Monthly Archives: August 2013

Jesus: The Great Divider

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Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 12C, August 18, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would like to listen to the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the written text, click here.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 5.1-7; Psalm 80.1-2, 9-20; Hebrews 11.29-12.2; Luke 12.49-56.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

If you have ever wondered what the modus operandi of a prophet looks like, you need to look no further than today’s OT lesson. In it we see God’s prophet taking God’s people to task for not being the people God called them to be, in this case to be doers of justice (cf. Micah 6.8). How are we to read texts like these? More importantly, how are we to read texts like these and not fall into utter despair and hopelessness? After all, are we as God’s people in Jesus the Messiah any less broken than God’s people in ancient Israel were? It is these questions I want us to look at briefly this morning to see what kind of answer we can glean from our texts. But first some review. 🙂 

You recall that last week I talked about the overall story of the Bible being a five-act play, vis-a-vis Bishop Wright’s model, and we can locate our OT lesson as being in Act 3 (Israel). I also encouraged you to look for grace notes in the midst of judgment oracles and in today’s lesson we have to look carefully for a grace note because it’s not easy to spot at first blush. We see God’s prophet Isaiah use some trickeration on God’s people Israel (Judah). Isaiah plays the part of a wandering troubadour and as he enters Jerusalem, he announces he is going to sing a love song to God’s people. We can imagine the people eagerly gathering around Isaiah to hear him sing of God’s love for them. The song starts off well enough. He tells the people about a vineyard—a well-known metaphor for God’s bride, Israel—and how God has called her into existence and tenderly cared for her over the years even though by definition a vineyard would not be able to ask for such treatment or deserve it, other than to be the beneficiary of the caretaker’s kindness and loving care (there’s the grace note; did you catch it?). So far so good.

But then Isaiah begins to speak about the caretaker’s expectations for his vineyard, i.e., for his people Israel, and here is where things start to go south. Isaiah asks why, in light of the TLC the caretaker has showered on his bride (vineyard), is it not reasonable for the caretaker to expect his vineyard to produce good fruit? Instead, however, the vineyard is only producing wild grapes—bad fruit. Isaiah’s audience would surely have understood that he was talking to them about being the people God called them to be but that clearly they were failing to live up to that calling. And if there was any doubt in their minds, Isaiah begins to speak directly to the people to confirm their suspicions. Was God to blame for their failure to respond to his call to them to bring his healing love and justice to the nations? After all, hadn’t God done all he could to care for and nurture his people? But they had not produced the fruits of their calling and now there would be terrible judgment on them and they had no one to blame but themselves.

So why the trickeration on Isaiah’s part? Isn’t it a bit unsporting of God to have his spokesman use this kind of strategy to deliver his message? Not at all, especially when we consider how none of us likes to hear hard truth about ourselves. Think of how the prophet Nathan confronted David about his adultery. Nathan told David a parable about a rich man and poor shepherd, which at once aroused David’s anger and condemnation. Only then did Nathan confront him with the awful truth that David was the man. Likewise with Isaiah here. The people of Judah were not ready to hear the hard truth about themselves, that they had failed to be the people God called them to be. We see evidence of this in our psalm lesson. Writing on behalf of his people, the psalmist asks God why God has allowed foreigners to overrun his people and Promised Land. We can sense a bit of “What? You’re mad at little ole me, God? Pshaw. What have I done?” And so Isaiah had to invite his audience to sit in judgment of a third party before he could tell them about God’s hard truth and impending judgment on them. God called them to do justice, to take care of the oppressed. But instead all God saw was the rich murdering the poor for material gain and heard the agonized cry of the oppressed as they cried out to God.

If you want to understand the prophetic view of justice, here it is. It isn’t Lady Justice blindfolded, holding balanced scales. Justice in God’s view is about action, about advocating for the powerless whenever and wherever we reasonably can, just the way Jesus exhorted us to do when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. And as we think about God’s stern warning of judgment on his people, we cannot help but wonder how it will go for us. After all, do we advocate consistently (or at all) for the powerless in our speech and actions? Do we love to be merciful all the time? Are we always walking humbly with our God? The answer, of course, is no. And so we must ask ourselves if we too must face God’s righteous judgment on us.

Well, yes we do have face that judgment unless something radically changes. We are too profoundly broken and self-centered to heal ourselves. But just when we are tempted to cry out in hopeless despair over our situation, we hear God speaking a further word to us, a word of hope and good news. The very love of God that grieved over his stubborn and rebellious people is so faithful and strong that it dared to become embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, to bear the baptism of fire, a symbol of God’s judgment on us, so that we do not have to bear it ourselves, and so be healed and reconciled to God, thanks be to God! And as the writer of Hebrews hints at in our epistle lesson, in Jesus’ resurrection we are given a glimpse of the world to come, of God’s new creation in which God will finally put all things to rights and heal all of our wounds, banishing evil from his good creation forever. This is the new Promised Land we are to inherit as Jesus’ people and it God’s free gift to us in Jesus, accepted through faith. More about that anon.

