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The Aaronic Blessing

Numbers 6:22-27   Psalm 73:25   2nd Corinthians 4:4-6    Revelation 1:6  

John 15:15   Mark 10:13-16

I: — Customarily we say it or sing it at a service of baptism.  Frequently the minister concludes worship by pronouncing it as a benediction:

The Lord bless you and keep you;

   the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

   the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

   What are we expecting?  Are we expecting anything?  Or do we repeat the words merely because they sound nice, merely because we are religious romantics at heart?

   “The Lord bless you.”  What’s the blessing?  We are uncomfortably aware that in some church-circles the blessing people look to God for is wealth, or popularity, or success, or social advantage, or public adulation, or any other such thing that the North American Prosperity Gospel (so-called) keeps on trumpeting.  Those who assume the blessing to be a magnified material emolument conveniently forget that Jesus, we are told, had nowhere to lay his head, and was so very unpopular as to incur rejection at the hands of government and church, friends and followers.

   To be sure, there have been people unquestionably blessed  by God who were indisputably wealthy.  Abraham, for instance; or Joseph of Arimathea, who was wealthy enough to own a family-sized tomb he generously made available for the crucified body of Jesus.

   While we are on this point we should admit that every person in this room is wealthy compared to the rest of the world.  After all, 99% of the world’s people would trade places, materially, with any of us in a heartbeat.  I live in a three-bedroom home, 1000 square feet, modest by Canadian standards; 99% of the world’s people would find my home a palace.

   I cringe when I hear the North American Prosperity Gospel put forward.  I recall the word from Proverbs 30:8: “Give me neither poverty nor riches…for if I am poor, I shall curse God, and if I am rich, I shall dismiss God as superfluous.”

    Then what is the blessing?  In the Hebrew Bible the blessing—ultimately—is God himself; our engagement with God, our immersion in God, our intimacy with God—ultimately, our transformation born of such intimacy.  When we say, “The Lord bless you and keep you,” we are invoking God-given intimacy with him for the sake of God-honouring transformation of them.

   As Jesus approached the cross he said to the disciples, “I no longer call you servants, because servants don’t know what their master is about.  But I have called you friends, for everything I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”(John 15:15)  In other words, Jesus Christ admits us, his followers, to the same intimacy with the Father that he has with his Father.

   When I ponder this truth, I think of Proverbs 18:24: “There are friends who pretend to be friends, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”  Just as Jesus Christ is that friend who sticks closer than a brother, to be blessed is to be, or at least to aspire to be, as much to him.  The blessing, then, is that transformative intimacy with him which is so very deep that no language can do justice to it; so very profound that while we may point to it and describe it we shall never be able to explain it; so utterly fathomless that we shall know it unshakeably as surely as it transcends all attempts to articulate it.

   When I was learning Greek (without which I’d be a much weaker preacher) my mother gave me, as a gift for my 23rd birthday, a book by Ronald Ward, Hidden Meaning in the New Testament.  The book discusses the theological significance of Greek syntax.  For instance, where and why do New Testament writers use a particular compound verb; why do they use this preposition instead of another; and when they use a past tense (called the aorist), what is the force of an ingressive aorist rather than a punctiliar aorist or a gnomic aorist?  Because of Ward’s book my Greek New Testament lit up for me (and has informed my preaching throughout my ministry).

   Ronald Ward taught New Testament at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, for eleven years.  Then he became a pastor in New Brunswick.  I used to visit him, Greek Testament in hand, and let him immerse me in it. In the words of the apostle Paul, Ronald Ward himself was ‘aglow with the Spirit’ (Rom. 12:8).  Unselfconsciously he exuded intimacy with our Lord; transparent, uncontrived, real.  One day as I struggled with the force of a subtle grammatical point he said, “Victor, think of it this way.  To the unbeliever Jesus Christ says, ‘Come’.  And to the  believer he says, ‘Come closer.’”

   What is the blessing?—it’s to find ourselves able to embrace and wanting to embrace ever more ardently the One whose crucified arms have embraced us from the day we were conceived.

   When I was a postgraduate student at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, I was asked to preach at the mid-week meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Royal National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen. The women supported the mission (a Christian outreach) to deep-sea fishermen, including North Sea fishermen from foreign countries who came ashore occasionally in Scotland.  Many women in the meeting had lost their husband in North Sea tragedies.  Several women had lost more than one relative in ocean mishaps.  Before I preached, the leader of the service asked if any worshipper had a hymn in mind she especially wanted the congregation to sing.  A radiant woman whose radiance was uncontrived and undisguised—she had lost both her husband and her son to the cold North Sea—she beamed, “Let’s all sing, ‘With Christ in the vessel I smile at the storm.’”  You know how the hymn reads:

                        Be gone, unbelief, my saviour is near,

                        And for my relief will surely appear.

                        By faith let me wrestle, and he will perform;

                        With Christ in the vessel, I smile at the storm.

  What’s the blessing?  As usual, Charles Wesley said it superbly for all of us when he wrote,

                        Thy name to me, thy nature, grant;

                        This, only this, be given:

                        Nothing beside my God I want,

                        Nothing in earth or heaven.

II: — How is the blessing bestowed?  “The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.”  We are blessed as God’s face shines upon us.

   What is God’s face?  And how is God’s face related to God’s heart?

   God’s heart is who God is in himself, his innermost truth and reality and character.  God’s face is who God appears to be to us.  Question: Are God’s heart and God’s face one?  Or might there be a discrepancy between God’s face and God’s heart?  The face God displays to us in Jesus Christ; is it one with God’s heart, and necessarily one with God’s heart, or might it be a false face?  Face and heart must be identical or else God can never be known or trusted.

   We all know that humans traffic in false faces.  We can despise someone in our heart even as we put on a face, a false face, that suggests we’re the best of friends.

   Are God’s face and God’s heart one, and necessarily one?  In other words, is it the case that God cannot—not merely does not, but cannot—put on a false face?  If so, then God can be trusted.  The face that shines upon us in Jesus Christ reflects God’s heart and only his heart.  The face that shines upon us is the face of him whose heart can always be trusted.

   God himself blesses us as he makes his face shine upon  us.  Shining entails light.  When God’s face shines upon us we are bathed in light.

   In the Hebrew Bible, what shines so very splendidly as to leave no one doubting that light is bathing us, our minds are illumined, our hearts are aflame, and our way through life is brightened?  In the Hebrew Bible what light shines incomparably like this?  It’s the glory of God.  Everywhere in Scripture the glory of God is glorious; the splendour of God is splendid.

   Then is the glory of God short-lived light, like a camera-flash or a lightning-bolt, here now and gone next instant?

   No.  The chief Hebrew word for ‘glory’ is kabod.  And the root meaning of kabod is weighty, heavy, dense, substantive, opaque, solid, thick.  The glory of God is at once brighter shining than the sun and denser than lead.

   The glory of God is the face of God shining substantively upon us so as to brighten our heart and illumine our mind and clarify our way—and all of this so very thick as to be undeniable.  God’s glory, everywhere in Scripture, is God in his inherent splendour shining his face upon us so as to render himself unmistakeable and undeniable.

   Now think upon Paul’s word to the congregation in Corinth: “It is the God who said, ‘Let shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”  It is the apostle’s conviction that the face of God shines gloriously upon us in the face of Christ, even as the same glory shines correspondingly in our hearts—and all with the result that God thereby renders himself unmistakeable and undeniable.

   The glory of God is a huge category in Scripture.  One aspect of it is the beauty of God.  “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” cries the psalmist, meaning, “Worship God in the beauty of God’s inherently glorious Godness.”

   God’s glory is always and everywhere beautiful.  What is beautiful is inherently attractive, isn’t it?  No one ever beheld beauty and pronounced it ugly.  To apprehend beauty is to be drawn to it.  In other words, just as God’s glory (God’s splendour, God’s shining face) renders God unmistakeable and undeniable, God’s beauty renders God irresistible.  When we apprehend beauty can’t we only fall in love with it? 

   In John’s gospel Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.”  The Greek language has two words for ‘good.’  One word, agathos, means ‘proper, correct, possessed of rectitude.’  The other word, kalos, means ‘winsome, attractive, compelling, inviting, comely.’  Isn’t calligraphy beautiful handwriting?  When Jesus says, Ego eimi ho poimen ho kalos, “I am the good shepherd,” he means he is winsome, inviting, attractive: “I am the fine shepherd.”  That’s it: Jesus isn’t merely upright.  (Lots of upright people are repugnant.) Jesus is the good shepherd in that he’s inherently attractive: rightly to apprehend him is to love him.  As surely as God’s glory shines in the face of Christ so does God’s beauty, an aspect of glory.  As surely as God’s face shining upon us renders God undeniable the selfsame face shining upon us renders God irresistible.

   This is how the blessing is bestowed.

III: — What is the result?  As the Lord lifts up his countenance upon us he gives us peace.

   ‘Peace’ translates ‘shalom.’  Shalom is the creation of God healed.  Shalom is the creation of God rendered the kingdom of God.  God has appointed the entire creation to be restored to wholeness and holiness.  Shalom, peace, kingdom of God—it all means that what is now out of order, counter-productive, dysfunctional, even deadly—it’s all been appointed to be put right.

   The universe (including us) was created to be a cosmos. The Greek verb kosmeo means both to order and to adorn.  The universe was created to be orderly and to adorn the God who made it.  Right now, however, in the wake of the Fall, the universe is disordered.  The cosmos is threatened with chaos.  Chaos is creation de-creating.  Chaos is the world on its way to uninhabitability.

   If chaos is to be checked and cosmos restored, then shalom must be rendered operative; peace must prevail.  Shalom means what is disfigured, warped, bent, broken, dysfunctional, is going to be rendered whole.  Shalom also means what is unholy, sin-infected, an affront to God: this is going to be rendered holy.

   Make no mistake: chaos laps at the creation at all times.  We need think only of terrifying earthquakes and treacherous tsunamis.  We need think only of pestilential disease.  In 1349 bubonic plague overtook Europe, and in a few years one-half of Europe’s people had succumbed helplessly to it.  In 1665 a huge fire consumed the greater part of London; one year later, 1666, the plague claimed thousands who had managed to survive the previous year’s fire.

   World War I, ‘The Great War’, as it was called, was ‘great’ inasmuch as it was the most hideous spectacle, the most monstrous spectacle, the world had seen to date.  And it was hideous: 20 million dead.  It can be blamed squarely on human depravity, sin.  As soon as The Great War ended in 1918, Spanish flu appeared.  Spanish flu killed 50-to-100 million people.  It can be blamed squarely on evil.

  Whom did Spanish flu kill?  Epidemics customarily kill the most biologically vulnerable; that is, the very elderly and the very young, old people and infants.  Spanish flu was different: it killed the 30-to-35-year-olds, with the result that millions upon millions of children were orphaned.  Chaos compounded!

  It’s little wonder Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves (Rom. 8:22).”  The entire creation is twisted by evil; and we humans are disfigured by sin.

   But not forever.  The day has been appointed when the creation, together with God’s people, already reconciled to God at the cross, will be restored definitively.  And on that day the creation will no longer be molested by evil nor God’s people disfigured by sin.

   Let’s move from the larger picture of the cosmos to the smaller picture of you and me particularly.  All of us are wounded, and are wounded for reasons we could list for the rest of the day.  To say we are wounded is to say we are victims of victimizations great and small, inner and outer.  To say we are wounded is to say we lack wholeness.

    At the same time, all of us are sinners.  We are people of depraved hearts.  As loudly as we like to complain that we are wounded inasmuch as we are victims, the Hebrew prophets keep reminding us that we are sinners inasmuch as we are victimizers, characteristically victimizing God and neighbour through our spiritual treachery.  To say we are sinners is to say we lack holiness.

   We have been appointed, however, to a glorious end: we are going to stand before our Lord, our wounds healed and our depravity remedied.  Which is to say, we are going to know and enjoy shalom, peace, eternally.

   No book of the Bible says as much about the restoration of the cosmos and the healing of Christ’s people as the book of Revelation, the last book in Holy Writ.  The man who wrote it insists that he has been visited with a vision of our risen, victorious Lord, and therein given what he is to say. He speaks of his vision at considerable length, spelling out detail after detail, only to wrap it all up climactically, “And his face was like the sun shining in full strength (Rev. 1:16).”

   As the writer apprehends the victorious One whose face is like the sun shining in full strength he knows that the shalom of God, the kingdom of God, the creation healed, the cosmos restored—peace—can be counted on.

   You and I can count on it too.  For to know ourselves visited with God’s blessing; to know God’s face shining gloriously upon us thereby rendering Jesus Christ undeniable and irresistible; this is to know that he who began a good work in us will certainly bring it to completion on the day of our Lord’s appearing. (Phil. 1:6)

The Lord bless you and keep you;

  the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

  the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Victor Shepherd              Streetsville United Church             July 2019

Wise People Bring Gifts

Matthew 2:1-12            1st John 5:3             Psalm 103

Everyone seems to complain about Christmas shopping. What are we supposed to give the relative who already has more clothes than she’ll ever wear, more books than she’ll ever read, and three waffle irons as well? Why are the stores so dreadfully overheated when all the shoppers are wearing overcoats and winter boots anyway? Why do so many salespersons seem to resent being asked to help when selling is their job? Still, despite our complaining about having to buy gifts, we continue to purchase them.

The real reason we keep purchasing gifts and giving them to those dear to us is that we relish giving them; we enjoy giving gifts even more than we enjoy receiving them. We are more excited, more suspenseful, when we watch someone else open the gift we have given than we are when we open the gift given to us. And we know why. Giving a gift is recognition of the recipient’s worthiness. It’s also a declaration of that person’s significance to us. Most importantly, giving a gift is a vehicle for giving ourselves.

Two millennia ago three Gentile men brought gifts to a Jewish child. They brought them for the same three reasons that we give gifts: they were recognising the child’s worthiness; they were declaring the child’s significance to them, and they were giving themselves to the child in the act of giving their gifts. Their gifts were gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Today we are going to examine each gift. Let’s start with frankincense.

 

I: — Frankincense was incense used in worship. In bringing incense to Jesus the wise men were admitting that Jesus is worthy of worship. Gentiles though they were, they knew that God alone is to be worshipped. They knew too that nothing so horrified Jewish people as idolatry. Then in worshipping the Bethlehem babe were the wise men idolaters (in which case they weren’t wise and we should pity them)? Or were they indeed worshipping him who is God incarnate (in which case we should emulate them)? Matthew tells us that this child is Emmanu-el, “With us-God”. The foundation of the Christian faith is precisely what the wise men were acknowledging: in this child God himself has come to live the life of humankind. Charles Wesley captured it all in his Christmas carol, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail th’Incarnate Deity.” Jesus Christ is God’s total identification with the human predicament through his self-identification with the Bethlehem babe.

And it’s precisely this notion that so very many people find unpalatable. They say it turns simple truth (as it were) into impenetrable labyrinth. Why not look upon Jesus as a splendid example, they ask, even a fine teacher, even a prophet, even the greatest of the prophets? He is all these, to be sure; yet the three visitors knew him to be so much more as well.

Within the church precincts there are always to be found those who secretly (or not so secretly) would really prefer to be unitarians. Unitarians speak of Jesus in glowing terms. Their admiration for him is genuine. Yet however much of the New Testament’s depiction of Jesus they esteem they finally reject the substance of the New Testament. For the apostles insist that this one Jew who knew that God alone is to be worshipped accepted the worship people rendered him and even insisted on it. Knowing it was blasphemy to claim to be Son of God, he yet claimed it. When Thomas fell before him in the wake of Easter Jesus didn’t say, “Now, now Thomas, there’s no need to get carried away. You flatter me with your exaggeration.” Our Lord never said that Thomas was exaggerating or had been carried away. When our Lord’s detractors had hissed at him, “Why do you pronounce forgiveness? Only God can do that” Jesus had replied, “My point exactly.”

The secret or not-so-secret unitarians among us maintain that the notion of incarnation is too narrow. Alas, they forget one thing: the effectiveness of a knife depends on the narrowness of its cutting edge. No one can do life-saving surgery with a crowbar. Church history demonstrates again and again that God surges over people and over congregations rendering them forever different not when God-in-general is talked about but rather when Jesus-in-particular is exalted. When Paul announces that he’s not ashamed of the gospel just because he knows the gospel to be God’s power for salvation (Romans 1:16 ), he’s always aware that the gospel is ultimately the risen, ascended Son himself. This one person and no one else seized him and shook him. Apart from this one person the world would never have heard of the little man from Tarsus .

One of my favourite scriptural episodes is that of the man born blind in John 9. Jesus enables the man to see. (Seeing, of course, is a biblical metaphor for knowing.) Are people overjoyed to have the fellow now able to see? On the contrary they harass him. Finally the man himself, simply knowing, says, “Listen. I was blind, I can see, and I know who did it.” And still they harass him.

When today, in our midst, the Incarnate one himself renders forever different the man or woman who can only speak simply yet gratefully of herself as lost and now found, dead and now alive, immobilised and now freed, silent and now speaking on behalf of her Lord; when it happens today detractors and assailants are as insensitive and aggressive as they were then. The theologian, embarrassed by the new believer’s simple testimony and wishing to take refuge in religious complexity, comments, “But are you aware of epichoresis and enhypostasia?” (Epichoresis is the mutual coinherence of the persons of the Trinity. Enhypostasia we’ll leave for another day.) The philosopher asks, “Are you aware of the metaphysical presuppositions of your assertion?” “Metaphysics” is a new word for the sighted blind man and he thinks it has something to do with Eno’s fruit salts. The psychologist suggests, “Let’s talk about your relationship with your mother.” His parents say, “We sent you to Sunday School all those years; we even sent you to Rev. Snodgrass’s confirmation class. And now you are telling us that only recently, when you really grasped the truth of the Incarnation, Jesus Christ himself lit you up?” The clergy say. What do the clergy say? Not much. Being face-to-face with someone who glows with the assurance that she sees and knows where earlier she was blind and unaware; this bothers many clergy. Meanwhile, of course, the browbeaten person continues to say, “I was blind, I can see, and I know who did it. What’s the problem?”

The wise men brought frankincense. They worshipped the child. They weren’t idolaters. They simply bowed in glad, grateful adoration before him who is in fact the effectual presence of God.

 

II: — The wise men brought gold as well. Gold was the gift that befitted a king. In the child they recognized the royal ruler.

It’s most important that we not stop with frankincense but offer gold as well. Not only are we to worship our Lord; we must also obey him. It’s too easy to worship him (or think we do) and then forget him; too easy to think we can profit from the salvation he has won for us yet refuse the sacrifice he requires of us; too easy to call upon him when we need him for ourselves yet ignore him when he needs us for work in his world; too easy to speak of what he has done in us while shunning what he needs to do through us. In short, it’s too easy to cheapen grace by claiming forgiveness from him while disdaining obedience to him.

Authentic believers always know that obedience isn’t onerous. Obedience is life; obedience is blessing. “His commandments are not burdensome” John exclaims in his first epistle. (1 John 5:3) Why aren’t they burdensome? Because the obedience we render our Lord is the natural expression of what he has made us by his grace.

Gold? Of course. He is the royal ruler who claims our obedience. If he has touched our eyes and made us to see then we know our obedience to be not irksome but rather the following of that path where life grows richer, even as other paths invariably find life growing poorer.

I used to think it was children, even adolescents, who had difficulty getting the point that while we can do anything in life that we want, anythingwe do entails momentous consequences.  I have found that most adults are as slow to grasp this point as any child or adolescent. Any choice we make, any option we pursue, any decision we settle on; these have irretrievable consequences. To expect anything else is to expect magic. Even the most enlightened people in our enlightened age, I have found, actually expect an infantile world of magic, only to rage and curse and lament and whine when, at age 40 or 50 or 60, it comes home to them that there is no magic and the option they pursued back then now has consequences pursuing them. To be sure, in our non-magical world there are also consequences to obeying Jesus Christ; these consequences, however, are all blessing.

“His commandments are not burdensome.” The apostle John wrote these words inasmuch as he had proven them true over and over in his own experience. But what had moved him to try them, try them out, as it were, in the first place? He had seen the commandments of Christ fulfilled in Christ himself. He had seen his Lord live what his Lord asks of his followers. He had seen that what his Lord lived was incomparably better, more satisfying than any “life” (so-called) he had seen to date, including his own. Then why not “give it a try”? And when Jesus had said to his disciples, “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light”, John had seen the truth exemplified in the yoke-maker himself.

We must always remember that it’s impossible to be yokeless. Something is going to determine how we live and what we do and where we go and whom we obey. Our yoke can be an upbringing that we have put on unthinkingly; it can be New Age ideology (or something akin to it) that we put on deliberately; it can be the mindset that characterises our social class inasmuch as the last thing we want is to appear out-of-step with our social class; it can be capitulation to craving, whether our craving be for illicit sex or social climbing or financial superiority or intellectual snobbery. These are all yokes. They all appear easy and light but in fact prove themselves so very onerous that the yoke strangles and the burden crushes. Jesus says, “Since yokelessness is impossible; since something inside you or outside you determines what you do, how you live, ultimately who you are, why not try my yoke? For my yoke fits well and doesn’t strangle; my burden is light and doesn’t crush. In fact my yoke is like the well-fitted yoke that allows the ox to work all day without choking itself; my burden is no more burdensome than wings are to a bird or fins are to a fish or skates are to a hockey player; no burden at all.” It was because the apostle John had first seen his Lord do that truth which the master now urged upon all; it was because John had first found it so very attractive that he had come to try it for himself, then had found it easy and light, and finally had come to write, “His commandments are not burdensome.”

The wise men brought gold. They were acknowledging their rightful ruler. They wanted only to obey their Lord and therein “find” themselves.

 

III: — Lastly the wise men brought myrrh. Myrrh was a medicinal substance used for healing. The wise men admitted Jesus to be the healer; the healer, the healer of the world’s dis-ease, the world’s wounds, the world’s distress and disorder and dismay.

Today we associate healing almost exclusively with the reversal of physical illness and the discomfort associated with such illness. No one wishes to belittle this. Anyone who has found relief even in aspirin for headache or backache or toothache isn’t going to belittle healing in the sense of reversing physical illness. At the same time, the biggest ills in life aren’t physical. The most significant ill in life isn’t the broken bone or the arthritic joint or the gall stones or even that illness which will close out our earthly existence. The biggest wounds in life are the rent that has occurred between God and us, together with the rent that opens up between us and those dearest us, plus the seemingly chronic dis-ease that leaves us knowing something is profoundly out of order inside ourselves even as we are unable to name it or fix it. This is where healing is most sorely needed.

Unquestionably Corinth was a rough city. We shouldn’t think, however, that it was any worse than rough cities known to us. It was of the same order as the tough parts of Glasgow today or Amsterdam or the Bronx or even the Jane-Finch area of Toronto . Paul established a congregation in Corinth and subsequently corresponded with it. In his correspondence he lets us in on what he found when he first went to Corinth , what he found among the people who came to faith in Jesus Christ through his ministry and whose lives were different ever after. “Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, drunkards, revilers, robbers.” He adds, “And this what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” (1Cor. 6:9-11) “This what some of you used to be.” Used to be, but are no longer.

Since I am a professor of historical theology I often return in mind and heart to the earliest days of the Eighteenth Century Awakening when John Wesley and George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards inadvertently touched a match to tinder and something burst into flame that surprised them as much as it surprised anyone else. I ask myself what was in the match that these men struck. There were many ingredients in the match, of course, one of which was their tireless insistence, “God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it.” People hungered to hear this and thereafter proved it. “God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it.” What can God do? “This is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

That healer whom the wise men adored was the fulfilment of Psalm 103. The psalmist cries, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all God’s benefits. He forgives all your iniquity and heals all your diseases.” (Ps. 103:2-3) It’s glorious that God forgives all our iniquity; more glorious still that he does something with our iniquity beyond forgiving it: he heals all our diseases.

All of them? Yes. Because Jesus is resurrection and life he heals us of that disease which closes out our earthly existence; and in healing us of this he heals us of all those diseases that anticipate it. Then what about the remaining dis-eases, the ones I mentioned a minute ago: the deepest rent between us and him, between us and each other, between us and our truest self: does he heal these too? What the psalmist wrote he wrote out of his experience of the Christmas gift given to him a thousand years before the Bethlehem event as surely as the same gift is given to you and me two thousand years after the event. For this reason the psalmist was unerring when he wrote, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all God’s benefits. He forgives all your iniquity and heals all your diseases.

 

Three Gentiles spared nothing to get themselves to a Jewish newborn. They wanted to bring the child gifts. They brought frankincense, for they were bowing in worship before one whom they ought to worship just because he was, and is, Emmanu-el, “God-with-us.” They brought gold, for they were obediently submitting themselves to their rightful ruler, only to learn subsequently that unlike all other yokes and burdens in life his yoke is easy and his burden light. They brought myrrh, for they knew that in Jesus of Nazareth there had appeared the kingdom of God , and the kingdom of God is simply the creation of God healed.

   In it all, of course, the wise men knew that their gift-giving was the vehicle of their uttermost giving of themselves. These men were wise, really wise.

 

Victor Shepherd

December 2000

Three Wise Gentiles and a Jewish Infant.

Matthew 2:1-12

It happened in Auschwitz, one of the Nazis’ most notorious extermination camps, in 1945. Jewish inmates only days away from murder by gassing, their remains then to be burnt in huge crematoria, are praying. Needless to say they have no Torah scroll. What are they going to do at that part of Jewish worship when a Torah scroll is carried around the synagogue sanctuary and worshipers reach out to touch it as it is borne past them? Elie Wiesel, himself a prisoner in Auschwitz and only fifteen years old at the time, survived to tell us what happened next. Lacking a Torah scroll (these scrolls are about four feet long), someone picked up a little boy, about four feet long, and carried him around the prison-barracks so that devout people could reach out and touch him. After all, wasn’t Torah to be embodied in a child at any time? Wasn’t Torah to be written on human hearts in all circumstances? And so a little boy was carried around the room while older worshipers touched him, the living embodiment of Jewish faith, in hope too that the youngster would survive and bespeak the faith of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel.

When I first read Wiesel’s description of this haunting moment I thought immediately of the prophet Zechariah and his Spirit-inflamed cry, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.'” The Jews in Auschwitz touched the prison rags of a boy. But we aren’t Jews, we aren’t in Auschwitz, and we don’t have a boy who embodies Torah. Zechariah knew as much when his prophecy flew from his mouth. He cried, “In those days.” “In those days” is a semitism, a Hebrew expression that means, “In the end-times; when God intervenes definitively on behalf of the entire world; at the end of history when God acts so as to leave discerning people saying to each other, ‘What more can he say than to us he has said…?'” Zechariah also spoke of “the nations.” “The nations” was a Hebrew expression meaning “all the Gentiles.” It’s plain that Zechariah foresaw a day, the day, to be exact, the last day, the end-time day, when the world’s Gentiles would make contact with a Jew inasmuch as God was with him — or else the world’s Gentiles would be forever without God.

