Grace then truth or truth then grace?

The answer to the question is, it depends when we are talking about sin. It depends on the person who has sinned. The difference is whether the person is a part of the believing community. When I consider the Gospels what I see is that if the person is outside the community grace leads the way and if they are inside then truth leads.

Matthew 5.38-42 tells us not to resist the one who is evil. That is where we get the idea of turning the other cheek. It is similar to killing someone with kindness. Similarly, Paul says in Romans 12.20, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head." Jesus deals with people differently when he meets them. The Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 is an outcast even from her community and Jesus leads with grace and then introduces the truth of her sin. With Zacchaeus, another outcast as a tax collector, grace leads. With the prostitute at the home of the Pharisee, grace is first, and on it goes.

Matthew 18.15-20 tells us how to deal with sin among believers, and truth, confronting sin, comes first. In 1 Corinthians 5.12 Paul says, "For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?" When Jesus meets a self-righteous person like a Pharisee, he confronts their sin first. When the apostles preach to a primarily Jewish audience their message nearly always includes "but this Jesus, whom you crucified..."

We have tended to miss this distinction in the church in our day and tolerated all manner of bad behavior in the church by excusing it, "That's just how so and so is." Sanctification requires change and change doesn't happen by excusing sin. If Christians behaved better towards one another, the world might actually believe we weren't complete hypocrites.

Do you want to be healed?

One of the things that you read in the Gospels is Jesus asking someone if they want to be healed. It seems a strange thing to ask a blind man, so pointless to ask a paralytic what he wants Jesus to do for him. The longer I am in ministry the more it makes sense to ask such things. The church should be a place where people get healed, therefore it should be a place for the sick in any way, the wounded, etc. What I experience is that often those people don't want to get healed and made whole, they are identified too deeply with the wounding to let it be healed, they are the guy wounded by the church or by ministers or whatever and they don't know how to live any other way.

In every church I have ever worked I have seen the same pattern, someone comes in who has been hurt by the church and people begin to reach out and offer sympathy and then the person gets influence at some level. Soon, they begin to share their expertise in how the church should really be operating and that this church doesn't really care about people. Along the way, they drive people away because no one wants to hear the constant complaint and criticism, wounded guy becomes lonely, isolated guy and it is now the fault of this church and the pattern continues at another church.

Jesus didn't waste time with people who didn't want to be healed. Maybe we should start asking the question in churches.

Be good for goodness sake

The British Humanist Association is placing ads on Washington, DC buses this season that ask, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake." My answer to that question, posed in that particular form, is that it is actually easier to believe in God than to work out how to be good for goodness sake. To accomplish the command there first requires that we identify and objectify "Good." Many have tried, including Plato and other philosophers, and none have ultimately succeeded in determining what is "good." Good requires more knowledge of reality than any of us possess. I have experienced many things in my life that I perceived as good that later I found to be something else.

What is good for me may not be good for someone else. When I was in consulting, I thought it was good when my firm got a contract, but when someone else got a contract we were bidding on, I didn't think it was good that they got the contract. I suspect they felt the same about my good. To be good is even harder and to do it for the sake of some principle of goodness that we can't really define is even harder, I have no reason to commit to something as ethereal as "Goodness."

No, what I need is what I have, not an ethereal god who is out there compelling me to be good, but God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, who has all the information necessary to know good and evil and who has, in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, come and enfleshed for us what is truly "good" and who died for us and for our salvation, and who has also given us His Spirit to dwell within us to lead us into truth which is goodness. Why believe in a god, because being good for goodness sake is too hard for even philosophers.

God and guns?

I heard a radio ad this week by Hank Williams Jr for John McCain that really troubled me. I am not, in any shape form or fashion, opposed to gun ownership but "We love our God and we love our guns" is a bizarre juxtaposition of images. It certainly caught my attention and made me wonder who in the world decided that was a good idea.

I am certain the message was geared toward gun owners who either hunt or collect but in our violence-ridden world I believe that the words are wrong. I know it has to do with an election but I am uncomfortable as a Christian with the words and in particular the linkage between God and guns. Is that really the Christian message or does it reinforce the worst stereotypes imaginable?

I believe we as Christians have a different message for the world about who we are and what our values may be. For me, this ad clearly demonstrated the reasons I dropped out of the political world in seminary. I believe we need to be more careful about our political engagements and we need to be more clear about ethics and morals and we need to be on the side of the vulnerable in our society, whether they are the unborn who have no voice but ours or those who are falling through the cracks in society in other ways. God and guns isn't the right message.

Reformatting the Hard Drive

Last night when I was praying before bed I had this image of my brain as a hard drive and over the course of my less than holy life a great many things are stored there that I wish weren't there. I was thinking how nice it would be for God to be able to delete those files and eradicate the pathways to find even a trace of them ever again. The other option is to do a complete re-format of the drive and erase everything that is there.

I think what I am up against is the understanding of the participation required in sanctification, what CS Lewis referred to as the two blades of a scissors. The scissors won't operate properly without both blades working together. We aren't to be passive in sanctification, becoming more like Jesus. In our epistle reading yesterday we read this from Philippians 4.8: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

God could reformat the hard drive of my brain and wipe out everything there and start all over again, but He wants me to do something about the problem, fill my brain with the things Paul is talking about and push that other stuff aside, make it more distant, less accessible and in the process, expose it in comparison with the true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise things, for what it is, not worth thinking about.

The glory of God

What is Moses asking for in Exodus 33 when he asks to see God's glory? When the Jewish scholars translated the Old Testament into Greek for Ptolemy II they chose not to use the Greek word for glory in this instance, they chose instead a word for "yourself." Moses is then asking to see God as He is. Given that Moses only gets a glimpse of God's glory but gets a fuller understanding of God via a sermon God gives him in Exodus 34, it seems that the translators got it right.

God's "self" was disclosed not in a visual way but in words. We need words for understanding and expression, we can't adequately communicate visions, what is seen. God is inexpressible in the way that joy is inexpressible, we can't truly describe joy to another, it is experienced not described. The limitation of words is significant and real and yet this is how God chose to reveal Himself to Moses and through the prophets. Because words have limits does that mean we can't use them or truly understand their meaning?

What Jesus shows us in his interaction with people, especially religious people, is that words can indeed be misunderstood or misinterpreted, but that they have value for communicating God's truth. What John picks up on in his description of Jesus as logos or the Word, is the embodiment of that truth. Jesus' life doesn't change the words God has spoken in any way, it interpreted them and shows us the way to live out the Word of God. What John said happened in the incarnation of Jesus was plain, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John saw in Jesus what Moses asked to see.

God's idea of our retirement

One of my least favorite passages in the Bible is Genesis 22.1-2: After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you."

The reason that this passage bugs me isn't what God tells Abraham to do, it is because of the first part of the verse, that God continues to test Abraham. I want to scream, "leave that old man alone!" He has given up his old life entirely because he believed he heard God's voice telling him to move away from everything he knew to a place God would show him. He waited 25 years, sometimes patiently, sometimes taking matters into his own hands because his wife had an idea (thanks very much for Ishmael - so much for the Bible not being relevant to today). Now, in his retirement from public service, God tests him?

The test is to destroy the fulfillment of the promise. During this topsy-turvy time, many people who have served faithfully and who have retired are finding that what they worked so hard to put together is either at risk or lost, they have been thankful for God allowing them to be secure and now it is gone. He is never done with us, He never allows us to rest as long as we draw breath, but it is because He wants us to have more of Himself, find our true security in Him. I don't believe this financial crisis is sent from God to test the saints or to punish them, but it can be used for His glory.

Manna and spiritual milk

Manna was never meant to be a long term food for the people of Israel, they weren't supposed to spend forty years subsisting on that stuff. Can you imagine though how much 2 liters of it per person for the entire nation would have been, each and every day (except the Sabbath) for that length of time? They were supposed to have moved beyond manna in a relatively short time but their disobedience concerning entering the land made it necessary to live on manna for all those years, it is no wonder we don't read more stories of complaints.

Both Paul in 1 Corinthians 3 and the writer of Hebrews in the 5th chapter of that epistle speak about their inability to move their people beyond spiritual milk even though they should have matured. It is never easy to grow up when we find a comfort level that works for us.

We become like spiritual pandas, whose digestives systems are much like our own but who limit themselves to only bamboo in spite of the reality that it has little or no nutritional value so they are forced to consume large quantities of it. Rather than take the risk of growth, entering the promised land, whatever that looks like in our lives, we choose to be satisfied with something less. They ate manna for forty years and never gave it a proper name, it simply means what is it? Stuck between the memories of the bounty of Egypt (?) and the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey, it was easier to eat manna than go forward. Comfort zones can be anywhere we don't have to stretch our faith.

If your brother sins against you...