But being Jesus’ people comes at a cost. I am not talking about the gifts of mercy, forgiveness, and eternal life because they are freely given. But accepting God’s gifts to us by faith requires that we come and die as Bonhoeffer put it. Like ancient Israel, we are called as Jesus’ followers to work to bring about God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven by bringing God’s healing love to all people without exception. To do this requires that we put to death our sinful nature with the help of the Spirit so that we are equipped to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. It means we embody kingdom values in a world that is increasingly hostile to those values. Whether it be in the area of economic or social justice or sexual ethics or how to treat each other as part of Christ’s body, the Church, Jesus calls us to embody the love and values of Scripture, the values that he himself embodied. Moreover, as Jesus makes clear elsewhere, he expects us to be his followers in deed, not simply word (cf. Matthew 7.15-27; Luke 13.23-30).

And this is where it can get really costly because as our Lord reminds us in our gospel lesson, when we choose to follow him and adjust our lifestyle, values, and thinking accordingly to align them with God’s good will and intentions for us as his image-bearing creatures, we are going to meet opposition and sometimes outright persecution. Sadly, not everyone will accept Jesus’ offer of new life. Not everyone will embrace life as God intends for us to live it and when that happens there will be division and conflict, even among families and even among churches! But we are to take heart and hope when we suffer for our Lord because Jesus himself tells us he was willing and eager to suffer for us so that we could be reconciled to God and become citizens of God’s promised new creation. Evil remains alive and well right now and that often puzzles and perplexes us. But it is the consistent testimony of the NT writers and countless Christians over time and culture, that in Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has overcome the evil of this world and launched his promised new creation. However, because God’s new world is only partially established and not yet fully consummated, this takes faith on our part.

Faith, as we read in last week’s epistle lesson is, “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1). This means, of course, that faith is much more than wishful thinking. It means we have to use our brains and find examples of the things hoped for, i.e., God’s in-breaking kingdom on earth as in heaven under Jesus’ rule (the new creation), so that we can have confidence in the veracity of our faith and act accordingly. Put another way, if we are not convinced that we have been reconciled to God through Jesus’ death on the cross, if we are not convinced that in Jesus’ resurrection we have seen the first-fruits of God’s promise to abolish evil and death, we would be out of our minds to act as Jesus calls us to act. If we do not believe in the promise of new creation, then why would we continue to kick against the pricks and act in ways that engender the world’s opposition and hatred? If this world is all that there is, we’d better get with the program and do as the world does, baby! Otherwise, time’s a-wasting and we are simply playing the fool.

But like Moses who had the faithful audacity (stupidity?) to lead his people out of Egypt against all odds or like Daniel who had the faithful audacity (stupidity?) to remain faithful to his God, even in exile, we too have the faithful audacity to live our lives in the manner of Jesus in our world today, despite its increasing hatred toward us. And just as the examples in Hebrews surely raised the derision and scorn of people living around them, surely when we choose to live faithfully to Jesus we will arouse the same kind of scorn and derision. This is why it is so important for us to remember, to remember God’s faithful acts in history on behalf of his people and to remember the lives of faithful people, both inside and outside the Bible. Doing so reminds us we are part of a bigger project and that our job is to be faithful builders for, and not fulfillers of, God’s kingdom. It will remind us to keep our eyes on the prize, even in the midst of our suffering, and it will also remind us that we are not in this project all alone. Others have gone before us, especially Jesus, who now sits at God’s right hand—NT code for Jesus reigning as Lord of this universe—ready to hear our intercessions as we cry out to him in our struggles to be faithful to his call to us to be his people and to help us endure opposition when it inevitably comes. When our faith is bolstered like this, we will be like Peter and John, who rejoiced that they were counted worthy enough to suffer for their Lord after they had received a severe flogging (Acts 5.27-42). They rejoiced because like us, they knew that suffering for Jesus meant they were one of his people. And being one of Jesus’ people means they (and we) have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you like to respond to this sermon? Use the form below. Please keep it clean and address its points, not the perceived shortcomings of the writer.

Jen Pollock Michel: The Misguided Theology of Kindness

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Does this go against your theology? See what you think.

Saunders suggests we cure selfishness to attain to the The Misguided Theology of Kindnessmeasure of kindness. We medicate ourselves with art, education, prayer, meditation, and friendship. We abandon the notion that “we are central to the universe.” We fight our Darwinian “built-in confusions,” which “cause us to preference our own needs over the needs of others.” When selfishness is strangled, kindness will flourish.