Shortly after Jesus was born some wisemen, Gentiles, came to him and worshipped. They were wise. For as long as it took them to get from their homes in the east to the birthplace of Jesus they had been repeating to themselves, “In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.'”

We Gentiles in Streetsville have taken hold of the robe of one particular Jew because we are convinced that God is with him uniquely: this one Jew is the Word made flesh, the incarnation of God’s word and way and wisdom and will. We have taken hold of him in that we know he is God’s end-time intervention on behalf of the entire world. God’s self-disclosure is complete in him.

Yet in taking hold of Jesus Christ we must be sure to understand that we can have him only as we have his Yiddishkeit (Jewishness); we can have him only as we have his people and the prophets and priests and sages of Israel who course through his veins. If today you and I are going to exalt the wisemen who were wise enough to bow before the one who is Torah incarnate, then like them we must understand that to make contact with him is to make contact with Abraham and Ruth, Jeremiah and Deborah, Amos and Rahab. Intimacy with Jesus Christ means intimacy with a heritage apart from which Jesus is incomprehensible and we are lost.

 

I: — One aspect of our heritage is God’s passionate involvement with the world and with individuals alike. God is passionately involved with you, with me, with the church, with the surge and savagery of world-occurrence. Think of the images of God that Hebrew saints have hung up in our minds:

– a husband whose wife’s repeated infidelities have left him humiliated;

– a mother whose bond with her offspring is so intense that she will give up anything before she gives up her child;

– a she-bear who will claw you if ever you think you can trifle with her or exploit her;

– a father whose disappointment in his children is so deep that he wants to disown the lot of them, only to find that he can’t but instead renames them one by one. God is passionately involved, and passionately involved relentlessly.

Do you remember a year or two ago when anyone who could sing was singing that wretched ditty, From a Distance? “God is watching from a distance”, the silly song said over and over again. Nothing could be farther from the truth! In the first place, God isn’t a spectator; he doesn’t watch. God acts. In the second place, he isn’t remote. God irrupts in human hearts and human affairs.

The Hebrew bible speaks everywhere of God as patient or angry or sad or delighted or eager or wistful or disgusted or even amazed. “Anthropomorphism”, someone says, “it’s nothing more than primitive anthropomorphism.” Anthropos, humankind; morphe, shape. Anthropomorphism is a human-shaped God. It’s suggested that God’s impassioned life (so-called) is nothing more than a projection of our passion. “Not so!”, cry the Hebrew prophets. It’s not that God is human-shaped, anthropomorphic. It’s just the opposite: we are to become theomorphic, God-shaped. We are to cease spewing passion fruitlessly on trivialities and instead become impassioned where God himself is. Right now our passions are all mixed up: we love what is detestable, crave what is harmful, hate what is beneficial, ignore what is helpful, admire what is useless. It isn’t a sign of sophistication to think that God is a projection of anthropomorphism; rather it’s a sign of folly to live a human existence that is less than theomorphic.

It’s easy to see how a Hebrew understanding of God differs from assorted Gentile understandings. For the ancient Greeks God set the universe in motion as its prime-mover, and then from a distance watched it unfold. Eighteenth century Deists compared God to a clockmaker. God fashioned the universe in all its intricacies the way a clockmaker fashions a clock, wound it up, and now sits back to hear it tick. Twentieth century writers don’t think of the universe as a clock ticking away with admirable regularity; they look upon the universe as a bobsled. God gave the sled the initial shove to get it going (or else the sled began to move spontaneously), and now the universe’s momentum has it careening faster and faster, amidst greater and greater danger, everyone in it hanging on for dear life. And there’s the more recent Gentile phenomenon of New Age and “spirituality.” People taken up into New Age spirituality confuse it with Christian faith; it never occurs to them that New Age spirituality has no place for sin or evil. (No wonder suburban “yuppies” are so taken with it!) The Hebrew prophets happen to have a large place for both, convinced as they are first of the holiness of God.

The Hebrew prophets in fact are qualitatively different. They don’t have a notion of God. (Notions are sheer speculation.) They have an impression of God, impression in the classical sense of “impression”: “pressed into.” God has stamped himself upon the prophet; the prophet is im-pressed in that he’s been indented and forever after bears in himself the stamp, the indentation, the impression of God’s descent upon him. Arising from his undeniable encounter with God, the prophet now possesses an irrefutable understanding of God. The prophet’s understanding of God arises from his encounter with the one who first grasped him and shook him. The name “Isra-el” means “one who contends with God, struggles with God, wrestles with God.”

Because Israelites are those who contend with God, the older testament unashamedly depicts people adoring God, questioning God, raging at God, even accusing God. But even to be furious at God is nevertheless faith! Indifference towards God, on the other hand, is inexcusable.

In other words, dialogue characterizes God and those who are serious about him. Very often the dialogue is riddled with anguish. People shout at God, “How long do we have to put up with the oppressor?” The psalmist feels abandoned and cries, “Where are you when I need you most?”

Dialogue, however, is never one-sided. Therefore God also puts questions to us. The first question God asks he addresses to Adam and Eve after their outrageous ingratitude and monumental defiance have incurred God’s displeasure. They try to hide from him, and stupidly think they have hidden from him. God questions them, “Where are you?” Of course God knows where they are; but he wants them to know that how ever hard they may run from but they can’t escape him. And God’s second question? After Cain has murdered his brother Abel, God says to Cain, “Where is your brother?” We must never think that savagery visited upon any man or woman anywhere is going to go unnoticed or unrequited. When Israelite people think they can divert God’s attention from their sin by heaping up sacrifices in the temple (as though God could be bamboozled by a liturgical extravaganza) God asks them all, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?”

Yet not every day is anguish day. Like a shepherd, God protects his people against marauders. Like a mother, God cannot part with what he has brought forth. Like a father who puts back on her feet the toddler who is just learning to walk, God bears with and supports us his people throughout our infantile totterings. Ultimately God points to his Son and exclaims, “He’s the apple of my eye! Now you be sure to hear and heed him!”

The wisemen adored the one in whom was found incarnate the impassioned God of Israel.

 

II: — In seizing the robe of a Jew we come upon yet another aspect of our inheritance: the world matters. Everyday life matters. The smallest detail of everyday life matters. Christians insist that the older testament is authoritative for Christian faith and conduct, as authoritative as the newer testament. Yet there are huge tracts of the older testament that Christians neglect. Think of the book of Leviticus. It’s the last book of the bible that Christians read, if they ever get around to reading it (even, of course, as they will continue to swear that it’s divinely inspired.) On the other hand, the book of Leviticus is the first book that Jewish children read as soon as they have learned Hebrew. Christians tend to regard Leviticus as nothing more than a compilation of legalistic trivia. But in fact Leviticus has everything to do with the sanctification of everyday life, God’s claim upon all of life and his involvement with all of life. The book of Leviticus has everything to do with holiness. Holiness, for many Christians, is a “trembly”, spooky feeling they have or hope to have. Holiness, according to the book of Leviticus, is simply what God’s people do in obedience to him.

Christians are impatient with the minutiae of Leviticus, like the prohibition forbidding anyone to boil a kid in its mother’s milk. There’s nothing wrong with eating boiled goat. The goat has to be boiled in something. In a land where water is scarce, why not boil young goat in goat’s milk? Mother-goat will never know. For Israelites, however, animals and humankind were created on the same “day”; therefore animals are humanoid in some respect; therefore to cook the offspring of an animal in the milk meant to sustain it is heartless and callous. No less a figure than Solzhenitsyn has said that a society which is indifferent to the plight of animals is a society soon indifferent to the plight of humans. There’s yet another reason for the prohibition. In ancient times, boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was a religious act practised by the devotees of the cult of Baal. Specifically, to boil a kid in its mother’s milk was to invoke the Baal deity, together with the disgraces and degradations that Baal-worship entailed. (If you want more details, re-read my year-old sermon on Voices United, The United Church’s new hymn book.) What are the seemingly-harmless practices in our society that in fact are invocations of something we ought to repudiate?

In the rabbinical Judaism that followed the biblical era, the rabbis speak of “Sabbath blessings.” “Sabbath blessings” is a polite circumlocution for the sexual intercourse that married couples have and are supposed to have on the Sabbath. Long before the rabbinical era, however, in the era of Leviticus, married couples are forbidden to have intercourse on the Sabbath. Why? Because the surrounding Canaanite nations had divinized sex, making an idol of it; the surrounding nations magnified religious prostitution as an act of worship; the surrounding nations trafficked in promiscuity and perversity. Israel abhorred such a development and wanted to distance itself as much as possible from such degradation. For this reason Israelite couples were forbidden to have intercourse prior to worship, lest the notion be disseminated that Israel too had fallen in with the pagan nations that bordered it. What is it in our society’s approach to sex that is tantamount to idolatry? What is it that divinizes sex, albeit informally? What is it in magazines like Cosmopolitan (to mention only one) that is no different from the paganism of the ancient Canaanite nations? Only a fool dismisses Leviticus’ sanctification of life as “legalistic trivia.”

According to the Torah if you lend someone money and he gives you his coat as collateral, you have to give him back his coat at nightfall even if he hasn’t repaid you your money. Why? Because the poorest people in Israel used their daytime coat as a nighttime blanket. Someone can’t be expected to spend nights sleepless on account of cold, even if he still owes money and has nothing else to put up as collateral. Don’t you think there’s a limit to financial jurisdiction over human affairs?

When a criminal had to be punished in Israel he couldn’t receive more than forty lashes. Why was there a limit to the punishment? A reason accompanies the command: “Lest your brother be degraded in your sight.” No society can allow criminal behaviour to go unpunished; at the same time, whatever society must do to punish offenders and restore order, it mustn’t punish offenders in such a way as to degrade them. This isn’t legalistic trivia.

We read that if we see our worst enemy’s ox going astray, it is sin to say to ourselves, “Let him look for his own ox.” We must rather inconvenience ourselves and take the animal back to its owner, our worst enemy or not. Why? Not because to do so makes us do-gooders who can then feel proud of ourselves. Rather, to do so is an act grounded in the character of God himself and exemplifying the character of God himself: he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike; he visits his kindness and mercy and patience alike on those who love him and those who don’t, on those who like Abraham can be called “God’s friend” and those who are just as surely God’s enemy. What modern Gentiles dismiss as legalistic trivia is really God’s claim upon all of life and his involvement with all of life, which claim and involvement are rooted in the character of God himself.

Not so long ago the Toronto Board of Education disseminated a pamphlet stating that all cultures are of equal value. I understand what the Board wanted to say and why: it wanted to head off subtle bigotry, racism, ethnic superiority, prejudice of any sort. At the same time, regardless of the board’s motive, I think that the statement, “All cultures are of equal value”, is patently false. I do not think that a culture which punishes theft by severing one’s hand at the wrist is one with a culture that doesn’t. I am convinced that a culture whose Christian majority permits the construction of any number of mosques and a culture whose Islamic majority permits the construction of no church-building at all; these are not of equal value. A culture that approves or tolerates the torturing of political dissenters; a culture that prefers tyranny to fair trials; a culture that subjugates one group of people as sub-human; are we to tell our schoolchildren that such distinctions are insignificant and are to be overlooked? In the final 80 years of Czarist rule in Russia there were 17 state executions. In the first month of Lenin’s rule there were over 1000. Does the Toronto Board of Education expect us to tell our children that at bottom “it’s all the same?”

The wisemen who went to Bethlehem to see and adore and obey: they knew, Gentiles though they were, that Israel’s God had everything to do with every detail of every day.

There are ever so many more aspects to our inheritance. I should like to speak of two more this morning, life and hope. In taking hold of the robe of a Jew, of one Jew in particular, how are to we understand life in the face of the deadly assaults rained on it relentlessly? And how are we to understand hope in the midst of cynicism and despair? But the sermon is already long enough, and therefore such a discussion will have to wait for another day.

“Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.'” (Zechariah 8:23) Christmas is God’s definitive incursion. According to God’s plan and purpose Christmas is the beginning of the end. There has been given to us one Jew whose robe we must grasp, for not to grasp it, Paul reminds the Gentiles in Ephesus, is to have no hope and to be without God in the world. (Ephesians 2:12)

 

                                                                    Victor Shepherd
January 1998            

WHAT WERE THE WISE MEN ENDORSING OF YIDDISHKEIT?

Who Ought to “Come and Worship Christ the New-Born King”?

 Matthew 2:1-12    Isaiah 60:1-3

 

Who ought to worship? Everyone ought to worship. (We all know this much. Everyone ought to worship.) Still, the Christmas carol, Angels, from the Realms of Glory, speaks of different sorts of people who ought to worship. It speaks of angels and shepherds, sages and saints.

 

I: — Today we are going to start with the shepherds. Shepherds were despised in 1st century Palestine. The social sophisticates in Jerusalem and other city centres of urbanity looked upon shepherds as uncouth, since shepherds worked with animals. Shepherds were also regarded as dirty. Sheep, after all, have very oily fleece and the shepherd has to handle them; besides, sheep poop everywhere. Shepherds were also looked upon as less than devout. It was awkward for them to get to all the church services as expected, since their animals were forever getting lost or falling sick or breaking a leg or having obstetrical difficulties.

Like all people who are despised for any reason, however, the shepherds were also useful to the very people who despised them. At both morning and evening services in the temple, the cathedral of Jerusalem, an unblemished lamb had to be offered up to God. High quality lambs, therefore, were always in demand. Temple authorities had their own private flocks just outside Jerusalem, in the Bethlehem hills. The Bethlehem shepherds looked after both their own flocks and the flocks of the temple authorities, always looking out for the perfect lamb to be sacrificed in the temple. These shepherds, despised as they were, were ordained by God to be the first people to behold the Lamb of God, the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. They were the first to hear the good news, gospel, of Christmas: “For to you is born this day a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”

I understand why the shepherds were the first to hear and see, apprehend and know, believe and trust. The shepherds were first in that like other people in general who come from the south side of town they aren’t taken in by the smokescreens and false fronts that middle and upper class people love to hide behind. People from the south side of town see it the way it is and tell it the way it is.

My first day on the job in Streetsville (I came to the congregation in 1978 and remained for 21 years) I arrived early at my office and waited for the church secretary. Promptly at 8:30 a.m. the secretary, a large, imposing woman, loomed in the doorway to my office, looked me in the eye and said, “I’m married to a truck driver; you get it from me straight.” That was her first utterance. Her second was like unto it: “There’s a toilet between your office and mine, but it’s noisy, if you get what I mean.” Is there anyone who wouldn’t get what she meant? Right away I knew I was going to get along with this woman. Because she, married to a truck driver, was utterly transparent and non-duplicitous, frontal, she spared me untold grief over and over in congregational life.

She and I had much in common, not the least of which is the simple fact that we both live in the shadow of a dog food factory. And there’s nothing wrong with this. After all, Moses was minding sheep when the Lord God accosted him and the world was different ever after. Gideon was threshing wheat when he was summoned from heaven. Elisha was ploughing a field when he was named successor to Elijah. No congregation can afford to be without shepherds and all those like them.

 

This being the case, why do we see so few of these people at worship in virtually all the churches of historic Protestantism? Roman Catholicism has always been able to attract people from the whole of the socio-economic spectrum, from the most affluent to the most materially disadvantaged. To be sure, the Protestant churches do see some of the latter; Protestant congregations aren’t completely homogeneous. Still, we see far too few. Their absence dismays me, since I have found that these people have no difficulty with me, at least. Several years ago a man with a grade ten education chuckled, “Victor, we can always be sure of one thing on Sunday morning: you’ll never be over our heads!” Such people live in Toronto in large numbers. But they are proportionately underrepresented in virtually all Protestant congregations. Why? Can any of you enlighten me? Their absence haunts me. For shepherds have been summoned to worship Christ the new-born king. And if they do worship, they’ll be the first to see and seize the Lamb of God who takes away their sin too.

 

II: — Sages ought to worship as well. To be sure, the hymnwriter insists that where sages are concerned “brighter visions beam afar”; brighter, that is, than the sages’ contemplations. I agree. But to see Jesus Christ as brighter, even the brightest, is not to say that lesser contemplations aren’t bright at all and aren’t to be valued. They are bright, and they are to be valued. To say that God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ supplies what no sage will ever arrive at is correct; but to say that because God’s self-disclosure is this what the sages are about is worthless – this is wrong. To say that the event of Christmas gives us what no philosophical exploration will ever impart is not to say that philosophy (or another scholarly discipline) is therefore foolish and useless. The uniqueness of the Christmas event never means that intellectual rigour isn’t a creaturely good, a creaturely good that gives God pleasure.

Philosophy is an academic discipline that I cherish. Please don’t tell me that philosophy’s significance is measured by the old question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Philosophy, after all, taught me to think, and 90% of good preaching is just clear thinking. Moreover, insofar as philosophical enquiry is the exploration of what is there is an intellectual excellence to it that we ought not to slight, for God takes pleasure in any human excellence. (Let’s be sure of something else: God takes no pleasure in mediocrity of any sort.)

Jesus Christ is truth. I am glad to affirm this. He is that “brighter” luminosity that sages are summoned to worship. But to say this isn’t to say that the contemplations of the sages are inherently vacuous and invariably useless, let alone evil. Because the church has undervalued the sages’ contemplations the church has largely abandoned the arena of intellectual endeavour. At one time the thinkers inside the church could out-think the thinkers outside the church; at one time. In my second year philosophy course the professor, a man who made no religious profession, had the class read both Bertrand Russell and Thomas Aquinas. Russell is an atheist; Aquinas, a Christian and the greatest philosopher of the middle ages. It’s easy to see why an agnostic or atheist professor would have us read Russell. But why Aquinas? Just because that professor wanted us to appreciate the intellectual power of the “Angelic Doctor”, as Aquinas was known in the 1200s.

Years ago I overheard Emil Fackenheim, himself a marvellous philosopher, remark that Kierkegaard was the greatest thinker to arise in Christendom. I thought the statement was perhaps exaggerated Then I found others saying the same thing. Then I noticed that Ludwig Wittgenstsein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century (together with Martin Heidegger); I noticed that Wittgenstein had said that Kierkegaard was by far the profoundest thinker of the 19th century. Will the profoundest thinker of the 20th century turn out to have been a Christian? And of the 21st? Not a chance. Why not? Because the church has abandoned the intellectual field. Fuzzy-headed feel-goodism is as profound as we get today.

At the time of the Reformation (16th century), those who had first been schooled as “sages” (i.e., humanists) before they applied themselves to theology also wrote theology that we shall never be without and provided leadership for the church. Those, on the other hand, who studied theology only without first drinking from the wells of humanism wrote no worthwhile theology and provided no leadership for the church.

Yes, sages should worship Christ the new-born king, since he is king and brings with him what the sages can’t supply of themselves. But this is not to say that the sages’ sage-ism is worthless. There is creaturely wisdom that is genuinely wise, even as the pursuit of that wisdom gives pleasure to God.

 

III: — Saints too are summoned to the cradle. “Saints before the altar bending, watching long in hope and fear.” The saints are those, like Simeon and Anna of old, who wait on God. The saints are always found “before the altar bending”; i.e., the saints worship, profoundly worship. They are always found “watching long in hope and fear”; i.e., the saints are both expectant and reverent. “Suddenly the Lord descending in his temple shall appear.” Shall appear; shall continue to appear. In other words, the Lord who came once in Bethlehem of old comes again and yet again, continues to come. Insofar as any of us are found at worship, waiting on God expectantly and reverently, the selfsame Lord will unfailingly appear to us.

It was while Isaiah was at worship that the sanctuary filled up with the grandeur of God and the holiness of God and the glory of God. The glory of God is the earthly manifestation of God’s unearthly Godness. It all overwhelmed Isaiah so as to leave him prostrated under the crushing weight of God, only then to be set on his feet so that he might henceforth go and do what he had been appointed to.

It was while Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, was at worship that he was rendered speechless for as long as he needed to stop talking in order to hear and heed what God was saying to him.

It was while the apostle John was at worship, exiled for the rest of his life on the island of Patmos, that he was “visited” and wrote, when he had recovered, “His voice was like the sound of many waters, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength…and when I saw him I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me saying, ‘Fear not….’”

What do we expect when we come to worship? Three hymns and a harangue? What if “Suddenly the Lord descending in his temple did appear”?

He who came once doesn’t come once only. He comes again and again. As often as he comes the saints before the altar bending – the saints at worship – are overtaken yet again, and like John of old can barely croak, “His voice was like the sound of many waters, and his face like the sun shining in full strength….” The saints in any congregation today know as surely as the saints of old knew. And the saints at worship today declare, “Come with us and worship Christ the new-born king.”

 

IV: — What about the angels? Make no mistake: the angels are real. It is the height of arrogance to think that we are the only rational creatures in the universe. Who says that a creature has to possess flesh and bone in order to possess reason and spirit? The Christmas carol invites the angels to “proclaim Messiah’s birth.” Such proclamation, such witness, is precisely what scripture says angels are always and everywhere to be about. Such proclamation or witness is crucial. You see, because the angels are mandated to bear witness, specifically to bear witness to Jesus Christ, God will never lack witnesses who attest the truth and power of his Son and of that kingdom which the Son brings with him. To be sure, you and I are mandated to bear witness to all of this too. Flesh and blood witnesses like you and me, however, are sadly lacking in quality and quantity. Still, where we are deficient, the angels are not. Therefore I find much comfort in the angels. However much I may fail in serving and attesting and exalting Messiah Jesus and his truth, there are other creatures whose service and witness and exaltation never fail.

Listen to Karl Barth, the pre-eminent theologian of our century. A few years after World War II Barth wrote, “Because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the apparently or genuinely troubled state of things on earth.” Just before the outbreak of the war Barth had been apprehended at his Saturday morning lecture in the University of Bonn, Germany. He had been deported immediately from Germany to his native Switzerland. As soon as hostilities with Germany had ceased the cold war with the Soviet Union had begun. While there was no war, hot or cold, in Switzerland, Barth never pretended the Swiss were uncommonly virtuous. He readily admitted his own country financed itself by harbouring the ill-gotten gains (the infamous unnamed accounts in the Swiss banks) of the most despicable criminals throughout the world. Nevertheless, “Because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the apparently or genuinely troubled state of things on earth.”

 

V: — Lastly, the Christmas carol invites us all, everyone, to worship Christ the new-born king. It tells us that this infant has been appointed to fill his Father’s throne. Since Christ’s sovereignty over the whole of creation is unalterable, acknowledging his sovereignty is not only an invitation to be received and a command to be obeyed; it’s the soul of common sense.

Our Lord is the new-born king. To be sure, the only crown he will ever wear is a crown of thorns. Finding no room in the inn and having no home in which to lay his head throughout his earthly ministry, the one house he’ll eventually occupy is a tree house, ghastly though it is. And of course the only throne he will ever adorn is a cross. Still, he is king. We mustn’t allow the bizarreness of his royal trappings to deflect us from the fact that he is king. He rules, he will judge, and he can bless.

Then acknowledge him we must. The writer of our carol cries, “Every knee shall then bow down.” Since everyone is going to have to acknowledge him ultimately, like it or not; since every knee is going to have to bow before him either in willing adoration or in unwilling resignation, it only makes sense to adore him and love him and delight in him now, together with sages, saints, angels, and by no means least, shepherds.

 

Victor Shepherd      December 2000

John the Baptist and Jesus

Matthew 3:1-12

 We expect to find a family resemblance among relatives. John and Jesus were cousins. Not surprisingly, then, they were “look-alikes” in many respects.

Both were at home in the wilderness, the venue of extraordinary temptation and trial and testing, but also the venue of extraordinary intimacy with the Father.

Both preached out-of doors when they began their public ministry.

Both gave their disciples a characteristic prayer. John gave his followers a prayer that outwardly identified them as his disciples and inwardly welded them to each other. In no time the disciples of Jesus asked him for the same kind of characteristic prayer, with the result that we shall never be without the “Lord’s Prayer.”

Both John and Jesus lashed hearers whenever they spoke of God’s severity and the inescapability of God’s judgement.

Both summoned people to repent.

Both discounted the popular notion that God favoured Israel with political or national pre-eminence.

Both were born through an uncommon act of God.

And both died through having provoked uncommon rage among men and women.

John insisted that the sole purpose of his mission was to point away from himself to his younger cousin, Jesus. Jesus, for his part, never uttered one negative word about John. Jesus even endorsed John’s ministry by submitting to baptism at John’s hand. Indeed Jesus said, “Among those born of women (that is, of all the people in the world), there is none greater than John.”

 

I: Elizabeth and Zechariah named their long-awaited son “Yochan.” “Yochan” means “gift of God.” This gift, however, didn’t come with the pretty ribbons and bows and curlicues of fancy gift-wrapping. This gift came in a plain brown wrapper.

Think of John’s appearance. He wore a camel-hide wrap-around, and it stank as only camels can stink. (Jesus, by contrast, wore a robe fine enough that soldiers gambled for it.)

Then there was John’s diet: wild honey. How many bee stings did he have to endure to procure the honey? No doubt he had been stung so many times he was impervious, bees being now no more bothersome than fruit flies. And the locusts? There’s lots of protein in grasshoppers, since small creatures like grasshoppers are the most efficient in converting grain protein into animal protein. Grasshoppers are good to eat, as long as you don’t mind crunching their long legs and occasionally getting them stuck in your teeth. John was anything but effete, anything but dainty, anything but a reed shaken by the wind.

John’s habitat was noteworthy. The wilderness, everywhere in scripture, is the symbol for a radical break with the posturing and the pretence, the falsehoods and phoniness of the big city and its inherent corruption. Jerusalem , hier shalem, describes itself as the city of salvation. But is it? Jerusalem kills the prophets and crucifies the Messiah. By living in the wilderness John contradicted everything the city represented.

And of course there was John’s manner. He had relatively few tools in his toolbox. When he saw that the truth of God had to be upheld and the sin of the powerful rebuked, he reached into his toolbox and came up with its one and only tool: confrontation. It wasn’t long before he confronted Herodias, wife of Herod the ruler.John looked her in the eye and said, “First you married Phillip, your uncle Phillip, no less. Then you ‘fooled around’ with the man who is currently your husband. Then you allowed your daughter, Salome, to dance like a stripper in order to inflame a crowd of half-drunk military officers. You, Mrs. Herod, are incestuous, adulterous, and a pimp all at once. It’s an abomination to God; you yourself are a disgrace; and the stench of it all looms larger than a mushroom cloud.” Whereupon Mrs. Herod had said, “I’ll have your head for that. Watch me.”

We mustn’t forget John’s singlemindedness. Because his camel-hide loincloth lacked pockets, John’s one-and-only sermon he kept in his head and his heart. It was a simple sermon. The judgement of God is so close at hand that even now you can feel God’s fiery breath scorching you and withering everything about you that can’t stand the conflagration. And in the face of this judgement, thundered John, there are three things that cosy, comfortable people think they can take refuge in when there is no refuge; namely, parentage, piety and prestige.