We tend to get forgiveness wrong in the church. I had someone once tell me that with respect to amazing things someone in the church had done to me that I needed to lead the way for the congregation and turn the other cheek. What really needed to happen was the person needed to be confronted as even my dialogue partner agreed that the behavior was far out of line. Matthew 18 tells us how we are to deal with interpersonal sin among Christians. The Matthew 5 passage about turning the other cheek begins with "Do not resist an evil person."

The body of Christ is actually supposed to confront sin in its midst in order that we all grow up into the image of Christ. If we turn the other cheek when another Christian sins against us we have actually said to them that they aren't a brother or sister but an evil person. In my case it would have required the person stepping down as a leader in the church if I were to turn the other cheek having decided they were an evil person rather than a Christian.

Too often we confuse Christianity as being nice to one another rather than being honest with one another and holding one another accountable for who we are and whose we are. Generally, the world knows this hypocrisy and readily notes it as why they have shunned the church. If we would change that perception, we need to begin by dealing with sin among Christians in a Biblical manner.

Citizens or Children

We tend to think of forgiveness from God in the same sense as a courtroom, that God is a legal entity, like a municipality, that has set up laws in order to maintain the public peace and I think that is where we have lost the battle. When we begin to think in those terms, we lose the real sense of the matter. We lose the understanding of relationship that underlies the situation, we de-personalize the matter of sin.

My relationship with the state isn't horribly compromised by driving over the speed limit unless I get caught and then I pay a fine and we are at peace with one another except I now have points on my driver's license which means I can do fewer things wrong without losing the privilege of driving a car. If I don't get caught, I don't carry a load of guilt around for having exceeded the speed limit. I haven't compromised my relationship with the state of North Carolina in any way. I certainly feel no need to confess that transgression.

There is an enormous difference between being a citizen and a child. When we pray the Lord's Prayer we begin by stating the relationship, "Our Father..." When we de-personalize the law, we diminish both the relationship and our transgressions. David understood that his sins of murder and adultery were primarily sins against God and this was the grief that drove him in Psalm 51. We aren't simply citizens, we are children of a heavenly Father. Relationship is primary.

Forgiveness starter

Monday morning is always a time of second-guessing for me, reviewing my sermon ad nauseum and thinking about the things I should have said. Today is no exception.

I preached on forgiveness and yet didn't begin at the beginning in some ways. Where forgiveness and reconciliation have to begin is at the place where those things are actually desired outcomes. We have to begin by wanting to forgive and wanting forgiveness, if those attitudes aren't present then it makes no difference if the protocols are followed. The rabbis recognized this and thus set the standard that if someone confessed their sin against another three times and were rebuffed in their efforts to reconcile they were absolved of the need to continue to seek forgiveness.

Sometimes we aren't ready to take that step of forgiveness if the hurt is too deep, it takes time to come to a place of desiring to forgive the sin. We all likely have experience of such wounding, either those we have wounded or wounds we have received that took time to get to a place where forgiveness and reconciliation is possible. That experience makes all the more amazing Jesus' appeal from the cross after all He had suffered and was in the midst of suffering. How could He ask the Father to forgive in the midst of His pain? Before we decide it is out of our reach and chalk it up to Jesus' divine nature, listen to Stephen as he was being stoned, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them."

Deception as a way of life

Sir Walter Scott wrote the famous words, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" When Eve made her defense in Genesis 3 she says that the serpent deceived her. The rest of the book of Genesis tells how well we learned from the serpent. Cain wasn't very good at deception, he couldn't hide his reaction to God favoring Abel's sacrifice, and He certainly wasn't able to deceive the Lord about what had become of his brother. Beginning with the deception of Abraham concerning Sarai's true identity, we hit our stride, continuing on through Joseph's deception of his brothers in Egypt.

We had become so accustomed to deception that when the real thing, Jesus, appeared, we no longer perceived truth. Today, we try and find ways to get around His claim to be "The Way, The Truth and The Life" by saying He is "a" way by questioning as the serpent did, "Did he really say..." It is the same deception as the garden yet we keep falling for it so why should satan change his tactics?

In the beginning, he had to take on the form of a serpent to pull it off. It worked so well that we have taken it up ourselves. When the truth came, it was in the form of a man, truth incarnate, a real man, true to His call as image-bearer of God. The deception is still the same, that God is keeping something from us and there is another way to get it outside of Him. Jesus says we will lack nothing and that if we ask our Father, He will give it to us, why don't we believe Him?

The Limits of Materialism

I want to say that to be Christian isn't to check your brain at the door and deny the principles of scientific materialism and it doesn't mean to be gullible to all the claims that are made for miracles. The laws of science are important to life, otherwise we would never be able to know any real security for simply living day to day. I need the law of gravity to be securely true for instance.

Christianity doesn't deny the science behind materialism, it does, however, challenge the claim of ultimacy in materialism. We believe that there is a higher law and that the universe has infinitely more possibilities than materialism would indicate. Ordinarily, everything works according to those laws but occasionally, God does things that can't be accounted for by them. Predictability and order are indeed evidence of God, He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, but they aren't the full definition of God's being.

Creation is evidence that something new happened in time and space, the universe came into being and nothing before that could have predicted it. Why do we have a problem with Him doing new things after that time?

Apprehending and Comprehending

I preached on materialism yesterday, both philosophical and economic materialism. I believe economic materialism, desiring more stuff in the belief that there is something in me that will be fulfilled by the possession of more stuff and directing all my effort to getting that stuff, is based on the philosophical belief that there is only matter (stuff) and there are no realities other than matter. If matter is all there is and there ain't no more, then it makes sense to desire to get as much of it as you can, only matter matters.

It isn't an unavoidable conclusion, but it logically follows, at least economic materialism is a sensible response to philosophical materialism. You could also decide that we should all share all matter in common or some other variation of that decision. What you have to consider though is that if matter is the ultimate reality, what brings about my ability to apprehend and comprehend that truth and why should I have confidence in my comprehension. If everything is geared for survival and propagation, why should I believe my comprehension is true?

Tough Times and Tough Love

Is there a difference between generational sin and just seeing your kids make the same mistakes you made? Over the past month we have replayed our own pasts in the lives of our teenagers and it has been an intense time. I hope we got through with all this but my own experience tells me that like the old Carpenters tune, we've only just begun.

There seem to be only a relatively few variations on the ways in which we seek out individuality and identity as adolescents, and nearly all of them are destructive to us and our inter-family relationships. I have gone through prayer for forgiveness of my family but never for seeking forgiveness from my family for the tough years when they stuck by me when I was incredibly difficult. As a parent now I have much greater respect and love for my own parents.

Humility and the Parables

On Sunday we read the parable of the weeds from Matthew 13 and it occurred to me that we have the wrong perspective on that parable most of the time. We think we can know the difference between the wheat and the weeds and we put ourselves into the role of the servants in the parable and make our judgments accordingly.

There is a significant problem with that perspective on the parable. When Jesus gives its explanation he tells who the servants are and they aren't us. The servants, according to Jesus, are the angels. We think we are able to judge the difference between the wheat and the weeds but that isn't the way Jesus explains the parable, in fact, we are only either wheat or weeds in the parable.

Most of the time when I hear that parable preached it seems that the preacher forgets to read the explanation which doesn't call for us to make those judgments at all. For some of my life people would definitely have decided that I was not likely to be wheat and I am thankful that the harvest was delayed. We need to be careful about judgment, we don't know what God may be up to in someone's life and we need to have the humility to keep our judgments to ourselves until God is done.

Running from the past

The Old Testament lesson we read in our worship today is about Jacob's vision of heaven in Genesis 28. As I think about Jacob I see a man with a past he is running away from into a future he can't imagine. He is a man who desperately needs to understand the aphorism, "Wherever you go, there you are."

This man is running from the problems he created at home. He has destroyed the family and now has made what seems to be a plausible excuse for leaving, to find a wife among his family's people, but that isn't the real reason. His mother has heard his brother breathing threats of murder against him because Jacob has ended up with what should have belonged to his brother. (There is a hint of Cain in this story.) God had promised these would be his but Jacob and his mother took them instead of receiving them from God (see Eve in Genesis 3 as she took and ate).

Jacob's past hasn't yet been dealt with, that comes later, but now he is going to meet a deceiver who is better than he is in order to come face to face with the destructiveness of this pattern for life. We can't run from the truth about ourselves, it needs to be dealt with in order that it doesn't continue to haunt us forever.

The Search for Identity

Why is it that our search for identity, in adolescence or middle-age crisis, almost never begins with God? It seems to me that this search for meaning and identity apart from God is, in many ways, the first sin. There was something other, something God had denied them, and the temptation included a sense of you will be complete when you have this.

The search for identity, for Christians, is found in reflection on our being created in the image of God and the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. In John's Gospel we hear the depth of the Fall, "He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." (John 1.10-11) Those who were created in the image of God no longer recognized the one whose image they bear, the Fall was complete.