There is some inherent biblical wisdom in these words. Despite our reflexive megalomania, we are not central to the universe: “In the beginning, God,” Scripture begins—as if anticipating the reminder we would need. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul describes well our “built-in confusions” in Romans 7:15: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” And finally, Jesus Christ serves as the example that each of us must look “not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others,” (Phil. 2:4).

We Christians hold this much in common with Saunders. However, we could not agree with him that our greatest virtue is kindness and our greatest vice selfishness—at least not as he defines them.

To make kindness into an ultimate virtue is to insist that our most important moral obligations are those we owe are to our fellow human beings. Under Saunders’s assumptions, the only plane of human behavior with moral import is the horizontal one: neighbor to neighbor. Sin is exclusively defined as the harm we do to one another.

Simon Chan: Why We Call God ‘Father’

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An interesting read. See what you think.

We could even say that Israel succumbed to an idea of God that was rather against her natural disposition. Left to themselves, the Israelites would have ended up worshiping the Baals and Asherahs—Canaanite fertility gods and goddesses. Israel’s prophets singled out idolatry for fierce denunciation because its people were constantly tempted to do just that. But Israel’s idea of God’s fatherhood bucked a common trend in the ancient world. Hence, it could not have been an Israelite invention, but rather the result of a long history of living under the revelation of God. It is the church’s continuity with this narrative of Israel that would lead eventually to the uniquely Christian doctrine of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the New Testament, God’s fatherhood conveys two distinct ideas. First, it refers primarily to the internal relationship within the Trinity. This is how the first article of the Apostles’ Creed puts it: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” Even as early as Paul’s writings, the phrase “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” had become commonplace. God is first and foremost the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not an invention of later church leaders, but comes directly from Christ, who refers to God as “Father.” In doing so, Jesus reveals a unique relationship between the Father and Son that constitutes the beginning of the Trinitarian doctrine.

Jesus taught his disciples to call God “our heavenly Father.” Therefore, the loving relationship he has with the Father from eternity now extends to those adopted into God’s family (Rom. 8:15). The father-son relationship is the most intimate personal relationship, one marked by reciprocal love and respect, and it is God’s supremely personal and loving nature that the term father is meant to underscore.

To claim, as many feminist theologians do, that the very presence of masculine metaphors for God excludes women simply does not square with the way Scripture uses them. Masculine images of God do not always convey exclusively “masculine” qualities. For example, Isaiah 54:5–7 refers to God as the Husband who with “deep compassion” (a stereotypically “feminine” quality) called estranged Israel back to himself (see also Isa. 49:13). The term father, then, excludes not feminine qualities, but rather the idea of a distant and impersonal deity, which is precisely the picture of the supreme being still seen in many primal religions.

Fox News: Mystery Solved: ‘Angel Priest’ Identified

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Even though the mystery is “solved,” it doesn’t change the fact that the girl survived a horrific crash in a manner some of her rescuers called “miraculous.” When we interact with the Lord is there anything not miraculous that happens?

dowlingThe “angel priest” who appeared at the scene of a Missouri car crash, anointed and prayed with the teenage victim, then vanished has been identified as Rev. Patrick Dowling of the Jefferson City Diocese.

A press release provided to FoxNews.com by the diocese said Father Dowling had been travelling Highway 19 between Mass assignments in northern and central Missouri when he arrived near the crash scene Aug. 4.

The arrival of the unidentified priest, who seemed to come out of nowhere, then attend to the victim before disappearing just as mysteriously, touched off nationwide speculation about the identity of the “angel” cleric.

Read it all.

Scot McKnight: The Good, Bad and Ugly About Christian Eschatology

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Preach it, brother Scot, preach it. 🙂

Screen-Shot-2013-08-10-at-9.59.47-AM-280x300Many of us are just turned off when anyone wants to write or talk about “eschatology.” I know I usually am, and here’s why: I grew up RaptureWorld where Christian eschatology was about the Rapture, about Jesus’ returning (almost)  to earth to snatch up genuine Christians, which didn’t include most who said they were Christians. Then there was the Millennium, which was designed for us genuine Christians. And the Great White Throne Judgment, and then Heaven. All in caps, but the inner core of eschatology is almost entirely left out in this scenario — like a world reborn to be shaped by peace, justice, love and wisdom — and joy and banquets (with wine) and fellowship. Like the end of death and the eternality of life. Like resurrection and reunion and union with God — forever. In other words, Christian eschatology is either hope or it is not Christian eschatology. (Tweet that.) And since eschatology has already begun in the Now, hope reshapes the present.

Read it all.

Jennifer Boardman: The Debbie Downers of Christianity

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Another interesting perspective. From Christianity Today online.