Parentage. “Abraham is our parent. We are safe because we are descendants from the grand progenitor of our people, Abraham our father.” We are Abraham’s son or daughter only if we have Abraham’s faith, John knew. In light of the crisis that God’s judgement brings on everyone, we’re silly for putting stock in the fact that our grandmother was once a missionary in China and our father once shook hands with Billy Graham.

Piety. “We are Israelites. Only last week we had our son circumcised.” “We’ve been members of St.Matthew’s-by-the-Gas Station for forty years. We had all our children ‘done’ there; we also contributed to the repairs to the steeple.” Piety, said John, is a religious inoculation. Like any inoculation it keeps people from getting the real thing. For this reason piety is worse than useless: it guarantees that what can save us we shall never want.

Prestige. “We are the Jerusalem aristocrats.” In 18th Century England an aristocrat was asked what she thought of John Wesley’s movement. “A perfectly horrid thing”, the Duchess of Buckingham had replied, turning up her nose as if someone had just taken the lid off an 18th Century chamber pot; “Imagine being told you are as vile as the wretches that crawl about on the earth.”

It was little wonder that those who found John too much to take eased their discomfort by ridiculing him. Baptizein is the everyday Greek verb meaning to dip or to dunk. John the dipper. “Well, Yochan, what’ll it be today? Dunk your doughnuts or dip your paintbrush? Here comes the dippy dunker.”

Might John have been deranged? His enemies said he was crazy. But the same people who said John was crazy said Jesus was an alcoholic. Certainly John was crude. Jesus admitted as much when he told those whom John had shocked, “What did you expect to see? A reed shaken by the wind? A feeble fellow smelling of perfume?” John lacked the polish of the cocktail crowd. But he was sane.

 

II: — Regardless of the family resemblance between John and Jesus they’re not identical.

John came to bear witness to the light. Jesus was (and is) that light.

John pointed to Jesus as the coming one. Jesus pointed to himself as the Incarnate one.

John reminded the people of God’s centuries-old promises. Jesus was, and is, the fulfilment of all God’s promises.

John administered a baptism of water as an outward sign of repentance. Jesus administered a baptism of fire as the Spirit inwardly torched his people.

With this lattermost point we have highlighted the crucial difference between John and Jesus. John could only point to the kingdom of God , the all-determining reality that was to heal a creation disfigured by the Fall. Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t point to it: he brought it inasmuch as he was the new creation, fraught with cosmic significance, the one in whom all things are restored. John’s ministry prepared people for a coming kingdom that the king would bring with him. Jesus’ ministry gathered people into that kingdom which was operative wherever the king himself presided — which is to say, everywhere.

It’s not that Jesus contradicted John. Rather, Jesus effected within people what John could only hold out for them. Because the ministry of Jesus gathered up the ministry of John, nothing about John was lost. At the same time, the ministry of Jesus contained so much more than John’s — as John himself gladly admitted. In other words, the ministry of Jesus was the ministry of John plus all that was unique to our Lord.

 

Ponder, for instance, the note of repentance sounded by both men. John thundered. He threatened. There was a bad time coming, and John, entirely appropriately, had his hearers scared. Jesus agreed. There is a bad time coming. Throughout the written gospels we find on the lips of Jesus pronouncements every bit as severe as anything John said. Nonetheless, Jesus promised a good time coming too. To be sure, Jesus could flay the hide off phoneys as surely as John, yet flaying didn’t characterize him; mercy did. While Jesus could speak, like John, of a coming judgement that couldn’t be avoided, Jesus also spoke of an amnesty, a provision, a refuge that reflected the heart of his Father. Everything John said, the whole world needs to hear. Yet we need to hear even more urgently what Jesus alone said: “There’s a party underway, and at this party all who are weary and worn down, frenzied and fed up, overwhelmed and overrun — at this party all such people are going to find rest and restoration, help, healing and hope.”

Jesus, like John, spoke to the defiant self-righteous who not only disdained entering the kingdom themselves but also, whether deliberately or left-handedly, impeded others from entering it; Jesus spoke to these people in a vocabulary that would take the varnish off a door. Jesus, however, also had his heart broken over people who were like sheep without a shepherd, about to follow cluelessly the next religious hireling — the religious “huckster” of any era who exploits the most needy and the most defenceless.

Because John’s message was the penultimate word of judgement, the mood surrounding John was as stark, spare, ascetic as John’s word: he drank no wine and he ate survival rations. Because Jesus’ message was the ultimate word of the kingdom, the mood surrounding Jesus was the mood of a celebration, a party. He turned 150 gallons of water into wine – a huge amount for a huge party. He is the wine of life; heprofoundly gladdens the hearts of men and women. His joy floods his people.

With his laser vision Jesus stared into the hearts of those who faulted him and said, “You spoil- sports with shrivelled hearts and acidulated tongues, you wouldn’t heed John because his asceticism left you thinking he wasn’t sane; now you won’t heed me because my partying leaves you thinking I’m not moral. Still, those people you’ve despised and duped and defrauded: your victims are victors now; they’re going to be vindicated. And their exuberance in the celebrations they have with me not even your sullenness can diminish.” Whereupon our Lord turned from the scornful snobs that religion forever breeds and welcomed yet another wounded, worn down person who wouldn’t know a hymnbook from a homily yet knew as much as she needed to know: life in the company of Jesus is indescribably better than life in the company of his detractors.

I’m always moved at our Lord’s simple assertion, “I am the good shepherd.” What did he mean by “good”? Merely that he is a competent shepherd, as any competent shepherd can protect the flock against marauders, thieves and disease? There are two Greek words for “good”: agathos and kalos. Agathos means “good” in the sense of upright, proper, correct. Kalos, on the other hand (the word Jesus used of himself), includes everything that agathos connotes plus “winsome, attractive, endearing, appealing, compelling, comely, inviting.” I am the fine shepherd.

Malcolm Muggeridge accompanied a film crew to India in order to narrate a documentary on the late Mother Teresa. He already knew she was a good woman or he wouldn’t have bothered going. When he met her, however, he found a good woman who was also so very compelling, wooing, endearing that he titled his documentary, Something Beautiful for God.

John was good, agathos. Many people feared him and many admired him. Jesus was good, kalos. Many people feared him, many admired him, and many loved him. Paul speaks in Ephesians 6:24 of those who “love our Lord with love undying.” Did anyone love John with love undying? If we’ve grasped the difference between agathos and kalos, between what is good, correct, upright and what is so very inviting and attractive as to be beautiful, then we’ve grasped the relation of John to Jesus.

 

There’s another dimension to Jesus that carries him beyond John. It’s reflected in the word he used uniquely at prayer, abba, “Father.” Now the Newer Testament is written in Greek, even though Jesus customarily spoke Aramaic. In other words what our Lord said day-by-day has been translated into another language. Then why wasn’t the Aramaic word, abba, translated into Greek? The word was left untranslated in that Jesus had first used it in a special way, and to translate it would seem to sully its distinctiveness.

 Abba was the word used by a Palestinian youth to speak of his or her father respectfully, obediently, confidently, securely, and of course intimately. It wasn’t so “palsy walsy” as to be disrespectful. Neither was it so gushing as to be sentimental. It was intimate without being impertinent, confident without being smug. Abba was trusting one’s father without trading on the father’s trustworthiness, familiar without being forward, secure without being saccharine.

We must be sure to understand that when early-day Christians came to use the word abba in their prayers they weren’t repeating the word just because they knew Jesus had used it and they thought it cute to imitate him. Neither were they mumbling it mindlessly like a mantra thinking that if they kept on saying it, mantra-like, whatever it was within him that had given rise to it would eventually appear within them. On the contrary, they were impelled to use the word for one reason: as companions of Jesus they had been admitted to such an intimacy with the Father that the word Jesus had used uniquely of his Father they were now constrained to use too, so closely did their intimacy resemble his. When Paul writes in Romans 8:15 that Christians can’t help uttering the cry, “Abba, Father”, any more than a person in pain can help groaning or a person bereaved can help weeping or a person tickled by a good joke can help laughing; when Paul reminds the Christians in Rome that this is normal Christian experience, “normal” means being introduced by the Son to the Father in such a way and at such a depth that the Son’s intimacy with the Father induces the believer’s intimacy. Abba.

We should note that the written gospels show us that Jesus used this word in Gethsemane; Gethsemane , of all places, when he was utterly alone at the most tormented hour of his life. I understand this. William Stringfellow, Harvard-taught lawyer and self-taught theologian who went to Harlem in a store-front law practice on behalf of the impoverished people he loved; Stringfellow, ridiculed by his denomination, suspected by the Kennedys and arrested finally by the FBI for harbouring Daniel Berrigan (a Jesuit anti-Viet Nam War protester); Stringfellow wrote in a little confirmation class book he prepared for teenagers, “Prayer is being so alone that God is the only witness to your existence.”

The day comes for all of us when we are so thoroughly alone we couldn’t be more alone. And in the isolation and torment of such a day we are going tofind that God is the only witness to our existence. But he will be witness enough. And because it’s the Father who is the only witness to our existence, we shall find ourself crying spontaneously, “Abba.” Surely Jesus had this in mind when he said, “There has never appeared anyone greater than John the Baptist. Yet the least in the kingdom is greater than John.”

 

We all need to be shaken up by the wild man from the wilderness, the grasshopper-eating, hide-wearing prophet whom no one should have mistaken for a reed shaken by the wind. Yet as often as we need to look at John, we find fearsome John pointing away from himself to Jesus, the Word Incarnate, the lamb of God and the Saviour of the world; someone no less rigorous than John to be sure, but also so much more than John – someone so very winsome, compelling, inviting as to be beautiful.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                      

Advent 2007

St.Bride’s Anglican Church, Mississauga

Has The Church A Future?

Matthew 4:1-11    Matthew 16:13-20    Deuteronomy 8:1-4

“Has the church a future?” “Of course it has a future”, the astute person says immediately.   “The church is the earthly manifestation of Christ’s body.  The body will live as surely as the head lives.  Christ is the head of the church.  He has been raised from the dead and will never die.  If the head lives, the body lives.  Therefore, the church will never die.  For this reason Christ has promised that the powers of death will never prevail against the church.”

I agree completely. The church is the earthly manifestation of Christ’s body.  The risen one is its head. As surely as the head lives, the body will live. And no destructive power will crumble it.

To say this, however, is to say that Jesus Christ guarantees that the community of his faithful people will never perish. The community (not a building or a congregation or a denomination); the community of Christ’s faithful people (faith-filled people: we’re not talking here of membership rolls or baptism registers or Christmas and Easter drop-ins); this is what our Lord has guaranteed.  But buildings? They are crumbling all the time. (Until the advent of fire alarms and sprinkler systems any one church building could be counted on to burn down every fifty years.)   Denominations? History is littered with the dry bones of long-dead denominations.         Congregations? Congregations come and go every day.

So — does the church have a future?   We need to put the question more precisely.  Does the community of Christ’s faithful people have a future?   Whether or not the fellowship of Christ’s people has a future is related to whether or not Jesus himself had a future when he began his public ministry. At the outset of his public ministry (and many times thereafter, we may be sure) our Lord was tempted; wrenchingly tempted.  Whether or not he had a future thereafter depended on his response at that moment. In similar manner whether or not the church has a future depends on our response to the same three temptations that assaulted our Lord.

 

I: — The first temptation Jesus faced was the temptation to be relevant.   What, after all, could be more relevant than turning stones into bread? Stones abound; bread is scarce. Jesus looked at hungry people every day. Surely a little more bread would have gone a long way.

At the same time, there were many ways that bread could be made in Palestine and should be made. But it wasn’t going to be made as it should until some men and women were moved to make it and share it; and they weren’t going to be moved until they had undergone heart-transplants at the hand of the master himself.

When our Lord was tempted to collapse his entire vocation and ministry into meeting instantly immediate physical need he fought down the temptation and shouted at the tempter, “One doesn’t live by bread alone but by the truth and reality of a living engagement with the living God!” When the three waves of temptation had abated (temptation, I find, usually comes in waves, like nausea) he emerged from his lonely spot, the wilderness, because the temptation to renounce vocation and ministry for immediate relevance had passed — for the time being.

Several years ago Robertson Davies, a novelist and playwright who never pretended to be a theologian, insisted that there is nothing more pitiable, nothing more pathetic, and nothing more irrelevant, than a church that tries to be relevant. A church that tries to be relevant, said Davies, holds up its finger to the wind, and then hoists its own sail to be blown in the same direction as everyone else. The church’s vocation, said Davies, is always to sail against the wind; to beckon others to its counter-culture, to sound the beat of a different drummer. The folly of a church bent on relevance, of course, is that it tries to out-world the world. It adopts the world’s agenda; it thinks with the world’s self-understanding; it parrots the world’s pronouncements.  It then succeeds in two things: it renders itself useless to God and neighbour, and it makes itself a laughing-stock.

Not for one minute am I suggesting that the church bury its head in the sand and ignore what’s going on all around it or remain unaware of the sorts of suffering people endure in our era.   But I must insist that underneath what’s going on in our era, for good and for ill, there remain in every era the deepest human need, the profoundest human heartache, the most frustrating self-contradiction. Regardless of the era the deepest human need is for God.         The profoundest heartache is for intimacy (genuine intimacy with our Lord and also with fellow-creatures).  The most frustrating self-contradiction is the ingrained futility born of our fallen nature, born of our systemic sinnership.         All of this is precisely what the world calls irrelevant.  And all of this is what the church knows to be supremely relevant.

Let me repeat. Our Lord never belittled material need.  He healed the sick and fed the hungry and assisted the storm-tossed. But he resisted the temptation to do this in any way that would inhibit even those he helped from coming to see their deeper need and their profounder predicament. He resisted the temptation to be immediately relevant in any way that would render them even less sensitive to the provision God has made for what ails them most. He resisted the temptation to conform to the world’s opinion of relevance in order to acquaint them with the ultimate relevance.  We don’t live by bread alone; we live by an encounter with the Holy One himself in which the human heart is transfigured eternally.

The church has a future, in the first place, as long as it too resists the temptation to be relevant.

 

II: — The church has a future, in the second place, if it resists the temptation to be spectacular. Jesus was tempted, in the second place, to throw himself off the highest pinnacle of the temple and alight upon the ground unharmed.         Think of the following he would have had if he had done that.

Yes, just think of the following he would have had.   There wouldn’t have been so much as a single disciple among them; there would have been only gawkers and rubber-neckers and sensationalists who wanted another look at the best sideshow trickster of them all. Sideshow trickery doesn’t induce people to repent and trust and love — and follow.

There’s a non-biblical legend about Jesus that speaks of our Lord fashioning clay pigeons out of clumps of wet clay.  When he has finished sculpturing these clay pigeons he animates them and they all fly away. If he had done such a thing people would certainly have flocked to him — for 30 minutes. They would have gathered around him and asked him to do it again.  A few instances of this, however, and they would have wearied of the magician’s show and gone home.  Who is induced to love and follow and adore — even give herself up for — someone who belongs in a C.N.E. sideshow?

For this reason I remain unimpressed by so much of which the church boasts. Cathedrals, for instance. The tour-guide tells us that this or that cathedral is the oldest or the largest or the best instance of this or that kind of architecture anywhere in the world. No doubt the tour-guide is right. He doesn’t tell us, however, that right now it costs fifteen million dollars per day to maintain all the cathedrals in Great Britain.   (Wouldn’t a dozen cathedrals be enough for museum interests?)   What does such spectacularity have to do with the vocation and mission of the church? Jesus repudiated spectacularity.

For years the cheerleaders at football games have bothered me.  I go to the game to see football.  If the game itself can’t draw enthusiasts then there’s something wrong with the game. There’s manifestly much wrong with the game if the event has to be augmented by a bevy of 22-year old females whose attire is provocatively “minimalist.” Things got worse with the Blue Jays — where there are no cheerleaders.  The spectacular electronic scoreboard is plainly the entertainment, the event, the game of baseball being less entertaining for most spectators, apparently, than the electronic displays, the beer concessions and the public washrooms.  Worse again with the Raptors, where the basketball game is merely a footnote to the extravaganzas unfolding everywhere in the building, not to mention the rock music that throbs throughout the game.

The church is always tempted to do the same thing.  We are always tempted to bring people onto the premises by something other than an exaltation of our Lord himself.  The problem is, what we deploy to get people onto the premises contradicts the nature and purpose and thrust of the gospel.

Recently the president of one of America’s largest seminaries “lit up” as he told me about a multi-million dollar bequest that would fund the newest technology in interactive T.V.  With this wonderful new technology there was no need to bring a visiting professor to the seminary; now a student could sit in front of a T.V. screen and listen to a lecture from a professor in England or Australia, even “talk” (as it were — but in fact is not and never will be) to the same professor. As the seminary president glowed to the point of spontaneous combustion I realized that what had “hooked” him was the spectacularity of the technology. A question occurred to me: “This technology and what it does; is it all of a piece with what we know of our Lord and how he acts and what he does for us in restoring us before God and reconstituting our humanness, or does it contradict this?”   You see, the incarnation means ever so much, but it means at least that God meets us most intimately where our humanity intersects the humanity of others. What does interactive T.V. have to do with the intersection of our common humanity?   I thought next of 2nd John 12 and 3rd John 13, two brief verses from the two tiniest books in the bible: “…I hope to come to see you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an old-fashioned “Luddite,” someone opposed to technology in principle. I do think that surgery is a genuine advance on the application of leeches, and I’d rather fly to England than endure two months of seasickness in a sailing vessel.

Neither am I opposed to educational technology.  In fact I have instructed scores of distance-education students by means of audio-recordings. Of course it’s better that the student in New Guinea pursue the needed course by means of electronic sophistication than not pursue it at all.  But we must remember at all times that such methods are always a distant second best. We must remember that what is communicated in a ‘live’ classroom isn’t chiefly information; what’s communicated chiefly is a person (who happens to be informed.) What is mutually communicated is the person of the teacher and the person of the student in a profound reciprocity. Information can be garnered from a book; persons can be communicated to each other only through personal encounter.  It’s little wonder that John writes, “I hope to come to see you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.”         The personal must never be surrendered to the spectacular.

What’s the alternative to spectacularity?  It isn’t dullness. The alternative to spectacularity is simplicity; simplicity that is at the same time vulnerability. Like the incarnation, the cross of Jesus means eversomuch.  But it means at least that there is no limit to the vulnerability of God’s love for us. If the cross means that there’s no limit to God’s vulnerability in loving us, then what does resurrection mean?  It means at least that there is no limit to the effectiveness of love’s vulnerability. If the cross of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus together mean that there is no limit to the vulnerability of God’s love for us and no limit to its effectiveness, then it’s plain what the Christian community must be about. Forget spectacularity.

Let me point out that simplicity doesn’t mean simple-mindedness. Neither does simplicity mean naive ignorance of life’s complexity.  Life is complex.  Any simplicity on ‘this’ side of complexity is a false simplicity; the simplicity on the ‘other’ side of complexity, however, is profound. The simplicity that we find on the ‘far side’ of complexity; the simplicity that’s suffused by vulnerability – this is where the Christian life unfolds, repudiating any temptation towards spectacularity.

Speaking of vulnerability; Gerald May (M.D.), is a psychiatrist in Washington whose books and personal correspondence have helped me immensely. May’s psychiatric work has taken him to Viet Nam with the U.S. Air Force, to city streets on behalf of the drug-addicted, and to prison hospitals as well as state hospitals. May says, “Some wisdom deep inside us knows that we can’t love safely; either we enter it undefended or we don’t enter it at all.”  May is right. Some wisdom deep inside us knows that we can’t love safely; either we love recklessly, defencelessly, vulnerably or we don’t love.

Henri Nouwen, Dutch Roman Catholic priest (now dead), whose works are known to many people in every denomination; Nouwen had a glittering career as university professor, first at Yale then at Notre Dame and finally at Harvard. Twenty years ago Nouwen left Harvard and went to live and work at L’Arche (in Richmond Hill), Jean Vanier’s facility for men who are severely intellectually challenged. Nouwen said that during all the years he lived and worked at L’Arche the question he was asked most frequently was — what question do you think intellectually challenged men would put to Nouwen most often? It was, “Are you home tonight?” “Are you home tonight?” didn’t mean, “Are you going to be in the building at 6:00 p.m.?” It meant, “Are you going to be available to us?  Are you going to be ‘present’ beyond being physically present? Are you going to lay aside your armour, surrender your defences, and grant us access to genuine intimacy?” To be sure, intellectually challenged men couldn’t wrap such words around their question, but the question deep in their hearts was profound: “Are you home tonight?”

The opposite of spectacularity isn’t dullness; the opposite of spectacularity is simplicity, a simplicity that invites rather than protects, forges intimacy rather than armour, cherishes vulnerability rather than victory — and knows that when all of this is suffused by the Spirit of the risen one, love’s vulnerability will be vindicated as the efficacy in God’s economy.

 

III: — Does the church have a future? It does if it can resist, like its Lord, one more temptation, the temptation of domination. Jesus was taken to a vantage point from which he could apprehend at once all the powers and forces of this world.  They were his for the taking — even as this entailed, of course, his forsaking of his cruciform vocation.         He spurned the tempter and affirmed his vocation.  He would serve, not domineer; he would trust his Father, not tyrannize to see instant “success”; he would even go to the cross before he attempted to coerce.

The temptation to dominate is with us all the time.  Because we are fallen creatures we assume that we are the measure of everything and therefore there’s no reason why we shouldn’t impose our will on others. What’s more, because we are impatient we want to impose our will on others now.  The older I grow the more I realize how much human distress, how many tortured relationships, can be accounted for by one matter: control; the craving to control; an obsession with control.  The point or matter or item that’s at issue can be small.  (Usually it is.) Nevertheless, the smallest matter is the occasion of life-or-death struggle for control.

It appears to be life or death for the two parties in the struggle.  The truth is, where human relationships are tortured it isn’t life or death, with one party emerging triumphant. Control-issues are death and death; death for both parties.

The temptation to dominate is a temptation that laps at us relentlessly. After all, it’s always easier to dominate than it is to love, isn’t it?  Love ultimately means that we abandon the safety of our fort; domination, on the other hand, means that we thicken the walls of the fort: ‘Fort Self-Preservation.’   But it never works, finally.  All attempts at control, all attempts at self-preservation, finally issue in such widespread destruction that no “other” remains to control and no “self” remains to preserve.

The church should know better.  God’s way with his people has always been different.  God’s way with Israel was never the way of coercion.  God’s way with Israel has always been the way of a lover who gains his beloved only by wooing her.  God’s way with Israel, says Hosea, is the way of a husband who is always grieved and frequently angered by an unfaithful wife but can never bring himself to give her up.  In struggling to bring forth a people who mirror him in faith and cherish their neighbours in love God likens himself to a woman in obstetrical distress over the resistance of her dream-child in coming to birth, a child who now pains the one who conceived it in joy.  She longs only to have her joy completed in the safe arrival of the new-born. However distressed she might be at her protracted obstetrical difficulties, there is no thought of aborting the enterprise.

But it’s easier to dominate, isn’t it?   The church has enormous difficulty resisting the temptation to dominate. So many of the tragic ruptures in the history of the church — like the schism between the Eastern and Western churches in the 11th century, and the schism within the Western church in the 16th century Reformation – these have been issues of domination.

There was a time when the church controlled Quebec politics.   There was a time when membership in the Orange Lodge was the ticket of admission to Toronto politics.   There was a time, one of my Scottish professors told me, even during his lifetime, when you had to be a member of the Church of Scotland if you wanted to get work in schoolteaching (in Scotland), in banking, or in the civil service. Today the Church of Scotland, the national church of the land, is dying so fast it’s expected to disappear virtually by 2040. And in Quebec? Any sociologist will tell you that Quebec is the most thoroughly secularized region of North America. The church in Quebec, I have found, is the outfit that young Quebeckers loathe.   When are we going to learn that the lust for domination spells death?

Does the church have a future?   The church relishes the chance to flex its muscles and roar like a lion and coerce people in our society whether physically or socially or psychologically the way the church has coerced people so often in the past. Even the people of the bible are quick to speak of the lion, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the symbol of God’s power. The problem, if problem it is, is that whenever the people of God think they need the lion most urgently, the lion never shows up.  What shows up instead is a lamb — over and over in scripture, right to the end.

In the book of Revelation, the last book in Holy Scripture, John is with his fellow-Christians who have been flayed by yet another wave of persecution. Desperate for relief, they all look for the lion once more.  Opening their tear-blinded eyes they see the lamb, bearing the marks of slaughter, and together they sing a new song, says John. Why new?   Because they know that their Lord’s faithfulness in the face of temptation ensured him a future. Their faithfulness will ensure them a future. And they know that “future” and “genuinely new” are one and the same.         Then it’s no wonder they see the lamb mangled and yet break forth into a new song.

 

Has the church a future? To say the same thing differently, to whom does Christ’s promise of protection against the powers of death apply?   In the last book of the bible John speaks of “a great multitude which no man can number, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the Lamb and the throne….”
Yes, the church has a future, a glorious future. And this future includes a great multitude which no one can number, for this multitude will be those who resisted temptations to be relevant, to be spectacular, to dominate; this multitude will be those who instead cherished intimacy with their Lord, exemplified his vulnerability, even lived and died for others so that these others too might be numbered among those gathered before the Lamb and the throne.

 

                                                                                                        Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                     

January 2010

 

Seven Questions About Discipleship

Matthew 4:18-22

1] “How many disciples did Jesus have?” Don’t say “twelve”. He had dozens more than twelve. On one occasion he sent out seventy-two. On the day of Pentecost one hundred and twenty were gathered in one place. Luke speaks of “a great crowd of disciples”. Then is a disciple anyone who happens to be within earshot of Jesus and might be remotely interested in him? Not at all. For in the one verse where Luke speaks of a great crowd of disciples he also speaks of “a great multitude of people”. It is plain that Luke, like every gospel-writer, draws a distinct line between the disciples (who follow Jesus) and the multitudes (who don’t). Then who are disciples? Simply, disciples are those who respond to Christ’s call.

We should notice that different gospel-writers use a different word for “call” inasmuch as they wish to highlight a different aspect of our Lord’s call. Mark uses a Greek word which has the force of “invite”; Luke, a word which has the force of “summon”. Mark tells us there is a winsomeness, a courtesy, a gentleness to an invitation; Luke tells us there is an urgency, an imperative, even an ultimatum to a summons. Put together, that call by which our Lord still calls men and women into his company is a winsome invitation which is also urgent, as well as a summons which is yet gentle. On the one hand our Lord does not coerce us into joining him; on the other hand, he does not allow us to think that joining him or not joining him is a matter of whim or taste. His invitation is a summons, and his summons an invitation. He issues his call to every human being. Everyone, without exception, needs to become a disciple, and everyone, without qualification, is welcome.