If we believe we are created in the image of God and we also believe Hebrews 1.3a: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word," then how is it that we search for identity elsewhere? Our identity is hidden in Christ with God and in order to discover our identity we must seek to know Christ by and and every means.

Truth against the world

Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, had a personal motto, "Truth against the world." The man was an incredible creative genius for certain but he was also an iconoclast and a man so consumed by his own genius that the motto essentially meant that he had transcended the world in most every way imaginable and had a bit of a messiah complex. In his field, Wright certainly pushed the envelope and taught the world a great deal about form, but his personal life was a disaster.

While his motto at first seems noble, worthy of Ayn Rand's attention and admiration, leading to the book, The Fountainhead, it is also defiant and egotistical in the extreme. It matters what principle we choose for living and Wright's perspective on life led him to stake out ground that set him above and apart from the world, alone with his truth. For Ayn Rand, it was an heroic choice, and based on the results of a survey by the Library of Congress in the 1990's which showed that Rand's Atlas Shrugged was second only behind the Bible when they asked which books most profoundly shaped their worldview, such a life is considered heroic by many in our culture.

The message of the Bible is, however, quite different from "Truth against the world." There is certainly that reality in the Gospel, that the way things are is not the way they should be, but the ultimate message is "Truth for the world." It wasn't and isn't a claim or play for power, God is pretty sure of His own sovereignty and doesn't need the acclaim of a small portion of His creation in order to establish His sense of identity. (Sarcasm intended) The basis of the claim of truth and the life that proclaimed it, is love, pure love, which gains nothing in the bargain.

Our common birth defect

The past couple of weeks I have been working on original sin and the effects of the fall in our lives and in all of creation and am realizing how incredibly frustrating it is to have only a few minutes on Sunday morning to attempt to get that into the hearts and heads of those whom God has given me to teach and equip. The implications of that understanding of the world are staggering and yet I have only 20-25 minutes to try and explain it.

Everything that we think about the world should be influenced by that idea, that there is a terminal infection shared by all creation that keeps everything from being as it should be. Out of the chaos that was before creation emerged God's intentional universe where order and harmony were seen. Into that perfect world came sin and, mercifully, God didn't destroy creation, it bore a curse that keeps it from being perfect but not from testifying to His goodness in creating it.

In this week's Gospel reading, the birth of the twins Jacob and Esau, we see them struggling in their mother's womb for dominance, a struggle that will consume most of their lives. In Genesis 25 we see original sin beginning before they emerge into the world, it isn't an environmental issue, it is an issue of our nature, written into our DNA. That makes all the more amazing what we see in Luke 1 when the baby in Elizabeth's womb (John the Baptist) leaps within her as she greets Mary the mother of Jesus. Here we have no struggle for dominance, but recognition of God's will in the older giving way to the younger, as he would do his entire life, but with joy.

The demise of Truth

This issue of truth isn't a new phenomenon, Pilate asked the question "What is truth?" the serpent asked the question, "Did God really say..." followed by "You shall not surely die." The first paragraph of the Screwtape Letters contains the following:
Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen
incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't
think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical',
'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument
is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to
make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark,
or courageous - that is the philosophy of the future.

I would say that is a most prophetic passage and a grand place to start to understand our own world. We have become those who embrace truth that has to commend it as actually true in science or experience so long as it supports what we already believe. Christians and Jews have been accused of this for centuries, believing in things that have no archaeological evidence, only to find later that they were indeed true. We are capable of saying something is false but accurate.

We are a world with an opinion seeking proof that our opinion is true and reliable. What we have seen is the breakdown of consensus and optimism that began in the Enlightenment. We believed in progress through science and the abandonment of religion and it hasn't happened. We have more stuff but less life, less joy and less optimism. We have lost coherence and hope in the face of disappointment and we now cling to doomsday scenarios as our organizing principle and our consensus.

Truth

Truth is the word that has suffered the greatest indignities of them all. When two people believe two different things about the nature of something, they can both be wrong or one of them can be right but they can't both be right. Truth is an impersonal concept, not a personal one. We can guide our lives by what we believe and be completely wrong. As I like to wander and find back roads, I have this experience more regularly than I would like to admit. My sense of direction isn't all that great, apparently my internal compass isn't working, and so I will sometimes end up in places I had no intention of going.

If I were not a man I would have somewhat fewer problems with this but since I am male I have a built-in aversion to asking for help and directions. As it is, I compound my problems by asking my wife to read a map and help me out. Since she is pretty bad at reading maps, it doesn't generally get us back on track to ask her to help in this way. I wish I could count the number of times she has said to me, "Just stop here at this store and ask."

Pride gets in the way, I won't ask for help and she won't spend time learning how to read a map, so I plow ahead without any real sense of where we are or where we are going. Sometimes there is a happy coincidence of finding ourselves where I intended to be. The way we now define humility would be for the person who knows the right way to affirm my current direction in order not to offend me and tolerance would be for Suzanne to sit back and enjoy the ride without respect to the destination. The reality is that there is a true way and what I really need is for someone to tell me I am headed in the wrong way and give me the truth, both about my mistake and the right way.

Language and meaning in postmodern religion

I think I believe in tolerance and humility. I believe we should not do attack evangelism because I never see either Jesus or Paul doing that. I see them both insisting on and defending truth without compromise and without ever giving ground and saying, "Well, I suppose you could be right as well." If either had been willing to be tolerant in that way, their lives would have ended quite differently. Neither were victims of intolerance either. They were victimized because they insisted on a particular truth which would not allow them to accept that any competing truth If Jesus was a victim for tolerance, it was His intolerance that made Him a victim, not His tolerance.

Likewise, Jesus was humble but not by the standard in the article about faith in America. He repeatedly said He was sent to a particular people, the chosen people of God, there is nothing humble about such a statement or a belief with respect to one group of people. His claims were certainly not humble in the sense that they invited diversity of opinion and belief, He said that diversity of opinion about Him was not possible if life were to be the outcome.

How did we get here? It seems that in the absence of a belief in truth we have substituted values about which we can have some consensus of their "goodness." After we are certain of the "good" values we then project language backwards onto those values in order to affirm the value. In the process, words find new meanings. We haven't changed the vocabulary, only what we intend by it. When we interpret the Bible, we do so in community, but the community of interpreters needs to include the original writer(s), the original audience, those who have interpreted it before us, and the community of faith in which we find ourselves, and we can't exclude any of the above as we do the work of interpretation. With respect to language, it seems that we have tossed out the history of meaning.

Humility?

Another word that gets misused in the religious dialogue of our day is "humility." It suffers the same fate as tolerance in many ways. I recently saw it used as a way of describing Christians willingness to accept that there may be other ways of salvation.

The humility of Jesus (God) is the greatest in the world. God becoming incarnate to His creation and suffering and dying, becoming sin for us, is the greatest act of humility imaginable. Why would He bother if there were other ways, most of them built on the foundation of self-righteousness and self-justification, just as good? When you go down that road, you have denied all of Christianity, beginning with the greatness of God, and begun to accept multiple gods which is actually the road to no god at all.

When Jesus talked about ways to reconciliation with the Father and eternal life, he spoke of one way and that it was the narrow way. It isn't just His statement of John 14.6 (I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me.") that is at issue here though that is particularly clear. It is the entirety of His message that must be dealt with. It isn't humble to throw that out in favor of pluralism, in fact it is the opposite of humility, it is arrogance.

Making Himself Known

Why would the creator not want to make Himself known and known clearly? We aren't sure in our day if the creator is knowable. There is a good impulse regarding religious beliefs in America in the 21st century, and that is that we generally believe there is a God or gods and that this God is a big dude, probably too big to be described by one religious system or faith. Now that isn't a bad thing in and of itself, it is a bad thing when those who describe themselves as Christian have that belief.

There are some battles that have been lost in my lifetime, and one of those is over the world tolerant. I am not quite sure how tolerance has somehow become equated with skepticism about your own beliefs. Intolerant would be persecution of those who disagree, it would not be intolerant to believe they are wrong and attempt to persuade them of their error if we believe that error has a significant consequence. If my house were on fire and I said to the firefighters that what they believed to be fire was instead rain it would not be intolerant of them to insist on their interpretation of reality and do all they could to rescue me from death. It isn't an issue of tolerance at all yet when Christians insist on preaching the Gospel to those who are dying and who we believe are risking eternity, somehow that becomes an issue of tolerance.

We can do and say a great many things that are indeed intolerant but preaching the Gospel is not one of them. Jesus could be quite intolerant of theological error, just as His Father was intolerant of the same, His Name was at stake. We believe that the Creator has made Himself known decisively and that His desire is for us to live with Him through eternity, but on His terms. We can be loving and proclaim that as truth, in fact, proclamation of that truth should be an act of love.

The evolution of God?

