Monthly Archives: February 2014
A Stark Choice
Sermon delivered on the 3rd Sunday before Lent, February 16, 2014, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.
If you would like to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually different from the text below, click here.
Lectionary texts: Deuteronomy 30.15-20; Psalm 119.1-8; 1 Corinthians 3.1-9; Matthew 5.21-37.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s texts are sure to trouble our 21st century ears and minds because they are so clear, straightforward, and blunt. And to sensitive hearts that are weighed down by the burden of past sins committed, our texts ostensibly offer little hope. What are folks like me, for example, who are twice divorced and remarried to do with Jesus’ teaching on divorce and remarriage? Is all lost? Is there no hope? This is what I want us to look at briefly this morning to see what we can learn from our texts to help us live out our faith with eyes wide open.
In our OT lesson, the Lord is devastatingly clear and blunt with his people. You’ve got a choice, he says. You can choose to worship me only and obey the Torah, my laws and teachings, completely or you can choose to whore around after other gods while giving me some (or even none) of your loyalty. If that happens, you will not possibly be able to love me in ways that honor the first commandment and you certainly won’t be able to obey my other commandments either. If you choose the first path (which is what the prayer in our Psalm lesson is all about), you will find life and blessings. If you choose the second path, you will find curses and death.
As we listen to God’s warnings, all kinds of things start bubbling up in our minds. Some of us hear this stark choice and become afraid because we know which of these paths we have chosen, and it isn’t the first path. Others will hear this choice and become angry. Who does God think he is to only give us two options? How dare God limit us like that? But our ranting will do us no good because at the end of the day, God is still sovereign and in charge, not us, and these are the only two paths God has put in front of us. Others of us will want to rationalize and/or sit on the fence. “Give us a little more time to consider what you say, God, and we’ll decide later.” But that won’t do because choosing not to decide is to choose curses and death. Or we might try to rationalize our disobedience by saying our religion will cover all our mistakes. But that makes a farce and mockery of religion, especially the Christian faith. How can we claim God’s benefits and remain inherently hostile toward God? How can we claim to follow Jesus and yet act consistently in ways that are contrary to his?
Still others will want to say in response to God’s stark choice confronting us that the way to find God is not a matter of faithful obedience but of following one’s heart. We hear this all the time and in a variety of ways. It doesn’t matter what we do as long as our heart is in the right spot. Or there are so many ways to find God or of being a human or good Christian that our decisions don’t really matter, especially if we follow our hearts. God will sort it all out in the end. And after all, if God is love, what’s the big fuss? This is just another example of a grouchy OT God vs. the real God of the NT who is all about love and grace, not punishment and condemnation. These ways of thinking, of course, make it possible to be a cafeteria Christian, where we get to pick and choose which of God’s laws we will obey and which we will ignore.
But as our gospel lesson attests, this kind of thinking is neither biblical or true. As the history of salvation unfolds in the Bible, starting with Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God in the garden, and as the history of humankind richly attests, following one’s heart is usually not a good thing to do because as the Lord makes clear to Jeremiah, the human heart is above all deceitful and desperately sick (Jeremiah 17.9). We are masters at deceiving ourselves so that many of us live our lives in a state of delusion and unreality.
We see this sadly reflected in our epistle and gospel lessons today. Jesus is reminding his followers that there really are only two choices that are before all humans, obedience or disobedience to God’s laws, and obeying them is a lot harder than we imagine. People get divorced or lie or commit adultery or murder precisely because our hearts are desperately sick. And we see that same heart-sickness at work in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Instead of giving their entire allegiance and loyalty to God and his work, people are too eager to give their loyalty to human agents like Paul and Apollos and as a result, conflict and strife occur.
I suspect that about now some of you are muttering to yourselves, “Wow, Fr. Kevin. What an uplifting sermon so far. We are so glad we braved another Sunday of cold and snow to come out and and hear this. You rock, dude—NOT!” And you are right, of course. So far this has been anything but a feel good sermon and I take no pleasure in preaching it. But you see, our discomfort with this stuff is a symptom of the problem. So I’ve got to dare love God and us all enough (myself included) to speak the truth, even if I risk raising your ire. We don’t like hearing hard truth because we would much prefer to deceive ourselves that we are the ones who have it all right and that God is the one mistaken here. But if we are interested at all in developing a real and life-giving relationship with the living God and believe in the least that the Bible is God’s authoritative word on how to live life that pleases God and be fully human, we cannot choose to ignore hard passages like today’s. To do so would be to pick and choose which gods we prefer to worship and obey and our choice would necessarily lead us down the path of curses and death.