2] Then what about the twelve? The number twelve is a symbolic number everywhere in scripture. There were twelve tribes in Israel, twelve tribes in the people of God. When Jesus appoints “the twelve” as part of his own mission, he is saying that his mission gathers up and carries forward what God aimed at in establishing the twelve tribes; his mission, in fact, is God’s renewal of Israel. The apostolic mission is a renewal movement within the people of God. Furthermore, just as the twelve tribes of Israel were formed, ultimately, for the sake of God’s blessing the world, so the mission of Jesus Christ (symbolized by the twelve) has to do with the world’s blessing.

We must be clear about something crucial today: while the twelve men symbolize Christ’s mission, that mission is much wider than the twelve. Our Lord’s mission includes and uses everyone who has heard his call and heeded it, everyone who has resolved to keep company with him and follow him.

3] We have used the word “disciple” several times today. What does it mean? It refers to the follower of any movement. Moses had disciples. So did the Pharisees. So did John the Baptist. All of these leaders attracted people who were serious about the teaching and outlook of the leader. The Greek word for disciple, MATHETES, simply means pupil or learner. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be his pupil or learner.

Now in learning anything there is something to be understood, something to be grasped mentally. And certainly we who are disciples of Jesus must always be learning in this sense. (Our master, after all, is a teacher who is always teaching.) Yet we must not think that discipleship is a head-trip, book-learning only, as it were. In the older testament the word “disciple” (learner) refers to the pupils in the music school of the Jerusalem temple. To be sure, all music pupils receive instruction in the theory of music; but no music pupil receives instruction in theory only. Music pupils have to sing or play; they have to make music, not merely scribble it. The music pupil has to do the very thing that embodies the instruction she has received.

To be a disciple or learner in the company of Jesus is not merely (not even chiefly) to receive religious instruction; it is to learn how to live a Christ-shaped life in the midst of a world which resists this. I am not minimizing the place of instruction. My point, however, is this: discipleship aims at equipping us to live.

There is another dimension to Christian discipleship. The distinctive mark of the disciples of Moses or the pharisees or John the Baptist was the appropriation of teaching. But the distinctive mark of Christ’s disciples is their personal allegiance to Christ himself. Not only did his disciples call Jesus “rabbi, teacher”; they also called him “Lord”. That is, they were utterly devoted to him himself, not merely to his teaching.

4] In order to grasp more clearly what discipleship means we should look at someone who didn’t become a disciple, that affluent fellow whom we used to call “the rich young ruler”. Mark speaks of him simply as “a man”; Matthew, “one”. “One came up to Jesus”, “A man came up to Jesus”. The gospel-writers deliberately say no more than this so that every gospel-reader can identify with the fellow. The man kneels before Jesus. People did not kneel before a rabbi: that would be blasphemous. Clearly the fellow recognizes Jesus as eversomuch more than a rabbi. He says he wants to inherit eternal life; that is, he wants to share in God’s own life. He tells Jesus he has kept all the commandments from his youth. Jesus doesn’t suggest that he hasn’t. Jesus simply says, “Sell what you own and give away the proceeds: you’ve got too much junk cluttering up your life. Then come and follow me.” The man’s face falls, for he owns much, and he walks away sad. And — be it noted — Jesus lets him walk away.

For years preachers have used this story to make hearers feel guilty. (“Have you given away all that you own?”) Or else preachers have used this story to relieve hearers. (“The fellow didn’t walk away from Jesus because he was rich; rather, because his possessions possessed him.”) Both approaches miss the point. The point isn’t where the line is drawn concerning wealth on one side of which I can be a Christian and on the other side of which I can’t. The point isn’t whether I can be a Christian with one car, two cars, or three cars. (While we are discussing this text we might as well admit that Jesus owned a cloak so fine that soldiers thought it worth gambling for. Clearly Jesus had never given it away.) The point is much more elemental: is the man willing to join himself to Jesus and become a follower? The man says he has kept the commandments. Jesus insists that following him is the meaning of keeping the commandments. If the fellow isn’t willing to become a disciple now, a follower of our Lord, then his commandment-keeping has nothing to do with eternal life; nothing at all. The man thinks he has obeyed God in scrupulously keeping the commandments. Jesus tells him that commandment-keeping is only the outer form of obeying God, the shell, as it were. The inner heart of it all, that which genuinely shares in the life of God himself, is joining oneself — right now — to the one before whom the fellow has knelt. The man walks away from Jesus holding on to his possessions. The point of the story isn’t that the man’s possessions have “hooked” him; the point is that he does not believe Jesus when Jesus says, “Get rid of the junk that is cluttering your life, follow me, AND YOU WILL HAVE TREASURE IN HEAVEN.” The man does not believe that following Jesus is rich; so rich, in fact, that alongside these riches his bank account looks like scrip from a game of Monopoly. You see, a major consequence of becoming a disciple is this: in the presence of Jesus Christ SECONDARY MATTERS ARE RECOGNIZED AS SECONDARY. To be a disciple is to be so “taken” with Jesus that everything else pales. To be a disciple is to find Jesus so winsome as to love him, and so compelling as to obey him. Years after the gospel encounter we are probing now St.Paul wrote the congregation in Philippi and spoke of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”. It is precisely the surpassing worth of knowing Chris that enables the apostle to relativize everything else. Whether fame or anonymity; whether affluence or material leanness — what does it matter alongside the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus? Disciples are those whose hearts melt when they see and hear the master; they know they shall have treasure in heaven; they follow; and they are admitted most intimately to God’s own life here and now.

5] What happens when men and women, of any era, become disciples? Most tellingly, our Lord renders us kingdom-oriented people; as we gradually become kingdom-oriented, we lose whatever ideological baggage we have brought with us. Let us be sure of one thing: our Lord is going to change us; he is going to make us different people. He is Lord. He has authority to create and to destroy; to mould and to fashion; he will certainly exercise his authority here with you and me. Jesus calls Simon. “Simon”, he says, “I have a better name for you: Peter, `Rocky'” He calls two brothers, James and John. “Boanerges”, he names them, “Sons of thunder”. Where there is thunder there is also lightning. “In the kingdom-work I have for you”, our Lord continues, “I expect you brothers to electrify others; I expect you to be seen and heard unmistakably.” For the Hebrew mind a change of name always means a change of nature. To be sure, it would be a long time before Peter became rock-like. It may have been longer still before the two brothers flashed and rumbled in service of the kingdom. The point is, Jesus is sovereign. He calls us as we are but never allows us to remain this. He renders us kingdom-oriented and useful for kingdom-work.

As he does this he relieves us of the ideological baggage we have brought with us. Within the smaller group of the twelve we find Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax-collector. Zealots and tax-collectors were at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The zealots hated Rome and sought to rid Palestine of Roman occupation through terrorism and sabotage and cold-blooded throat-cutting. Tax-collectors, on the other hand, made a personal fortune through cozying up to Rome and collaborating with Rome. They were self-serving, opportunistic traitors. Jesus calls into his company both traitor and terrorist, both the arch-friend of Rome and the arch-foe of Rome. He is going to have them live together. He will also move both of them beyond their ideology. The kingdom of God is neither bloodcurdling terrorism nor opportunistic treachery. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of God. It is neither laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of God.

Jesus continues to call. People continue to respond. As we do we bring our idiosyncratic ideologies with us. This person wants the church of Jesus Christ to be a setting for group therapy. That person wants it to be the bastion of law and order in the streets. Someone else wants it to be a voice for pacifism. Unquestionably Jesus calls all such people (that is, calls all of us) into his company. As we keep company with him, however, he moves us all beyond our hobby horses; he equips us to discern his kingdom and exalt it.

Several years ago a bestseller appeared in the USA, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. It was supposed to be a book about Jesus. It portrayed him as a successful businessman whose kingdom-pronouncements were actually sure-fire business techniques. Books appear now depicting Jesus as a Latin American revolutionary, or as a proponent of existential philosophy, or as the guru of mood-altering psychology. He is none of these. We are to become none of these. As disciples we are to be rendered kingdom-oriented and made kingdom-useful.

Our Lord does this to you and me; that is, he relieves us of our ideological baggage by directing us again and again to the written gospels. As we become steeped in the written gospels he steps forth to meet us, and steps forth startlingly different from the hobby horses that we project onto him. As he does this, he renames us, remakes us (however long it takes), and renders us children of the day, as St.Paul says, children of the light.

6] What are disciples to do? All disciples are to do three things: we are to announce that the kingdom of God has come; we are to cast out demons; and we are to heal the sick.

To say that we are to announce the kingdom is to say we are to announce that the sovereign rule of God is effectual in Jesus Christ. And because the sovereign rule of God is effectual in Jesus Christ, death has been defeated. Death is not the last word. Deadliness, however evident in our midst, is not the final truth and reality of our lives.

Sickness is a manifestation of death; sickness is death-on-the-way. Yet Jesus Christ has overcome death. Therefore we are to heal the sick as a sign of Christ’s effectual sovereignty over humankind.

Evil is the power of death running wild. Evil is the power of death chaotically disrupting and disfiguring everything that God has pronounced good. Therefore we are to cast out the demons (that is, resist evil) as a sign of Christ’s effectual sovereignty over the creation.

To say that all disciples are to announce the kingdom is not to say that all disciples are to become preachers, any more than the mandate to heal means we should all become physicians. Most disciples will announce the kingdom not by preaching but simply by embodying the truth and reality of the kingdom of God. Most disciples will heal not by performing surgery or prescribing medicine but by being beacons of hope and help in the midst of the life’s wounds and haemorrhages. Most disciples will cast out demons not by performing charismatic exorcisms but by identifying evil and resisting it as it confronts them. We shall do all of this just because we live in the company of him who is resurrection and life. He commissions us to live and speak and act in such a way as to exalt his life, point to his victory, and deny the illegitimate encroachments of that deadliness which has already been defeated and will one day be dispelled. All disciples are ordained to this ministry, without exception.

At the same time, as individual disciples we may be commissioned to individual tasks. The word “disciple” is rarely found in the singular in the NT. When it is found in the singular, however, it identifies one particular person and usually identifies one particular task for that person. John is one such disciple. He is spoken of in the singular, and his particular task is to take Mary, mother of our Lord, into his home following the death of her son. Mary was by this time a widow; her eldest son was soon to be dead; her three other sons were nowhere to be seen; she was homeless and penniless. Jesus appoints John to take her into his home for as long as she lives — a specific task for this one disciple.

So it is with you and me. As disciples we are all ordained to that ministry which is common to all disciples. As individuals we may be commissioned to a task uniquely. Then we must ever be alert to this; alert to discern it, and enthusiastic in doing it.

This is what disciples are to do.

7] Lastly, what can disciples expect? “Blessed are you when men slander you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” — so says Jesus. Disciples can expect to be slandered and hounded. “If anyone wants to be my follower, let her deny herself, and let her shoulder her own cross” — so says Jesus. Disciples can expect cross-bearing, and cross-bearing means torment. “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will certainly persecute you” — so says Jesus. “You will be delivered up to councils, flogged in synagogues, dragged before governors and kings for my sake” — so says Jesus. Disciples can expect victimization at the hands of church-authorities and civil authorities alike.

What can disciples expect? Wrong question. What are disciples guaranteed? We are guaranteed all of the above: slander, persecution, cross-bearing, ecclesiastical abuse and political victimization. Then why bother becoming a disciple?

Why bother? In the written gospels bystanders (that is, those who haven’t made up their minds about becoming disciples) notice that the disciples of Jesus appear to have a rollicking good time. They party a great deal. They laugh. They don’t have a face as long as a horse’s. Other religious devotees fast, and end up with a face like a prune. The disciples of Jesus celebrate. Bystanders are startled, and ask Jesus why his followers are far happier than one should expect them to be. Jesus replies, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”

In ancient Palestine a rabbi’s biblical instruction was deemed so important that nothing could interrupt it — nothing, that is, except a wedding celebration. A wedding celebration was regarded so important that a rabbi would interrupt his exposition of the sacred text so that he and his students could join in the festivities.

“Life in my company”, says Jesus, “is rich, satisfying and exhilarating — like the deepest marriage you can imagine. If the rabbi’s students are allowed to party when the wedding-procession moves through town, then surely my disciples can do as much in my company. For the joy my disciples find in me outweighs the difficulty they have on account of me. They know that life with me is worth it; always!” So says Jesus.

Recall the parable of the pearl: a man comes upon a pearl so beautiful that he sells everything he owns to buy it and still feels it has cost him nothing.

Recall the woman who spent a year’s wages on a bottle of perfume and then poured it over our Lord’s feet. She gave up all she had — and felt she had given up nothing.

Recall Jean Vanier visiting hospital patients in a Cleveland slum. He came upon a poor black woman, sick unto death, who had been vomiting all day. Vanier was so taken aback at her poverty and her sickness and her thoroughgoing misery that he didn’t know what comfort to offer. He simply placed his hand on her head and said, “Jesus.” “I been walking with him forty years”, she croaked.

What, then, can disciples expect? We can expect the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord, in light of which everything else in life is relativized. We can also expect the world’s hostility. Ultimately, however, we shall know a satisfaction in him that is but dimly mirrored in the satisfaction that the best-matched couple find in each other. “I been walking with him forty years.”

Victor A. Shepherd
March 1995
“How many disciples did Jesus have?” Don’t say “twelve”. He had dozens more than twelve. On one occasion he sent out seventy-two. On the day of Pentecost one hundred and twenty were gathered in one place. Luke speaks of “a great crowd of disciples”. Then is a disciple anyone who happens to be within earshot of Jesus and might be remotely interested in him? Not at all. For in the one verse where Luke speaks of a great crowd of disciples he also speaks of “a great multitude of people”. It is plain that Luke, like every gospel-writer, draws a distinct line between the disciples (who follow Jesus) and the multitudes (who don’t). Then who are disciples? Simply, disciples are those who respond to Christ’s call.

We should notice that different gospel-writers use a different word for “call” inasmuch as they wish to highlight a different aspect of our Lord’s call. Mark uses a Greek word which has the force of “invite”; Luke, a word which has the force of “summon”. Mark tells us there is a winsomeness, a courtesy, a gentleness to an invitation; Luke tells us there is an urgency, an imperative, even an ultimatum to a summons. Put together, that call by which our Lord still calls men and women into his company is a winsome invitation which is also urgent, as well as a summons which is yet gentle. On the one hand our Lord does not coerce us into joining him; on the other hand, he does not allow us to think that joining him or not joining him is a matter of whim or taste. His invitation is a summons, and his summons an invitation. He issues his call to every human being. Everyone, without exception, needs to become a disciple, and everyone, without qualification, is welcome.

2] Then what about the twelve? The number twelve is a symbolic number everywhere in scripture. There were twelve tribes in Israel, twelve tribes in the people of God. When Jesus appoints “the twelve” as part of his own mission, he is saying that his mission gathers up and carries forward what God aimed at in establishing the twelve tribes; his mission, in fact, is God’s renewal of Israel. The apostolic mission is a renewal movement within the people of God. Furthermore, just as the twelve tribes of Israel were formed, ultimately, for the sake of God’s blessing the world, so the mission of Jesus Christ (symbolized by the twelve) has to do with the world’s blessing.

We must be clear about something crucial today: while the twelve men symbolize Christ’s mission, that mission is much wider than the twelve. Our Lord’s mission includes and uses everyone who has heard his call and heeded it, everyone who has resolved to keep company with him and follow him.

3] We have used the word “disciple” several times today. What does it mean? It refers to the follower of any movement. Moses had disciples. So did the Pharisees. So did John the Baptist. All of these leaders attracted people who were serious about the teaching and outlook of the leader. The Greek word for disciple, MATHETES, simply means pupil or learner. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be his pupil or learner.

Now in learning anything there is something to be understood, something to be grasped mentally. And certainly we who are disciples of Jesus must always be learning in this sense. (Our master, after all, is a teacher who is always teaching.) Yet we must not think that discipleship is a head-trip, book-learning only, as it were. In the older testament the word “disciple” (learner) refers to the pupils in the music school of the Jerusalem temple. To be sure, all music pupils receive instruction in the theory of music; but no music pupil receives instruction in theory only. Music pupils have to sing or play; they have to make music, not merely scribble it. The music pupil has to do the very thing that embodies the instruction she has received.

To be a disciple or learner in the company of Jesus is not merely (not even chiefly) to receive religious instruction; it is to learn how to live a Christ-shaped life in the midst of a world which resists this. I am not minimizing the place of instruction. My point, however, is this: discipleship aims at equipping us to live.

There is another dimension to Christian discipleship. The distinctive mark of the disciples of Moses or the pharisees or John the Baptist was the appropriation of teaching. But the distinctive mark of Christ’s disciples is their personal allegiance to Christ himself. Not only did his disciples call Jesus “rabbi, teacher”; they also called him “Lord”. That is, they were utterly devoted to him himself, not merely to his teaching.

4] In order to grasp more clearly what discipleship means we should look at someone who didn’t become a disciple, that affluent fellow whom we used to call “the rich young ruler”. Mark speaks of him simply as “a man”; Matthew, “one”. “One came up to Jesus”, “A man came up to Jesus”. The gospel-writers deliberately say no more than this so that every gospel-reader can identify with the fellow. The man kneels before Jesus. People did not kneel before a rabbi: that would be blasphemous. Clearly the fellow recognizes Jesus as eversomuch more than a rabbi. He says he wants to inherit eternal life; that is, he wants to share in God’s own life. He tells Jesus he has kept all the commandments from his youth. Jesus doesn’t suggest that he hasn’t. Jesus simply says, “Sell what you own and give away the proceeds: you’ve got too much junk cluttering up your life. Then come and follow me.” The man’s face falls, for he owns much, and he walks away sad. And — be it noted — Jesus lets him walk away.

For years preachers have used this story to make hearers feel guilty. (“Have you given away all that you own?”) Or else preachers have used this story to relieve hearers. (“The fellow didn’t walk away from Jesus because he was rich; rather, because his possessions possessed him.”) Both approaches miss the point. The point isn’t where the line is drawn concerning wealth on one side of which I can be a Christian and on the other side of which I can’t. The point isn’t whether I can be a Christian with one car, two cars, or three cars. (While we are discussing this text we might as well admit that Jesus owned a cloak so fine that soldiers thought it worth gambling for. Clearly Jesus had never given it away.) The point is much more elemental: is the man willing to join himself to Jesus and become a follower? The man says he has kept the commandments. Jesus insists that following him is the meaning of keeping the commandments. If the fellow isn’t willing to become a disciple now, a follower of our Lord, then his commandment-keeping has nothing to do with eternal life; nothing at all. The man thinks he has obeyed God in scrupulously keeping the commandments. Jesus tells him that commandment-keeping is only the outer form of obeying God, the shell, as it were. The inner heart of it all, that which genuinely shares in the life of God himself, is joining oneself — right now — to the one before whom the fellow has knelt. The man walks away from Jesus holding on to his possessions. The point of the story isn’t that the man’s possessions have “hooked” him; the point is that he does not believe Jesus when Jesus says, “Get rid of the junk that is cluttering your life, follow me, AND YOU WILL HAVE TREASURE IN HEAVEN.” The man does not believe that following Jesus is rich; so rich, in fact, that alongside these riches his bank account looks like scrip from a game of Monopoly. You see, a major consequence of becoming a disciple is this: in the presence of Jesus Christ SECONDARY MATTERS ARE RECOGNIZED AS SECONDARY. To be a disciple is to be so “taken” with Jesus that everything else pales. To be a disciple is to find Jesus so winsome as to love him, and so compelling as to obey him. Years after the gospel encounter we are probing now St.Paul wrote the congregation in Philippi and spoke of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”. It is precisely the surpassing worth of knowing Chris that enables the apostle to relativize everything else. Whether fame or anonymity; whether affluence or material leanness — what does it matter alongside the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus? Disciples are those whose hearts melt when they see and hear the master; they know they shall have treasure in heaven; they follow; and they are admitted most intimately to God’s own life here and now.

5] What happens when men and women, of any era, become disciples? Most tellingly, our Lord renders us kingdom-oriented people; as we gradually become kingdom-oriented, we lose whatever ideological baggage we have brought with us. Let us be sure of one thing: our Lord is going to change us; he is going to make us different people. He is Lord. He has authority to create and to destroy; to mould and to fashion; he will certainly exercise his authority here with you and me. Jesus calls Simon. “Simon”, he says, “I have a better name for you: Peter, `Rocky'” He calls two brothers, James and John. “Boanerges”, he names them, “Sons of thunder”. Where there is thunder there is also lightning. “In the kingdom-work I have for you”, our Lord continues, “I expect you brothers to electrify others; I expect you to be seen and heard unmistakably.” For the Hebrew mind a change of name always means a change of nature. To be sure, it would be a long time before Peter became rock-like. It may have been longer still before the two brothers flashed and rumbled in service of the kingdom. The point is, Jesus is sovereign. He calls us as we are but never allows us to remain this. He renders us kingdom-oriented and useful for kingdom-work.

As he does this he relieves us of the ideological baggage we have brought with us. Within the smaller group of the twelve we find Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax-collector. Zealots and tax-collectors were at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The zealots hated Rome and sought to rid Palestine of Roman occupation through terrorism and sabotage and cold-blooded throat-cutting. Tax-collectors, on the other hand, made a personal fortune through cozying up to Rome and collaborating with Rome. They were self-serving, opportunistic traitors. Jesus calls into his company both traitor and terrorist, both the arch-friend of Rome and the arch-foe of Rome. He is going to have them live together. He will also move both of them beyond their ideology. The kingdom of God is neither bloodcurdling terrorism nor opportunistic treachery. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of God. It is neither laissez-faire capitalism nor socialism. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of God.

Jesus continues to call. People continue to respond. As we do we bring our idiosyncratic ideologies with us. This person wants the church of Jesus Christ to be a setting for group therapy. That person wants it to be the bastion of law and order in the streets. Someone else wants it to be a voice for pacifism. Unquestionably Jesus calls all such people (that is, calls all of us) into his company. As we keep company with him, however, he moves us all beyond our hobby horses; he equips us to discern his kingdom and exalt it.

Several years ago a bestseller appeared in the USA, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. It was supposed to be a book about Jesus. It portrayed him as a successful businessman whose kingdom-pronouncements were actually sure-fire business techniques. Books appear now depicting Jesus as a Latin American revolutionary, or as a proponent of existential philosophy, or as the guru of mood-altering psychology. He is none of these. We are to become none of these. As disciples we are to be rendered kingdom-oriented and made kingdom-useful.

Our Lord does this to you and me; that is, he relieves us of our ideological baggage by directing us again and again to the written gospels. As we become steeped in the written gospels he steps forth to meet us, and steps forth startlingly different from the hobby horses that we project onto him. As he does this, he renames us, remakes us (however long it takes), and renders us children of the day, as St.Paul says, children of the light.

6] What are disciples to do? All disciples are to do three things: we are to announce that the kingdom of God has come; we are to cast out demons; and we are to heal the sick.

To say that we are to announce the kingdom is to say we are to announce that the sovereign rule of God is effectual in Jesus Christ. And because the sovereign rule of God is effectual in Jesus Christ, death has been defeated. Death is not the last word. Deadliness, however evident in our midst, is not the final truth and reality of our lives.

Sickness is a manifestation of death; sickness is death-on-the-way. Yet Jesus Christ has overcome death. Therefore we are to heal the sick as a sign of Christ’s effectual sovereignty over humankind.

Evil is the power of death running wild. Evil is the power of death chaotically disrupting and disfiguring everything that God has pronounced good. Therefore we are to cast out the demons (that is, resist evil) as a sign of Christ’s effectual sovereignty over the creation.

To say that all disciples are to announce the kingdom is not to say that all disciples are to become preachers, any more than the mandate to heal means we should all become physicians. Most disciples will announce the kingdom not by preaching but simply by embodying the truth and reality of the kingdom of God. Most disciples will heal not by performing surgery or prescribing medicine but by being beacons of hope and help in the midst of the life’s wounds and haemorrhages. Most disciples will cast out demons not by performing charismatic exorcisms but by identifying evil and resisting it as it confronts them. We shall do all of this just because we live in the company of him who is resurrection and life. He commissions us to live and speak and act in such a way as to exalt his life, point to his victory, and deny the illegitimate encroachments of that deadliness which has already been defeated and will one day be dispelled. All disciples are ordained to this ministry, without exception.

At the same time, as individual disciples we may be commissioned to individual tasks. The word “disciple” is rarely found in the singular in the NT. When it is found in the singular, however, it identifies one particular person and usually identifies one particular task for that person. John is one such disciple. He is spoken of in the singular, and his particular task is to take Mary, mother of our Lord, into his home following the death of her son. Mary was by this time a widow; her eldest son was soon to be dead; her three other sons were nowhere to be seen; she was homeless and penniless. Jesus appoints John to take her into his home for as long as she lives — a specific task for this one disciple.

So it is with you and me. As disciples we are all ordained to that ministry which is common to all disciples. As individuals we may be commissioned to a task uniquely. Then we must ever be alert to this; alert to discern it, and enthusiastic in doing it.

This is what disciples are to do.

7] Lastly, what can disciples expect? “Blessed are you when men slander you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” — so says Jesus. Disciples can expect to be slandered and hounded. “If anyone wants to be my follower, let her deny herself, and let her shoulder her own cross” — so says Jesus. Disciples can expect cross-bearing, and cross-bearing means torment. “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will certainly persecute you” — so says Jesus. “You will be delivered up to councils, flogged in synagogues, dragged before governors and kings for my sake” — so says Jesus. Disciples can expect victimization at the hands of church-authorities and civil authorities alike.

What can disciples expect? Wrong question. What are disciples guaranteed? We are guaranteed all of the above: slander, persecution, cross-bearing, ecclesiastical abuse and political victimization. Then why bother becoming a disciple?

Why bother? In the written gospels bystanders (that is, those who haven’t made up their minds about becoming disciples) notice that the disciples of Jesus appear to have a rollicking good time. They party a great deal. They laugh. They don’t have a face as long as a horse’s. Other religious devotees fast, and end up with a face like a prune. The disciples of Jesus celebrate. Bystanders are startled, and ask Jesus why his followers are far happier than one should expect them to be. Jesus replies, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”

In ancient Palestine a rabbi’s biblical instruction was deemed so important that nothing could interrupt it — nothing, that is, except a wedding celebration. A wedding celebration was regarded so important that a rabbi would interrupt his exposition of the sacred text so that he and his students could join in the festivities.

“Life in my company”, says Jesus, “is rich, satisfying and exhilarating — like the deepest marriage you can imagine. If the rabbi’s students are allowed to party when the wedding-procession moves through town, then surely my disciples can do as much in my company. For the joy my disciples find in me outweighs the difficulty they have on account of me. They know that life with me is worth it; always!” So says Jesus.