Just a few weeks ago, Pope Francis tweeted, “A Christian is never bored or sad. Rather, the one who loves Christ is full The Debbie Downers of Christianityof joy and radiates joy.” Never? If only. We can be Debbie Downers, even when it comes to our faith.

This is not to suggest discontentment is inherently bad. All people feel the rumblings of “Is this all there is?” in life, which often pushes us to look outside ourselves for truth. At its best, discontentment often reminds us that we were made for a different place, producing in us a hunger to ask deeper questions and pray more fervent prayers.

But hasn’t discontentment also introduced the possibility that we Christians have been marketing our own spiritual brand of a most unholy product? Just as American culture sells, “You need this thing or that experience to be happy,” does American Christian culture insist, “You need this feeling with God or that experience of God to be happy?” And if this is the case, are we asking Jesus for too much?

Read it all.

Peter Chin: Blindsided by God…But Never Betrayed

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A very real piece. From Christianity Today online.

You see, I was a good person, or at least had tried my hardest to be one. I had devoted my entire life to following and serving God, giving up a promising career in medicine to become a pastor. I wanted to do great things for his sake, and so planted a church in

Washington, D.C. My family had moved into the heart of the city, intent on being an incarnational witness of Christ. As a result, God was supposed to protect us against the worst that the world could offer.

But he hadn’t. Instead, three months into that church plant, he had allowed my wife to get aggressive breast cancer. Then, only a few years after its founding, the church plant was forced to close its doors. Our home has been broken into twice, our car, more times than I can count. These kinds of events, I thought, aren’t supposed to happen to people who follow God faithfully. We are supposed to enjoy protection, blessing, and providence, not cancer, failure, and crime. I never expected our lives to be perfect, but this was too much to bear. I felt betrayed by God because he had broken his promises.

This might all seem strange for a pastor to say. After all, Jesus obeys his Father’s will and yet is persecuted and suffers terribly. The disciples follow in the footsteps of their Lord and experience the same. According to 1 Peter 4:12, “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.”

As a pastor, I understood—and taught—these very truths. But despite all my good theology and good intentions, here I was, struck by a deep sense of God’s betrayal. I tried to remind myself time and time again of the witness of the life of Christ and the early church, and how God could use suffering to refine and strengthen our faith. I even preached on those themes more than a few times during that hellish year. I knew the right answers like the back of my hand, but they were of no use to me, because feelings of deepening anger and mistrust toward God inevitably crept back into my heart.

I realized then that I didn’t really believe what I thought I believed, what I said I believed. My conscious theology had been overridden by a subconscious theology: the gospel of health and wealth, or the idea that following God ensures blessings in this life. Had anyone accused me of subscribing to such ideas, I would have denied it vehemently. But it became abundantly clear that I had subconsciously absorbed them, in at least some subtle form, from countless sources.

Read and reflect on the whole thing.

Update on “Angel Priest” Story

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From Fox News.

angel priest artist renditionAn artist has created a sketch of the mysterious “angel priest” who witnesses say appeared at the scene of a Missouri car accident Sunday, anointed and prayed with the teenage victim and then vanished without a trace.

Fox4KC reports Tucson-based artist Randall Sands created the sketch using online face sketch software at facesid.com based on media reports, hoping someone would be able to identify the cleric.

Officials are still scratching their heads over the priest, who they say appeared out of nowhere. Perhaps more mysteriously, the local fire chief said he does not appear in any of 80 photos from the accident scene.

“I think that this time I’ve actually witnessed a guardian angel at work,” Jeremiah See of the New London Fire Department told ABC News.

Read the whole fascinating article.

Read Scripture for the Love of God

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Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 11C, August 11, 2013 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you would like to hear the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text, click here.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 1.1,10-20; Psalm 50.1-8, 22-23; Hebrews 11.1-3, 8-16; Luke 12.32-40.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

As I am inclined to do from time to time, I am going to try something a bit different with you this morning. You may or may not like it and if you don’t please tell me before you leave. The idea stems from last week’s sermon. From it, you recall we saw that living the Christian life is all about dying and rising with Jesus, about taking off our old sin-stained clothes and putting on new ones like Jesus’ (you do recall this, don’t you?). In other words it is about developing a real relationship with Jesus and learning to become like him in our thinking, speaking, and acting. We certainly have to use our minds in this endeavor but we also saw that Paul was adamant in insisting that we don’t do this on our own. We do this with the very help of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. Like any good relationship, our relationship with Jesus is never one way and we hamper our relationship with him when we think we are the ones doing all the work.

