Forgiveness Blooms

Mark 16:1-8

Here in the original ending of Mark we see the women going to anoint Jesus’ body. This is part of life; death.  It is known that all living things die.  It hangs over all of us and its reality is important to how we live on earth.  Call it survival if you want, call it thriving, but death shapes how we live. 

Fear is an important theme in this passage, but it was not fear of the dead body or of death.  I am always struck at how fearful some people are to be with a dead body, but these women were going to do the things we have professionals do today.  They were going to handle the body to pay deepest respects to the one lost.  No the fear was that Jesus was not there.

It is in this fear that Christian hope begins.  Remember Sarah laughs when she is told she will bear a child.  Yes because it is funny, but out of fear of this great possibility that can only happen because of the Divine.  The empty tomb is much more radical and hence the running in fear, not just nervous laughter.

God is the only true other.  What I mean is that because of death being part of life on earth, we are all in the same boat, or globe, what have you.  God is however beyond this as the creator.  I remember learning about Creation ex nihilo, in seminary, and questioning it like any good seminarian, for in the first verses of Genesis, there is reference to the deep, to chaos, as if something existed before creation.  Well I was studying with Dr. Rev. Joe Jones in a study group (a great theologian of the Christian Church), and he made it clear it was less about the existence of matter before creation, but that creation was not made of God’s own self.  That is nothing God created is Divine, we may see something or experience something and say “Wow that is Divine,” however I believe we are pointing to the great Divine with that experience.  God created, to have relationship with, not to simply be an extension of God.  This is however, not to support the gnostic idea that all earthly and physical is inherently evil.  I remember that God said it was Good when it was created, but it is not God.  It is physical and that with life does die.

Thus the fear of the women was the realization that God is truly the only other.  We are all invited to the wedding banquet, as the parable Jesus tells in Mathew 22.  We are all invited and we wear our wedding robe (of course the people on the street did not really have their special robe with them), but when the one not wearing a robe asked he was without word.  He did not understand, he would have stood at the empty tomb and thought “I wonder who took the body?”  He would question the angel and may had experienced fear, but not the fear that sent the women running.

Their fear was that the resurrection did happen.  It meant they would have to deal with their doubt, their sin, their shortcomings to the one that is coming with a winnowing fork.  The one that would separate the chaff from the grain with the help of the Holy Spirit.  To accept you were that loved that Jesus would go to the cross and to face him, is wear the fear comes from, and the hope begins. 

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. Revelation 3:20

Hope stirs when we realize Jesus does not avenge, but witnesses as the ultimate other.  The one that knows the truth is that forgiveness blooms on earth as it is in heaven. For when Jesus comes through the locked door He says, “Peace be with you.”

Come & See

1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51

Writing the article that is linked here, I realized that it worked well with the scriptures above.  Basically my son may not answer to his name, but he seems to answer to the Divine who calls one to love perfectly.  The article is not the sermon, but in written form it worked very well, and I thought it wise to simply link that written word in this week’s sermon jotting.

Many blessings, JC

 