What use is a God who changes and evolves? There are theologians in our day who see God as "in process," that He, like us, is coming to new understandings and changing according to those understandings. There are certainly great benefits to be had in such a god, not the least of which is our ability to invent a god completely to our own liking, to throw out the bits of Scripture that make us uncomfortable or would require us to change and simply declare that God is changing His attitude towards things as He grows in understanding to catch up with us. I can see how such a god could be attractive if I had decided that I wanted a god who thought much like I do on things.

The problem with an "in process" god is that we can't truly know or declare anything about that god at all, all our understandings would have to be contingencies, until the god itself comes to fuller understandings. We are left with a god who would constantly be saying little more than "Huh, I hadn't thought of that." Essentially a radical Darwinian world view has been imposed upon the deity, even God is subject to evolution or, at the least, surprised by it in His creation.

The immutability of God is important for us who choose to believe in and follow Him. On this doctrine rests many others, including the sovereignty and omnipotence of God and the authority of Jesus to speak on behalf of the Father. If God is changeable, the cross is not necessarily the final word on sin, and if God's attitudes towards sin are evolving, then righteousness also is ever changing and at some point has no meaning at all as tolerance becomes the only measure of righteousness yet that tolerance is itself intolerant of what it deems to be intolerance which was originally defined as righteousness. The image of a dog chasing its tail comes to mind. To be changed into the likeness of God in Jesus Christ means that we can orient by the fixed point of the unchangeable nature of God, not a moving target.

Navigation

Before we moved to Asheville to begin planting the church, I came up every other Wednesday and held services. One week as I was driving I got a phone call to tell me we were going to meet at an OB-Gyn office and that the local newspaper was sending a reporter and a photographer to the service. I couldn't have been less excited. What kind of nut jobs would we look like, a handful of people meeting in a doctor's office?

When I got here the reporter wanted to talk so we went into a hallway and talked for over an hour and when the article came out not a single word I spoke was used. That was better than I had hoped, but it showed me that I had confused her agenda. The words she wanted me to use were conservative and liberal and I had rejected her political vocabulary in favor of orthodox and traditional. She wanted to interpret traditional in light of her own experience, a denomination that didn't allow women any role and I asked that she look at a longer tradition and find many women, Terese of Lisieux, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and on down to Mother Theresa who served the church and who were used by God and recognized by the church.

As I think about the state of the church today, I realize that political thinking has dramatically shaped the church over the last century. We have become so accustomed to thinking in terms of evolving and changing that we have forgotten that while the church and its structures may change, God doesn't. Sailors need a fixed point for navigation and so do we in our lives. How the church fulfills its mission can change but its mission does not.

The Importance of Presuppositions

It is important to say that my presupposition is that there is a God. Since it can't be proven by scientific method whether there is or isn't a God, it is a matter of faith to say that there is a God. Once that faith statement is made and truly accepted, the world becomes a true wonder of a testimony to His greatness.

The presumption that there is a God begins to get at the question of "Why?" that science can't truly answer. It can say that there is life but it can't quite say why there should be life and in particular why this kind of life or whether this is a transitional phase to some other sort of life that will be a higher form but bearing similarities to this one. If we presume there is no God then we are left to construct meaning on our own, either as a cooperative venture or a solitary one and there is little basis for preferring the cooperative to the solitary.

The presupposition that there is a God should immediately lead us first to the understanding that if He had something to do with bringing about the universe in general and our life in particular, that He is great in the sense of powerful and capable of incredible things. If we simply begin with that presupposition we can easily pray the first sentence of the little mealtime prayer, but that statement of faith opens up a world of possibilities that is more vast than the universe itself.

God is Great

It is far easier to always know God is great than God is good. Does anyone who is a theist doubt that God is great? If He created all that is, it seems that there couldn't even be argument on that issue. Even if you believe in God the watchmaker, He is big enough to have created and walked away. Now if your perspective is Kantian, He is now dead, then maybe we could argue but the only real argument then would be, could the creator qualify as God if He ceased to exist.

The statement God is great is an enormous statement of faith and a wonderful place to begin, so wonderful in fact that it could be the summary statement of Genesis 1, John 1, and Ephesians 1 just to get started. Beginning with God is a good place to begin a prayer, beginning with "God is" is better still. A declaration concerning the greatness of God should get our attention as to what kind of God we are praying to. The God that even Jonah proclaimed on board ship as "the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." (Jonah 1.9) Would it be worth praying to a lesser God if a great one was available?

I don't want to deal with "Mother Earth" if I can deal directly with the One who created the earth do I? It isn't surprising that we invent such "deities" concerning the earth, sun, moon, stars and heavens, they are, in themselves, wonderful. We cling tenaciously to this life, spend enormous resources not just to understand it but to prolong it because we can't imagine anything better or more real. We are fortunate that this life has been good to us and for us, but it should raise our sights above ourselves and beyond ourselves to that greater something out there.

Six Life-Changing Words

The pressure to be "good" is too much to bear sometimes. Paul says in Romans that he isn't able to do it, that the good he wants to do is the very thing he doesn't do and vice versa. Living by the Spirit 24/7 is the only possibility and I don't find myself doing that on a daily basis. What I find is that there is a lot of painful stuff in my heart and head that keeps me from being able to live that way and I need the confession of Morning Prayer to begin the day and the confession of Evening Prayer to end the day. I don't often pray those specific prayers but I need to confess my sins in bookending the day.

The bigger problem with being "good" is that I can rarely do that without pride. At some level I see it as having made a conscious decision to be good or do good and when I do I then take credit for the good I have done which makes it not good at all. Doing good or being good can't be the goal of life, being Christ-like is the goal, doing all things at the direction of and for the glory of God.

I memorized a prayer to say at meals when I was a kid that began "God is great, God is good." If I could live out of those six words every day my life might actually look different. We need to remind ourselves of those two great truths at least the three times a day that we eat meals. If we could work those deep into our hearts and heads it would change the way we think about everything else.

Goodness and simplicity

Why is it so hard for us to understand that we aren't "good enough?" How many sins did Adam and Eve commit when judgment and death became a reality? One is the answer to that question. How many sins did Moses commit that kept him out of the land? One is that answer to that question also. It isn't to say that they committed no other sins in their lives, but one was enough to DQ them from participation in the fullness of life.

When we ask people whether they will get in at the end, the answer most often given is that they think they have been good enough. They haven't, I haven't, no one has but Jesus. When the rich young ruler first begins talking to Jesus here is the conversation, "And a ruler asked him, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' And Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.'" (Luke 18.18-19) Any questions?

Nothing exists apart from God that can be truly considered good. None of us is good apart from God, no matter what we think or what the rest of the world thinks. The Articles of Religion (particularly 11 and 12), the basis of Anglican theology, speak clearly about our beliefs in goodness. The only One with real knowledge of Good and Evil is God, and Jesus (God incarnate) says that no one is good but God. The sooner we stop trying to make judgments on good and evil and accept that God alone is arbiter of such things, the sooner we can receive mercy and grace which are aspects or characteristics of God, and therefore, eo ipso, good. Simple stuff.

Perfect love

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

In Genesis there was fear, judgment and punishment and they were cast out of the garden. John says all that is done away with in perfect love. That perfect love is manifest to us in Jesus and John says that love is perfected in us in order that we have confidence in the day of judgment. That is all wonderful stuff, we don't have to hide ourselves when He comes, but there is more to the Christian life, more than abiding in God's love than simply having confidence and John knew it and said it before he got to this bit.

John says also, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us." That is the pretext for the confidence. He says if we don't have that love for one another then we don't have a right to the confidence of the love of God. Salvation has implications for the way we live towards others too, it isn't just our little gift we will unwrap in due time.

Relational intimacy - fear and judgment

Why is intimacy so frightening? Sin has everything to do with that question. If I don't have anything to hide, intimacy is natural and no big deal. If you knew who I really am, what I really think, you might reject me, so we hide and avoid real intimacy. We fear not only exposure but judgment of others even on those things we aren't ashamed of.

I have had some time in the past few days to observe people avoiding intimacy with one another because it is safer to put up the facade and refuse to go deeper in relationships. Superficiality wears me out quicker than almost anything in my life and yet I spend most of my time on that level. Is there any hope for more?

We were made for intimacy, and the One who knows us with greater intimacy than we can imagine loves us enough to die for us. If we can live from the level of the Spirit and love with God's love, our relationships can be richer and more fulfilling. Do we really want that kind of relationship, enough to set aside our fears and our judgments? We can marvel at and talk about the love of Jesus for prostitutes and tax collectors and other sinners, but do we live that same way? We need a revolution.

Liturgy and life

Liturgy is always an interesting thing when you do weddings and funerals and most of the people are unfamiliar with any liturgy at all in church. I feel a need to explain why we use it and the purpose it serves. It is the earliest form of worship and teaches the story of God through repetition and asks that participants take responsibility for telling the story themselves in the Creed and in other places by singing and speaking.