But we also must acknowledge that developing a living relationship with Jesus is a bit different from how we develop our other relationships. When we develop relationships with others, we can see them, talk to them, and hear them as they talk to us. We note body language and voice inflections. We can see people’s love for us in their eyes and how they act toward us. We don’t have the same dynamics with Jesus. Yes, we can certainly talk to him in prayer, but because he is currently hidden from us in heaven, we can’t see him or hear him audibly (although there have been some notable exceptions to this rule). And because we can’t enjoy Jesus’ physical presence with us, we have to learn how to listen for his voice if we are to ever grow to become like him in the power of the Spirit. There are many ways to do this but from the very beginning the Church has recognized that reading Scripture is one of the best ways to listen to our Lord so that we can learn to recognize Jesus’ voice and see his behaviors in others. This is why I constantly, um, encourage you to read Scripture on a regular basis and this is what I want us to look at this morning. How can we read Scripture in a way that will help us recognize the love of God for us expressed chiefly in and through Jesus Christ our Lord? To help us in this task I want us to look at passages from Scripture from the last three weeks to see what we can learn about God’s character as revealed in them.

But before we do this, we must first keep in mind Scripture’s meta-narrative, its Big Picture story of how God is rescuing us and his creation from the power of evil, sin, and death. In his book, Scripture and the Authority of God, Bishop Tom Wright has a good analogy that can help us better understand the Bible’s Big Picture of God’s rescue plan. Wright compares the overall narrative in Scripture to a five-act play: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus; and (5) the NT and people of God. Scripture tells us that God created his creation good and appointed his image-bearing humans to be wise stewards and rulers over it. But then human sin entered the picture and corrupted God’s good creation and intentions for us. Sin gave evil a foothold into God’s good creation and resulted in God’s curse, and with it came death. We find this story contained in Genesis 1.1-3.24 and these chapters constitute the first two acts of the biblical play. As you read these stories, read them for what they intend to tell us, not what they don’t tell us. In other words, don’t try to make the creation and Fall narratives into a science narrative or look to them to answer ultimate questions the text simply doesn’t answer, e.g., why was there a snake in the Garden of Eden in the first place? This isn’t why Genesis was written. Instead read the creation narratives as the story of how the Creator God called into existence things that were not (cf. Romans 4.17) because it pleased him to do so and fulfilled his creative purposes.

The rest of Scripture tells the story of how from all eternity, God in his wise providence has chosen to rescue us and the rest of his creation from the ever increasing ravages of evil, sin, and death, i.e., how God is reestablishing his good rule on earth as in heaven. God chose to rescue us primarily through human agency, which is itself a glorious testimony to God’s love and faithfulness to his human creatures. Specifically, as the writer of Hebrews reminds us in this morning’s epistle lesson, God called his people Israel into existence by establishing a covenant with Abraham to bring God’s healing love and rule to all the nations (cf. Genesis 12.1-3), and as Jesus reminds us in our gospel lesson, it pleases God to do so.

But from the beginning Israel was as much part of the problem as the solution and so God became one of us and lived as Jesus of Nazareth to be and do for Israel and the world what Israel could not even be and do for herself, let alone the world. We know that God rescued us from evil, sin, and death in Jesus’ own death and resurrection and then called both Jew and Gentile to be people of God’s Messiah Jesus, who are empowered by the Spirit to be the reconstituted Israel whom God uses to help bring in his kingdom on earth as in heaven. Of course the kingdom has not fully come yet, but in Jesus’ resurrection God has launched his promised new creation and so we as Jesus’ people live in the “already-not yet,” where we live by faith and await the promise of God’s new creation to be fully consummated when our Lord Jesus returns in great power and glory. We live by faith, in part, because we have seen God’s mighty acts on behalf of his people as recorded in Scripture, e.g., the Exodus. This part of the story comprises acts 3-5 of the biblical play where we are living out Act 5 with all its hope, promises, and ambiguities, precisely because we are living in the “already-not yet.” Again, as you read these parts of the play, try to resist taking potshots at God and calling into question why he has chosen to rescue us in this fashion. Sure there are things about God’s plan we don’t understand. But we would expect that, given we don’t have God’s knowledge or perspective.

With this Big Picture narrative in mind, we are now ready to look at some of our passages from the last three weeks to help us better read for the love of God contained in them. I’ve chosen excerpts from our last three OT lessons because we can see a pattern emerging in them.

Hosea 1.2-10

Hosea 11.1-11

Isaiah 1.1, 10-20
When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “[T]he land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord…I will no longer have pity on the house of Israel or forgive them…You are not my people and I am not your God.

”Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living God.”

 When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols.

They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword rages in their cities…My people are bent on turning away from me.

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?

 Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood…Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

[T]hough your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

What stands out to you in these passages? On one level these are hard passages to read because there is certainly God’s judgment on his people. But this is where understanding the Big Picture of Scripture is helpful because it reminds us that God called his people Israel to embody his healing love to the nations but that Israel steadfastly refused to obey God’s calling to be his people. Israel’s disobedience as God’s people is the reason for God’s judgment, not because God is some capricious and angry god who delights in punishing people.

