Too much

I am reflecting this morning on the breackneck speed at which I am living my life. Taking time off seems to cost too much both in dollars and in playing catch up after the time off has been taken. I am sitting here looking at long-stemmed red roses and white chrysanthemums that are stuffed in a vase because I simply do not have the time to take 5 minutes to arrange them. And I love to arrange flowers, it used to be one of my favorite things.

Here's the question for the day. Is this what God is requiring of me, that sometimes the roses must be ignored and left to die? Or is this another hamster wheel in which soemthing/someone else has entrapped me?

How can we make good decisions about our world, our families and our future if we don't even have the mental space to decide what to have for breakfast? What is the political equivalent of grabbing a granola bar as you run out the door?

Come away with me, Jesus said. At this point, He may have to kidnap me.

Change

People and systems don't change unless:

they have to because otherwise it hurts too much
they have to because they have learned enough to want to
they have to because they have grown enough to need to

Change is inevitable. Which group do you want to be in?

Signposts of the Resurrection Life

Since church ran long and I had to shorten my sermon, here's the whole thing..

Acts 4 and John 20:19-31
Easter is a season, not just one day. Jesus stayed with the disciples and his followers for awhile after his resurrection, showing them what his resurrected, Spirit-animated, glorified new life was like. Because of that, we too are going to spend this Easter time with the Resurrected Christ and asking him to show us what our Easter lives should look like, both individually and as the church. Let me tell you why that is important. Maybe it isn’t something that I have fully articulated, something I haven’t made plain because I just assumed we were all on the same page.

Here it is: I believe the local church is the hope of the world. I believe the local church, this local church, Bath United Methodist Church and its’ sister churches around the globe are the hope of the world. Why? Because the only hope for our world is the salvation of Jesus Christ offered through the amazing grace of God through the real and active presence of the Holy Spirit. If I didn’t believe that I’d be an English Literature professor at Oxford or Cambridge. For the next 40 days, the season of Easter, let’s explore what Jesus’ resurrection body was like, how he interacted with his disciples AFTER the resurrection, how the reality of his resurrection not only changed him but also changed the disciples and how it continues to change us, even today.

This church is a direct descendent of those disciples that huddled in fear in that room. We point to the birth of the church as the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit fell and thousands were baptized. But I submit to you that the birth of the church was Easter Sunday evening when the disciples huddled afraid and ashamed in that room and Jesus sought them out, passing through the locked doors of that room and the fear-locked doors of their hearts and breathed peace to them. The physical marks and new abilities of Jesus’ glorified, Spirit-animated body are signposts of the resurrection life that we live as Jesus’ followers today. The parallels between Acts 4 and John 20 are highlights that we need to see and live into.

Jesus went looking for them and no physical barriers, or emotional ones for that matter got in his way. That’s point #1 about Jesus’ resurrection body. Normal walls and locks and physical barriers didn’t matter to him anymore. He moved across them, across physical space as if it wasn’t there. That ‘super-natural’ ability isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus sought them out. After they had been at the empty tomb, Peter and John ran to find the other disciples, but then what did they do? Did they shout from the rooftops that something new and wonderful and world-changing had occurred? Did they scour the streets and fields looking for the Risen Jesus? He had been their friend in life, their closest companion, the one they radically changed their lives for? So why didn’t they go out looking for him once they knew he was alive? They were afraid.

Even when he came to them in that room, Thomas voiced the suspicion of them all: It’s a ghost they are seeing, a vision brought on by over-wrought emotions, lack of sleep and incredible stress and suffering. Seeing the ghost of someone recently dead was unheard of in that ancient culture any more than it is unheard of in our modern world when someone is recently and tragically bereaved. But this was no ghost. This was Jesus himself, in a physical form that was very different, but very much the same. He talked with them, he ate with them, and he still bore the scars of his death. But he was somehow different, different so much so that even as they locked themselves away from fear, Jesus effortlessly crossed over the barriers of their walls and doors and their fearful hearts to seek them out, to assure them of his love and presence.

The ‘church’ word for it is ‘prevenient grace.’ Even now, this minute God is working in the lives of those who don’t know him or don’t want to. And that is where we can join him already at work in their lives; we can speak his name in places it isn’t usually heard to point out what God is up to and what he is like. Our human limitations of time, distance, knowledge and our physical inabilities are overcome in the fullness of Christ’s resurrection and the empowering of the Holy Spirit. I know that there is pain and suffering and evil in the world. I realize that all will be made new and perfect when the new heaven comes down to join the new earth and all crying and pain and death will have passed away. All that is assured in Revelation 22. But many of us going around acting like since the Kingdom hasn’t come in full, then it hasn’t come at all. We are denying the resurrection power offered us, promised us as Easter people. That power is the power to know what God is like, to have faith that he is acting in our lives and in our world and the power to have the assurance that we can join him in that work. We, too, in concert with Christ, through the motivation of the Holy Spirit can move through the locked doors and hearts of people to tell them the truth and reach them with the good news of Jesus Christ.