We who use the creeds regularly in worship should be the most comfortable evangelists. We should know the story better than anyone since we recite it each and every week, yet often the words never become real. We simply know the words without entering the story ourselves, the truth is external to us and we can own the criticism that it is no more than rote memorization. The problem on the other side of the issue is that personal experience is disconnected from theological truths which in fact matter. The only story we have to tell is our personal story and yet there is a grander story than our personal salvation, there is the story of the Triune God that begins "I believe in God the Father Almighty creator of heaven and earth," takes in the life and death of Jesus for us, the Spirit given to us and concludes with life everlasting.

Liturgical worship draws us into common worship, we have sinned, we have been redeemed, we believe what the church has always believed, and in that we are drawn out of our private story and into the great story of the sweep of history that will continue into the age to come. Christ would have died for me if I were the only one who needed it, but He didn't, His work was bigger and greater and in accepting that I lose my sense of isolation and become part of the communion of saints. I need to celebrate that reality.

Marriage and the African Queen

As I prepare for a wedding this weekend, I recall my own feelings of both excitement and fear when I was preparing to get married 24 years ago. I am glad that we didn't live together first and then formalize the relationship, that I was forced to confront what was and should be a life-changing decision and the break that it represents with a former way of life. I am glad this couple is making even better decisions than we made and are anxious to talk about their future together because they want all the wisdom they can get as they enter this new life.

I recall the sense I had of being completely unprepared for what I was about to do. A few days before the wedding I had a "morose" evening when I realized that I was moving into new territory and my childhood was giving way to real adulthood. I had graduated from college and gotten a job and an apartment yet this step was bigger than any of those things and I suddenly knew it in a way that shook my core. I never thought about calling Suzanne and bailing out of the wedding but I felt like I was in free fall.

If I had any sense of what lay in store I probably wouldn't have done it based on the knowledge I had at the time. I wouldn't willingly have put her through the twists and turns, heartache and difficulty that was ahead if I had known it. As I look back though, I realize I couldn't have made it without her and all those difficulties have shaped and molded us in ways that made us one flesh, just as God intended. Maybe that whole running the rough river thing in the movie The African Queen that brings Bogie and Hepburn's characters together isn't so contrived after all.

Distinction with a difference

There is sadness in the declaration of Genesis 9, "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea." That represents change in those relationships or it wouldn't be there in this way. The animals are given as food shortly after the declaration of Genesis 8 that "the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth." This is a permanent state of affairs, the fallen nature of creation is now accepted as a given.

There is a distinction in the Bible between humans and animals. From the start, man had naming rights over the animals and was given dominion over the animal kingdom. It established a pecking order in creation. Now that distinction is more sharply drawn after the flood. A reckoning for shedding the blood of man is required for humans and animals because mankind bears the image of God, at some level it is an attack on Him. How horrible then that God Himself is killed my man on the cross at Golgotha.

If murder of man who bears God's image but whose intentions are evil requires reckoning, what must be required for the murder of God's Son whose intentions were not evil? "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." As the future of creation depended on the faithfulness of Noah, so did the hope of eternity depend on the faithfulness of Jesus who is more than an image bearer. The writer of Hebrews says He is "He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature..." Now about those intentions of the heart, can He do anything about that?

Timing is everything

For nearly a year Noah is in the ark with his family and the animals, what was he thinking? Surely in some of that time he wondered if the waters would ever roll back, wondered if there would be enough food, wondered if God had forgotten him. Did he know the story of creation? If he did, he must surely have wondered why when it took the Lord only a day to separate the waters from the waters (Gen 1.6-8) and then another day to gather the waters so that the dry land could appear (Gen 1.9-10), did it take 40 days of rain to complete his judgment and then almost another 300 days to re-create the world from the chaos of the flood.

Where in the beginning the spirit of God hovered over the waters, now we have what must have seemed like an enormous ship when he was building it but what must have felt completely inconsequential during the flood, floating on the waters. The original creation was preserved in this one vessel through the righteousness of Noah.

What joy he must have taken in seeing the tops of the mountains again yet the time was not yet to come out of the ark. The sign that it was time to once again resume life was the return of the dove with an olive branch, things were growing again! Noah looked and saw the ground was dry, but after that it was nearly another two months before Noah left the ark. Why? Because he waited until God told him to leave the ark. In all things he waited on the Lord.

Saying Yes to God

At my grandmother's funeral yesterday someone said to me, "Oh yes you were one of those who were called to ministry later in life." My answer is that no, I was called early in life but I only answered "Yes" nearly 20 years later. In thinking through that as I drove home it made me appreciate both the Lord and those who did what Abraham did in saying yes at the start.

It is amazing to me that He waited on me for so long. It tells me something about the God I serve that in all the stuff I got myself into in those intervening years that He never gave up on me. For most of that time there was no reason to believe that my life would ever be as it is today. I realize that for most of that time I wasn't chasing anything in particular, mostly I was being chased and running as fast as I could and doing everything to avoid hearing His voice. Since I can't change the past I don't live with regret, but as I look at my life today and the things I have done and the people I have met, I look back wistfully on what might have been.

Men like Noah and Abraham amaze me. They just heard and did. In both cases though there were fatal flaws that in the end kept them from fully experiencing God's blessing. Noah got drunk and it ruined family relationships and Abraham took matters into his own hand to complete what God seemingly wasn't going to do Himself and even today we are paying the price. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. In spite of their sins, these men stand out from the rest to me yet I realize that I can't measure what might have been by projecting backwards, these men's lives tell me that.

Transitions

I am dealing with an odd juxtaposition of emotions as I attend my oldest son's high school graduation this morning, prepare myself for preaching tomorrow, prepare for my grandmother's funeral on Monday and a wedding next Saturday. In the midst of all of that we have about 20 people coming for lunch today after the graduation. I realize in this that I am participating in many transitions in the lives of those who are important to me and I feel the pressure to do it well and right and to say something of value and significance in the right place at the right time.

Transitions are important times in our lives and we typically aren't as well prepared for them as we should be. Ceremonies to mark those transitions matter, we are initiating a new phase in life and at the same time saying good bye to the past phase. Baptism is the clearest ceremony of demarcation of transition we have in our culture as it relates to past, present and future. These other ceremonies I will participate in over the next few days all relate most clearly to one or two of those "seasons" but the connection with all three is less explicit.

Standing on the edge of a new season of life is a precarious place to be. We prepare for this transition but at the same time we are aware that we aren't really prepared because we have no idea what actually comes next. The mixture of excitement and uncertainty is what the disciples must have felt when they were called to be Jesus' disciples, when Mary Magdalene told them Jesus had been resurrected and told them to go and wait for him, when they were told to wait in Jerusalem, and on the day of Pentecost. Welcome to the great adventure of life!

The love of a Grandmother

My grandmother died today. At 47 I am fortunate to have had a grandparent still living. It is even more surprising when I realize that she has been my only living grandparent for 25 years. She never did anything great, she never even attempted anything great, but her life had meaning and purpose, she loved Jesus, other people and me.

In John's first letter (1 John) he makes many profound points but the most important is that we can't just love God and be Christians. We have to love the other people who love God. He says that love must be shown towards others, not a theoretical construct of our imagination. Unless we love the people of God we have a theoretical construct of God not a real God. John gets that from God Himself who sent His only Son to die for us, He showed us love. God's love isn't a theory and our love for Him can't be either, it has to show itself and love and service to others. Love in the Christian world isn't just an emotion, it is an active verb.

My grandmother loved people not in an abstract way, but in ways that you knew you were loved. She would do anything for me, I was the oldest grandson and her favorite. It sometimes made me feel terrible because she so clearly favored me, but deep down I liked it a little too. I didn't do anything to have her love me, I was born the first son of her only son and that was enough for her to love me completely. My faith in Jesus means God loves me just like that.

Brennan Manning tells the story of a man named Ed Farrell, who traveled from his home in Detroit to spend a two-week vacation in Ireland to celebrate hisuncle’s eightieth birthday. When the great day dawned, Ed and his uncle rose early to greet the sun. They walked along the shores of Lake Killarney, loving the emerald green grass and crystal blue waters. For twenty minutes they watched the scene together in silence. Then the uncle began to do an unusual thing for an eighty-year-old man: He began to skip along the shore of the lake, smiling like a schoolboy in love. Ed was puffing hard as he tried to catch up with him.
“Uncle Seamus, you look very happy. Do you want to tell me why?”
“Yes,” said the old man, tears streaming down his face. “You see, the Father is very fond of me. Ah my Father is so very fond of me.”

Apocalypse Then and Now

When the flood waters come on the earth, we have gone back to the state before creation began in some ways, with the exception of this life boat with Noah and his family and the animals on board. All that is left of life is floating on what on dry land would have seemed an enormous boat but on the face of the waters that covered the earth would have seemed remarkably small and inconsequential.