But on another level there is also something else going on in these passages. Even in the midst of judgment, we see God’s love and compassion for his people. We see God speaking to his people as a jilted husband might speak to his wife after he catches her with another lover or as a heartbroken parent might speak to a stubborn and rebellious child as the parent watches the child head down the path of certain destruction by becoming involved with drugs or porn or other highly addictive and destructive things. Yes, there is anger. But there is also love, tenderheartedness, and a steadfast faithfulness in these passages, and we realize to our astonishment that nowhere does God cancel his covenant promises to Israel to be their God and for them to be his people. To be sure, God threatens to do so but he never does. Instead we see that promises of ultimate redemption always accompany promises of God’s judgment on his stubborn and rebellious people whenever they turn back to him in penitence and faith.

But we also wonder how this can be. How, for example, can God go from telling his people Israel they are not his people to calling them his children? How can their (and our) many sins that stain our lives and the lives of others be turned into something as pure and white as snow? These passages do not give us the answer but elsewhere the OT writers tell us that God will accomplish this through his Messiah and the new covenant he will make with his people (cf. 2 Samuel 7.4-16; Jeremiah 31.31-34). This, of course, points us to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and this is why from the very beginning the NT writers and first Christians saw Jesus in the OT. As they reflected on the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, they saw the fulfillment of God’s love and promises to his people in Jesus. This is also why we need to understand the Bible’s Big Picture so that we don’t fall into the error of seeing an “angry God” of vengeance in the OT and a “loving God” in the NT. God remains God throughout the entire biblical story and his character never changes. And as we think about our own unfaithfulness to God, we dare to hope that even when we are unfaithful, God will likewise be gracious to us when we repent, even as he is to Israel because we know God’s love for us is constant. This is especially true when we dare stand at the foot of the cross in faith and experience God’s love poured out for us so that we are reconciled to God and thereby healed.

And just as God called his people Israel through Abraham to bring his healing love to the nations, so God calls us as Jesus’ people to do likewise and we are equipped for this work precisely because we belong to Jesus who heals us of our sins and restores us as God’s children. This is also why there is such an emphasis in the NT on good moral conduct and imitating Jesus as his people. We are part of God’s reconstituted Israel and are given the power and presence of the Spirit to help us fulfill God’s call to us to be his kingdom builders. But we have to act accordingly and like the old ethnic Israel who chased after false and destructive gods, we cannot be God’s people if we worship our own idols that prevent and distract us from imitating the love of God embodied in Jesus. When we understand what God calls us to do and be as his people, we discover a wonderful consistency throughout the unfolding story of God’s rescue plan contained in Scripture.

I’ve only scratched the surface here. We could do the same exercise with the psalms and NT/gospel lessons. But I hope you have gained some insight into how to better read Scripture for the love of God. If you have, and if you are not doing so already, resolve this week to start reading Scripture in this manner. Remember the overall story of God’s rescue plan and then read both the OT and NT with this in mind, seeing how each story you read fits into the broader narrative of God’s rescue plan for his creatures and creation. Equally important, read Scripture to better learn about God’s wonderful and gracious character as revealed in Jesus. Dare to appropriate the promises that the writer of Hebrews talks about. Accept the love, mercy, and forgiveness of God that is contained in Scripture and make it your own. As you do, you will learn more and more about Jesus and his great love for you in the power of the Spirit so that it will change you and empower you to be his kingdom builder. And when that happens, you will surely know more fully what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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USA Today: ‘Angel’ Priest Visits Missouri Accident Scene

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Received via email. Awesome. See what you think.

Emergency workers and community members in eastern Missouri are not sure what to make of a mystery priest who showed up at a critical accident scene Sunday morning and whose prayer seemed to change life-threatening events for the positive.

Even odder, the black-garbed priest does not appear in any of the nearly 70 photos of the scene of the accident in which a 19-year-old girl almost died. No one knows the priest and he vanished without a word, said Raymond Reed, fire chief of New London, Mo.

If we believe in the God of the Bible, the God who is Creator and actively involved in his creation (as opposed to the false man-made deist god of the Enlightenment who is absentee landlord and only nominally cares about what goes on here), this story should not surprise us even as it does. Read it all.

Living Faithfully? Not Without Jesus You Aren’t!

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Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 10C, August 4, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you would like to listen to the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the texts below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Hosea 11.1-11; Psalm 107.1-9, 43; Colossians 3.1-11; Luke 12.13-21.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our texts this morning again point out the fundamental problem of the human condition and God’s response to our brokenness, and this is what I want us to look briefly at this morning. Specifically I want us to look at what being in Christ really means because it contains the essence of God’s Good News to us.