http://dmergent.org/2012/01/18/autism-sculpts-divine-desire-asdd/

Love

Isaiah 61:1-4;; 8-11; Luke 4:16-21
I remember helping my father with the Christmas lights.  I even remember one strand that if one was out or loose the whole strand was out.  I am so glad that strand did not persist in our yearly tradition, but it was not as easy as today.  Incandescent bulbs broke easily and they needed to be clipped on the tree.  So when Mindi and I started celebrating Christmas as a married couple I was happy to buy a strand of the new LED lights.  They were easy to put on and seemed to work well for the last 6 years and they worked perfectly fine the first night I put them up this year.  The next day half the bottom strand stopped working.  I changed the fuses and they still did not light. 
I thus went out searching for similar lights and I did find something compatible at the second store.  As a son of an engineer I was searching for a strand strung in a parallel circuit, not a series circuit.  It is fine if you do not remember this information from grade school, as a son of an engineer I have to remember certain things.  I will remind you the difference between these two type of circuits.  A series circuit the current of electricity passes through each circuit element without branching, thus if one element is disconnected (for bulbs burnt or loose) the current is disabled.  A series circuit also must share the voltage of the source, while a parallel circuit will have the same voltage draw of the source for each element is directly connected to the source.  This is why a parallel circuit light strand will stay let if one bulb is burnt out or loose.
So I, as my father’s son, looked at the box of lights for the words parallel circuit, and found the trademarked term “Constant ON” with a accurate definition of a parallel circuit, including two illustrations.  However, no where is it confirmed that the circuit was strung parallel, not even in parenthesis (I do like parenthesis).  I have no problem with the company trademarking a catchy term, but if they were going to take the time to define it on each box, I feel it would be a good idea to share the official term within the definition.  Do they really think we cannot handle the term “parallel circuit”?
I bring this up to demonstrate how terms meanings can be lost and or manipulated so easily in society.  And as religious people we also let some of our important words to lose their meaning.  Take for instance the word “love,” it is of great importance to the Gospel.  We use it between, family members and friends.  We say it to our children even before they understand language, and we use it to explain the feeling we have for them.  We use it also for pizza, paintings, and presents under the Christmas tree.  We are quite aware that feeling the word love varies as per the context.  However, the word love is used only for half of its Biblical meaning.  Feeling is important, but it is also used to refer to action. 
Isaiah’s prophecy is about action for those oppressed, broken-hearted, captive, mourning and more.  Jesus correctly states that the prophesy had been fulfilled in His reading, for Jesus is the incarnation of love.  It is not that Jesus has a warm and fuzzy feeling, but came to earth as a baby to preach, heal, teach, and most of all love us beyond understanding, to the point of death.  Isaiah’s words define the action part of the definition of Love, which is known as the Good News; Gospel. 
I believe the best explanation how the definition is feeling and action is when Jesus answers what the most important law is: 

He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matthew 22:37-40)

Yes it is important to have a wonderful feeling for God and simultaneously love your neighbor as yourself.  As this is recorded in Luke, the neighbor is the Good Samaritan.  It is clear that we are not simply to have nice and warm feelings, but to do compassion and merci to express this love.  Just as Jesus tells us in Matthew 25 what we do to the least of these we do onto Him.  The one that loved us so much he went humbly to the cross.  This love is equally action, and we participate in the action of love we are in touch with the feeling for God with all our heart, soul and mind. 
As church, we are to love each other, as Jesus told Peter when Jesus asked him three times if Peter loved Him.  Peter would respond with affirmation and Jesus responded with a call to action; “…feed my lambs…tend my sheep….feed my sheep.” (John 21) And as a church we are not strung in a parallel circuit, we are strung in the old series circuit.  The light of Christ is more than powerful enough to light each one, but if one is burnt out or loose we are all affected.  Jesus is the strand itself, as He says He is the vine (John 15), but God does the pruning.  We must love one another and the neighbor for we are all interconnected.  God will fix and/or replace the burnt bulbs and loose ones, but we must realize we are strung together by God’s grace and love, and thus we shine Jesus’ love by our action of love, for Jesus fulfilled this prophecy and we are called to do the same:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4: 18-19)

Plumb Line

Amos 7: 7-9, Matthew 5:38-48

Jesus is asking us to not retaliate and to even go as far as to offer more to an enemy, to someone attacking you.  This is a hard scripture.  Jesus asks us to pray for our enemies, and love them.  I do not believe Jesus wants us to get on our knees and propose to an enemy, nor have warm fuzzy feelings for said enemy, but He is asking us to love them, just as God loves us.  We can pray that they will change their hearts and actions and that is certainly a fine and healthy prayer, but in this context I do not believe that Jesus is even upholding the Proverbs that Paul quotes (proverbs 25: 21-22)":

If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat;
   and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink;
for you will heap coals of fire on their heads,
   and the Lord will reward you.

In the Matthew passage Jesus is asking us to pray for our enemies so we may see them in God’s eyes, and to show them love.  We actually determine our enemies generally by who is outside our group.  Be it nation, religion, clique, for it is rare that we actually have someone who is specifically attacking another, without the support direct or more likely indirect from others.  When we see someone as God seems them, it is hard for us to act as an enemy.