Movies like Omega Man and I Am Legend explore something of what it would be like to be alone on earth, but they always find others and others find them, for good or ill. Apocalyptic movies such as that all understand that ultimately it is man's propensity to violence, rapacious greed and dominance that lead to destruction. There is a certain plausibility structure in them that cuts across the political ideas of conservative/liberal. Inside us we know that ultimately we as a race or species are capable of incredible stupidity such as would be sufficient to bring about an apocalyptic ending of most life as we know it. Isn't that what Genesis 6 says happened? The only difference is that God brings about an ending rather than mankind.

Over my lifetime we have lost not the story but the cohering principle of the story. We don't doubt that ultimately we will blow it and there will be a need to start over again if possible, but we have written God as creator and judge out of the story. Our hope is in humanity, a better bunch of people, who will "get it" and survive the end and build a new society which is based on the right principles. Why do we hope in humanity when we have ample evidence that from the beginning of recorded history, whether biblical or otherwise, that we can't sustain peace among each other?

The end of theology

Rather than looking at the purpose of creation from a human perspective, since it is Sunday, it is a good thing to think of it from God's perspective. One of the things I have been telling my congregation lately is that if your theology (words about God) doesn't lead to doxology (praise of God) then you ain't doing theology right. Creation reveals so much about the Lord that it should bring forth incredible praise from us. It tells us what kind of God we serve that He has given us this beautiful earth, imagine its glory if we hadn't screwed it all up in the beginning and continue to do so today.

One of my favorite songs as a wee lad in church was This is My Father's World:

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.

Thinking on creation should lead us to praise for the creator. When I lived near many golf courses I would occasionally meet people who said they didn't go to church but they worshipped on the golf course. As I drove past several courses on my way to worship on Sundays I would sometimes pray for God's Spirit to fall on those courses since so many people said they were going there to worship. He never seems to have answered that particular prayer in the affirmative as I never met anyone who said they met Him there and realized that they had to come to church to worship Him fully.

This is the day for worship, O Worship the King.

Meaning

Is meaning created by me or is it inherent in my existence? That question is at the heart of the Christian faith, the faith that includes the first book of the Bible. If the world exists because of the sudden expansion of a singularity without reference to a force behind the expansion and that from that this planet had a climate such that life could exist and within that life began from the stuff that was here, then meaning is something that is up to me to create for my life.

If, however, the world was created, by whatever means, by a God, as a place where life like ours could thrive, and that we are the pinnacle of that creation, in His own image, then meaning is up to that creator God. There is someone who knows how it all is supposed to work and for what purpose it was all created. The ultimate revelation of that purpose and meaning is in the cross of Jesus Christ.

In studying the book of Genesis for 2 1/2 years with a group of men, I have been profoundly shaped by the book. It asserts itself in many ways into my reading of the rest of the Bible. The implications of this worldview and what it says about human life and all of creation and our relationships with God, one another and the world around us, are immense. Accepting all of this brings a responsibility for all those relationships and the stewardship we have been given, both of the mysteries of the Gospel and also for stewardship of life. I can't do it alone, I need help, maybe I will eat some fruit or, my personal favorite for knowledge, read a book. Prayer, asking for help, seems a better answer.

Beginning and ending

In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey encourages people who would be effective to begin with the end in mind and uses the example of living life so that what your best friend would say at your funeral about you would be what you would want them to say. The book isn't "Christian" but that principle should matter to us. In thinking about knowing and living, it is important for us to consider the end as we begin.

We tend to spend more time asking the question the Talking Heads asked in the song, "Once in a Lifetime," "How did I get here?" That question is an important one because it measures whether what we have done to date is working or not, but once the analysis is done, we either need a new plan or we need to keep working the old plan. Too often, especially when we aren't pleased with the answer to that question, we fail to move on, spending our time on regret and self-pity or self-loathing.

We don't have the details re creation and exactly what it looked like for God to create. The answer to the question, "How did I get here?" is simply that God created me to be here at this moment in time in this particular place (see Acts 17.26-27). What is more important than knowing the mechanics of it all is knowing the end of it all, where am I going and how do I get there. That is the part the first pair of humans got wrong, being like God in knowledge requires God's help, not some fruit.

How and Why

I wonder how much time and energy has been spent on the question of how this all came to be. Darwin framed the debate in those terms and since then the church and the world has been consumed by the question of how. It seems that this has done little more than side-track much of our work as the church. It isn't that the question of "How" is an improper field of study for the church, I wonder though if it should be primary as it has been. If we believe in divine inspiration then we have to believe also that we got only the important stuff for life and if we were doing a better job of that we wouldn't be as concerned about this question.

"Why" seems a better question and the Westminster Shorter Catechism begins there, with the question, "What is the chief end of man?" "Why are we?" is another way to phrase that question. The question takes seriously that we exist and now that we are clear on that the next step is to figure out the why of existence. The church's business, it seems is the working out of life, glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.

The how question is partially responsible for much of the mess of the church in my lifetime. We have become consumed with mechanics because of the "how" question when the "why" question of existence is the more important issue. I appreciate the scientific work on biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics and it is fascinating to realize the incredible complexity of life and this universe, but at the end of the day I still need to know why there should be a thinking person like me in that universe and if that means anything. For tomorrow - beginning and ending.

Watergate and Genesis

In the Watergate trial the most famous and important question was "What did he (the President) know and when did he know it?" Genesis asks a famous philosophical question, "How do we know?"

Adam and Eve decided that the serpent was right, there was some knowledge God had kept for Himself and it was to be found outside of God. Throughout the Bible God implores people to ask Him for knowledge, and excoriates His people for searching for wisdom outside of Him. Jesus, in the Beatitudes, turns wisdom on its head. Paul speaks of the wisdom of God which seems like foolishness to men.

Who would think that a man dying on a cross 2000 years ago was the personification of wisdom itself? Does the cross tell us something about how we know things that turns all knowledge on its ear? On Sunday we sang a song with the lyrics, "When I survey the Wondrous Cross" and "The Wonderful Cross." The resurrection of Jesus makes the cross wonderful and wondrous, and knowing, knowledge and wisdom find another source and another goal.

Knowledge and the Holy Spirit

The knowledge gained in the garden, the knowledge of good and evil, failed to produce righteousness. What was begun in sin, disobedience to the command of God, could not possibly produce its opposite. What was gained by the knowledge? The only thing I can see that was gained was a knowledge of sinfulness. As Lewis Grizzard said, naked simply means you have no clothes on, nekkid means you don't have any clothes on and you're up to something. That was what happened in the garden, the transition from naked to nekkid.

What does Jesus say is the first work of the Holy Spirit? He will convict the world of sin (John 16.8). The Holy Spirit, though, is also described as Comforter. Comfort is what was not gained through the eating of the fruit of the tree in the garden, only knowledge. God had another way of giving us knowledge concerning good and evil, the Holy Spirit, living in us, who convicts us of sin, righteousness and judgment and also testifies to the cure for sin, faith in Jesus.

The knowledge we gain by the Holy Spirit is the truth about us and God. The truth is that we have sinned and fallen short of His glory, we must hide ourselves from Him yet the fullness of truth is that Jesus died a sinner's death so we can come out of hiding and receive garments of righteousness (see the high priest Joshua in Zechariah 3 for a picture of a believer's reception in the heavenly courts.)

Intimacy and Fear

The cliche is that males fear intimacy. The truth is that we all fear intimacy, being known. We have learned over time that some things aren't safe to tell and some people aren't safe to tell either. Vulnerability is dangerous business, always has been, always will be. Naked and unashamed (Genesis 2.25) is not something most of us relate to very well.

There are times when I am glad God sees and knows but there are times when that knowledge is not so good and I want to get my own fig leaf, knowing it is completely inadequate and doesn't hide the sin but actually draws attention to it.

Sometimes I think we comfort ourselves with knowledge about God and use that knowledge as our fig leaf. It is safe to know about Him and to keep the distance that kind of knowledge affords us. Adam and Eve didn't have that luxury, they knew He was near, walking in the garden, theoretical, doctrinal knowledge is safer. Doctrinal knowledge doesn't have to be intimate and immanent. The incarnation blew away the theologians who knew all about God (or thought they did). They couldn't handle the idea of Him being present with them as He was present in the Garden and they used their theology as their fig leaf. We have even greater intimacy than that with the Holy Spirit. Do I hear footsteps?

In the movie War Games, a brilliant man has created a computer program that the defense department uses to determine strategies for conducting war. A teenager hacks into the system and finds the games menu which includes global thermonuclear war. He believes it to be a game when in reality it is the real deal and begins playing. The computer takes over the game and the country is soon headed towards a doomsday scenario. The teenager and a girl friend track down the designer who comes to help save the day. In the end they three get into the "mind" of Joshua, the computer, and trick it into shutting down the game in futility that in the end nobody wins.