You recall that in our OT lesson from last week, God directed his prophet Hosea to take a prostitute for a wife to symbolically act out Israel’s unfaithful relationship to God despite God’s constant love for Israel. In today’s lesson, we see God continuing to reflect on his relationship with his people through his prophet. The first thing we notice is the root problem of idolatry that serves to drive a wedge in between God and his people and diminish our relationship with God. Idolatry—the worship of other false gods, and not just golden ones—is the central issue behind almost all of God’s judgment oracles because idols distract us and will eventually destroy our ultimate loyalty to God. Whether it is golden calves, baals, money, power, sex, security, health or whatever, when our idols pull us away from God so that we are more busy thinking about and serving them than thinking about God and how to please him by living as the fully human beings he created us to be, it has a serious deteriorating effect on our behavior, which inevitably dehumanizes us. For example, recall that last week God condemned the political shenanigans of Israel’s rulers and the violence and murder that resulted. When we are firmly rooted in God’s truth and good will for us, these kinds of behaviors are simply not possible.

Not only that, when we pull away from God to follow our own disordered desires or idols (or both), we separate ourselves from the only real source of life, which will inevitably result in our death. After all, if God is our only source of life, why should we expect any other outcome? This is not about a vengeful and angry God taking it out on his people whenever we don’t get things right. This is about us living with the consequences of our behaviors when we choose consistently to separate ourselves from God through our disordered worship of false gods.

We see this dynamic illustrated powerfully in today’s gospel lesson. Jesus uses a request for him to settle a property dispute as the pretext to warn against the idolatry of greed for material possessions. If we are going to learn anything from this parable, it is critical for us to stay focused on the main thing and not get distracted by the side issues. We can do that best by seeing the two things Jesus is not saying and then looking at what he does say. Jesus is not condemning wealth nor is he condemning wise and judicious planning. Instead, Jesus is condemning the idolatry of greed for material possessions on the rich fool’s part which led him ignore his relationship with God and hoard his possessions, assume that life could be secured and its quality measured by those possessions, and regard his wealth and property as his own rather than as part of God’s many and generous blessings.

As people who live in a materialist culture and who are constantly bombarded with exactly these messages, we need to pay attention to these warnings lest we succumb to them (if we haven’t already). The rich man was a fool precisely because he put his ultimate hope and trust in something that simply cannot give life. No matter how rich we are, no matter how powerful we are, no matter how secure we are, none of it can give us life and when we die we must leave it all behind. We tend to reduce these things to mere cliches, which itself is a symptom of the greater problem of our idolatry. After all, who really takes cliches seriously?

Well, in this case, God apparently does because he calls the rich fool to account and reminds him (and us) that all the blessings we enjoy, from health to wealth and everything in between are not ours but God’s generous blessings showered on us, and when we focus on the blessings rather than on the Provider, we put ourselves in mortal danger because we are not doing the things that God calls us to do as his image bearers, things like being loving and generous and kind and humble so that God can use us to bring his healing love to the world.

And this helps us better understand God’s reaction to idolatry that we see in our OT lesson. We see both a mixture of anger, sadness, and disbelief, not unlike that of a jilted lover or incredulous parent. God reminds his people of all that he has done for them (and us), undeserving as they (and we) are. He called his people Israel into existence to bring his healing love to the nations, but they could only do that when they learned from God how truly human beings behave. That’s why God initially gave his people the Law through Moses. But God’s people were not interested in learning how God called them to live. They were more interested in securing his blessings for their own benefit and when they received God’s blessings, they ran off after other gods! We should always note that the problem of idolatry usually occurred during times of prosperity for God’s people, not during hard times. No, it took the harsh realities of living in God’s good but fallen world where sickness, evil, death, and all kinds of other nasty stuff regularly occur to make God’s people wake up and smell their foolishness in abandoning God. And lest we get all haughty and look down our noses at God’s people Israel, are we much different? Don’t we too get all proud and presumptuous when things go swimmingly well for us so that like the rich fool, we start deluding ourselves into thinking our prosperity is our own doing instead of the result of God’s generous blessings on us, undeserving as we are?

This is why believing in a sovereign God—a God who is not defeated even by the appearance of evil gone rampant in his world—is so critical for us to get our minds around because it is is part of the basis for the gospel of Jesus Christ and this what Paul and the OT writers want us to hear this morning. As both the psalmist and Hosea remind us, God’s heart is gracious and kind to his people and God has a track record of rescuing them from their exile. Whether it was from Egypt or Babylon, God consistently rescues his people from what oppresses them despite their sin and stubborn rebellion against him and he does this because of his steadfast love for them.