Recall the parable of the pearl: a man comes upon a pearl so beautiful that he sells everything he owns to buy it and still feels it has cost him nothing.

Recall the woman who spent a year’s wages on a bottle of perfume and then poured it over our Lord’s feet. She gave up all she had — and felt she had given up nothing.

Recall Jean Vanier visiting hospital patients in a Cleveland slum. He came upon a poor black woman, sick unto death, who had been vomiting all day. Vanier was so taken aback at her poverty and her sickness and her thoroughgoing misery that he didn’t know what comfort to offer. He simply placed his hand on her head and said, “Jesus.” “I been walking with him forty years”, she croaked.

What, then, can disciples expect? We can expect the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord, in light of which everything else in life is relativized. We can also expect the world’s hostility. Ultimately, however, we shall know a satisfaction in him that is but dimly mirrored in the satisfaction that the best-matched couple find in each other. “I been walking with him forty years.”

                                                                      Victor A. Shepherd
March 1995

 

Meekness: Is It Weakness? Creepiness?

   Matthew 5:1-12          Numbers 12:1-9        2nd Corinthians 10:1-8

   What comes to mind as soon as you hear the word “meek”? Most likely, “weak”. Meekness is weakness, in the minds of most people. Think of the associations that surround “meek” for most people. A meek fellow is “milquetoast”, someone who falls over as soon as huffed upon and puffed upon. Or a meek fellow is a “creep”, like Uriah Heep, a character in one of Charles Dickens’ novels. Uriah Heep likes to ooze alongside people, wringing his hands and whimpering, “I’m so humble, you know, so very humble.” He’s not humble at all; he’s merely “creepy.” A meek fellow may be the sort of person the clergy are depicted to be in movies and plays 50% of the time: harmless to be sure, but laughable in their naiveness and their gullibility and their trusting simple-mindedness. (I say 50% of the time, for the other 50% of the time movies and plays depict the clergy as cold and cruel.) Something’s wrong in our understanding, because Jesus speaks of himself as “meek and lowly in heart.” Something’s wrong in our understanding, because the book of Numbers reports, “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth.” (Num. 12:3) Moses is the meekest of all, and Moses, everyone knows, is the figure in Israel who looms larger than anyone else. Moses towers over prophets, kings, priests, seers. Moses is tougher than rawhide, more resilient than spring steel, more durable than Tie Domi. And Moses is meek, the meekest ever. Moses is meek. Jesus is meek. Christ’s people are to be meek, for the meek are destined to inherit the earth. Paul tells the Christians in the Colosse to clothe themselves in meekness. James insists that Christians are to exemplify the meekness born of true wisdom. Then what is meekness? Before we probe the apostles’ understanding of the work and the manner in which it characterises our discipleship, we must understand that the Greek word pra/utes, “meek”, had a long history in the philosophy of ancient Greece centuries before the apostles took the word over. The ancient philosopher Xenophenon described as meek that wild horse which has been tamed but whose spirit has never been broken. Because the wild horse has been tamed, it’s useful; yet because its spirit hasn’t been broken the horse is still lively, vigorous, energetic. The ancient philosopher Plato used it of the victorious general who spares a conquered people. The general has triumphed, to be sure; yet he allows to live and thrive even the people he could have annihilated. Plato also used the word pra/utes, “meek”, of a physician who does whatever he has to do in order to treat the patient effectively, and yet whose treatment causes the patient the least pain possible. The ancient philosopher Socrates described as meek the person who can argue tellingly a matter of utmost importance to him yet do so without losing his temper. The ancient philosopher Aristotle used the word of the person who is properly angry at shocking injustice yet whose anger never degenerates into ill-temper or vindictiveness or a spirit of retaliation. Now when we bring together all these illustrations from the world of ancient Greek philosophy, it’s plain that meekness is strength exercised through gentleness. The wild horse now tamed is a horse gentle enough to harness yet strong enough to work. The triumphant general is plainly strong or he wouldn’t have triumphed, yet every bit as gentle or he wouldn’t have spared the conquered people. The physician is so very gentle as not to hurt the patient unnecessarily, yet so very resolute as to effect a cure. So far from weakness, meekness is strength exercised through gentleness. One week before his death Jesus enters Jerusalem . It’s called “the triumphal entry”, and so it is. For our Lord is the conquering one; he asserts his rulership over the entire creation. But he doesn’t assert his rulership over the creation the way Stalin asserted his over Russia , callously slaying thirty million people in the worst reign of terror the world has ever seen. Jesus asserts his rulership by subjecting himself to his subjects. The throne from which he rules is a cross, even as the crown that attests his kingly office is a crown of thorns. Our Lord is sovereign; and the strength of his sovereignty is exercised through gentleness. The meekness that characterises our Lord’s life he expects to characterize ours too. “Learn of me”, he says, “for I am meek and lowly in heart.” Then we must learn of him, for discipleship is a matter of having his life reproduced in us. We must come to exercise strength through gentleness. We must be people who are impassioned yet gentle at the same time, effective without being coercive, vigorous without being wild. [1] Scripture speaks of several situations where we are called to be meek. One is the situation where someone has to be corrected. Paul writes to the church in Galatia , “Friends, if someone in your congregation is detected in some sin, you who are spiritually sensitive should set him right. But do it meekly, gently.” There are two mistakes we can make when someone in our fellowship is found to have been overtaken in sin. One mistake is to assume that nothing needs to be said or done. This appears to be an act of kindness but in fact is an act of cruelty, since it’s never a kindness to leave such a person with the ghastly illusion that “everything’s all right.” This isn’t to say that such a person is to be corrected by every last member of the congregation; it isn’t to say that the entire congregation even has to be informed. But how could Christians who are aware of a brother’s misstep or a sister’s folly allow that person to stumble farther and farther into what can only poison her, harm others, and finally help no one at all? To see a fellow-Christian meandering or galloping farther and farther into sin, mind blinded and heart hardened as rationalisations become ever more fanciful and ridiculous; to be aware of this and do nothing is to fail in love toward that person. The second mistake, of course, is to correct such a person but not correct her meekly, in a spirit of gentleness. There have been times when I was sure I was righteously redressing injustice, and may in fact have been doing just that – when at the same time someone else noticed that my sub-agenda was revenge. I should never want to be made aware of my vengefulness in such a way as to humiliate me publicly; at the same time, it would never be a kindness to leave me uncorrected, for then my sin-compromised heart-condition would only worsen. There have been occasions when someone took me aside and told me quietly that the “joke” that I thought funny enough to tell others in fact wounded many. To be sure, it wounded them precisely where I had no idea it would, or else I wouldn’t have told it. Still, the fact that I wounded others unknowingly doesn’t mean for a minute that I shouldn’t be corrected. As much as I need to be corrected, however, I want to be corrected gently. Everyone knows that offence can be taken where offence has been given. Offence can also be given, however, where no offence was intended. And offence can be taken where no offence has been given. These are three situations where correction is needed. If offence is given intentionally, the offender should be taken aside and corrected, albeit gently. If no offence was intended but was given nevertheless, then the offender should be informed that while he intended no offence (at least consciously) he’s still guilty of offence, and should therefore be corrected. But if no offence was given at all yet someone takes “offence”, then the fault lies with the “offended” person; this time it’s not the offender but rather the offended who should be taken aside and led to see that the offence is merely imagined, however much the “offended” person was pricked by the imagined offence. These three scenarios are played out before us every day. In each case a different approach is needed. In one case it’s the offended person (offended by imagined offence) who is to be corrected; in the other two cases, the offender. How effective correction is in any situation depends largely on how that correction is administered. Angry denunciation ends only in a flare-up. Caustic rebuke provokes retaliation. Mocking contempt produces smouldering rage that burns underground for ever so long but finally bursts into a flame that consumes everything it can lick. No one is genuinely humbled by public humiliation. No one is helped to own her own “baggage” by having it ridiculed. No one is brought to repentance by being taunted or lampooned or laughed at. And of course no one is moved to a fresh start in life by having to defend himself where he’s indefensible, to be sure, but where he has to defend himself in order to survive psychically. To be sure, you and I can be corrected profoundly only if we are addressed vigorously and persistently. At the same time, we will be corrected only if we are addressed gently. Our Lord was never gentler than he was the day he spared the life of a guilty woman about to be stoned, and then put her on her feet saying, “I’m not going to condemn you. You shouldn’t do it again.”   [2] Another situation where scripture urges meekness is our witness as Christians. The apostle Peter writes, “Be ready at all times to answer anyone who asks you to explain the hope you have in you. But do it meekly.” We Christians ought to be able to say something when we are asked about the faith that possesses us. If we know whereof we speak when we say, “I believe in Jesus Christ”, then we ought also to be able to say more than this by way of amplifying this or explicating it. It isn’t pretended for a moment that we ought all to be world-class apologists for the faith, able to counter the arguments of nay-sayers who may be merely clever but who also may have very searching arguments against the Christian faith. Still, when our child asks us who Jesus is, or our teenager asks us why she should have to go to church, or our newly-bereaved neighbour asks us about the future of the deceased; here, the apostle Peter tells us, we must both have something to say and say it gently. Would we ever be tempted to say it non-gently? Would we ever be tempted to commend our Lord nastily? I think we might be, depending on the context. To be sure, when the child asks us what’s good about Good Friday, or when the puzzled teenager questions us about the prevalence of evil in a world ruled by one who is both good and mighty, it would be difficult to imagine anyone replying in an ugly manner or displaying a nasty mood. There are other contexts, however, where the Christian is mandated to speak and where we can be tempted to reply non-meekly. Such contexts, I think, are those where Christian discipleship conflicts starkly with the life-style of so many non-Christians. Not so long ago I was in a high school in Toronto where the notice board informed students of an upcoming party and advised them, “Bring your own condom.” Now parents whose convictions impel them to say and do and protest what should be said and done and protested because they are properly incensed are likely to say and should say why they are incensed (what Peter calls explaining the faith that possesses us); at the same time, just because they are incensed they will be tempted to say the right thing in the wrong manner, tempted to speak the truth but assault the person to whom they are speaking, tempted to speak the truth but impugn the integrity of the hearer, tempted to speak the truth but do anything except “speak the truth in love.” (Eph. 4:15) Where our convictions concerning a Christian life-style starkly conflict with the life-style that is touted and exemplified all around us we are much more prone to uphold the truth and at the same time regard those who differ from us as stupid or malicious or apparently sub-human. Having to criticize the positions that others hold, we are always in danger of allowing criticism of a position to degenerate into contempt for those who hold it. And of course it will then be “obvious” that all such people are greater sinners than we are ourselves. It’s here that all such temptation has to be resisted. Yes, we are to be ready to speak on behalf of the truth that has seized us, and of course we shall do speak as strongly as we can. Just as surely we must temper our strength with gentleness. Meekness isn’t weakness; meekness is strength exercised through gentleness, and this adorns the Christian as surely as it exalts our Lord.   [3] Lastly, we must consider the matter of leadership. Moss is said to be the meekest man on earth. (Numbers 12:3) Then is Moses ineffective? a pushover? spineless? voiceless? On the contrary, Moses is the single most telling figure in Israel ’s history. Miriam and Aaron, the sister and brother of Moses, “speak against Moses”; that is, they denounce him, speak ill of him, try to turn the people against him – and do all of this because Moses has married a Cushite woman. Now the Cushites were Ethiopians. In other words, Moses had married a woman who was likely neither Jewish nor Caucasian. Moses’ wife is a gentile woman and black as well? His was a mixed marriage mixed twice over. Miriam and Aaron, already resenting Moses’ place in Israel , now resent him even more. “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” they ask the people, “Hasn’t the Lord spoken through us too?” No one is saying the Lord hasn’t. Still, Moses occupies a position before God, on behalf of the people, that Miriam and Aaron will never occupy. We are told that whereas God inspires and equips and moves the prophets by means of vision and dream, God speaks with Moses “mouth to mouth.” At the end of his life it will be said of Moses that the Lord knew him face to face.” (Deut. 34:10) Before God, on behalf of the people, Moses occupies a place greater than that of any prophet, great than that even of Elijah , Israel ’s greatest prophet. Moses is a giant before God, the mediator of God’s covenant with Israel , and this man is pronounced meeker than anyone else on earth. Moses is a colossus but he doesn’t coerce. He stands taller than anyone else but he doesn’t tyrannise. He doesn’t stand above his people when they sin. He doesn’t stand apart from them when they meander in the wilderness. He remains intimately identified with them even as he bears the tension of leading them. Moses is possessed of immense authority (none greater in Israel ) even as he displays no authoritarianism. The difference is crucial. Authoritarianism is the manner in which tyrants and bullies threaten and throw their weight around. Authority is what genuine leaders display as their people recognise their gifts and graces. People know that the tyrant’s authoritarianism is a curse upon them. Just as surely they know that the leader’s authority is a blessing. Meekness, strength exercised through gentleness, is authority manifested and acknowledged. Which do we want: authority or authoritarianism? What kind of rulers do we need? What mood and mindset do we think should permeate our society? Some of us are parents, some schoolteachers, some employers, some leaders of church groups or community organisations. All of us are voters. Perhaps this is the most telling point: all of us are voters. Surely we want to live under neither ineffective “wimps” nor authoritarian arm-twisters. Moses was the both the meekest and the most effective. (After all, the whole of western society is unimaginable without the Ten Words he brought with him from Sinai.) Did I say Moses was the meekest? Surely our Lord was meeker still when he did his most effective work at the cross. Little wonder he has told his followers, “Take my yoke upon you (bind yourself to me) and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.” (Matt. 11:29) Our Lord has promised that the meek are going to inherit the earth. He doesn’t mean that those who are meek now are going to get their chance later to tyrannise others and profit from it as well. He means something very different. In rabbinic teaching of first century Palestine “earth” referred to the messianic age. To say that the meek are going to inherit the earth is to say that Christ’s people, cruciform in their faith and understanding and doing, are going to share in the messianic age in the company of the messiah himself. They will be found in his company, rejoicing in him and in each other, on that day when wrong is righted, injustice redressed, and tears wiped from eyes so as to leave dried eyes never weeping again.                                                                                                       Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                    2004  

The Heart Of The Matter

Matthew 5:1-14   Matthew 5:8    Jeremiah 17:5-10   1st Peter 1:3-9

 

I have been a minister of the gospel now for 37 years. In this time the gospel has never ceased to shine brightly for me. No doubt many of you could say as much for yourself concerning the gospel. We know that there is no substitute for it, just because we know that the gospel (which is to say, the living Lord Jesus Christ himself in his presence and power) penetrates to the innermost core of our humanness as nothing else can.  The gospel effects the profoundest alteration within us as nothing else will. To have been seized by the gospel ourselves; to know that the gospel is the outer expression of the inner being and character of God; to have witnessed again and again the life-long transmutation the gospel effects in those who become steeped in it — what is this but to have a confidence in the gospel that no secularism can dilute nor ecclesiastical betrayal diminish?

From time to time I relish preaching a simple sermon from a simple text simply to remind us all once more of the truth and trenchancy of the gospel. One such text comes from our Lord’s short statement in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”.

 

[1]         When Jesus declares that the pure in heart are going to see God he doesn’t mean, of course, that we shall see God with our eyes; the blind person will not be at a disadvantage.   He means that the pure in heart will know an intimacy with God that has the ring of authenticity about it.  The pure in heart will be acquainted with the mind and will and purpose and way of God so as to know what good is to be pursued and what non-good is to be repudiated. The pure in heart will find a satisfaction in God that renders them unseduceable in the face of the religious and ideological smorgasbords that hold out so much yet deliver so little.  This is the blessing imparted as promised to the pure in heart.

 

[2]         And yet as surely as our Lord knows this and declares it plainly, he knows something else and states it starkly: the human heart isn’t pure. It has to become pure, be made pure, for right now it isn’t.  Many different words can describe our heart-condition: fragmented, corrupt, self-serving, blind, contradictory, insensitive, silly, uncontrollable, inconstant. The list is endless.

So many different words describe the heart of fallen humankind just because a heart-condition is the most serious condition we can have. You see, “heart” is the metaphor scripture uses most frequently to speak of what it is to be a human being under God. “Heart” is the single most important metaphor for understanding human complexity and the relation of complex elements within us.  The heart is the “control centre” of feeling, thinking, willing and discerning.

Let’s think first of affect, desire.  The heart is the seat of our feelings, our desires, our passions.  The heart of fallen humankind, however, is disordered: we desire what we were never meant to have and fail to desire what we need to have.  We passionately pursue what will only prove ruinous and just as passionately avoid what would be our salvation.

How messed-up is the human heart?   As the seat of feeling it feels dreadful when the favourite political party loses the election or the hometown sports team loses the game, yet feels nothing at all when God is dishonoured.  Recall how you felt the last time you were slighted.  Even if you were slighted ever so slightly, you were outraged.  What did you feel when last you heard Jesus Christ insulted?   Likely you felt nothing.

 

The heart is also the seat of thought and understanding.  In fallen humankind thinking, then, is distorted too.  It’s not the case that we can no longer think consistently, think logically; we can. Fallen humankind remains able to do algebra marvellously.  Rather it’s the case that our thinking serves the wrong end.  Our thinking, as logically rigorous as ever, now churns out “reasons” that rationalize temptation, make excuses for sin, render our selfishness perfectly reasonable and our depravity perfectly acceptable. Paul says our thinking has become “futile”.  He doesn’t mean that we can’t reason — the structure of reason survives the Fall (or else we shouldn’t be human);  he means that our reasoning leads us to futility, a dead end — because the integrity of reason has collapsed (reason’s integrity doesn’t survive the Fall.) Our thinking leads not to an intellectual dead end; it leads us, rather, to intellectual riches that are a human dead end. When he insists that our “senseless minds are darkened” he doesn’t mean that we can’t do biology; he means that our biology serves a dark end and we promote biological and germ warfare.  Not that we can’t perform electronic wizardry, but that we deploy electronic surveillance and super-sophisticated munitions and thereby dehumanize ourselves. The heart is the seat of thought and understanding; when the heart isn’t pure our thinking — as rigorous as ever — promotes a destructive, deadly end.

 

For our Hebrew foreparents the heart is also the seat of the will.  Our will is our doing. We have a bent will; it has a bent toward doing what it shouldn’t.  No child has to be taught to misbehave.  No adult has to be schooled in vindictiveness, grudge-holding, spite, envy.   I am forever amazed at intelligent people who endorse the liberal myth of history, the liberal myth being that history is the unfolding of human progress. They assume that humanly to do is inevitably to do better.  To be sure, humankind does advance technically (laser surgery is a technical advance on the application of leeches), yet humankind never advances humanly. How anyone can believe in human progress is beyond me, given overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In view of the countless generations of human beings who have come and gone upon the earth, the cumulative effect of even a smidgen of progress per generation should have rendered us all angelic by now. Yet the twentieth century, just concluded, saw unparalleled savagery, thanks to the unholy marriage of technology and darkened minds.  Actually, upon reflection I’m not amazed that intelligent people believe in the myth of progress.  After all, one aspect of the darkened mind is that even intelligent people prefer palatable falsehood to unpalatable truth.

 

The heart is also the seat of spiritual life.  We were created to recognize God, respond to him and rejoice in him. But our heart, afflicted with the profoundest kind of heart trouble we shall ever have, does not recognize God but instead prefers idols both crude and sophisticated. We do not respond to God but instead reject him.  We do not rejoice in God but instead seek satisfaction everywhere else.

 

Scripture uses one word predominantly to speak of our heart, one word that gathers up all other descriptions in itself: hard.  Hard in the sense of stony, unyielding, insensitive, obstinate, rigid; simply hard. It doesn’t beat, doesn’t throb, doesn’t pump life-sustaining blood.

 

[3]           On the other hand, whenever scripture speaks of the heart made new at God’s hand it uses a wonderful variety of expressions: heart of flesh (it beats, throbs, pulsates, pumps), holy heart, reverent heart, broken heart, contrite heart, new heart, pure heart, circumcised heart.

          Circumcised heart? What on earth is a circumcised heart? Circumcision was the indelible sign, the ineradicable sign, the undisguisable sign that this person in particular had been pledged from infancy to love God and thank him and obey him and delight in him. The prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul, both Jews to whom circumcision was non-negotiable, nonetheless insisted that if one’s heart wasn’t circumcised there was no point in circumcising anything else.  Circumcision not matched by a circumcision of the heart, said both Isaiah and Paul, is but a misleading sign, a deceptive sign, a fraudulent sign. Baptism not matched by faith; church membership not matched by service; Sunday attendance not matched by sacrifice — a misleading sign, a deceptive sign, a fraudulent sign. It’s the circumcision of the heart that identifies someone as pledged to the love and service and satisfaction of God.

 

[4]         Jesus insists that it is the pure in heart who see God.  A pure heart isn’t a state of faultlessness, sinlessness, or perfection. A pure heart, rather, is a singleminded heart, a heart dedicated to one, all-consuming pursuit: God. But if the heart is already in the mess we have described at length, if the heart is in so great a mess that it will never be able to purify itself, then how will anyone come to have that pure, singleminded heart which sees God? If the messed-up heart can’t even recognize the truth of God, then how can the messed-up heart even get to the point of knowing that it is messed-up?   How can the messed-up heart determine to be singleminded when the messed-up heart isn’t even aware of heart-trouble and would laugh off singlemindedness as soon as it heard of it?

In order to answer this question I must acquaint you with a most significant aspect of the thought of the universal church.  Throughout its history the church has spoken much of prevenient grace. Pre, “before”; venire, “to come”. Prevenient grace is grace that comesbefore; comes before we are aware of grace, comes before we are possessed of faith, comes before we know our need of grace, before we have even heard of grace. Prevenient grace is the hidden work of God in the heart of every human being quietly preparing that person for the moment when the morning dawns and the truth flashes and he who has always been the light of the world is finally recognized and acknowledged to be this.  Prevenient grace is that preparatory work of God, unknown to those in whom prevenient grace is at work, bringing someone to that point where our Lord’s saying, “Only the pure in heart are going to see God”, is recognized as true; to that point where purity of heart (singlemindedness concerning God) is all-important just because seeing God is desired now above all else.

When our forebears in Christian understanding spoke of prevenient grace they knew that the gospel-seed which they sowed they were always sowing in soil that God had already, beforehand, ploughed and fertilized and watered and prepared in every way to receive that gospel-seed which would otherwise never germinate and yield faith.         Prevenient grace is the anticipatory work of God in the heart-troubled heart quietly rendering us dissatisfied with our present satisfactions, quietly quickening in us a desire for “something more” even though we can’t specify what the “more” is, quietly moving us toward that day when the gospel rings in our hearing with such authenticity that we wonder where we could have been for twenty-five years. Prevenient grace is that preparatory work of God, of which we have never been conscious, bringing us to the point of conscious faith and quickened discipleship.  In other words, prevenient grace has been operating within us, quietly rendering us able to see and want and seize the new heart, the circumcised heart, which is nothing else than the self-giving of our Lord Jesus Christ forging himself within us.

 

[5]           What is the result of all this going to be?   Paul maintains that the result of Christ’s “dwelling inour hearts by faith” is that we have “power to comprehend the breadth and length and height anddepth of Christ’s love”.(Eph.3:17-18)   Breadth, length, height, depth: Paul is speaking here of the vastness of Christ’s love for us, the sheer enormity of it.  To speak of Christ’s love for us in terms of its breadth, length, height and depth is to know that Christ’s love is the environment, the atmosphere in which we live, regardless of what we are about.  Christ’s love reaches so high that it towers above even our highest cultural achievements; so deep that our bottommost depravity cannot sink us beneath it; so broad and long that everything about us unfolds within this dimension. When we were born we were born into this love, and when we die we shall die into this love in its greater transparency.  The apostle is careful to point out that as Christ dwells in our hearts by faith we have the “power to comprehend” Christ’s inexhaustible, immeasurable love for us.  To comprehend such love, needless to say, doesn’t mean that we merely grasp the idea of it; to comprehend it is to be seized by it, to be possessed by it. And to be possessed by it is to have a singleminded passion for him whose love it is. And to have this singleminded passion is what it is to be pure in heart.

The apostle James insists that the “doubleminded person is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:7-8)   Of course. The doubleminded person is always trying to move in two contradictory directions at once, always trying to uphold two contradictory loyalties at once, always struggling with two contradictory impulses at once, with the result that he is constantly distracted, constantly frustrated, constantly heart-troubled. Kierkegaard knew better: “Purity of heart is to will one thing”, the Danish philosopher never tired of saying. Paul knew that to have the power to comprehend Christ’s passionate love for us is to be freed to love him with a similar passion.

As we do so love our Lord the miracle of the new heart occurs, the circumcised heart, the heart of flesh.  And as this takes hold of us everything of which the heart is the seat takes hold of us as well.

Since the heart is the seat of feeling and desire we come to desire above all else what is of God and therefore good and therefore good for us.  Since the heart is the seat of thought and understanding we come to cherish the truth of God and the truth about the world and the truth about ourselves, however out-of-step we appear to be with those whose unremedied heart-trouble finds them misunderstanding life and romanticising death and rationalizing what we now see to be blatantly false. Since the heart is the seat of the will our bent will comes to be straightened enough that at least we want to “do the truth”, in John’s splendid phrase, and begin to do it.  Since the heart is the seat of our life in God we taste what it is to recognize him, respond to him and rejoice in him. All of this arises from a singleminded love that Jesus names “purity of heart”.

There is one more thing we must be sure we understand about our Lord’s word. When he says, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”, he doesn’t mean merely that they are going to see God in some far-off future.  He means that singlemindedness issues now in an intimacy with him that we know and cherish, issues now in an acquaintance with God’s will and way that strikes us as the only way, issues now in a satisfaction that ends all groping and guessing.

 

At the beginning of the sermon I said that the gospel has never ceased to shine brightly for me. My confidence in the gospel is unshaken.  I trust yours is too. For together we want only to persist in that singlemindedness which finds us “seeing God” now through the eyes of faith, and will find us seeing him even more gloriously on that day when faith gives way to sight, and hope gives way to hope’s fulfilment, and love gives way to nothing — except more love to him who has loved us always and always will.

                                Victor Shepherd   
2008

You asked for a sermon on Who Are The Poor?

Matthew 5:3     Mark 14:3-9    Luke 6:20     Jonah 4:11    Isaiah 55:1-2   Galatians 2:10

[1] Who are the poor, anyway? Those who lack money? In 1968 I was an impecunious student at the University of Toronto. But even though I lacked money, was I poor? That year I was hospitalized for forty-five consecutive days. I was seen daily by the physician who admitted me, as well as by the orthopaedic surgeon who had me placed in a body-cast. When I was discharged from hospital the orthopaedist continued to see me until he deemed me fit to play hockey again. I had received medical treatment incomparably better than the treatment 99% of the world will ever see; I was treated him a hospital whose services cost hundreds of dollars per bed per day. At the end of it all my expenses were zero.