Is there an allegory in this movie? It is interesting that the name of the computer is the name of the designer's son who died as a child, before he reached his potential, and the name happens to be the Anglicized version of the name Yeshua, or Jesus. The doomsday scenario, destruction of the earth because all the countries who possess nuclear weapons fire them, is clearly meant to be a message against the proliferation of such weaponry, a la Dr Strangelove. But could it also not include the ultimate end game of God vis a vis creation and the book of Revelation? We can see in our enlightenment world that many no longer believe that there is an end game, surely God can see nobody wins and therefore would rather just play nice.

God knows us but do we know Him? His desire, like our own, is to be known. The book of Hosea says it again and again, that His people don't know Him but that He wants them to know Him. The incarnation of Jesus is God making Himself known to us, we who are hiding in darkness, just like in Genesis 3, pitifully clothing ourselves emotionally just like Adam and Eve. The knowledge that we are known is too wonderful for us (see Psalm 139.6). They sought knowledge apart from God when they should have sought knowledge about God and from God.

True intimacy

What does it mean to know and to be known? Through the Old Testament God continually says that he knows us, in fact He has known us since before He formed us in our mother's womb. His knowledge of us essentially has no boundaries, for David in Psalm 139 that is originally a burden and then he finds comfort in that reality, essentially God knows him because he cares so deeply for him. In other Psalms he asks what is man that you are mindful of him. Through Hosea God speaks of having taught Ephraim to walk, through Isaiah He says we are inscribed on the palms of His hands. In the Gospel of John, we are told in the second chapter that Jesus knew what was in man and in other places we are told the same. God's knowledge is complete and yet he loves us anyway.

When I was a kid I was convinced that at some level there were little thought bubbles like in cartoons that floated above my head and that people knew what was running through my brain. Why those weren't there for other people so that I could know their thoughts I have no idea, but I remember being concerned that people would know what I was thinking about and that they would be horrified about that. I can't imagine what horrible thoughts a third grader would have been having but even then I was aware that they weren't something I should share with the rest of the world, sort of like getting caught in a private chat in class and having the teacher say, "John would you like to share that with the entire class."

God doesn't need my presumed thought bubble, He knows my heart. That is the reason that the first thing we do in our worship is pray, "Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen." We both know that some of the stuff in my heart is a complete mess and that unless it is cleaned up I can't really worship, my sin separates me from a holy God and the intimacy He wants more than I do.

Children of God

We use the term "child of God" too loosely, in a way that God doesn't. John says in his Gospel that Jesus' work on the cross gave us the right to become children of God which implies that without faith in that work we are not children of God. We bear his image by default of creation but that doesn't mean we are his children, the family resemblance isn't enough to have it simply in the flesh. We need the new hearts He promised through the prophets and made possible through the giving of the Spirit in order to reveal God to the world. The Spirit doesn't sanctify our desires in the sense that whatever we now do is sanctified, He sanctifies us by changing what we desire. That process though requires effort on our part, the spiritual disciplines matter.

In Romans 8, Paul says all creation eagerly awaits the revelation of the children of God. Why? Because it has been subjected to futility, wasted effort and energy, kept from reaching its potential, because of the sin and sins of mankind generally. If all creation awaits that revelation and groans in childbirth, shouldn't that tell us something of our duty towards creation? Doesn't it also say that all are not children of God?

We need to understand the mystery of Christ in us but we also need to understand the reality that sanctification is a participation sport as well. We need to practice the disciplines of study, prayer and fasting, just as Jesus himself practiced them. As I have started exercising lately I see evidence that my body is changing, I don't have new muscle tissue, but the muscle I had is becoming stronger. The disciplines work in our lives in the same way. Unfortunately, I see my dedication to working out as greater than my desire to practice some of the disciplines, and I see also the results or lack thereof in certain areas of my life.

Romans 8

When Paul speaks of the law of sin and death in Romans 8, is he speaking about the 10 Commandments or is he simply speaking of Genesis? The law of sin and death can be simply stated as sin brings death, beginning with Genesis, it wasn't a new concept in Exodus 20 with the giving of the law constituting the nation of Israel as God's people. The law of sin and death applies to all flesh.

When he speaks of Jesus setting us free from that law, it must mean more than the 10 Commandments, it is the law that applies to all flesh, not just those who were under the particular laws of Israel. The law of sin and death is the law for everyone, just as Christ's death wasn't just for those who had been circumcised.

John used great wisdom in starting his Gospel with the words of Genesis. In doing so, he connected the creation story to the redemption story, it is all one story. Paul, in speaking of the law of sin and death, does the same in his own way. He says that if we live by the Spirit we set our minds on the things of the Spirit. When they sinned in the garden it seemed their minds were set on the things of the Spirit, desiring wisdom, but they sought it through material things, which were appealing to the eye and good to eat. Truly setting our minds on the things of the Spirit allows us to understand the source of those things isn't found in material things. I wonder when I will ever really get that truth at a heart level that sees me living by it.

Finding our way

I just read an article from England that says the country may lose one in five churches in the next generation. The sad reality is that the main concern is the loss of the buildings, which represent the country's cultural heritage. The people most concerned seem to be government officials who are prepared to work via tax laws and funding for maintenance of the buildings. When the church simply becomes a building, is it still a church?

The church in many places in the west has given up on its own story. When its leaders ceased to believe the story, when they ceased to believe God had created all that is, ceased to believe He had spoken and had clearly expressed His will for life, ceased to believe Jesus was God incarnate, ceased to believe God in the form of Jesus had died on a cross for the forgiveness of sins, and ceased to believe He had been resurrected from the dead, ensuring our own resurrection to eternal life, its demise was predictable. I would argue that the demise of the civilization created by those beliefs, that story, was equally predictable.

I believe also in the power of the truth of the story so I don't believe all is lost. We may be living in a time when a 1700 year old institution breathes its last breath. "Christian" countries and societies that came into being with Constantine may now be coming to an end. What organizing principle(s) replace those is up for grabs. Maybe it is time for church buildings in England to go away so that Christianity can recover its own identity as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light." (1 Peter 2.9)

More metanarrative

When John wrote his Gospel he simply picked up in Genesis and tags his Gospel onto it. By using those first three words, "In the beginning God," John says, this is the continuation of the story that begins in Genesis 1.1. It isn't a new story or a different story as Marcionists would have you believe, it is the same story and the same God.

We shouldn't be surprised then when we get to John 3.16 that God loved the world. He created it all and it was (and is) dear to him, it is His desire to save that creation from destruction, as it always has been. Noah and his family were saved from destruction rather than God wiping it all away and starting again with new people being created.

Noah had a rough experience of what it all looked like before creation. Water, water everywhere, a chaotic environment which not only didn't support life but destroyed it, and then, the waters returned to their boundaries set by God in creation and life began again but things weren't as they were, life spans were shortened and the atmosphere was different, there had never been a rainbow before this time. Corruption was even more significant.

The Judeo-Christian metanarrative explains change and degradation by pointing to sin. It explains the power of God and the judgment of God but more than that it explains God's love for us and this creation. The story is the story of love, redemption and mercy for a world gone wrong. Tomorrow we will look at Romans 8 and see a bit more into the heart of God for this creation.

Who needs a metanarrative?

The metanarrative (grand story) of the Judeo-Christian faith begins in Genesis and if we don't take the time to understand the beginnings how can we even begin to understand the final book in the Bible. For a long time Christians have been obsessed about what will be and many trees have sacrificed for the cause of understanding. The Bible is one of the few books I know of that anyone would pick up and read the final chapter without bothering with the first chapter of the story. In this way, Christians have more to do with the loss of metanarrative than the postmodern philosophers. We have completely neglected to immerse ourselves in the story of our faith.

Is the question, how did the world get where it is today less important than the question of what is the ultimate destiny? If we bothered more to understand the care with which God made the world in the first place in order to make it the perfect environment for our lives, we might read the final chapter of the story (Revelation) with great sadness rather than with any sense of triumph. Ultimately, God has to destroy His own creation in order to redeem it.

I have made one piece of furniture in my life and it isn't particularly well-made and we don't actually use it in our house but if Suzanne ever tried to toss it out I would feel an incredible sense of loss. We have been so focused on the ending of the story: destruction of the earth in the end in preparation for the new heavens and new earth that we have neglected to concern ourselves with the preservation of the creation, our original task. The metanarrative that begins in Genesis is important stuff if we are to understand our place in creation, caretakers.

So What?

So what that the Bible tells me why the world isn't fair? I know that without reading the Bible, I know that by living. What the Bible tells me that the world doesn't is that it wasn't God's design or plan for our lives or for the world. It tells me how things went wrong from the start, and it tells me of the God who has the same ideas about things that I do when I am most idealistic. It tells me that I can have another standard other than the standard of the world and that it won't make life easier to live by that standard but it will make it better and give me the hope of a meaningful life.

