s Word—a blend of divine inspiration speaking with human voices.

The Bible uses the language and cultural forms of the human authors and their audience. If you have ever moved from one country to another, you have probably been surprised by something that does not mean what you expect it to mean. That also happens in the Bible. Here is a simple example, told to me by a friend from the Middle East. You remember the story of Lot in Sodom in Genesis 19. Because of Sodom’s wickedness, God sent two angels to Sodom to warn Lot to get out of town before judgment. Lot took them in as his guests and gave them supper. After they ate, the men of Sodom came to the house and tried to abduct these men (not recognizing them as angels). Then we read these words:

Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, “Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

We read this story and wonder how Lot could consider giving his daughters to these terrible men. But my friend said something like this: “You think it means that he was willing to give them his daughters. But this is just how we talk in the Middle East. What it really means is that the law of hospitality is so strong that he could no more give his guests to these men than he could give his daughters to them.” In fact, we have a similar form of speech in our own culture; it is called sarcasm.

This change does not affect how we understand the whole story, but such misunderstandings can occur anywhere in the Scriptures if we read too quickly and don’t listen carefully. How do we avoid this problem? By reading carefully and repeatedly. I have a friend who did his Master’s thesis at Providence on the Gospel of Mark. The first step he took before trying to write the thesis was to read the gospel through in one sitting. Three times in a week. For ten weeks.

When we read over and over, we focus less on individual verses that we might take out of context, and we begin to hear the whole Gospel. We will still get some individual passages wrong, but we will get the whole message right. You see, alongside the many voices of Scripture, we hear always God’s Spirit speaking through the authors. It is one of miracles of inspiration that the whole Bible does tell one coherent story, speaking through so many different people. If you want to know that story and learn to live by that story, you have to read the whole Bible and listen to the whole Bible.

I think of my grandparents’ generation in the Brethren in Christ. Many people had only book: the Bible. For some their formal education stopped with Grade Eight, but they read the Bible. I have studied more than they—going on to seminary, but they read the Bible constantly and thoroughly. I suspect that they often read more clearly than I do.

A Concluding Thought

As we read the Bible together, we will sometimes disagree about what it says. We also disagree about how we can read the Bible. Some say that the Bible is plain and needs no interpretation. Others say that the Bible is complicated and we cannot understand it. Both are right. In its overall message the Bible is clear—even if we have some disagreements. In many places the Bible is complicated—but in fact those places are fewer than we might think.

We do sometimes disagree about what the Bible says. I have worked most of my professional life as a seminary teacher among people with whom I disagree. I am convinced that Jesus’ call to peace is integral to the message of the gospel. Reconciliation with God includes reconciliation with people. Most of my colleagues, however, see peace as a goal to work towards rather than a life to live now. They are not pacifists; I am. Yet we continue to work together. We live and work together as brothers and sisters of Jesus, children of God, saved by the blood of Jesus on the cross, gather around the communion table, reading the same Bible, willing to follow all that Jesus commands us to do.

The first thing that the Bible is meant to do, then, is bring us to Jesus. Then it teaches us how to live—using stories and examples from history. Precise lessons may be complex and we may disagree, but they always fit into the whole story of God’s reconciling ways. In our own struggles here and now, let the Bible call you back to Jesus, to walk with him until he returns.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

18 September 2016

Texts

2 Timothy 3: 10-17

A Final Charge to Timothy

¹⁰ You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, ¹¹ persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. ¹² In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, ¹³ while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. ¹⁴ But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, ¹⁵ and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. ¹⁶ All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

John 5: 31-47

Testimonies About Jesus

³¹ “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. ³² There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is true. ³³ “You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. ³⁴ Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. ³⁵ John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

³⁶ “I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me. ³⁷ And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, ³⁸ nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. ³⁹ You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

⁴¹ “I do not accept glory from human beings, ⁴² but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. ⁴³ I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. ⁴⁴ How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

⁴⁵ “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. ⁴⁶ If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. ⁴⁷ But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”

Forgiveness

Introduction

I understand that you [Grace Mennonite Church] are taking four Sundays to consider the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in Luke’s Gospel. That means that my focus this morning is on Jesus’ words here, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” I will begin by setting the context of the prayer in Luke, comment briefly on the prayer and the saying on prayer that follows, and then consider the idea of forgiveness as we have it here.

Luke’s Gospel

Luke’s Gospel divides naturally into the following sections: the first four chapters, culminating in Jesus’ beginning sermon in Nazareth (Luke 4); Jesus’ ministry in Galilee (chapters 4-9), which has miracles interspersed with some teaching; Jesus on the road to Jerusalem (chapters 9-19), which consists mostly of teaching, with some dramatic action; and finally the climax in Jerusalem (chapters 19-24), with the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.