In 1986 my mother, seventy years old, was hospitalized for seventy-five consecutive days. She too was billed nothing. She is kept alive by the excellent care she receives from a cardiologist. He is a chemical magician whose prescriptions leave my mother’s bedside table resembling a bowlful of “Smarties”. Since she is over sixty-five she pays nothing directly for her medication. Could she ever be poor?

A few days ago I took the several cases of applejuice which Maureen had purchased to Foodpath, our well-known foodbank. When I arrived I found many clients waiting to have a food-hamper filled. None of them appeared rich. But in view of the fact that they would never be allowed to go hungry, how poor were they when compared to the 35,000 people who starve to death every day?

So far I have not attempted a definition of poverty and will not attempt one now. But I will say this much: if to be poor is to be without food, clothing, elemental education and medical care, then it would appear difficult to be poor in Canada.

Yet even in Canada there are those whose material misery (to speak of only one kind of misery) is so very pronounced that we do not hesitate to call them poor, regardless of the definition of poverty. Think of the families who are “double-bunked” in Cooksville. (There are 25,000 “double-bunked” people in Toronto, but I mention Cooksville in that Cooksville is the area of Mississauga where the practice is most apparent.) One family, adults and children, rents a two-bedroom apartment-unit. The entire family sleeps in one bedroom. This family in turn sub-lets its second bedroom to another family. Now we have seven, eight, nine people living in a two-bedroom apartment, elbowing each other aside to get into kitchen and washroom. Can you imagine the frustration, the flare-ups, born of overcrowding? Is it any wonder that from time-to-time someone “boils over” and the police are called to yet another domestic irruption? What school-performance can be expected of children in such a setting? Two television sets blaring, no defensible space, no solitude, no incentive to study. A further dimension, a frightening dimension, to this state of affairs is this: since education is the single most effective means of escaping poverty, lack of educational opportunity and encouragement fixes yet another generation in the same sort of poverty.

When I was living undercover in Parkdale while researching my magazine article on chronically mentally ill people I learned that the more severe one’s illness (itself a form of poverty, intellectual and emotional poverty), the worse one’s living accommodation. I visited several of the infamous boarding houses in Parkdale. The worst one — indescribable, really — housed two dozen people who were utterly deranged. Never mind that social assistance pays their rent and thus forestalls death by exposure; never mind that when they have appendicitis they can get a free appendectomy; they are deranged, they live in degrading filth, and throwing eversomuch more money at them would still find them poor in any non-economic sense of the term.

Who are the poor? When I was newly-ordained Maureen and I found ourselves in a small village of northeastern New Brunswick. Most families there were sustained by fishing or lumberjacking or peat-bog excavating. The villages surrounding ours were sustained in the same way. Yet the villages surrounding ours were manifestly wretched! Shanty-houses with earth floors; two-by-four partitions but no walls, with the result that the entire house was illuminated (as it were) by a single unshaded lightbulb dangling from the ceiling-peak (if the house had electricity). All of us have seen icicles hanging from the outside of a home; have you ever seen them hanging from the inside? Why was it that our village and the neighbouring villages fished the same water and cut the same trees, yet our village appeared relatively resplendent?

When we moved east Maureen and I had just finished reading Catherine Marshall’s novel, Christie, with its heart-catching character, Fairlie. The first time Maureen met Opal Murray she rushed home and shouted, “I’ve just met Fairlie, right out of the book!” A few days later Opal, together with a friend, called on Maureen and announced, “We’s here to learn you about babies”. (The learning “took”, I might add.) Opal and her husband Jack lived in a home which had been a fish-processing plant. They had purchased it for a few dollars, the only few dollars they had. As a result their six children had slept on straw ticks. Come Sunday morning all eight of them appeared at church radiant, happy, confident. Opal said she couldn’t afford shampoo and so she washed her children’s heads (in rural New Brunswick you don’t wash your hair, you wash your head) with a bar of Sunlight soap. When Maureen had to be hospitalized for surgery Opal and Jack had me to their home for supper. As Opal served up thick slices of bologna Jack beamed at me and said, without a hint of embarrassment but with more than a hint of triumph, “Victor, it’s poor man’s steak!” And so we feasted.

Were Jack and Opal poor? The villagers in the villages surrounding ours were certainly poor, as everyone agreed. Compared to us Streetsvillians Jack and Opal were very hard-pressed financially. (Whose children here have slept on straw ticks?) But were Jack and Opal poor, poor in any extra-financial sense?

Who are the poor, anyway? Are the Arab masses poor? They appear wretchedly poor whenever we see photographs of them. Are we to conclude that they are citizens of wretchedly poor nations? We shouldn’t draw this conclusion. After all, the per capita income of Saudi Arabia is greater than the per capita income of the U.S.A. The nation of Saudia Arabia is exceedingly rich. Then how does their claim on our charity compare to that of people in countries where the per capita income is very low?

The per capita income of Israel is lower than the per capita income of the Arab states. Yet the average Israeli is much better off materially than the average Arab. Are we to conclude, therefore, that the Israelis are less poor? On the contrary in some respects they are far more poor than the poorest of the Arabs. Surely one aspect of poverty is vulnerability. Israel is far more vulnerable than any Arab state. Right now Israel receives one-third of the U.S.A.’s foreign financial allotment: ten billion dollars per year. Ten billion dollars per year are spent on a country whose entire population is scarcely larger than that of metropolitan Toronto. The twenty-two Arab nations (whose population outnumbers Israel’s 100 to 1) which surround Israel have vowed, in the Arab Covenant, the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of every living Jew. What will happen when either external pressure or internal pressure forces the U.S.A to alter its support? Israel is at risk in a way that no Arab state appears to be at risk. I can foresee the day when external or internal pressure (or both together) will force the U.S.A. to alter its support. On that day Israel will disappear in blood, while the Arab nations, with their unquestionably wretched masses, will survive. So who is poor?

Who are the poor, anyway? Consider this: anyone is poor who lacks recognition. When Elie Wiesel was a fifteen year-old in Auschwitz an S.S. guard taunted him, “I know why you want to survive, young man; you want to survive in order to tell the world how horrific Auschwitz and its perpetrators were. But the world will never believe you. So horrific is this camp that humankind will refuse to believe this of itself. No one will believe your testimony, and you will have survived for naught.” Not to be recognized is to be poor.

On the other hand to be recognized is always to be non-poor, whether one has much money or little. Ned Vladomansky was a Czechoslovakian hockey player whom Harold Ballard wanted for the Leafs. Because Vladomansky the hockey player was recognized his escape from Czechoslovakia was engineered and his flight to Canada paid for even as Canadian immigration officials lied through their teeth and falsified every document they laid their hands on, as ordered by their political superiors. Never mind that Vladomansky was a dud as an N.H.L. player and therefore didn’t draw a rich man’s salary. He was recognized. People in Ireland have waited twenty-five years to emigrate to Canada. But they aren’t recognized. They are poor.

Who are the poor, anyway? I am not going to answer the question. I shall allow you to answer the question for yourself. We must each answer the question for ourselves. Who are the poor? “Does Victor mean merely those who lack money? or also those who lack health, lack friends, lack opportunity, lack responsible parents, lack support?” I cannot reply. We must each answer the question, “Who are the poor?”, for ourselves.

 

[2] All of which brings me to the second point of the sermon. The apostle Paul tells the church in Galatia that he is “eager to remember the poor”. He insists that all Christians remember the poor. Now because the Streetsville congregation has been schooled in the Hebrew meaning of “remember” you will recall that to remember, in Hebrew, does not mean to recall an idea or a notion or a concept. To remember is to make something outside ourselves in space and time a living actuality within ourselves right now. At the last supper, when Jesus took bread and wine and said, “Do this in remembrance of me”, he didn’t mean that we are to recall the idea or notion of his sacrifice. He meant that his sacrifice, which bears our sin, bears our sin away, and forms the pattern or template of our discipleship; his sacrifice, outside us in space and time, is to become living actuality within us — now and always. As we “remember” his sacrifice we find our sin borne and borne away, live in the freedom which is now ours, and cheerfully walk the road of crossbearing discipleship ourselves. When the apostle tells us we are to remember the poor he means that that which is outside us is to become a living actuality within us so that our heartbeat and the heartbeat of the poor are one. We have identified ourselves so thoroughly with the poor that they now have the freedom and the desire to identify themselves with us.

And who are these poor whom we have identified as poor? That is known only to us. Of course it could be someone without money or dental plan who needs dental work done. It could just as easily be the richest person in town whose grief or loneliness or anxiety are off the chart. It could be the youngster whose appearance or manner or ethnicity find him picked on. It could be the deranged person who has been robbed again inasmuch as schizophrenics are easy to rob and hurt. Who are the poor? We must each decide for ourselves. But once we have decided, we must be sure to “remember” them.

The romantics among us like to romanticize poverty. How silly! There is nothing at all romantic about poverty, as the poor have always known. The romantics among us who like to romanticize poverty assume there is something righteous about poverty. But there isn’t. If poverty were righteous then it would be our responsibility to increase the world’s poverty, thereby increasing the world’s righteousness. On the contrary, scripture insists that poverty is evil; like any evil it must be resisted and repulsed, even eradicated.

“But wasn’t Jesus poor himself?” It all depends on what we mean by “poor”. He wasn’t financially poor. During the years of his public ministry he was never gainfully employed. Anyone who can thrive without being gainfully employed is not poor financially. Jesus (and the twelve) were funded by wealthy women. He never hesitated to accept their support. He never hesitated to eat and drink the sumptuous fare which the rich offered him — even to the extent that his enemies accused him of “pigging out” and overdoing the wine. When he died soldiers gambled for his cloak, so valuable did they deem it; they didn’t toss it aside as worthless. Then was our Lord poor? Who are the poor? Now I shall attempt an answer: the poor are those in extreme need, extreme need of any sort. Was our Lord ever in extreme need? I recall reading that he wept, he sweat blood, he cried out, he was so distracted that he stumbled repeatedly. The poor are those in extreme need, any sort of need.

We must say a few more things about the poor.

 

(i) While poverty is never pronounced righteous, it is pronounced blessed. In Luke’s gospel Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”; in Matthew’s gospel, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. “Kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven” amount to the same thing. What about “poor” and “poor in spirit”? Do they amount to the same thing? “Blessed are the poor” means “blessed are those in extreme need”. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” means “blessed are those who admit their spiritual emptiness, their spiritual hollowness, their spiritual inertness”. The two expressions don’t mean exactly the same thing. Nonetheless those who are in extreme need are more likely to admit spiritual need. Poverty is blessed, says Jesus, not because poverty is good (poverty is evil); it is blessed just because the poor are more likely to cry to God with the hymnwriter, “Nothing in my hand I bring; nothing!”

Jesus pronounces poverty blessed in that the poor are more likely to see that the consolations of the world are finally spurious. One of the world’s consolations is wealth. Has wealth ever improved the spiritual condition of anyone? It has spelled the spiritual ruin of countless. What does wealth bring finally but a shrunken heart? Another of the world’s consolations is adulation. What does adulation bring finally but a swollen head? Poverty isn’t blessed because poverty is good; poverty is blessed because those in extreme need have the fewest pretences about themselves and their profounder need, even their ultimate need — which need, of course, is their need of the saving God. The more extreme our need, the less likely we are to think we need nothing; the less likely we are to think that we don’t even need the One who claims us for himself by his generosity in creation and claims us for himself again by his mercy in redemption.

When we come upon extreme need of any sort what do we do? What step do we take to “remember” the poor? I do not think we can specify this in advance; there is no formula or recipe which tells us what to do about the specific evil of this or that specific need. There is only our Spirit-sensitized discernment of poverty of any sort; there is only the unshrunken heart which throbs with the suffering of a fellow-sufferer; there is only the unswollen head which apprehends specific cross which a specific disciple is to shoulder in view of someone else’s specific need.

The one thing we must never do, of course, is use the text, “The poor you have with you always” (Mark 14:9), as a pretext for doing nothing. A grateful woman lavishes the costliest perfume — twenty ounces of “Escape” — on our Lord. Some hard-hearted nit-pickers pick, “It could have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor”. Yes, it could have. But life can’t be reduced to the functional. Unselfconscious gratitude can’t be measured. Love can’t be exchanged for currency. The kingdom of God, while certainly including the material, cannot be reduced to the material. The woman’s gratitude was incalculable just because her spiritual need had been incalculable and our Lord’s gift of himself to her incalculable. Those who object to what she has done are not yet poor in spirit themselves; would to God they were simply poor, for if they were poor they might also be poor in spirit and then would find themselves made rich by the only Saviour they can ever have.

 

(ii) The last point I am going to make today. While not everyone is poor in the sense of extreme financial need or extreme social need or extreme emotional need, every last person is poor in the sense of extreme spiritual need. Since this is the case, we shall always be safe in beginning here as we endeavour to remember the poor.

I am moved every time I read the book of Jonah. Jonah has failed to grasp the enormity of the spiritual need of the Ninevites. Finally God jerks Jonah awake and tells Jonah that he, God, has immense pity for a vast city whose people do not know their right hand from their left. Centuries later Jesus would look out on crowds and say to his disciples, “See? Sheep without a shepherd!” But our Lord did more than say that the crowd does not know right hand from left. The Greek text tells us that at the sight of the crowd his gut knotted and pain pierced him as though he had been stabbed.

If we begin with the assumption of spiritual poverty, we shall soon find ourselves drawn into the orbit of those whose need of the Good Shepherd is extreme. Once in their orbit we shall find their needs, like ours, to be many and manifold, and manifest. At this point we shall never have to ask, “But what are we to do? How are the poor to be ‘remembered’?” We shall know. And the poor will know as well.

F I N I S

 

                                                                                                   Victor A. Shepherd
March 1993

Of War and Peace

Matthew 5:9       Jeremiah 6:14         Romans 12:18        Hebrews 12:14

I: — I have seen the veterans weep as young people belittled, even despised, their service and sacrifice. I have seen veterans rage as people too young to have faced war taunted them with “war-monger,” “killer.” I understand why the veterans weep and rage. I remember what they have told me.

I sat with one such veteran the night his fifteen-year old son was decapitated in an automobile accident. The man was shaking uncontrollably, dry-mouthed, beside himself. “I haven’t felt like this since D-Day,” he told me. What does this tell us about D-Day? Anyone whose fifteen-year old son is killed is scarred for life. Plainly anyone who survived D-Day is scarred for life.

I have long known a clergyman who served on a warship in the Royal Navy throughout World War II. To this day he sits up in bed from time-to-time, terrified, screaming, “My life-jacket; I can’t find my life-jacket.” His wife awakens him and makes him a cup of tea. Together they sit and sip and wait for the sun to rise.

The man is shell-shocked. He’s also irked. He’s irked because when he returned to England after the war his former chums, all of whom had been conscientious objectors, told him he was a cold-blooded killer. They told him this from the pinnacle of their business careers. Since many young men were in the forces during the war, those who weren’t rose extraordinarily quickly in the business world. My friend’s business career, of course, had been stalled for six years. He told his chums that had Britain been invaded (certainly this was Hitler’s intention) they would have had no business career at all – or much of anything else. But they only scoffed at him.

At the conclusion of World War II there were hundreds of airmen who had been burnt horribly. For the most part they had been Spitfire pilots. The Spitfire aircraft, so crucial in the Battle of Britain, had its fuel tank behind the flier. The fuel line ran through the cockpit to the engine in front of the flier. When the aircraft was hit and caught fire, in three seconds the heat in the cockpit was so intense that the flesh melted off the flier’s face. Those men would never have their faces restored. What sacrifice would these men continue to make for the rest of their lives? After all, how many women are going to marry a face they can’t kiss?

Those who scorn the service and sacrifice of veterans even defame them, forget one thing. They forget that they have the freedom to publicize their opinion only because those they are defaming paid the dearest price to guarantee them that freedom.

 

II: — Don’t think I’m glorifying war. I’m not. I repudiate utterly the outlook of General George Patton who said, “War is humankind’s noblest endeavour. Our humanness is never so rich, our character never so pure, as when we are waging war.” General Sherman, a Union officer in the American Civil War, was far closer to the truth when he announced, “War is hell.”

The greatest military leader in scripture is Joshua. He won many battles. Yet the bible never boasts of them. Why not? Because Israelite conviction shuns war. The Hebrew prophets refuse to sanctify war. Hebrew poets refuse to romanticize war. In his farewell address to his people, Joshua , Israel ’s greatest soldier makes no mention of his military triumphs. Why not? Because the people don’t want to hear of them; because he doesn’t want to be remembered for them; because Israel ’s Messiah is Messiah in truth only if he brings with him peace wherein swords are beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, peace wherein war isn’t learned any more.

Whenever war is mentioned someone speaks of Gandhi. Gandhi was committed to non-violent resistance.   Let’s be sure to understand something crucial about Gandhi’s movement and method. A leader can rouse the world as Gandhi did only in a setting that upholds natural justice and the right of assembly. Without the right of assembly Gandhi and his followers wouldn’t have lasted a day. Who guaranteed him the right of assembly? Who protected him against mob violence while he orchestrated protests day after day? The British Army did. Gandhi survived day after day as he continued to recommend non-violence just because he was protected by soldiers who weren’t committed to non-violence. Gandhi knew that if he were mistreated he could rely on British justice to help him. In the USA the same was true of Martin Luther King jr.: he could advocate non-violence as a means of social protest just because the Unites States government guaranteed him (by means of heavily armed personnel) the right of assembly and access to the courts.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived under a different regime: no natural justice, no guaranteed right of assembly, no protection against molestation. Bonhoeffer, initially impressed by Gandhi’s example, soon saw that Gandhi-type non-violence would do nothing to stem the rising tide of death in Germany and elsewhere. Bonhoeffer was convinced that the fastest way to end the slaughter of combatants and civilians was to assassinate Hitler. He joined a plot (unsuccessful) to do just that. He knew that in some situations the choice isn’t between taking life and not taking it; in some situations the only choice is between taking much life and taking little. This is a terrible choice. It so happens that life often traffics in terrible choices.

George Orwell, then, may have been right. Orwell said, “War has never been right; war has never been sane; but sometimes war has been necessary.”

 

II: — At the same time Orwell never lived in the nuclear era. What could be said of yesteryear’s conventional warfare can never be said of nuclear warfare. When Orwell said “War has sometimes been necessary” he meant that war has sometimes been the lesser of two evils, sometimes the only way to safeguard the victimized neighbour.

Nuclear war is different. Nuclear war can never be the lesser of two evils. We must understand that it’s impossible to win a nuclear war; it’s impossible to limit or contain nuclear war. It’s impossible for nuclear war to protect the neighbour in any way. And, we should note, it’s impossible to defend against nuclear war. Richard Nixon admitted this thirty years ago. Nixon admitted that while there might be a slight defence against the piloted bomber, there is no defence against the intercontinental missile and none against the submarine-launched missile.

Neither can we protect ourselves against nuclear radiation, fallout. Fifty years ago a small nuclear warhead was detonated on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. One hundred miles away from the point of the explosion another island was saturated with eight times the lethal dose of radiation.

A twenty-megaton warhead isn’t large by today’s standards. Nevertheless, a twenty-megaton explosion in Toronto in one second would raise the surface temperature of the city to four times the heat at the centre of the sun: 150 million degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature people don’t burn; they don’t even boil; they are vaporized, without so much as ashes left over. Anyone in Toronto who survived the blast would suffocate as the ensuing firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the air. Those outside the city would die slowly of radiation.

Why do I speak of nuclear warfare at all? Hasn’t the USSR crumbled? Let’s not be naïve: the countries of the former USSR are staggering economically. If their economic malaise worsens they could re-communize themselves tomorrow. In this case the arms race would heat up instantly. What’s more, many smaller nations now have nuclear arsenals. Who knows when these smaller nations are going to inflict nuclear war on each other? Once it began, where would it end?

 

IV: — The truth is, with present-day conventional weapons nations can wreak the kind of havoc they could only wreak with nuclear weapons thirty years ago. In other words, conventional weapons today have the killing capacity of last generation’s nuclear weapons. Conclusion: armies that don’t have nuclear weapons can kill as effectively as armies that have. Then who needs nuclear weapons? Since nuclear weapons aren’t needed, some nations will be tempted to wage conventional warfare with its new levels of killing power, but without the disadvantages of nuclear war; namely, that nuclear war is unwinnable and uncontainable. If nations think that conventional warfare (now as deadly as nuclear) is winnable and containable, then it becomes more likely that conventional warfare will break out. When it does break out it will annihilate as many people as only a nuclear war could have consumed three decades ago.

The truth is, many conventional weapons are now deadlier than nuclear weapons. The F-4 Phantom Fighter aircraft delivers greater destruction conventionally than does the nuclear cruise missile. Conventional chemical warfare can readily obliterate cities the size of Hiroshima . So who needs nuclear weapons?

The Starlight scope, a heat-sensor the size of a small telescope, can tell the difference between male and female bodies at a range of 1000 metres by means of the difference in heat given off by the pelvic areas of a man and a woman. The Starlight scope can therefore detect any heat-producing item: tank, soldier, missile-launcher, artillery piece.

Speaking of artillery, we should understand that the killing capacity of conventional artillery is 400% greater now than in World War II. In World War II TNT was the explosive in artillery shells. Today it’s plastic. Plastic explosives are far more powerful than old-fashioned TNT. It used to be that an artillery shell killed people by means of metal fragments that spewed out and struck people within a few feet of it. Today a small artillery shell only four inches in diameter but containing plastic explosive will kill anyone within 200 feet of it – but not by metal fragments; by concussion, sheer blast, without any metal fragments at all.

In World War II aiming was very inexact. It took an artillery crew six minutes to zero in on a target. Today all aiming is done by computer. The computer zeroes in on a target in fifteen seconds. In WW II it was very difficult to hit a moving target. Today laser illumination will direct an artillery projectile onto a target 30 km. away moving at 80 kmh.

So much for artillery. What about armour? In WW II a tank could penetrate 5 inches of steel plate at a range of one mile. Today a tank can penetrate 10 inches of steel plate at a range of three miles.

But of course tanks don’t merely fire at targets. Tanks are also targets to be fired at. Anti-tank guns can penetrate the most-heavily armoured tank. The truth is, however, the tank doesn’t have to be penetrated at all. One kind of anti-tank projectile doesn’t penetrate the tank; instead, when the projectile strikes the tank it spreads a “blob” of plastic explosive no bigger than a dinner plate on the tank’s surface. The dinner plate of plastic explodes so powerfully that the thick armour of the tank is dented, only dented. Still, the explosion outside the tank is so thunderous that chunks of metal are blasted off inside the tank and the crew dies instantly.

What about air power? One helicopter ( America ’s C-130H), discharging all its conventional weapons at once, can reduce all the buildings in a city block to rubble in less than one minute. So who needs nuclear weapons?

The Fuel Air Munition bomb carries an explosive liquid that is released in a dense cloud over a heavily populated city. When the cloud is properly formed a fuse in the same bomb ignites the cloud. The ensuing destruction is greater than that of many nuclear warheads. So who needs nuclear weapons?

And then there are chemical weapons. Chemical weapons are exceedingly destructive. They happen to kill exceedingly slowly. Plainly the worst feature of chemical weapons will be their psychological devastation.

While we are speaking of psychology we must be sure to understand that in any war psychiatric casualties outnumber deaths 3-1. This 3-1 ratio has remained constant since the American Civil War in the 1860s when it was found that a soldier was three times as likely to become deranged as he was to be killed. The same ratio obtained in both World Wars. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon , once again psychiatric casualties prevailed at a ratio of 3-1. (When a war ceases all sides have myriads of veterans who are psychiatrically ruined for life.)

This ratio will change when war next breaks out. It is expected, for several reasons, that the ratio of psychiatric casualties to deaths will change from 3-1 to as high as 100-1. In other words, any major conflict today will see unprecedented carnage and unprecedented craziness.

 

V: — What I have brought forward today: where does it all leave us? It should leave us hearing with unstopped ears our Lord Jesus Christ who cried, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” If our ears are really unstopped we shall note that Jesus speaks of peacemakers, not peace-wishers or peace-hopers or peace-preferrers. War, we know, “breaks out.” But peace never “breaks out.” Peace has to be made.   Jesus insists that peace, unlike war, has to be made. Then we must never begrudge money and effort given over to peacemaking. We must never begrudge money spent on international travels and visits and exchanges. For as long as we are meeting one another we recognise a common humanness in each other. As long as we are meeting each other we de-mystify our neighbour as ogre or monster or less-than-human.

Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” “Son of” is a Hebrew expression that means “reflecting the nature of.” To be a son of God is to reflect the nature of God. Therefore it must be God’s nature to make peace. And so it is. Then we have to examine how God makes peace with us, his rebellious creatures, so that we might learn to make peace among our neighbours. How does God make peace?

[1] We are told in scripture that God has made peace with a wayward world “through the blood of the cross.” In other words, God makes peace with a wayward world through a sacrifice that he makes at enormous cost to himself.   If God can make peace only through his self-offering and self-renunciation, we can be peacemakers only in the same way ourselves.

I stress this because we tend to venerate the sacrifices made for war but belittle the sacrifices made for peace. I am not denigrating in any way the sacrifices Canadians and others made in war. Still, I do want us to understand that sacrifices made for peace are to be honoured as much. Peacemaking entails no less sacrifice than war-waging.

Then we must never scorn the service peacemakers render and the sacrifice they make. Fifty years ago we applauded the person who made costly sacrifice, especially the supreme sacrifice, in time of war. Then we must do as much for those who strive to make peace. If a soldier crouched in freezing mud in a foxhole for hours on end we thanked him. I know people who, for the sake of peace and the demonstrations essential to peace, have done as much and suffered as much – yet they are rarely thanked. Surely they are entitled to something besides scorn and ridicule. They merit the same recognition as the bravest war hero.

The “Sojourners” organization in the USA is a group of Christians dedicated to pursuing peace and justice. Several years ago, during the “cold war” between the USA and the USSR , the Sojourners community learned of a railway train that was transporting nuclear warheads across the country to a military site. One of the “Sojourners,” protesting the traffic in nuclear weapons, lay down on the railway tracks. The train ran over him, severing both legs. He survived only because a nurse happened to be nearby and she prevented him from bleeding to death. The press ridiculed the man as silly. Had he thought the train was going to stop? (In truth, he had thought it would.) And now he was legless for the rest of his life? “He gave up his legs for nothing, stupid man,” public opinion opined.

No Christian who clings to the cross can say this.   Bystanders on Good Friday would have said that our Lord gave up his life for nothing. He announced himself, “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.” Then plainly he didn’t have to go to the cross. The two criminals on either side of him – their lives were taken; they had no choice in the matter. Jesus laid down his life. Uselessly? God made his peace with the world right there. You and I must never be found saying “pointless” dismissively when we hear or read of what someone, somewhere, is doing to make peace. Remember, peace has to be made; peace doesn’t break out.