No, we must be confronted with God’s hard truth so that we can begin to live our lives in ways that will free us from the deceits, lies, and delusions that plague us, both our own and Satan’s. And the first hard truth that we must acknowledge, contrary to what our culture wants us to believe, is that we must choose whether we will live in ways that bring God’s blessings and life or God’s curses and death. When we take this stark choice seriously, it will likely produce a reaction in us as it did for good King Josiah of Judah, who, when he heard the newly-discovered book of Torah read to him tore his clothes in anguish because he realized that he and the people of Israel had chosen the path that leads to death.
But neither would I be faithful to God’s word if I were to talk about the hopelessness of the human condition without offering real hope. Before I do, however, we must remember why God put this stark choice in front of his people. God did not do this because he is some kind of angry God who is terminally irritated with his human creatures. God put this choice before his people because he had called them to be his agents to bring his healing love to a world created good but despoiled by human sin and the evil it allowed to enter into it. The only way God’s people could do this is to live in ways that would restore God’s image in them completely and make them fully human beings. To run after false gods would make this impossible because we become what we worship. And Israel (and those of us who follow Jesus) had to learn that there was only one God to follow so that they could learn to fully trust him. This was no small task because humans from Adam and Eve onward have had the inclination to trust and follow any god other than the one true and living God. So the choice God laid out before his people was laid out in love for his people, not anger. Without fully obeying God’s laws, God’s called-out people could not possibly hope to be the people God called them to be to bring God’s healing love and justice to his broken world.
And like Josiah, if we are totally honest with ourselves, we know in our hearts and minds that we have already chosen death because who among us has lived in complete obedience to God’s laws? But we are Christians and so we have real relief and hope from our desperate human condition. The actual choice laid before us is therefore not life or death but resurrection and death. Because we have already chosen the path that leads to death, God became embodied as a human in Jesus of Nazareth, who went to the cross to bear God’s just judgment on our sins himself. All have sinned so all will die. That is a biblical axiom. But for those who are in Christ Jesus, resurrection is our ultimate destiny, not death. God himself has borne the brunt of his curses so that we who follow Jesus can share in a resurrection like his (cf. Romans 6.4-5) and here we are again confronted with a choice. The resurrection either happened or it didn’t. Which do we believe? I don’t have time to explore that issue here (I will do so during Easter), but if the resurrection didn’t happen we are still dead in our sins and there really is no sovereign God who has rescued his people from sin and death. But if the resurrection did happen, it effectively puts an end to our delusions of self-help in matters of faith and living, and our only appropriate response is to fall on our knees and cry out, “My Lord and my God!” (cf. John 20.24-28).
Freed then from our fears of death and with hearts full of wonder and love for God’s graciousness toward us, we are ready to allow the Holy Spirit to help us develop hearts that really do love God and want to obey his laws so that our faith is made manifest and God can use us as his salt and light to the world. This essentially involves replacing our first and broken nature with a healed and renewed second nature that sees all of life as the faithful outworking of our Lord’s Great Commandment to love God and love others as ourselves. And we will keep a constant eye on Jesus to help us apply the practical outworking of this command. So, for example, we will begin to see the value and truth of not harboring anger toward another and seeking reconciliation with those who offend us, even if we didn’t cause the problem. We will be willing to do the extremely hard things we need to do to break old destructive habits so that we can become more and more like Jesus in all we say and do. We will be willing to speak the truth in love to others and to confront the lies of this world that claim life is possible outside of Jesus.