This passage, then, comes near the beginning of “the road to Jerusalem”. Luke structures the Gospel so as to present much of Jesus’ teaching as a walk to Jerusalem. I am reminded of an Anglican catechism class described by Tom Sine in Mustardseed vs. McWorld. The class chose to do their instruction, leading up to confirmation, as they walked from London to Canterbury—a distance of about 70 miles. As they walked, they learned the catechism and concluded their instruction with the confirmation ceremony in the Canterbury Cathedral. A Japanese theologian (Kosuke Koyama) uses the phrase, “the three-mile an hour God”, God who walks with us at the ordinary pace of daily life. This is the God to whom we pray in this prayer.

The Context of the Prayer

Luke reminds us that Jesus prayed regularly and gave his disciples a pattern for prayer. Since this prayer (which we call the Lord’s Prayer) is that pattern, we can expect that he told them more than once. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives the prayer as part of the Sermon on the Mount talking about how to pray. Here, Jesus gives the prayer as a response to one of the larger group of disciples who were walking with him from Galilee to Jerusalem.

In Matthew Jesus introduces the prayer thus: “This, then, is how you should pray.” Here he says, “When you pray, say.” The difference in wording is unimportant, reflecting Luke and Matthew’s memories as well as the different occasions on which Jesus taught them to pray. The disciple’s question reminds me of how often we have to say the same things before everyone hears them—which is not the point of this prayer, but a daily reality in community life.

The saying after the prayer has to do with praying for results, so that you might say the prayer focusses on spiritual power, where Matthew’s context focusses more on the relationship that the disciples have with God. In this context, then, Jesus tells his disciples—and us—to pray persistently and thus also to receive God’s blessing.

The Prayer

Luke’s version of the prayer is quite brief, compared to Matthew’s account: “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.” The prayer begins with acknowledgment that God is God, and that our lives depend on God. Then follow three simple requests: 1) Meet our physical needs; 2) Meet our spiritual needs; 3) Protect us in a dangerous world.” We focus on the spiritual need for forgiveness.

Forgive, for we also forgive

We are more familiar with the prayer in Matthew, where Jesus says, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” There God’s forgiveness appears to depend on our response of forgiving others. Here our attitude of forgiveness appears to be the grounds that somehow require God also to forgive us: “Forgive us, because we are people who forgive.” The difference is again unimportant. We are sometimes inclined to read a real difference where we have simply a way of expressing oneself. This morning I use both forms of the prayer interchangeably, as the prayer speaks about forgiveness.

A couple of rabbit trails:

1) You notice that Luke records the prayers as “forgive us our sins; we forgive others what they owe us.” The idea of debt (here and in Matthew) is of a moral obligation, but it is interesting that Jesus calls what we do against God “sin”, and what others do against us a failure to meet an obligation. Another sermon might explore the concept of sin more fully. Here I note only that the basic idea of “sin” is that it is rebellion against God. To pray “Your kingdom come” while insisting on being in charge of our own lives is the essence of rebellion.

2) Matthew records the prayer as, “Forgive us … as we forgive others.” Luke records the prayer as, “Forgive us … for we forgive others.” The difference is not to suggest that we earn forgiveness, but rather to remind us that the refusal to forgive others can become the obstacle to receiving God’s forgiveness. Alan Kreider has observed that the early church insisted that people wanting to become Christians had to show the “fruit of repentance” before they were allowed to hear the gospel. A curious fact! (See The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom.) 

“Forgive us,” we pray: God extends mercy. “For we also forgive”: We in turn are to extend mercy. One might express more fully thus: God treats us with kindness and mercy, which leads to a new life flowing in us and through us—expressed by treating those around us also with kindness and mercy. To put it more bluntly: God will treat us the way that we treat each other. I find this thought to be somewhat disturbing, because we often do not treat each other well.

Some Illustrations

Consider the following examples. I wonder what our world would be like, following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, if George Bush would have prayed this prayer before each strategy meeting determining the American response: “Forgive us our sins, because we forgive others their sins.” Could we have found a response to Al Qaeda that pursued justice (for example, through the World Court in Hague), but did not embrace vengeance? Treating even our enemies with kindness and mercy would lead to a very different world.

I think of another situation. During his undergraduate work at a school I won’t name, one of my students at Providence rented rooms in the basement of a house owned by a professor of “peace and conflict studies”. There were three rooms in the basement, which shared a common eating and sitting area. He told me how he and the other two students renting the basement would sit there listening to the professor and his wife fighting upstairs. The irony: that someone who could teach others how to move towards peace could not live at peace himself in his own house.

Please note: the fact of strong disagreements is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes we must speak up, wherever or whatever the situation. But one can fight well, in ways that move towards peace and in ways that reflect the prayer Jesus taught us to pray.