[2] While we are pondering how God makes peace we must understand that God never short-circuits justice. The prophet Jeremiah insists that a false peace (soon to break down) occurs when “wounds are healed lightly;” that is, when injustices aren’t redressed. To want peace without justice is to want magic – and everywhere in scripture God’s face is set flint-hard against magic. Peace without justice is impossible. When Jeremiah denounces those who shout “Peace, Peace” where there is no peace, no shalom, Jeremiah means we mustn’t cry for peace where we won’t do anything for justice.

In all of this I want to return to the cross. Plainly God doesn’t make peace by “puppeteering” people and situations and events. God makes peace between himself and the world by that sacrifice whose price he himself pays gladly. In his self-giving, justice is served; legitimate grievance is addressed; violations are admitted to be violations; and there is no false peace. Genuine peace between God and his creation is made as God himself enters the fray and sacrifices himself for the sake of peace.

The peace that Christ summons us to make; our peacemaking (genuine peace that doesn’t attempt a false peace through healing wounds lightly) entails no less sacrifice than war-waging.

 

The unknown writer of Hebrews urges us, “Strive for peace with all men….” Paul pleads, “If possible, as far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all.” Jesus insists that it is the makers of genuine peace who are going to be recognised on the Day of Judgement as having mirrored in especial manner the nature of God himself.

 

                                                                                             Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                               

November 2004

 

From Power to Effectiveness or From Social Ascendancy to Salt

Matthew 5: 13

I:– Toronto used to be known as “Toronto the good”. In those days the buildings which towered over the city were all churches. St. James Cathedral, Anglican; St. Michael’s Cathedral, Roman Catholic; Metropolitan Church, Methodist. Huge structures, they rose up above everything else in the city and dominated it. Not only did church buildings dominate the city, so did church leaders. No city politician dared defy church leaders. No public servant or Board of Education official would say or do anything that simply flew in the face of the church’s convictions. Why, back in the days of Toronto the good even a clergyman was president of the University of Toronto.

Tell me: what buildings dominate Toronto’s skyline now? What buildings tower over the city now? BANKS! They are all banks! Toronto Dominion was the first superstructure, followed by Bank of Montreal, Commerce, Royal, Nova Scotia. Last year, Canada Trust. Clearly, it’s the pursuit of money which characterizes the city. Last year, in the recession, the auto manufacturers had their worst year in ten. But the banks made a profit, and the trust companies cleaned up! Compared to the banks the cathedral churches like tinker-toys, the playthings of children.

There is no doubt about it. The Christian church has lost the kind of power it used to have in our society. Can you imagine a clergyman occupying the president’s office at the University of Toronto today? A clergyman couldn’t be the caretaker!

The fact is, we are not going to bring back the days of Toronto the Good any more than we are going to bring back the British Empire. The Christian church is not going to have the kind of power it once had. Let’s admit this right now.

But this is no reason for weeping! Think of the situation in first century Rome. The city of Rome held one million people. There were only five house churches in it. 5×15 (approx) = 75. Seventy five Christians in a city of one million. Yet the Christians never looked at themselves as mere trace elements. The two New Testament books which have to do with the church in Rome are Mark’s gospel and Paul’s letter to the Romans. In neither book is there any suggestion of self-pity. There is no suggestion that those Christians felt themselves handcuffed or useless. They knew that were not socially ascendant. They could only be salt. They would have to be salt. We are going to have to be salt as well. What’s wrong with this? So confident is Paul in the Roman Christians’ saltiness he regards 75 parts per million as a strong concentration!) that he plans to visit them only briefly before moving on into Spain where he is really needed.

II: — Let’s be honest. Regardless of how the apostle might feel, we are not keen on being salt. We, the church, would much rather have the kind of power we used to have. After all, we suburbanite types are accustomed to power. We are achievers. We are goal-attainers. We are successful.

We achievers have obviously mastered techniques which ensure results. We have mastered the technique of passing exams, the technique of shaping metal or wood, the technique of rising steadily on the corporate ladder . We have always predicted what it takes to reach a goal. Then we have programmed ourselves to reach the goal. We’ve been able to engineer the result.

Now, as individual Christians and as a church, we find we have no clout. Our society doesn’t listen to our Christian convictions. Public officials don’t have to take seriously our advocacy of Christian truth. We’ve become a minority, a minority without clout.

There’s only one thing we can do. We have to become salt! There is no reason for discouragement. Remember, the Christians in Rome nowhere complained that they lacked clout. Instead, they had every confidence that Christian salt would penetrate and permeate as salt invariably does.

As we learn what it is to have salt instead of clout we must understand something crucial: salt becomes effective precisely when it seems to have come to nothing. Salt becomes effective precisely when it seems to have disappeared.

The effect of salt is twofold, we all know. Salt preserves food from spoiling, and salt brings out its richest flavour. We Christians are to be salt in both senses in our society. What we add is meant to inhibit social decomposition and to bring out, under God, human richness. But salt does this only as salt gets out of the saltshaker and into the stew. Paradoxically, once the salt is in the stew it has disappeared as salt, it would seem. But precisely when the salt has been swallowed up it becomes effective.

Yet to say that we Christians lack power is not to say we lack effectiveness. We do lack the kind of power yesterday’s church had in Canada. But we don’t lack effectiveness. We may be only a little pinch of salt; and we may feel we’ve been swallowed up. Certainly we can’t program results or engineer success. But this is only to say that real effectiveness can now begin.

III:– Once we have decided we can only be salt and therefore we are jolly well going to be salt, many things fall into place. We are now free — gloriously free from concern with results and success — gloriously free to stand by our Christian conviction. Free to do the truth (as John says) and keep on doing it. That capitulation you have been rationalizing for the past six weeks; a capitulation which would sabotage so much of your integrity, even leave you not knowing who you are– RESIST IT! That sacrifice you were going to make just because it is the right thing to do, but were hesitating over because it might not result in something big and splashy — make it anyway! The help you have been giving someone, help which is starting to look pointless — go on with it! The smallest amount of salt has some effect. Don’t listen to those who say, “It’s only a drop in the bucket, so why bother?” It’s not a drop in the bucket at all! It’s salt in the stew! There is a world of difference! A drop in the bucket is a quantitative change of negligible significance; salt in the stew is a qualitative change of incalculable significance.

My father taught Sunday School for dozens of years. I remember him shaking his head, one day, about Gordon Rumford, a fellow a bit older than I who misbehaved defiantly and wrote off my dad as an antiquated jerk and who eventually cavorted with a motorcycle crowd, most of which became guests of honour in one of Her Majesty’s homes. “If anything comes of that fellow it will be a miracle”, was my father’s comment time and time again. A year or two ago I was walking through a hotel lobby in Toronto when I bumped into Gordon Rumford. He told me he preached frequently at Erindale Bible Chapel on Dundas St, Mississauga. As soon as we “bumped” he said, “It was your father. All the time I was running with the crowd that eventually went to prison I kept thinking of your father’s kindness and patience. He was so kind and patient with me even when I laughed at him. What kept me out of jail was thinking to myself, ‘What would Jack Shepherd think if he could see me now?'” Salt. I asked Gordon to write my widowed mother and let her know about this. He did. More salt: his letter delighted her for weeks.

Recently I was exposed to a university professor from the U.S.A. whose professional standing is sound. He has taught well, researched thoroughly, published papers and books, and, of course, has tenure. In other words, he has “it” made. He is also a Christian of Mennonite persuasion. Mennonites, everyone knows, are especially concerned with peace. This fellow has resigned his professorship and has moved himself, with his family, to Managua, Nicaragua. In Managua he will join other Mennonites in deliberate, conscientious efforts at waging peace. Is he a nincompoop in view of what his own government has done for decades in El Salvador and Central America? He knows what bridges he has burnt behind him. He knows that his group of Mennonites can’t program any results or engineer any success. Nonetheless, the pressure of his Lord upon him constrains him to be salt; just a small pinch in a very big stew, yet a pinch whose effectiveness begins only when it seems to have come to nothing.

If today you know what stand you have to take or what step you have to take, THEN TAKE IT! When you are doing what you are convinced is right and other people are snickering at your supposed naiveness or your supposed simplemindedness IGNORE THEM BEFORE YOU DOUBT YOURSELF. We aren’t in the business of engineering results. We’re in the business of a resilient, confident faithfulness whose effectiveness we can safely leave in God’s hands.

The lottery setup stuns me. Lotteries have been outlawed again and again and again throughout the western world. (For three hundred years in France and Great Britain.) Outlawed for one reason: they have produced nothing but misery; social and moral and human wreckage. They have proven themselves, over several centuries, to be humanly ruinous. Lotteries deliberately foster an out-of-control appetite. Historically, lotteries have only degraded people. Nevertheless, when the Ontario government implemented the 6/49 set-up, the government cleared 90 million dollars in the last two weeks alone of the leadup to the first draw. $90 million in two weeks! Obviously the lottery is going to be around for a while. The goose which lays the golden egg isn’t about to be slain. Churches don’t dominate Toronto’s skyline anymore, just as churches don’t dominate the public’s mindset. Banks do. The pursuit of money does. No church group is able to pressure a politician. We can only be salt.

Our salty contribution to the stewpot is just this: by what we live for and what we can live without you and I will demonstrate that the pursuit of wealth ends in anxiety and unhappiness; we shall demonstrate that the pursuit of sensuality leaves people empty and hollow; that the pursuit of security only intensifies insecurity.

Nobody is going to listen to us! Nobody is going to notice us, it would seem. Yet precisely at this point an effectiveness will begin in the social stewpot which we may not live to see but which God has guaranteed.

If you doubt this then you should think about the Christian church in Russia and China and totalitarian countries generally. These countries have endeavoured to eradicate the Christian faith by any and all means, however vicious or cruel. The expression of church life changed dramatically. Christians in those countries had no choice but to become salt. What results could a church in Russia engineer when employers and schools and government and secret police were bent on eradicating any suggestion of faith? A church in this situation couldn’t engineer anything. And if you had had to state, 30 years ago or 60 years ago, which side in the struggle was more likely to emerge the winner, you would have picked the non-Christian side, in view of the enforcement it could wield. Yet right now there are more self-confessed Christians in the Soviet Union than there are members of the Communist party! Salt was quietly effective for decades when it appeared to have been swallowed up and to have come to nothing. People who have no choice at being successful still have every chance to be faithful. We are never an insignificant drop in the bucket! We are salt in the stew!

IV: — Before I stop this morning I must insist that saltiness matters. It matters so much that Jesus insists that to lose our saltiness is to render ourselves a kingdom-reject. It is important that we be salt whenever, wherever, however we can. We must never abandon our own saltiness because we don’t see around us leaders who support us. Instead, we must be salt, for then the appropriate leaders will appear in God’s own time.

We often hear it said that any society gets the kind of leaders it deserves, since the society generates its own leaders. “If this is the case”, someone says, “then our situation really is hopeless. If leaders, so-called, simply reflect the society which produces them, then we are never going to have leaders who are any better than the society which coughed them up. What we call `leaders’ are really nothing more than camp followers!” I certainly understand the questioner’s despair. I will make no comment on the work of Mr. John Ziegler, currently president of the National Hockey League. For a long time, however, I stood amazed at the decisions of his predecessor, Mr. Clarence Campbell. The NHL team owners seemed to own him as well. He appeared to be their flunky. He did exactly what they wanted. He never seemed to do the right thing, the good thing, what was best for the wider society. (After all, NHL hockey is played in a societal context.) He never seemed to grasp the fact that the NHL player is the most adulated model for countless Canadian youngsters. And he seemed to provide pathetically little support for NHL referees who were abused by players and coaches. One day the late Stafford Symthe said proudly, “We owners wanted a league president who was intelligent, socially prominent, educated — and who would do exactly what we told him to do. And this is what we have!”

It would appear that society as a whole is no different. It would appear that our leaders do exactly what their public tells them to do. Which is to say, they aren’t leaders at all. They are nervous nellies who quake in anticipation of the Gallup poll. Then there is no way of changing anything.

But there is! There really is! You see, as soon as salt, just a little salt, is added to the stewpot the salt begins to penetrate and permeate. To be sure, the stew is changed only slightly, even unnoticeably. Nevertheless, in truth there is a new agent, a new factor at work in this situation. And because there is a new agent at work the slightest change is yet a profound change. Which is to say, the social stew is going to give rise to profoundly new leadership. Barbara Tuchman, a prominent U.S. historian, maintains that the prevailing element in American life today is false dealing. Few would care to differ with her. What would it mean, ultimately, if a few grains of salt resolved to deal differently?

Of course we often feel we are a lone voice, a lone witness. Yet insofar as we are salt the one grain which we are encourages another grain here to come forth and another grain there. It takes several grains to make a pinch. But it takes only one pinch to be effective.

Centuries ago the prophet Elijah complained that he was the only salt-grain left in Israel. “I alone have not bowed the knee to Baal”, he lamented. “Don’t be so presumptuous”, relied God, “and stop pitying yourself. There are 7000 in Israel who haven’t bowed the knee to Baal”. It takes only one person doing what (s)he knows is right to encourage and call forth so many others. Many grains make one pinch. And one pinch is effective beyond our imaging.

When Jesus tells us, his disciples, that we are the salt of the earth he means exactly what he says. How effective he knows we can be is measured by his caution that our saltiness, yours and mine, we must ever retain, lest we cast away.

                                                                       Victor A. Shepherd
June 23, 1991

And if Salt Ceases to Be Salty . . .?

Matthew 5:13

I:– At one time Toronto was known as “ Toronto the good”. In those days (roughly from the 1880s until 1950) the buildings that towered over the city were churches. St. James Cathedral, Anglican; St. Michael’s Cathedral, Roman Catholic; Metropolitan Church , Methodist. Huge structures all, they rose up above everything else in the city and dominated it.  Not only did church buildings dominate the city, so did church leaders. No city politician dared defy church leaders. No public servant or board of education official would say or do anything that simply flew in the face of the church’s convictions.  Back in the days of “ Toronto the good” a clergyman (Rev. Maurice Cody) was even president of the University of Toronto, Canada’s most prestigious post-secondary educational institution.

What buildings dominate Toronto ‘s skyline now? What buildings tower over the city now? Banks.  They are all banks. Toronto Dominion was the first superstructure, followed by the Bank of Montreal,  the Commerce, Royal, Nova Scotia , and Canada Trust (now blended with TD).   Clearly, it’s the pursuit of money and the handling of money and the magnification of money that characterises the city now.   Everyone knows that even when the economy declines, the banks continue to make unprecedented profits.ined in the last few years.   Compared to the bank buildings the cathedral churches look like tinker-toys, the playthings of children.  And compared to the pursuit of money and the handling of money and the magnification of money (what the banks are about), what the churches are about looks like – does anyone know what the churches are about? Does the city care?

Unquestionably the church has lost the kind of power it used to have in our society. Can you imagine a clergyman occupying the president’s office at the University of Toronto today? Long before a clergyman was appointed, one hundred and one lobby groups would pressure the university administration arguing that (i) clergymen aren’t intelligent enough to preside over a university, (ii) clergymen aren’t even-handed, fair, prone as they are to prejudice, (iii) clergymen don’t uphold academic excellence (iv) clergymen, Christians by definition, don’t appreciate the pluralism that is said to characterise our society.

The fact is, we aren’t going to bring back the days of Toronto the Good any more than we are going to bring back the British Empire . The church isn’t going to have the kind of power it once had.  Let’s admit this right now.

But this is no reason for self-pity.  Think of the situation in first century Rome . The city of Rome held one million people. There were only five house churches in it.  A home, in that era, would have held no more than fifteen people.  Five times fifteen is seventy-five.  Seventy-five Christians in a city of one million. Yet the Christians never looked upon themselves as mere trace elements.  The two New Testament books which have to do with the church in Rome are Mark’s gospel and Paul’s letter to the Romans.  In neither book is there any suggestion of self-pity.  There is no suggestion that those Christians felt themselves handcuffed or useless. To be sure, they knew they weren’t socially ascendant.  They could only be salt. We are going to have to be salt as well.  What’s wrong with this?   So confident is Paul in the Roman Christians’ saltiness (he regards 75 parts per million as a strong concentration) that he never doubts the 75 parts per million will be effective, noticeably effective.   So very effective will it be that the apostle doesn’t feel he’s really needed in Rome . Therefore he plans to visit the Roman Christians only briefly before moving on to Spain where he is needed, since the gospel hasn’t been declared there yet.

 

II: — Regardless of how the apostle might have felt, we aren’t keen on being salt. We, the church, would much rather have the kind of power we used to have.  After all, we middle-class types are accustomed to power.  We are achievers. We are goal-attainers. We are successful.

We achievers have obviously mastered techniques that ensure results. We have mastered the technique of passing exams, the technique of shaping metal or wood, the technique of rising steadily on the corporate ladder.         We’ve always been able to predict what it takes to reach a goal; then we’ve always been able to program ourselves to reach that goal. We’ve been able to engineer the result. Now, as individual Christians and as a church, we find we have no clout.  Our society doesn’t listen to our Christian convictions.  We’ve become a minority, a minority without clout.

Things are so bad we’ve been reduced to salt.  But surely this is no reason for discouragement. Remember, the Christians in Rome nowhere complained that they lacked clout.  Instead, they had every confidence that Christian salt would penetrate and permeate as salt invariably does.

As we learn what it is to have salt instead of clout we must understand something crucial: salt becomes effective precisely when it seems to have come to nothing. Salt becomes effective precisely when it seems to have disappeared.

The effect of salt is twofold, we know.  Salt preserves food from spoiling, and salt brings out its richest flavour. Christians are to be salt in both senses in our society. What we add is meant to inhibit social decay and to bring out, under God, that human richness which is nothing less than his covenant-purpose for us.  But salt does this only as salt gets out of the saltshaker and into the stew. Paradoxically, once the salt is in the stew it has disappeared as salt, it would seem.  But precisely when the salt has been swallowed up it becomes effective.

To say that we Christians lack power is not to say we lack effectiveness. We do lack the kind of power yesterday’s church had in Canada . We may be only a pinch of salt now, and we may feel we’ve been swallowed up.  Certainly we can’t program results or engineer success.  But this is only to say that a profounder effectiveness can begin.

 

III:– Once we have decided we can only be salt and therefore we are going to be salt, many things fall into place. We are now free: gloriously free from concern with results and success, gloriously free to stand by our Christian conviction.  Free to do the truth (as John says) and keep on doing it.  That capitulation you have been rationalizing for the past six weeks; a capitulation which would sabotage so much of your integrity, even leave you not knowing who you are – resist it.  That sacrifice you were going to make just because it is the right thing to do, but were hesitating over because it might not result in something big and splashy — make it anyway.  The help you have been giving someone, help which is starting to look pointless — go on with it. The smallest amount of salt has measureless effect.  Don’t listen to those who say, “It’s only a drop in the bucket, so why bother?” It’s not a drop in the bucket at all. It’s salt in the stew. There’s a world of difference. A drop in the bucket is a quantitative change of negligible significance; salt in the stew is a qualitative change of incalculable significance.  My father taught Sunday School for dozens of years.  I remember him shaking his head, one day, about Gordon Rumford, a fellow a bit older than I who misbehaved defiantly and regarded my dad as a “fuddy-duddy.” Rumford eventually cavorted with a motorcycle crowd, most of which became guests in one or another of Her Majesty’s homes.  “If anything comes of that fellow it will be a miracle”, my father commented time and again as he shook his head.  A few years ago I was walking through a hotel lobby in Toronto when I bumped into Gordon Rumford. He told me at that time that he preached frequently at Erindale Bible Chapel on Dundas St. , Mississauga . (He now preaches and teaches throughout Ontario and occasionally in Scotland as well.) As soon as we “bumped” he said, “It was your father.  All the time I was running with the crowd that eventually went to prison I kept thinking of your father’s kindness and patience.   He was so kind and patient with me even when I laughed at him.  One day I was only minutes from ‘sticking up’ a corner store with my friends when I began to say to myself, ‘How am I going to face Jack Shepherd?’”   Salt. I asked Gordon to write my widowed mother and let her know about this.  He did. More salt: his letter delighted her for weeks.

If today you know what stand you have to take or what step you have to take, THEN TAKE IT. When you are doing what you are convinced is right and other people are snickering at your supposed naiveness or your supposed simplemindedness IGNORE THEM BEFORE YOU DOUBT YOURSELF.  We aren’t in the business of engineering results.         We’re in the business of a resilient, confident faithfulness whose effectiveness we can safely leave in God’s hands.

The lottery set-up stuns me.  Lotteries have been outlawed again and again and again throughout the western world. (Outlawed on and off for three hundred years in France and Great Britain .) Outlawed for one reason: they have produced misery; social and moral and human wreckage.  They have proven themselves, over several centuries, to be humanly ruinous. Historically, lotteries have only degraded people.  The government of Ontario knew this would be the human outcome (as distinct from the financial outcome for government coffers.)  The first lottery was established in Windsor . Americans would come to Canada and spend. Ontario would import money and export colossal social problems (human distress) back to the USA . The second lottery was set up in Niagara Falls , another city bordering the USA . Plainly the arrangement was to be identical: import money, export social problems.  The third lottery was set up on the Rama First Nation Reserve, Orillia . Once again Ontario would garner the monies; this time, however, social problems were exported to the federal government of Canada , since First Nation Affairs is a portfolio of the federal government.  Knowing all this (indeed, having contrived all this) the Ontario government implemented the 6/49 set-up over a decade ago, and in the last two weeks leading up to the first draw the government cleared 90 million dollars.  Ninety million dollars in two weeks.  Obviously the goose which lays the golden egg isn’t about to be slain. Churches don’t dominate Toronto ‘s skyline anymore, just as churches don’t dominate the public’s mindset. Banks do. The pursuit of money does. We can only be salt.

Our salty contribution to the stewpot takes many forms, one of which is just this: by what we live for and what we can live without you and I will demonstrate that the pursuit of wealth ends in anxiety and unhappiness; we shall demonstrate that the pursuit of sensuality leaves people empty and hollow; that the pursuit of security only intensifies insecurity.

Nobody is going to listen to us.  Nobody is going to notice us, it would seem. Yet precisely at this point an effectiveness will begin in the social stewpot which we may not live to see but which God has guaranteed.

If we doubt this then we should think about the church in the USSR a few years ago and in China today and in totalitarian countries generally.  Thanks to their totalitarian regimes these countries endeavoured to eradicate the Christian faith by any and all means, however brutal.  The expression of church life necessarily changed dramatically.  Christians in those countries had no choice but to become salt.  What results could a church in the USSR engineer when employers and schools and government and secret police were bent on eradicating any suggestion of faith?   A church in this situation couldn’t engineer anything.  And if we had had to state, 30 years ago or 60 years ago, which side in the struggle was more likely to emerge the winner, we would have picked the non-Christian side, in view of the big stick it wielded.  Yet right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union there were more self-confessed Christians in the nation than there had ever been members of the Communist party.  Salt was quietly effective for decades when it appeared to have been swallowed up and to have come to nothing.  People who have no chance at being successful still have every opportunity to be faithful. We are never an insignificant drop in the bucket.  We are salt in the stew.

 

IV: — Saltiness matters. It matters so much that Jesus insists that to lose our saltiness is to render ourselves kingdom-rejects. It is important that we be salt whenever, wherever, however we can.  We must never abandon our own saltiness because we don’t see around us leaders who support us. Instead, we must be salt, for then the appropriate leaders will appear in God’s own time.

We often hear it said that any society gets the kind of leaders it deserves, since the society generates its own leaders.   “If this is the case”, someone says, “then our situation really is hopeless. If leaders, so-called, simply reflect the society which produces them, then we are never going to have leaders who are any better than the society which ‘coughed them up’. What we call ‘leaders’ are really nothing more than camp followers.”  I certainly understand the questioner’s despair.

I shall make no comment on the work of the current president of the National Hockey League. For a long time, however, I stood amazed at the decisions of his predecessor several times removed, Mr. Clarence Campbell.  The NHL team owners seemed to own him as well.  He appeared to be their ‘flunkie’.  He never seemed (to me) to do the right thing, the good thing, what was best for the wider society.  (After all, NHL hockey is a social event; the game is played in a societal context.)  Campbell never seemed to grasp the fact that the NHL player is the most adulated model, the most telling image, amounting to an icon, for countless Canadian youngsters. And he seemed to provide pathetically little support for NHL referees who were abused by players and coaches. I was always frustrated at the seeming  incomprehension and inertia of a man who had had a distinguished legal career as a prosecutor at the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg . One day the late Stafford Symthe said proudly, “We owners wanted a league president who was intelligent, socially prominent, educated, and who would do exactly what we told him to do. This is what we have.”

It would appear that our political leaders often aren’t leaders at all. They are nervous nellies who quake in anticipation of the Gallup poll. Think of how our elected political representatives have repeatedly refused to honour the task to which they were elected. I speak now of their assigning controversial social issues to the courts instead of passing legislation concerning these issues as they have been elected to do. When something like the human status of the about-to-be-born or manifold matters pertaining to same gender “marriage”, it’s the responsibility of our elected legislators to legislate on the issue.  In nothing less than a cowardly cop-out, however, they abdicate and say, “Let the courts decide.” The courts were never meant to do this. The mandate of the courts is to assess violations of the law. The mandate of the courts is never to enact law. Parliament governs the Canadian people, not the courts. Furthermore, the legislators whom we elect are ultimately accountable to the electorate.  But the judges who preside in the courts haven’t been elected by anyone and aren’t accountable to the people. If legislators refuse to legislate then they should be removed from office and not paid. Right now, however, we are seeing one abdication after another.

Then have I implied that the situation is hopeless? that nothing can be done to change this? I trust I’ve implied no such thing.  I have found over and over in many different contexts that it takes surprisingly little salt to change more than we commonly think.  I have found over and over that many things that we assume are carved in stone are carved in no more than soap.  A surprisingly small injection of salt in the stewpot would give rise to more change than we allow ourselves to think.

Of course we often feel we are a lone voice, a lone witness.  Yet insofar as we are salt the one grain which we are encourages another grain to come forth here and another grain there.  It takes several grains to make a pinch.  But it takes only one pinch to be effective.

Centuries ago the prophet Elijah complained that he was the only salt-grain left in Israel . “I alone have not bowed the knee to Baal”, he lamented. He wasn’t boasting of his faithfulness; he was bemoaning his isolation.         “Don’t be so presumptuous”, replied God, “and stop pitying yourself. There are 7000 in Israel who haven’t bowed the knee to Baal”.  It takes only one person doing what (s)he knows is right to encourage and call forth so many others.         Many grains make one pinch. And one pinch is effective beyond our imaging.

When Jesus tells us, his disciples, that we are the salt of the earth he means exactly what he says.   How effective he knows we can be is measured by his caution that our saltiness, yours and mine, we must ever retain, lest we be cast away.