This takes a lifetime and we will never get it completely right. But we remember always that we do all this in the power of the Spirit, not our own, and we can therefore have confidence that the Spirit does indeed do what Jesus promised he would do—to make Jesus present to his people as we live out our lives in faithful obedience to him.This is never easy and that is why we are called to do this together as Christ’s body, the Church. And when we stumble or when life seems overwhelming, we need to call to mind the fact that even though we initially chose the path that leads to death, we are now on the path that leads to life because One greater than us has made that possible. This will allow us not only to persevere but to actually find joy that transcends any circumstance because we are loved, healed, and forgiven. That, folks, really is Good News, now and for all eternity. Is it yours? To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
More Thoughts on President Lincoln
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. He is one of my personal heroes and would have been 201 years old today. I am thankful that God put this man in our country’s history at just the right time. I am thankful that President Lincoln was a man of determination and compassion. I am grateful that he was more interested in restoring our broken nation than in exacting revenge on the enemies of the Union.
In April 1865, just days before he was assassinated, the president gave a speech from the White House to a crowd that had gathered to celebrate the surrender of General Lee. The crowd had gathered expecting to hear the president talk about vengeance and retribution that they very much wanted to exact on their defeated enemies. But Lincoln would have no part of it. He understood that this would cause vastly more harm than good. Instead, the president spoke of healing and reconciliation to the crowd that night, and it infuriated at least one person there—John Wilkes Booth.
Booth killed President Lincoln a few days later, in part out of hatred, but also for his own glory. In Booth we see a small, angry, and egotistical little man who sought self-glorification through murder. Booth had deluded himself into thinking that murdering the president would make him a hero to the South, and doubtless there were some who did see him as that.
But whom do we remember this day? Who is a towering giant in our history? Not J.W. Booth, but rather Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, the president was the consummate politician and never let folks get too near him, even those who claimed to know him the best. And Lincoln was a determined warrior, but he was not driven by hatred or bloodthirstiness. He was a determined warrior because he saw the war as regrettably the only way to bring the Union back together again, and it took a terrible toll on the president. Look at the two pictures of President Lincoln below. The picture on the left was taken in 1862 (I think). The picture on the right was taken in February 1865, just two months before he was killed. Look at the personal cost the war inflicted on the president. This is often what happens when evil confronts compassion.
For you history buffs out there, I would also encourage you to read Jay Winik’s, April 1865: The Month that Saved America. Winik is a wonderful historian who tells a gripping and interesting story of how Lincoln and others on both sides (Grant, Lee, Sherman, et al.) followed Lincoln’s conciliatory example and behaved in ways that saved America from guerrilla warfare after Lee’s surrender. Winik also paints a compelling picture, at least for me, of God’s gracious providence toward this nation of ours. I wonder these days if we are still beneficiaries of God’s gracious providence or whether over the past 40 or so years the enemies of the Cross have changed us in ways that are leading us to God’s judgment and death. Only time will tell.
This Monday we celebrate Presidents’ Day. Sadly many in our country do not even know the two presidents for whom the day is celebrated (do you?). Yet had it not been for Washington and Lincoln, this country surely would not be here today, or at the very least would not have enjoyed the prosperity we enjoy. Take time this weekend and on Monday to honor these two great presidents. Get to know them and their accomplishments so that you will gain a greater understanding and appreciation for the great gift of this country that God has bestowed upon us. We are not perfect. No country is. But we kid ourselves if we think we became the great nation we are without God’s providence and blessings.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Thank you for helping to save this great nation of ours. And thank you, dear God, for placing him, and President Washington, in our midst to do so.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. He would be 205 years old! The president is one of my heroes, primarily because of the role he played in saving this country. Mr. Lincoln had a wonderful spirit about him and his humility, compassion, and willingness to forgive his enemies arguably saved this country from a terrible aftermath following our Civil War. Reconstruction was hard enough as it was, but at least we did not have guerrilla warfare to contend with, something that would have probably done us in as a country forever.
We healed as well as any country could following a civil war. If you don’t believe me, check out other countries who have suffered through a civil war. Most of the time it didn’t turn out well. The reason our country’s reconstruction went relatively well is because of president Lincoln. He set the tone for U.S. Grant and the other Union commanders by insisting that they treat the vanquished with dignity and respect. Lincoln insisted that the rebels would not be treated harshly or punitively and as a result, everyone else followed suit, including the Confederate commanders.