I think of other situations that most people here are fully familiar with. Following the gathering of MC Canada in Saskatoon, we know of strong disagreements across the conference to which we belong. Again, as with the peace and conflict professor and his wife, it is not bad that we disagree—even disagree strongly. But the principle stated in the Lord’s Prayer holds true: God will treat us the way that we treat each other.

Our forebears knew this truth well. Some years ago I sang in a choir with Rudy Schellenburg directing. Our concert consisted of Low German folk songs, including one, “Mein Noba Klassen.” The basic idea of the song was a complaint about my neighbour, Klassen, who kept borrowing things from me and breaking them. We sang fervently that we could never forgive this thoughtless, careless neighbour.

“Our neighbor is angry at me because I did not lend him my new ax.

He borrows all kinds of things from me, there doesn't seem to be any purpose in it.

The other day he borrowed my wagon,

Then immediately broke the axle in two.”

The sting in the song came in the tune, a well-known hymn tune. The hymn appears in our own Mennonite Hymnal as #524, “What mercy and divine compassion has God in Christ revealed to me.” We sang our bitterness and unforgiveness to a tune that reminded us of God’s undeserved mercy. And the principle holds true: God will treat us the way that we treat each other.

Judgment and Grace

I find this truth to be more than a little disconcerting. If God treats me the way that I treat my brothers and sisters, I may be in trouble. I pray the Lord’s Prayer every morning as a part of preparing to live each day. I have focussed on different aspects of the prayer at different times—sometimes the beginning formula, “Your name, Your reign, Your will.” Sometimes I focus on this morning’s verse: “Forgive us (me) as we (I) forgive.” I have tried to live faithfully by this principle, not holding others’ faults against them and lifting them up to God for God’s blessing. But of course I fail sometimes, as I suspect all of us do. A critical spirit creeps in. I begin to judge others and I get angry with them for their blindness. Perhaps the most obvious place I experience this spirit is when I argue with my American friends who inexplicably (to me) support Donald Trump. I can understand supporting some, even many, of his policies; but to support the man himself? And as I argue, I hear the Spirit quietly reminding me, “The way you treat these friends is the way God will treat you.”

Such a difficult standard then stands in judgment on us. We all fail to extend forgiveness freely, to extend mercy and kindness to each other. If God judges us as we judge others (Matthew 7:1), we are in trouble! At that point the prayer becomes a plea for God to remake us and show greater grace than we have any right to ask for—grace that not only pardons and cleanses, but grace that transforms and remakes us as God’s children.

Some Closing Thoughts

As we continue to learn the path of forgiveness, a path we can walk only by God’s great grace, I offer a few closing thoughts about how we might act in times of conflict:

1. There are times we do disagree. This is not bad. We should practice a basic honesty that honours our own integrity as well as respects those around us. Nothing in the practice of forgiveness says that we should avoid conflict.

2. How we disagree is critical. We should not fight dirty. We should not tear the other person down. We seek the other person’s good, even as we disagree. The disagreement may be so strong as to say that we must separate, but even in the hardest times, we fight fair and act in love and respect.

3. To disagree well and treat the other person kindly, we assume the best about the person. I have heard people speak clearly in arguments—and then move on to judge the other person’s motives. Assume the best of the other person. Assume they also are seeking to follow Christ faithfully. If we assume the worst about others, we invite God to find the worst in us.

4. Act in good faith and in love for the other at all times—even when separating. I think of a congregation I know who divided down the middle over whether they wanted a pastor-led congregation, or a lay-led congregation. It was hard. Such separations are bitter, and there were many broken relationships. Those people who acted in love and good faith throughout found it easiest to forgive at the end. Those who were convinced that the others were trying to destroy the church and spoke most strongly found it hardest to forgive.

Remember, God will treat us the way that we treat each other. In this prayer, we not only recognize this truth, we go further and ask God to make this truth alive in our hearts and minds.

What Mercy and divine compassion has God in Christ revealed to me!

My haughty spirit would not ask it, yet he bestowed it full and free.

In God my heart does now rejoice. I praise his grace with grateful voice,

I praise his grace with grateful voice.

Your bounteous grace is my assurance, the blood of Christ my only plea,

Your heart of love my consolation until your glorious face I see.

My theme, through never-ending days, shall be your great redeeming grace,

Shall be your great redeeming grace.

Text, Luke 11: 1-11 (Jesus’ teaching on prayer)

11 One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” ² He said to them, “When you pray, say:

‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. ³ Give us each day our daily bread. ⁴ Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’

⁵ Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; ⁶ a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ ⁷ And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ ⁸ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need. ⁹ “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. ¹⁰ For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹ “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? ¹² Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? ¹³ If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

28 August 2016

Grace Mennonite Church