A great example of a man that knew he had an enemy is that of Dietrich Bonheoffer.  See Dietrich watched as his church, the German Church, began to ignore the cross of Christ, so to be able to support Hitler.  Bonheoffer knew Hitler and his followers as an enemy, and despite his Christian ethics, felt a need to participate in an assassination attempt.  Eventually Bonheoffer was jailed.  Despite being an enemy of what we, as humans, considered to be one of the most evil leaders, Dietrich treated each of his captors with respect and compassion.  They may have locked him up and may be called on to execute him at any moment, Dietrich saw them as children of God.

The plumb line is being consistent and perfect like our Heavenly Father is perfect.  To understand this, I share with you my experience of plumb lines. When I was a child we lived in a relatively new home and thus my father, the engineer, would require shelves and the like to be plumb level, that is the plumb line was based of gravity.  And it worked.  I then went in my early adult life on a mission trip to Virginia, where we were to reroof, put up siding, hang doors, replace windows, and put up a ramp to the front door.  This group tackled this project in three days, and on one of the days I was helping with the ramp.  Well the building was old and leaning some, it was not obvious to the naked eye, but when we started considering putting the ramp on the house we realized if we made it plumb to the building it would look very slanted, and if we made it plumb to gravity it would look slanted in the opposite direction.  One of the elder contractors shared his experience, that in this situation you make the plumb line the average of the two.  Sure enough that worked well, after carefully cutting the dowels in a specific order about an 1/8th of an inch different from the proceeding one.   (We may had changed the design if we had more time or was aware of the plumb line issue previously).  It worked out aesthetically wonderful, and even allowed for the water to run off well. 

Jesus tells us that our plumb line is to not retaliate, to love and pray for our enemies, and thus as Jesus says:

…so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. …Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:45 & 48)

This plumb line cannot be averaged with the world.  When we follow this line, it will be noticeably different then the world.  When we love as God Loves, we bring Heaven to Earth.

Low Salt Area

Matthew 5:13-20
We have to follow the law even greater than the Pharisees and Scribes?  That seems quite difficult since they were the experts in the Jewish Law, the Torah.  Jesus says He came to fulfill the law not abolish it, so we need to explore what is the law according to the Rabbi Jesus.  The best example would be in the Gospel of Luke when a young lawyer tests Jesus on the law.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’ (Luke 10:25-28)

The lawyer answers with the Shema with an additional caveat of loving your “neighbor as yourself,” which is confirmed by Jesus as being the right answer.  Of course the young lawyer is not satisfied with this, and asks who is his neighbor, which is when Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan.  Making it clear our neighbor is not simply the person who lives next door.

There is this children’s book about two boys living in Jerusalem.  One Jewish and one Muslim, who were both feeding the same stray white cat.  Both had been raised on the rules of their religious tradition, and both thought the other was not their neighbor, until the day they both worrying about the cat who had been missing for a while.  When they went looking for the cat and  met each other, they followed the rules of their society and fought (specifically over whose cat the stray was).  They followed the cat to a litter of kittens as a rare snowfall began concerned about her freezing.  They realized that she wants peace and they worked together for their love of the cat.  The book is called “Snow in Jerusalem” and is truly a oversimplification of peace in the Middle East.  Or is it?  The boys realized that love took precedent over the rules they had learned.  They saw how the snow fell, as we noticed this week in Durant, on everything.  Reminding me of Jesus’ saying in the end of this chapter five of Matthew:

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The boys realize that the snow represents the Grace of God that falls upon everyone, so we are to love everyone as God does.  That is the real law.  It is not simply about the rules.