Jesus lived by the standard God had in mind and what did it get him? What Adam and Eve wanted was to be like God and instead they brought death into the world, everything from then on was corrupted, nothing worked like it was supposed to work, that was the curse on man and the earth. By living in obedience to the standards of God, Jesus died but his death brought life into the world.

What Jesus did was give us the real hope of being like God if we do the same things Adam and Eve did in Genesis 3, the language is the same as we say every week in our worship, "she took of its fruit and ate." When Jesus was with his disciples on his last day of freedom before the crucifixion he said they were to "Take, eat; this is my body." The difference in the takings and eatings is the difference between rebellion and obedience. Rebellion brought death, obedience brings life.

No matter what popular preachers may say, living by the standards of God isn't the road to popularity and prosperity. In fact, Jesus said that it was exactly the opposite, the road to persecution and poverty (Matthew 5.1-11). He says we have to choose our path and that while the path of authenticity and integrity to the standards we believe are best may be hard, at the end of the road is an eternity where those standards are the order of the day.

Fairness

From the time my kids could talk they have had a concept of fairness, just like all of us. When they were little though they learned to avoid saying something wasn't fair. They heard the "fairness" lecture too many times from me and it was not something to look forward to.

We all have a sense that things should be fair but aren't. As soon as we think we are wronged or that someone else has something we don't but we are equally deserving we trot out the fairness argument. What my kids learned from me (or at least heard from me) is that we tend to only look one way on the fairness street. We tend only to look at those who have more than us when we measure fairness and living in America (apologies to James Brown) in the 21st century and complaining about not having more as unfair is ridiculous. We need a bigger perspective on life in the world to get a true idea of fairness. Just as often we need to remind ourselves or be reminded of what is truly important in order to worry about fairness.

Jesus had to speak about fairness on several occasions (see Matthew 20 for example). In the kingdom of God, fairness isn't measured the same way. We get more than fairness, we get grace. All through the first chapters of Genesis is this concept as people sin and rebel against God and yet He perseveres in the human experiment, even in Noah and his family. God could have started over without Noah and the rest of the menagerie on the ark, He could have made all things new without using any of the corrupted creation. I don't want fairness, I want grace.
(Check out this interview with Bono on the issue of grace v. fairness/karma)

Corrupt

Doesn't that describe the state of the world today? That is actually how God described the world to Noah. It has described the state of the world most of its existence as long as there have been people. Prior to our creation the earth and all that was in it were described as good.

It is a humbling thing to know that we are responsible for the corruption of creation, but it is clearly our fault, due to sins of greed, envy, lust, etc. that causes us to constantly seek more when we clearly don't need more. We are supposed to seek more of the creator and instead we seek more of the creation. Creation is finite, however and He is infinite, as is His capacity to satisfy. It is amazing that however far we are from original creation, the earth continues to provide so much for us to lust after. Think about all the things just on your desk or within the view of your eyes that have come about just in the past 100 years that never were possible to earlier people and you'll be astounded when you realize it all came from what God created so long ago. Nothing has truly been created out of nothing by mankind, it all comes from the original creation.

Corruption though is an interesting word for God to use, it means that we weren't made this way or for this purpose. Corruption implies there was an original intent from which we have deviated, a change from what we should be and that change affected everything so God had to wipe it all out, not just the agents of corruption, men. Corruption points back to origin and intent, creation and design. What was God's answer to corruption in Genesis 6?

Is confession really good for the soul?

What the beginning of the story of "us" tells us is that there is no such thing as human progress, only regression. From one act of disobedience to murder, and not just any murder, but fratricide, in one generation! By the time we get to Noah, we get something like God knew that every intention of man's heart was only evil all the time. That is like saying you don't just have cancer, you are cancer, there is no health in us. In fact, in our tradition that is exactly what we used to confess, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us..." (We confessed that for the first 400 years of our Prayer Book but apparently we don't want anyone's self esteem to suffer so we leave that last bit out now.)

Isn't actually good to acknowledge before God that we need more of him? Isn't it a bit arrogant of us to pretend otherwise? When Isaiah came into the temple in chapter 6 of his prophetic book, he probably thought of himself as a more or less righteous guy but when God showed up and he saw what real holiness looked like he was panicked and would have confessed to being the most sinful man on earth. When Jesus tells the disciples to let down their nets for a catch in Luke 5 and they haul up an incredible catch, Peter's response to him at the shore is, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."

The less we understand about the reality of sin, the less we make of it, the more it grows in us. Tolerance is an enemy to our souls and confession is the antidote, but not morbid introspection. We don't need that, if we open our lives to the Holy Spirit He will bring those things to our attention that He wants to cleanse. Our only health is from the indwelling of the Spirit. In the first four chapters of the Bible we have great sin but the greater failure is the failure to confess those sins but rather to make excuses for them or hide them. If we acknowledge our sins He is faithful to forgive them.

Total Depravity

Cain thought it might be okay in the sight of God to murder him, that is his fear, death. God further cursed the ground so that it would not yield its "strength" to him and He also sentenced Cain to be a fugitive and wanderer (of course he paid no attention to that second thing, he settled in the land of Nod). His only concern was that someone would kill him if they found him. He had no concern for his brother's life but a great deal for his own.

When Jesus spoke of murder, he said if you hate your brother it is as if you murdered him. His standards are incredibly high regarding sin, so high in fact that I can't even pretend to be righteous. I get from his words about lust and murder that he has a very different definition of holiness, one I can't ever attain. I can more or less restrain conduct but there have been many times when I realized my only hope of righteousness is a lobotomy because my mind seems to have a life of its own.

We carry around all our anger and our thoughts about people and then we become like Cain, paranoid that other people are probably just like us, filled with the same garbage and it will be directed towards us. Cain needed to be a fugitive and wanderer, he was a guy unfit to live with other people (I don't where those other people come from by the way). His attitude got passed down to his descendants, culminating in the arrogant boast of the thoroughly obnoxious Lamech at the end of chapter 4. Attitude isn't DNA, it has to be deliberately passed down. Self-centered, now that is DNA.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Why is it I am never satisfied? If I lived in a vacuum apart from other people and things maybe I could pull off satisfaction, but as it is, I see other people who have something I want or something I think I lack, and envy creeps into my life and re-orients it entirely. The new orientation of my thoughts is to get whatever that thing is, however I can get it. It orients both my actions and my prayers towards that aim. If I were honest with you, I could probably name a dozen things I would like to have right now, I could make a wish list like a kid at Christmas and make the case why all of them were important to my ministry.

Augustine said centuries ago, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you." Has anything changed about human nature since he said that? My heart longs for rest, but not as much as it longs for stuff most of the time. It doesn't have to be material stuff either, it can even be spiritual or psychological stuff, it can even be stuff for my kids like success in what they are doing, solid friends, trust from others... Rest is hard to come by because of my restless heart.

I don't generally begrudge others having the things I want, at least not at the level Cain did. I don't have a problem with them having it, I just want it too. Right now in my life I am more or less satisfied on my own behalf so I want for others. It bugs me that people who love God and desire to serve Him suffer financially and so my prayers are filled with requests on their behalf. Is there any hope of true rest in this world? From Genesis 3 on, we have been people who want that one other thing we think will satisfy us.

Cain and Peter

What do those two guys have in common? When God asked Cain where his brother Abel was, Cain's flip reply was, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It is amazing how quickly sin becomes acceptable. His parents hid from God over the eating of the fruit because they knew that He knew. Cain makes no attempt to hide himself after fratricide. When God asked his parents a question they were more naive, betraying their sin by their answer, "I was afraid because I was naked..." They had been naked with God before and unashamed, they had no sense of vulnerability in their nakedness but now something had changed, naked suddenly felt vulnerable. Cain has none of that, he more or less assumes that God either doesn't know what he has done or that it wasn't that big a deal. His attitude is incredibly arrogant.

Peter too denied he was his brother's keeper. When Jesus needed a friend, Peter threw him under the bus to save his own skin. His testimony wouldn't have made any difference in the eventual outcome so he didn't commit murder by his actions, but his denial was a serious betrayal of a friend. Because Jesus had prophesied this in advance, and given the sign of the cock crowing, Peter couldn't hide from the sin. He knew that Jesus knew.

When Peter wrote his epistle, he uses a form similar to what God told Cain, "...sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it." Peter told his disciples, "Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith..." Peter had been told roughly the same thing by Jesus, that satan desired to sift him like wheat. Both Cain and Peter were men who received grace, unmerited favor, both had done terrible things and both lived to tell about God's grace, but Peter actually did tell about it while Cain thanked his lucky stars and not God and went on doing his own thing.