Of course, this wasn’t all Lincoln’s doing, but as president he set the tone for others to follow. It would have been just as easy to hang all the rebel commanders and make life miserable for the vanquished. But Lincoln knew better. He knew how that would turn out. It would have been interesting to see how much more quickly we would have healed as a nation had Lincoln lived to serve a full second term. Instead, the zealots and self-righteous decided to “fix” Lincoln’s initial proposals for reconstruction and nearly managed to destroy all that president Lincoln had sought to establish in the process.
I am convinced God put Abraham Lincoln in our history for a reason. His presidency is more evidence that God has blessed this country. Whether that blessing continues today is debatable. But that’s a different story for a different day. Today, it is fitting that all Americans honor our 16th president and give thanks to God for placing the right man in the right situation at the right time. Happy birthday, Mr. President, and thank you for your service to our country.
Canon Phil Ashey: What Was Justin Welby Thinking?
Troubling times indeed for the Anglican Communion. It is precisely during these times that we must remember and proclaim that Jesus is Lord.
Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church (TEC), will receive an honorary degree from Oxford University. The award — announced last week (Feb. 6) — will be presented on June 25 in the presence of some of the world’s top scholars and fellow religious leaders.
“This award, richly deserved, affirms Bishop Katharine’s remarkable gifts of intellect and compassion, which she has dedicated to the service of Christ,”said Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.
Institutions like Oxford are certainly free to honor anyone whom they wish. I have no argument with that.
But how can the Archbishop of Canterbury offer such fulsome praise for Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefforts Schori who, in defiance of Lambeth Resolution 1.10 (1998), has accelerated the unilateral innovations of same-sex blessings and consecrations of same-sex partnered clergy as bishops that have brought terrible division to the Anglican Communion? How can Justin Welby say with any ecclesial integrity that she has “remarkable gifts of intellect dedicated to the service of Christ” when the unilateral innovations she has championed have destroyed that deeper spiritual unity in Christ for which Anglicans pray—that spiritual unity which is the highest good of the Anglican Communion and the very basis for its mission?
How can Justin Welby ascribe “remarkable intellectual gifts dedicated to the service of Christ” to a leader who has been challenged time and again over the last ten years by the Windsor Process itself, who has ignored the moratoria begged of her and TEC, and whose acceleration of those innovations was the very cause for the response of the Anglican Churches in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and elsewhere in the majority Global South which offered pastoral care and covering to those Episcopalians, now Anglicans, who would not submit to her innovations as a matter of conscience and fidelity to Biblical teaching and Lambeth Resolution 1.10?
Is such conduct really an expression of remarkable intellect in the service of Christ?
Evelyn Underhill on Work and the Spiritual Life
Our place is not the auditorium but the stage—or, as the case may be, the field, workshop, study, laboratory—because we ourselves form part of the creative apparatus of God, or at least are meant to form part of the creative apparatus of God. He made us in order to use us, and use us in the most profitable way; for his purpose, not ours. To live a
spiritual life means subordinating all other interests to that single fact. Sometimes our position seems to be that of tools; taken up when wanted, used in ways which we had not expected for an object on which our opinion is not asked, and then laid down. Sometimes we are the currency used in some great operation, of which the purpose is not revealed to us. Sometimes we are servants, left year in, year out to the same monotonous job. Sometimes we are conscious fellow-workers with the Perfect, striving to bring the Kingdom in. But whatever our particular place or job may be, it means the austere conditions of the workshop, not the free-lance activities of the messy but well-meaning amateur; clocking in at the right time and tending the machine in the right way. Sometimes, perhaps, carrying on for years with a machine we do not very well understand and do not enjoy; because it needs doing, and no one else is available. Or accepting the situation quite quietly, when a job we felt that we were managing excellently is taken away. Taking responsibility if we are called to it, or just bringing the workers their dinner, cleaning and sharpening the tools. All self-willed choices and obstinacy drained out of what we thought to be our work; so that it becomes more and more God’s work in us.
—From The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill
A Prayer from William Barclay
O God, you are our refuge.
When we are exhausted by life’s efforts;
When we are bewildered by life’s problems;
When we are wounded by life’s sorrows:
We come for refuge to you.
O God, you are our strength.
When our tasks are beyond our powers;
When our temptations are too strong for us;
When duty calls for more than we have to give to it:
We come to you for strength.
O God, it is from you that all goodness comes.