So what about this salt?  It is a very strong metaphor that is understood when you explore how it was used in Old Testament.  How the first believers would have understood salt as a religious metaphor.  First of all culturally, one would say in the first century, “sharing salt” to refer to table fellowship.  That is certainly powerful for Christians, whose worship centers around a holy feast.  In Leviticus 2:13, “  You shall not omit from your grain-offerings the salt of the covenant with your God; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.” Which tells us to specifically to put salt in all offerings, because as the first half of the text says, it is a metaphor for the covenant itself.  The next piece of scripture I have us turn to is Numbers 18: 19, “All the holy offerings that the Israelites present to the Lord I have given to you, together with your sons and daughters, as a perpetual due; it is a covenant of salt for ever before the Lord for you and your descendants as well.” Again telling us that salt is a sign of the everlasting covenant.  And a very powerful sign of the covenant.  We have been iced over the whole week and we have not had salt to through out on the roads to melt the ice.  Up north we would call it a Low Salt Area, which you would see signs for such areas around reservoirs.  Salt is so strong it  contaminates the water supply, and I have known of houses whose wells are no longer good to drink from because of the salt that is put down on the roadway.  This idea of salt being so powerful is also found in 2 Kings 2: 19-22

Now the people of the city said to Elisha, ‘The location of this city is good, as my lord sees; but the water is bad, and the land is unfruitful.’He said, ‘Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.’ So they brought it to him. Then he went to the spring of water and threw the salt into it, and said, ‘Thus says the Lord, I have made this water wholesome; from now on neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it.’ So the water has been wholesome to this day, according to the word that Elisha spoke.

Now we know that salt is seen as very powerful and even purifying, a symbol of table fellowship, and the Covenant, the Law.

Jesus says to the believers who were listening to him on the mountain, “You are the salt of the earth”  You are the very powerful purifying, table fellowship that is the covenant.  You are the Law.  You are the law as He teaches and fulfills which is love of God and of humanity, our neighbor.  We are not to lose our saltiness but to permeate the world and change it.  To be a light for the true covenant that is embodied by Jesus’ love that He went to the cross for all of us, leaving us to be the church the body of Christ, the fulfillment of the Law, SALT.

Go out in the world as salt demonstrating this love and flavoring the earthly world with Heaven’s law.

God's Weather Forecast

January 17, 2010

God’s Weather Forecast.

Matthew 5.43-6.5

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This text I choose for my first sermon because I had an overwhelming fear that I must be perfect. I looked up this text and first saw the line, be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. At first this did not help. How could I be perfect like God? Was not Jesus the only human that could be called perfect? What does Jesus mean here? Well if someone sticks simply on one piece of scripture without looking at the full context one can come up with strange ideas. First of all we know that Jesus was the only perfect human in the sense we generally think of as perfect. Jesus, fully human and fully divine, without sin fulfills our definition of perfect.

We so often think we have to be perfect, be it our family baggage, and/or society, and that gets in our way. It affects everything we do and if we worry about being perfect we try too hard or avoid doing it all together so we cannot fail. I know for myself I worry less about a sermon being “perfect” I am more likely to preach a Spirit filled good sermon (I can rip all them apart myself but that is my own issue to work on).

But as I wrote above God cannot be telling us to be “perfect” as we understand it in the vernacular, so back to the Bible. Jesus says “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And earlier in the passage where is our heavenly Father mentioned? Most of the passage are commands to us, but God is present in this part, “he [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” So it has something to do with God’s weather. God sends rain on everyone, good and bad. For me it is Grace. Prevenient grace is the grace that precedes our decision to accept God’s call and salvation. Or better yet our ability to understand and hear that Jesus has saved us, as we are not active participants in salvation but active participants because of our salvation. This grace that is offered to us does require our free-will to accept, and thus I described it as opening up to collect such rain that follows this knowledge of salvation. It is as if you had a rain barrel to collect and thus share this Grace. Of course once it is accepted it is not Prevenient Grace but rather sanctifying Grace, or simply Grace. Anyways I heard that some in the congregation were ordering rain barrels on their mobile devices, I heard as a joke later (I hope a joke).

So we know it has to do with God giving grace upon the good and the bad. This grace before grace, but how can we be perfect like God, well if God is consistently offering this to all perhaps we most also be consistent like God. To be perfect in context of this scripture is to treat everyone as you would treat another, (like ourselves I would say but many of us our harder on ourselves then others). If we are consistent with those in the pews and with everyone we meet we will be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. This is not easy but it is important for someone may choose to start collecting in their barrel today or better yet may share some of the Grace they had collected. We tell our story by living it.