Point#1 is that Jesus’ resurrection ability to move through barriers to seek out those he loves means that we, too, with him can move through the barriers that our own hearts and the hearts of others raise up to separate us from the love of God. Remember what Paul tells us in Romans 8:38-39 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Point #2 is about peace, the shalom that Jesus breathed when he had crossed those barriers. This is about a peace that is not just an absence of conflict but peace that is an active power. This is a peace that defines life in a whole new way. This new creation is pointed to by the use of the Hebrew rûªH’ the Greek pneuma, the breath of life that God breathed into Adam, the Spirit that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1. It is the qualities of the Acts 4 church that show the details of this new creation. Here you have to remember the things the Jews held dear, as signposts of their Exodus life: the importance of the land and how it was handed down from generation to generation, the importance of the Temple as the physical place where God lived on earth, the importance if the Torah as the revelation of God’s word, the story of the Jews as God’s people and the importance of the very blood that flowed through their veins, their Jewish ethnicity and circumcision were the physical marks of what it meant to be one of God’s chosen people, a Jew. They clung to their possessions, their church building, their version of God’s story and the specific kind of human beings they were.

And though we in the Easter church, the resurrected church are part of the new creation, the new covenant we have become complacent about those very same things. Jesus in his glorified resurrected body reminded them and us that they were now residents of a new land, so they gave up their land, sold it and shared the proceeds with all the believers. He calls us to do the same with the possessions we cling to so desperately. He reminded them that they were part of a new church, not defined by walls and buildings, a new Word with a capital ‘W’ not defined by scholars and paper and ink and a new family, not defined by blood or skin color or race or gender, they and we belong to the very family of God.

The hope of the world is not the United States government. The hope of the world isn’t the science department at MIT. The hope of the world is not the United Way, the Salvation Army or the Samaritans’ Purse, fine organizations though they all are. The hope of the world is the local church, patterned after the resurrected body of her Lord Jesus Christ; motivated, animated and empowered by the Holy Spirit of God; existing for the glory of God in the world both now and forever.

So we need to live our lives asking that one simple, basic question. Is what I am doing right now, this minute and with my life in general working in light of my belief in God and my commitment to His church? Or am I living my life to build barns and bigger barns, to get more toys, to keep the fear and anger at bay by filling up my life with mindless activities and a lot of stuff? Do you want to make a difference in the world? Do you want to matter in that eternal way and for eternity? Or are you content to sit in your little sandbox with your own little bucket of toys and convince yourself that is enough?

The local church as it reflects the power of God is the hope of the world, one person at a time, one church at a time. Brothers and sisters, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, peace, shalom. It is not the absence of conflict but the peace of Christ is the power to make all things new.

You can't have Easter without the cross

I’d like to briefly go back to where we started on our journey, to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Sometimes I think we get so caught up in the drama and excitement of Jesus riding into Jerusalem that we can hear the echoes of the shouted hosannas. We too, want to run alongside the crowds, straining to catch a glimpse of Jesus. We get wrapped up in the drama of his righteous anger as he and the disciples sweep through the temple courts and we miss the one verse that describes why Jesus died.
Jesus went to the Temple, that place where the Jews believed that they met God; the place that was God’s dwelling place on earth. The outer court area was full of stalls and booths with people selling and buying, poor families and rich ones. All of noise of that mass of humanity was punctuated by the sounds of the animals and birds that were being bought and sold to be sacrificed in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins. And God, in the person of Jesus, once and for all pronounced judgment on the way the Jews had interpreted his covenant with Moses, the way they had taken the law given them on Mt. Sinai and corrupted it, turned it in on itself and made it all for their advantage. In a loud voice and with dramatic action, turning over tables, ablaze with righteous anger, Jesus pronounces the judgment “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer and you have made it a den of robbers.’”
This isn’t just some scuffle over in a corner that a few people notice, that stops business for a minute and then everyone goes back to what they are doing, like a teenager acting up in a public place and folks looking the other way and going on. There is a reason that historic accounts call this “Jesus Clearing the Temple.” All the regular business stopped and for the first time in hundreds of years, just for a little while, the Temple went back to its intended use because after the shouting and the clearing out, after the animals that were to be slaughtered had gained a reprieve, they wouldn’t die that day or in the next few days since it was the Passover holiday, something else amazing happened. We tend to gloss over this in the light of all that is going to happen. Look at verse 14-16:
Matthew 21:14-16 14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry 16 and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read, 'Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself'?" (NRSV)

What is Jesus saying here that made the Pharisees so angry? Jesus is claiming to be the Son of God. The Pharisees knew the Torah, the Law of Moses like the back of their hands and they knew the text Jesus was recalling to them. They also knew the text referred to the praise offered to the Most High God. So, Jesus is claiming that the praise being given in the Temple at that moment, the praise for him, was really praise for His Father. To the Pharisees that was the ultimate blasphemy, and as often as we have overlooked it, that was the political reason the Pharisees decided Jesus had to die.