Believing in a sovereign and gracious God is also part of the basis for Paul’s astonishing claims in our epistle lesson because the sovereign God who reveals himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is precisely the God who has rescued us from our exile to sin and death and made us a new people in Jesus the Messiah. As we saw last week, God did this in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus and in our baptism we become like Jesus in his death and resurrection. In today’s lesson, Paul works out for us the implications of this wondrous gift to us. Our natural inclination is to zoom in on the behaviors Paul identifies in this passage, in this case behaviors that revolve around sexual ethics and our speech, and to reduce these behaviors to a list of dos and don’ts that every good Christian should follow. But we miss Paul’s main thrust if we do that. Yes, our behavior matters but what Paul really wants us to see is the reality of our union with Christ as a result of our baptism. Our very being is changed, precisely because we share in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection which enables us to act more and more like Jesus. But this isn’t automatic nor is it a one time event. Rather it is a daily process that we have to work out in Jesus’ power over a lifetime. And that’s the key. In Jesus’ power, not our own. To do this, Paul tells us we must set our minds on things above, i.e., on Jesus, who is currently hidden from our sight in God’s space (heaven), but whose Spirit lives in us because he is alive and Lord of the universe.

As we set our minds on Jesus and are united to him, it will necessarily mean that we will see the need to take off our old filthy clothes that got that way by us mucking around with our idols and fallen desires and put on new clothes that Jesus gives us so that we can join his party, the hope and promise of new life and new creation. What Paul is telling us is that we don’t have to wait until the Second Coming to enjoy new life in Jesus. We can enjoy it right now because we are being changed by his Spirit living in us.

But here is where we often hit a snag because even though all this is true, it may not feel like it and this may lead us to believe we really haven’t been changed and/or share in Jesus’ inheritance. After all, it’s hard to believe you have new life in Jesus if you are suffering from a debilitating illness or if you are addicted to porn or struggle constantly with the same sins that seem to bedevil you regularly. But despite outward appearances and circumstances, Paul insists our union with Jesus is real and tells us to embrace this promise through faith. Once we wrap our minds around the truth that we have died and our life is now hidden with Jesus who is in heaven, our heart (our core) will start to come around and we will be ready to experience the joy of holy living because we know we are empowered to do so by Jesus’ power, not our own.

As we are empowered by Jesus to become more and more like him, i.e., to have God’s image restored in us so that we become the fully human beings God created and wants us to be, Jesus, through the Spirit, renews our minds to act accordingly. We will look closely at our old fallen habits that bring about discord and rancor and hurt and seek to put them to death with the help of Jesus through the Spirit. In other words, Paul expects us to use our renewed minds to think deeply rather than superficially about issues like sexual ethics and how we treat each other in our speech. Guided by God’s love and truth contained in Scripture and living life together as healed and redeemed people of God, we are called to think carefully about what we think, say, and do about these topics et al. and how they play out in our fellowship here at St. Augustine’s and in the broader contexts of our lives. None of this is particularly easy, but our job as Christians is not to park our minds at the door but to think harder about what it means to embody Jesus’ love to the world, both in our actions and in what we support or oppose in the political and social arenas.

Let me give you a quick, albeit imperfect, example of how this all works. When I was a boy, I idolized my grandpa Shaffer, in part, because of his great, great love for me. I wanted to dress like him, talk like him, and act like him, and even took on the nickname, “Little Earl.” I didn’t think I had to do any of this to gain his favor because I knew he already loved me unconditionally. I did it because I loved him and wanted to be like him and to do that I had to think and act like him. Now to be sure, my grandpa wasn’t hidden from me in heaven nor did he promise me eternal life and the hope of new creation. But my point is that I did all this because I loved my grandpa for who he was and wanted to be like him, and I had to work out in my young mind what that looked like, based on who I knew him to be. This, I think, is what Paul is trying to get us to see in our passage today. Living life in Jesus is not about following an arbitrary set of rules we cannot possibly hope to follow in the first place. It is having a relationship with Jesus that will allow him to empower us to live and be like him, both here and in the promised new creation. If we can wrap our minds around this mind-boggling love and grace of God, we will want to change our old clothes and put on the same kinds of clothes Jesus wears. In other words we will want to become just like him in our thinking, speaking, and actions and be empowered to do so. We may never be called to do signs and wonders as our Lord did, but we are all called to embody the grace and love of God as manifested in Jesus.

So this week, if you are not already doing so, start using your mind to think about these things. Start by thinking about the deeper issues around idolatry that are involved in our lessons this morning. Ask Jesus to open your mind to their meaning. What are the texts calling you to put on and take off in your life so that you can become more like Jesus? Make this a daily habit and ask other Christians you trust to help you track your progress so that your faith will grow. Faith always seeks understanding and we rob ourselves of faith-building material if we ignore real examples of God working in our lives and the lives of others. If you do that consistently, sooner or later Jesus will lead you by his grace and power to really accept the gift he has given you in himself to empower you to live as he does and share in his inheritance. And when that happens, you will surely know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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