It is from you that our ideals come;
It is from you that there comes to us the spur of high desire and the restraint of conscience.
It is from you that there has come the strength to resist temptation,
and to do any good thing.
And now we pray to you,
Help us to believe in your love,
so that we may be certain that you will hear our prayer;
Help us to believe in your power,
so that we may be certain that you are able to do for us above all that we ask or think.
Help us to believe in your wisdom,
so that we may be certain that you will answer,
not as our ignorance asks,
but as your perfect wisdom knows best.
All this we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
C.S. Lewis on Christian Rewards
If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philosophical importance.
The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The NT has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of [having] a [vacation] at sea. We are far too easily pleased.
—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Fr. Philip Sang: Where is Your Light?
Sermon delivered on the 4th Sunday before Lent, February 9, 2014, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.
Lectionary texts for today are Isaiah 58.1-12; Psalm 112.1-10; 1 Corinthians 2.1-16; Matthew 5.13-20.
There is no sermon text available. To listen to the podcast audio of this sermon, click here.
The Problem with Ice Golfing
Who knew?
Book Review: Timothy Keller’s “Enduring Suffering Without Losing Hope”
Keller is a wonderful pastor and theologian and any of his stuff is worth your read. Check out the following review of his new book, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, and then consider reading it. I know very few folks who have walked away from the faith who have not cited suffering and the existence of evil as a major cause.
From Christianity Today online.
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (Dutton) adopts a surprisingly broad perspective. The book is at turns apologetic, theological, and pastoral. As an apologist, Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, explains how other religions and philosophies address and answer the problem of evil and suffering. After exploring these options (Stoicism, Buddhism, and several others), he demonstrates convincingly that the Christian answer is both more intellectually satisfying and personally helpful. But, he adds, it must be the genuine Christian answer rather than some insipid and superficial expression of Christianity.
It is only in the past 200 years, Keller argues, that Westerners have used evil and suffering as an argument against the existence (or goodness) of God. He is especially critical of the modern and secular view of suffering, which places all confidence in human reason and assumes that God, if he exists at all, exists solely to make us happy. This view helps explain why so many people avoid suffering at all costs, do their best to manage and minimize it once it interrupts their lives, and often yield to utter hopelessness when it persists. In the end, a secular view leaves us empty and alone, stripped of answers, devoid of all comfort and confidence.
The Christian answer to suffering, on the other hand, is more consistent, complete, and humane than any of the alternatives. It is attentive to human emotions. It views God as both sovereign and suffering. It alone satisfies the human longing for meaning and significance. And it is by far the most hopeful. Keller sums up the Christian perspective with the metaphor of a furnace. The flames of suffering consume our sinful inclinations, and yes, this is painful. But this purification process makes us holy, provided we turn to the God who reveals himself as both transcendent and present, Victor and Victim, Lord and Servant.
Ed Stetzer: Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? Why We should Choose Church Anyway
This is a good read for anyone who has wondered why bother going to church. See what you think.
So how does Miller find intimacy with God? He continues:
The answer came to me recently and it was a freeing revelation. I connect with God by working. I literally feel an intimacy with God when I build my company. I know it sounds crazy, but I believe God gave me my mission and my team and I feel closest to him when I’ve got my hand on the plow.
A few years ago, I was at a similar place. I had been the interim pastor at a church of 9,000 members. I loved the church, the people were great, but I just showed up on Sunday and preached. I lacked community with them.
Then I was done serving at that church and was suddenly an attendee and not the pastor. I, too, found I don’t get much out of sermons, even the good ones. Honestly, there is not much new content I learn at church. Finally, I am easily distracted and the slow pace of sermons lets my mind wander, so I’d rather read a good sermon than listen to one.
So, I could’ve just stayed home.
But, I didn’t. And neither should you. Church is more than sermons and music, it’s community, mission, ordinances, and so much more.
Our church involvement is not just anticipated (1 Corinthians 12:27), but commanded (Hebrews 10:25).
I took some time over the last few days thinking over the issues Miller raised. The more I think on it, the more I see his comments are worth noting, but not emulating. Here are three reasons I found for attending (and committing to) a local church and why I think you (and Don) should.
You see, the church is where you experience the love of God, support God’s people, and accomplish God’s mission.
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