They could have lived with him being a revolutionary to throw of the yoke of Roman oppression. Israel had seen revolutionaries before. They could have lived with him being a Spirit-filled healer and teacher. Healers and teachers fit well into their traditions. But despite years of waiting for the promised Messiah, despite knowing the Isaiah text of the suffering servant, they could not and would not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, the only One who could set his Father’s house to rights.

After Jesus cleansed it, the Temple became a place of healing and restoration and praise. The blind and the lame were restored and the ones there saw the power and the glory of God and praised Him truly without death and sacrifice and blood but in freedom. And they were the ‘least of these’ that Jesus had taught about in the Sermon on the Mount earlier in Matthew, the children, the true children of Israel, children of the Mosaic covenant that had been pushed aside by the more powerful political and financial movers and shakers of the day. But here, hours before the end of his earth-bound life, Jesus clears a space for them, literally, in the house of God His Father and he heals them and loves them even as the Pharisees come and see and plot to be rid of Him once and for all.

Though Jesus’ action granted a reprieve for the birds and sheep and cattle that were doomed to be sacrificed that day, by his action in the temple he himself, the Lamb of God would be offered up once and for all for the sins of the world. His death on the cross was once and for all the end of the covenant God made with Moses, the climax of that covenant but Jesus’ life, his resurrection is the inauguration of the new covenant that Jesus makes in this world with each of us that will come to Him in faith, believing that He is God and that through his stripes, his wounds, we are healed.

It is an old, old, story. Two thousand years and more old and yet every year, we tell the story. Not because it’s made up but because it’s true. And hundreds of years ago, some of the ones who were there and were part of it, wrote it down for us, so that we would remember and we would become ones who are not just stewards of our money and the material things God gives us but that we would be good stewards of the story, the truth about God at work in the world. And so, this morning, I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you what finally happened to this Jesus of Nazareth.
The 26th and 27th chapters of Matthew tell it plainly:
o the last supper,
• Peter’s protests that he never would deny his Lord,
• Jesus’ heart-wrenching prayer at Gethsemane for his Father to take away this bitter cup and finally Jesus’ obedient “Thy will be done.”
• We read and hear the details of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and his last words to Judas; “Friend, do what you have come to do.”
• We hear the words in the high priest’s palace and the words “I barely know the man” fresh off Peter’s lips as the cock crows for the third time.
• We hear the whine of the lash and the thud as it crashes into human flesh and we see the crown of thorns, we see it crown that sacred head, now wounded for us.
• And finally, after 33 years, only 3 spent in active ministry, the cross itself where Jesus, son of God, Son of man, submits to the final suffering and with a last cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He dies and the universe mourns.
• The sky turns dark in the middle of the afternoon.
• The veil of the temple is torn in two, the most holy place now exposed and open for all to see, God’s garment ripped from top to bottom in grief.
• Graves are opened and the dead appear to folk in a looking-forward to that day when this new covenant between God and humanity will be fulfilled.

For you see, on the cross, the old covenant was finished, the promises God made to humans though his servant Moses came to final completion, the debt of sin was paid and that covenant set aside. But in His amazing and abundant grace God instituted a new covenant through Jesus Christ that day –a promise and a hope that is extended to you and me if we will only believe. And in this new covenant the law isn’t written on tablets of stone but on the tablets of our hearts.

But all that is in the future. For now the shouts of “Hosanna!” have turned to shouts of “Crucify him!” and “Give us Barabbas!” Imagine the scene in that jail where Jesus and Barabbas sit awaiting their final fate and both men hear the cries “Give us Barabbas!” The guard comes to take one of them away to freedom and one of them to a shameful Roman cross. Barabbas goes free and Jesus dies for him and for all of us.

The kingdom of God has seemingly been defeated by the kingdom of this world and there doesn’t seem to be anything left: the broken body of a young man, a world turned upside down, an afternoon turned into night but somewhere, perhaps only in the depths of the heart of his mother and in the depth of that cave-like tomb there is a small flicker of hope and of light.

But for now we must leave him there in that tomb. Like the disciples, like Mary his mother, we have watched the huge stone rolled over the mouth of the cave sealing it off, capping our connection with him. And as the humans we are we can stand dumbly staring at the stone or we can walk away in awe and grief, shaking our heads in sorrow and leave him there and wonder what in the world is going to happen next.