                                    

Victor Shepherd

                                                                                            September 2006

 

The Seven Deadly Sins: Lust

Matthew 5:28

2nd Samuel 11:2-5; 12:1-7         Ephesians 5:3-5        John 8:2-12

 

I: — The child loves her pet rabbit. In fact she never speaks of it as a rabbit.  She insists it’s a bunny, not a rabbit.         (There’s a big difference, you know, between a bunny and a rabbit.) Along comes a thoughtless adult who prides himself on his superiority and sophistication. He looks at the bunny and says, “Where did you get that thing?         It’s only a rodent, you know, nothing more than a rodent.”   The child is heartbroken, angry and frustrated at once.         Even as she knows she’ll never be able to convince this oafish adult that her bunny isn’t “nothing more than a rodent”, deep down in her heart she knows that her beloved bunny can never be reduced to his front teeth. She knows that if she ever regarded her bunny as nothing more than his front teeth, her dearest treasure would be worthless.

Love recognizes worth.  Love cherishes worth. Love magnifies worth. Love never says “nothing more than”. Love never cheapens worth until something precious is a throwaway item to be discarded without a second thought.

Lust, however, is just the opposite.  Lust degrades and keeps on degrading until something is disposable.

 

II: — Before we proceed with the distinction between love and lust we have to say something about human libido. We have to acknowledge that when God creates item after item, each time pronouncing it “good”; when God creates man and woman and then pronounces them “very good”, the “very good” includes human libido.   When the book of Proverbs speaks approvingly, glowingly, of the mystery of “the way of a man with a maid”, Proverbs is underscoring the declaration in Genesis: human libido is God-ordained and therefore good.

At the same time, we must understand that human libido serves human intimacy in the first place.         It’s different with the animals: in the animal world libido serves reproduction, and reproduction only.  In the human world libido serves reproduction, obviously, but not reproduction only and not reproduction primarily.  In the human sphere libido serves the fusing of a man and a woman. The nature of this fusion is a union that aims at, intends, lifelong fidelity in a relationship so very intimate, intertwined, interpenetrating that it can be terminated only by death. Libido serves this end. Libido serving any other end is what we call lust.

Love exalts humans; lust diminishes humans.  On the one hand lust reduces the person who is lusted after to a tool, a toy, a play thing that we can exploit and exploit and then discard. On the other hand lust also reduces the person who lusts to one appetite, one craving.  Love is always concerned to see the whole person thrive.  Lust reduces the whole person lusted after to one aspect of her even as lust reduces the person lusting to one itch.

Not so long ago an Argonaut football player was interviewed following a Toronto victory. He was exhilarated with the victory and his part in it.  He concluded his interview as he said to the reporter “Now I want a woman.” But he didn’t want a woman. A woman, after all, is a person, a human being of intelligence and profundity and mystery; a human being made in the image of God whom we can’t violate without violating him and without violating ourselves.         The Argonaut player didn’t want this; he wanted his itch scratched.

 

II: — Really, it’s not as difficult to distinguish love and lust as some people think. In fact there are several telltale features that identify love unmistakably.

[a] In the first place love has inherent durability.  Love lasts beyond ten minutes not because love ought to last but because it’s love’s nature to last.  Love doesn’t flit, like a bee flitting from one flower to another, extracting whatever it can before alighting on the next flower for the next extraction. Love doesn’t alight and leave, alight and leave.         Love has inherent durability.

Lust, on the other hand, dies at dawn.  It may quicken the next night, to be sure, but just as surely it dies the following dawn. Jean Paul Sartre, French philosopher and novelist, used to speak of lust as a “mere twitch.” Love, however, doesn’t twitch; love lasts.

A major ingredient in love’s perdurability is romance. Romance is hard to find these days. There’s no time or place for romance when the casual relationship moves to the bedroom by the second date. Several years ago when the Shepherd family was camping in a provincial park on the shore of Lake Ontario I noticed that there were no young couples strolling up and down the beach hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm.  Romance had disappeared. Courting had disappeared. Enchantment, stardust, charm – all of it was gone.  Of course it’s gone. Romance and courting and enchantment are long gone when 18-year olds are seen emerging from the tent the morning after.

Tragically, if there’s no romance when we are 18, there will be none when we are 28 or 38 or 48.  Romance lends love resilience and rigour.

[b] A second feature of love, identifying it as love for those in love and for those who see others in love; a second feature is interwoven, intertwined involvement.  Rebecca West, a British novelist with much to say, maintains that love is a journey into another land.  Two people who have pledged themselves to each other and become fused in a relationship that aims at being terminated only by death; two such people know that their life together is a land that awaits them, a land to be explored and shared and enjoyed together.  Lust, however, isn’t the slightest bit interested in exploring a new land over the next several decades.  Lust laughs off any talk of a new land.  Lust has no concern past tonight, and even then no more than a concern with tonight’s tool or trinket or toy.

Everyone appears jarred when the 30-year olds who have been married only three years decide to end their marriage. Three years ago they assumed that the huge attraction they had for each other on one front in life, the sexual, was so huge that there was neither time nor inclination nor perceived need to explore other life-fronts.         Relatively quickly (within three years) they concluded that their lives overlapped virtually nowhere apart from the sexual.  Lacking large areas of overlap in their lives, they concluded (correctly) that they had little in common; too little, in fact, to sustain a union. Lacking significant areas of overlap in their lives, they quickly got to the point where they couldn’t see anything in each other, or what they saw they didn’t like. A new land to be entered upon and explored and enjoyed together?  “Mythic lunacy” they now sneer cynically.  Romance always entails adventure.  They had never considered adventure.  All they had ever wanted was libidinal relief, only to learn that this alone won’t sustain a union.

The opposite of interwoven, intertwined involvement isn’t uninvolvement. The opposite of such involvement is emptiness.  Those who fail to grasp that love entails profound involvement don’t find themselves “free” in any sense; they find themselves in a desert.

[c] A third telltale of love is loyalty.  Loyalty, like romance, is increasingly hard to find.  Are people less loyal than they used to be?   Plainly yes. The real tragedy, however, is that they are less able to be loyal.

There is a truth here we do well to note everywhere in life.  The student who abandons the discipline of study; or the student who never develops the discipline, the healthy, helpful routine of study soon finds herself unable to study. First she doesn’t, then she can’t. If the athlete decides to give up training for six months on the assumption that he can recover competition-level conditioning three days before the event, he finds that he can’t recover it in three days.

The worst consequence of disloyalty isn’t that we have been disloyal (serious as this is); the worst consequence is that we’ve diminished our ability to be loyal. This is much more serious. Unfaithfulness doesn’t mean that all our love has been withdrawn on one occasion.  Unfaithfulness does mean, however, that our capacity to love has eroded significantly. The next instance of unfaithfulness or disloyalty, anywhere in life, will erode it more and then more again (unless of course someone perceives what’s happening inside him and is frightened enough to do something about it).

I find contemporary Christians naïve right here. We ought to look back to another feature of mediaeval understanding, what our 13th Century foreparents called “habit”.  They had in mind the Latin word “habitus”.         “Habitus” doesn’t mean what the English word “habit” means. The English word “habit” means “unthinking repetition.”  At best it means “unthinking repetition”.   At worst “habit” has to do with “habituation”: addiction.         The habituated person is the addicted person.  In mediaeval theology, however, “habit” (“habitus”) meant “cumulative character”. Temptation resisted in this moment is important to be sure, if only because sin has been averted in this moment. But temptation resisted in this moment is vital for another reason: temptation resisted now forms and forges character wherein the same temptation, encountered again, will be more readily identified and more easily resisted. Resisted again, it will then be even more readily identified and even more easily resisted. There is a cumulative gain here as character is deepened and strengthened and made ever more resilient. This is what our mediaeval foreparents meant by habit/habitus.

It all means this: the singular act of loyalty today is the first brick in the edifice of loyalty.  The singular act of loyalty, in other words, is never merely singular: it’s one more building block in that fortress which will soon be found repelling assailants and repelling them for life.

In other words, just as it’s tragically possible to erode one’s capacity for loyalty or truthfulness or withstanding frustration of any sort, it’s also gloriously possible to enlarge one’s capacity for loyalty or truthfulness or withstanding frustration of any sort.

Loyalty, truthfulness, the capacity to withstand disappointment and pain and hope-not-yet-fulfilled; these will ever be one of the marks of love.

 

III: — What is a Christian response to all of this? How are we to situate ourselves in the midst of a society that appears largely indifferent to the deadly sin of lust, and therein advertises itself as mindlessly superficial compared to our mediaeval foreparents who at least could recognize it for what it is?

[a] In the first place we are going to do what Christians should do in any case, in all times and places, concerning anything: in the words of the apostle Paul, we are going to speak the truth in love.

There are two deficits that mustn’t be found in us here. One deficit is speaking the truth but not speaking it in love.         Here the truth is used as a hammer whereby we can bludgeon those who don’t agree with us. Or the truth is used as a sword whereby we can defend ourselves when we feel ourselves under attack – the sword being the weapon of choice to those who are somewhat insecure in themselves and perhaps not quite convinced that the truth of the gospel is true.  To say that we should speak the truth in love is to say that we shouldn’t be shrill. We shouldn’t carp.

But if we shouldn’t carp, neither should we cower. In other words, the second deficit shouldn’t be found in us either; namely, failing to speak the truth. Of course we ought not to brutalize others with the truth; but neither do we apologize for the truth. And for this reason we shall not be cowed concerning the distinction the gospel makes between lust and love, why the former is deadly sin and why the latter is the fulfilment of all that God requires of us.

According to the gospel, marriage remains the context for sexual intimacy. I do not apologize for saying this. According to the swelling army of sociologists, pre-marital co-habitation does not increase one’s likelihood of remaining married; it decreases it. According to self-evident logic, there is no more “trial marriage” than there is “trial parachute jump”. Once the parachutist has jumped, it’s not a trial of any sort; it’s the real thing. Until the parachutist has jumped; as long as the parachutist remains in the airplane, he hasn’t jumped in any sense.  In the same way trial marriage is an oxymoron, an inherent self-contradiction. Until we have committed ourselves irrevocably in marriage, we aren’t “married” in any sense; once we have committed ourselves irrevocably, there’s no “trial” aspect to it; it’s the real thing.

I shall not fall silent on the fact that the single largest reason for infertility in women is pelvic inflammatory disease (disease whose incidence is sky-rocketing), and the single largest reason for pelvic inflammatory disease is promiscuity.  I don’t intend to beat anyone over the head with this, but I also don’t see why I should pretend anything else.

To be sure, we must speak the truth in love; and in order to speak the truth in love we have to be ready to speak the truth.

[b] What is a Christian response?  In the second place we should remember that everything we’ve talked about today is so very riddled with anxiety and guilt for so many people that we must hear again the gospel incident where some men bring to Jesus a woman they have found committing adultery, “in the very act”, they tell our Lord. They remind our Lord that the Law of Moses requires the death penalty, and then ask him, “Now what do you have to say?”         It’s a trap question. The men don’t really care about the law of God or about the woman who has violated it. They care only about their own venomous hearts and the hostility they cherish concerning Jesus. They want to trap him.

If Jesus says “Stone the woman”, the Roman police will arrest him since only Roman courts can impose the death sentence in Roman-occupied Palestine . If, on the other hand, Jesus says “Let her go”, these men will accuse him of blasphemy, since he has denied the law of God to be God’s law.  It’s a trap.

Jesus, as always, doesn’t reply to their question. Instead he bends over and writes with his finger on the ground.         With his finger.  Every Israelite would have known what he was doing.  God was said to have written the Ten Commandments on the stone tablets with his finger.  As Jesus writes on the ground with his finger, he is doing two things: he is reinforcing the commandment forbidding adultery, and he is claiming for himself that authority which belongs to God alone.  Then Jesus straightens up, looks at the men who are out to “get” both woman and him, and says, “If any one of you men thinks yourself to be without sin, you pick up a stone and throw it at her.”   The men slink away.

What’s happened here?  In writing with his finger on the ground and in thereby claiming to speak and act with the authority of God, Jesus has upheld the commandment forbidding adultery in the context of a woman who has committed adultery. Therefore she stands condemned. Nothing else can be pretended. She stands condemned by God, since only God can condemn.  Then Jesus announces, “I don’t condemn you.”   The condemnation the woman deserves has been rescinded, rescinded by the only one who can rescind God’s condemnation, the one who is God-with-us. Finally Jesus warns her, “Never, ever do it again.”

All of scripture either anticipates the cross or looks back to the cross. In the incident we are probing the cross is anticipated.  Jesus rescinds the woman’s condemnation knowing that he will shortly bear in himself the condemnation that all of us deserve.

Today’s sermon concludes the series on the mediaeval catena of The Seven Deadly Sins. After one and one-half of months of investigating sin we should depart the series with several points in mind:

-sin is lethal at any time and therefore deadly at all times;
-sin merits condemnation just because the claim and commandment of God cannot be relaxed;
-yet sin’s condemnation is borne by the crucified who sets us free to sin no more just because the pardon he, the Son of God, pronounces upon us is ratified by his Father in heaven.

In short, you and are I summoned henceforth to die to sin just because someone who loves us more than he loves himself has already died for it.

 

Victor Shepherd
March 2006

Turning the Other Cheek

Matthew 5:38-42           Romans 12:19-21

 

Everyone has heard it. Everyone knows that Jesus said it. We’d like to think we take Jesus seriously. After all, if we Christians aren’t serious about Jesus, then who is? The more serious we are, however, the more we are haunted by our Lord’s word. Turning the other cheek is neither natural nor easy.

Frank Robinson was an outstanding baseball player with the Baltimore Orioles. When he retired as a player he became team manager. One day the opposing pitcher threw the ball at a Baltimore batter and knocked him down. The inning ended without incident. Now it was Baltimore ’s turn in the field. The Baltimore pitcher threw his first pitch over the plate for a strike. Good. If a pitcher’s first pitch to each batter isn’t a strike 70% of the time, his time can’t win. Therefore managers are pleased when a pitcher throws a first-pitch strike. But not Robinson on this occasion. Immediately Robinson charged out to the mound like a man possessed and berated his own pitcher in front of 40,000 hometown fans. “How many times have I told you?” he shouted at his pitcher. “When they knock down one of our men you are to knock down their first batter next inning with your very first pitch. Never mind throwing a strike. I want to see their batter in the dirt. We don’t let opponents get away with anything.”

Robinson speaks for the whole world: “Don’t let them get away with anything. Give them a taste of their own medicine.” This is where the world lives.

 

I: — Before we explore what Jesus meant and why Christians must obey him, we should be clear as to what turning the other cheek is not.

[a] To turn the other cheek is not to make a virtue of psychological deficiency. It is not to make a virtue of low self-esteem, of pathetic lack of self-confidence. We are all aware of people who have no self-confidence. They regard themselves as insignificant and useless. They look upon themselves as doormats, and to no one’s surprise they invite victimisation as doormats. Their psychological deficiency is pitiable. We mustn’t think that to turn the other cheek is to glorify “doormatism” and glorify as well the invitation to victimisation that goes with it. We must never confuse our Lord’s going to the cross with “doormatism.” “No one takes my life from me” he insisted; “I lay it down of my own accord.” Others may think he has “victim” written on his forehead. In fact he hasn’t: he lays down his own life. No one else takes it from him. They may think they take it from him, but he knows the difference.

[b] Again, to turn the other cheek is not to turn a blind eye to public justice. Christians must uphold justice. A society without justice quickly collapses into unruliness, and unruliness is eventually subdued by brute force without concern for law or fairness or human decency. Either we uphold justice or we foster the irruption of brute force, arbitrary and amoral in equal measure.

[c] Again, to turn the other cheek is not to overlook the ill-treatment currently visited on other people. Jesus certainly “turned the other cheek” on the cross. Yet whenever he came upon heartless people abusing defenceless folk; whenever he saw vulnerable people exploited, he acted forthrightly and formidably. Here’s the difference. Jesus never looks the other way, never turns his head, when he sees defenceless people abused; but he turns his cheek when he’s abused himself. He never turns a blind eye to the abuse of others; but he will turn a blind eye when he’s abused himself.

We must be sure to understand that to turn the other cheek isn’t to overlook abuse of others. Neither is it to submerge justice. Neither is it to glorify “doormatism.”

 

II: — Then what is it? Quite simply, it is to renounce retaliation. It’s just that: to renounce retaliation. Jesus says, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other as well.” When a right-handed person punches someone else, the blow normally lands on the assaulted person’s left cheek. A backhand blow, however, lands on the right cheek. For an Israelite a backhand blow is more than an assault. It’s the rudest insult as well. In fact a backhand blow (unlike a closed fist punch) does very little physical damage. It’s little more than a slap. Yet because it’s backhanded it’s outrageously insulting. It does vastly more damage to our pride than a punch does to our body. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek…” says Jesus; “if anyone not only assaults you but insults you outrageously as well, don’t retaliate. My followers have renounced retaliation. Non-retaliation is one of the distinguishing marks of my followers.”

In the same paragraph Jesus insists, “Don’t resist one who is evil.” Immediately we protest: “But surely Christians are called to resist evil” – and indeed we are, even as our Lord resisted and rolled back evil whenever he came upon it. Still, the context of our Lord’s pronouncement is crucial. In the context of cheek-turning our Lord means this: “When someone does evil against you, don’t you launch yourself on a vendetta against him personally. When someone assaults you slightly but insults you greatly (insult is much more difficult to withstand than assault, isn’t it?) don’t fly back at her in a spasm of revenge. Don’t think it’s up to you to even your own score.”

“What about ‘eye for eye and tooth for tooth’?” someone asks. “Eye for eye” is indeed a quotation from the Hebrew bible. We modern gentiles, however, fail to understand something crucial: “eye for eye” means only an eye for an eye, no more than an eye for an eye. Because human depravity is what it is, whenever our “eye” is taken (as it were) we want to retaliate by taking eye and arm and leg. In other words, “eye for eye” was a limiting device: the Israelite was to limit the severity of the retaliation to the severity of the offence. Jesus , Israel ’s greater Son, goes one step farther: “So far from limiting your retaliation,” he insists, “don’t retaliate at all. My followers have renounced it.”

Only a work of grace, only a colossal work of grace within us, can move you and me to renounce retaliation. Retaliation, after all; retaliation for us depraved creatures is sweet. Harold Ballard used to own the Maple Leaf Hockey Club. Carl Brewer used to play for the Maple Leaf Hockey Club. Brewer thought Ballard had exploited him in some manner, and therefore Brewer sued Ballard. The sum Brewer asked for wasn’t huge; it was only eight or ten thousand dollars. The courts decided against Brewer, however, and he came away with no money. Shortly thereafter, as Brewer sniffed and snooped around, he discovered that while Ballard owned the hockey club, he had never registered the name of the club with proper authorities. Whereupon Brewer registered the name and thereby came to own, and have exclusive rights to, the name of the club. Now a most unusual situation had developed: Ballard owned the hockey club, while Brewer owned the name of the club. Needless to say Ballard, publicly embarrassed, was desperate to own the “Toronto Maple Leafs” name. How desperate? How much did Ballard have to pay? Vastly more than ten thousand dollars. Brewer bided his time and then pounced: the retaliation was hugely greater than the offence (even as the courts insisted there had been no offence.) Revenge is sweet to us fallen creatures. It’s sweet enough when we’ve been wounded and can even the score. It’s sweeter still when we’ve been insulted and are “loading up” a retaliatory insult. It’s sweetest of all when our retaliation plunges someone else into public humiliation and pays us a fortune as well.

Still, the sweetness only disguises the poison, the deadliness. Jesus knew this. For this reason Jesus doesn’t tell his followers to limit retaliation; he tells them to renounce it. As long as we are limiting retaliation, even limiting it so as to reduce it to a minimum, we are still operating within the framework of retaliation. Jesus maintains that we are to move beyond all such frameworks altogether.

In Romans 12 Paul outlines the shape or pattern of the Christian life. He insists that we are never to avenge ourselves, since to avenge ourselves (or even try to) is simply to augment the world’s evil; it’s to be overcome by evil. Paul knows, as Jesus knew before him, that to continue the deadly game of retaliation is already to have been overcome with evil. Of course we can justify our retaliation as “teaching that fellow a lesson he needs to learn;” we can always tell ourselves “we’re doing that woman a favour she’ll thank us for one day.” Even as all such froth dribbles out of us the truth is we’ve been overcome with evil ourselves, and we don’t even know it. But we aren’t to be overcome with evil. We are to overcome evil with good. We must turn the other cheek.

 

III: — Then why don’t we? Because unconsciously we want to be Rambo. Rambo is the movie tough guy who may have to eat dirt now and then but who eventually sees his foes face down in the dirt. Anyone who steps over the line with Rambo he hammers into the ground. We all want to say to others (and to ourselves) “No one puts anything over on me. No one takes me for a fool. I may appear docile, but this cat has claws.” Our identity is tied up with all of this. Our identity is tied up with being the tough guy outwardly while inwardly our identity is so very fragile that we fear it will disappear if we don’t retaliate. If we don’t pass ourselves off as “tough” then our identity will crumble as our puffed up public image is rendered laughable. Therefore pretence and image and identity must be shored up. And if it all means that I, in my fragility, can survive only as someone else is slain, then it appears he will have to be slain. The truth is, fragile people fear that unless they retaliate, others won’t know who they are.

I see all of this in so very many marriages. Hubby comes home from work. He’s had a bad day. He’s not in good “space.” He walks into the house and trips over a tricycle. “Does this place always have to look like a scrap metal yard?” he explodes at his wife. “What do you do all day, anyway?” Now she’s hurt, and insulted. She feels she’s been both punched and backhanded. It would be a sign of weakness, she thinks, not to retaliate. It would only invite further victimisation, she thinks, not to retaliate. It would only advertise herself as an underling, she thinks, not to retaliate, and she’s too proud to appear an underling. And therefore she retaliates. “What do I do all day” she comes back, “What do you think I do all day? I simply stand around all day doing nothing since there’s nothing to do with three children underfoot. I merely wait for little Lord Fauntleroy to come home. Who do you think prepares your supper five times per week?” Now she’s sarcastic. In her pain she goes one step farther. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I can’t hold a candle to your secretary, Miss Twitchy-Bottom or whatever her name is.” Now she’s gone on the attack, just to make sure her husband is pushed back far enough to allow her to survive.

At this moment her husband is wounded, insulted, and crushed. But he can’t appear crushed; no male can. As for being insulted, no red-blooded male is going to put up with an insult like this. Whereupon he comes back with his own retaliatory “zinger.” Up and up it escalates. As it escalates its potential for irreversible deadliness increases. The entire situation can be defused, and can only be defused, when one person, either one, simply turns the other cheek. But both have an image and an identity to maintain. Both are fragile; both fear that appearing weak before the other would mean ceasing to exist themselves.

There’s only one way out. We have to recall that our identity isn’t something we forge for ourselves and then spend the rest of our lives shoring up. Jesus Christ forges our identity for us and maintains us in it. Our Lord tells us who we are. He can tell us who we are just because he, and he alone, has made us who we are. Because our identity is rooted in his action upon us and not in anything we do to ourselves, our identity in him can never be at risk. Were our identity self-fashioned it would also be the feeblest, frailest identity imaginable. Since, on the other hand, we are who we are on account of his having made us who we are, we can always know who we are and be who we are regardless of what others think we are. They may think of us as King Kong or as Caspar Milquetoast. Let them think. We don’t have an image to maintain. We don’t have an identity to preserve. Jesus Christ does this for us. And if three or four fellow-Christians keep on reflecting this truth to us we shall find ourselves cemented into this truth and it into us so as to render us impervious to those who would otherwise find us doubting ourselves and annihilating ourselves only to swing over into a nasty self-assertion that we fancy will get us through the day when in fact others are secretly laughing at our bombast and buffoonery.

If we cherish the identity our Lord gives us then we don’t have to establish a “tough guy” identity for ourselves. And if we don’t have to do this then we are free to appear weak or silly or naïve or foolish. In a word, if our identity is in Christ, we are free not to retaliate. We are as free as our Lord himself was free when he turned the other cheek.

 

IV: — All of which brings me to the last point. Turning the other cheek is the only way reconciliation is won. Reconciliation is never won through retaliation. If it’s true (and it is true) that to fight fire with fire is to ignite a blaze in which everyone is burned, then non-retaliation is the only fire-extinguisher we have.

Earlier in the sermon I said a work of grace, a colossal work of grace, must occur within us if we are ever going to renounce retaliation cheerfully. Even as such a work of God’s grace does occur and we do renounce retaliation, we should be sure to understand that in the eyes of the world we are going to appear weak. We are going to appear stupid. We are going to be laughed at as “losers.” We must be prepared for this. But of course we can be prepared for this just because we know that “losing” has always been the way God wins. It’s when God himself appears to be the biggest loser of all (a Jew, the person the world relishes hating, executed by the state, rejected by his followers, dangling from a scaffold at the edge of the city garbage dump;) it’s when God appears most to be a “loser” that he achieves his greatest work of reconciliation. It’s precisely when he appears most helpless that he’s most effective. It’s precisely when it appears he can’t do anything that he achieves the purpose for which he sent his Son.

Then today there’s only one question for you and me to settle: are we secure enough in Christ, big enough in Christ, mature enough in Christ to withstand looking like losers the next time we are insulted, and renounce retaliation? We are. Because of our Lord’s grip on us we are free from having to prove ourselves. Free from having to prove ourselves we are free from having to succumb to that evil we say we are resisting. Free from having to succumb to the evil we say we are resisting, we are free to do the truth as our Lord himself ever did the truth.

Jesus says, “If the Son makes you free, you are free indeed.”

 

                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                          

January 2005

 

You asked for a sermon on Postmodernism

 Matthew 5:43-6:4

I: — What is postmodernism or postmodernity? Plainly we have to know what is meant by “modernity” before we can grasp “postmodernity.” Some people maintain that modernity begins with the French Revolution with its avowedly secularist, anti-religious outlook. Others date modernity from the Enlightenment with its development of science. Others still (here I include myself) date modernity from the Renaissance with, among other things, the rise of market-capitalism, the development of transnational banking, the nation-state. Modernity, then, runs from mid 15th century to mid 20th century, or from 1450 to 1945.

Let’s think first of modernity. There are several features of modernity that we all recognise as soon as they are mentioned: technoscience, for instance. Think of how the telegraph was followed by the wireless, followed in turn by sophisticated telephone systems, followed yet again by satellite communication, and so on. The same path, of course, is found from the printing press to the word processor.

Mass production is another feature of modernity. At one time goods were produced in what were known as “cottage industries.” Someone with a few sheep spun wool in her living room and then wove it, eventually having a garment of some kind she could sell. With mass production a newly-invented mechanical loom hummed night and day in a factory, producing wool far more quickly, and thus permitting a vastly more efficient means of manufacturing and distributing huge quantities of woollen goods. Horse-drawn carriages used to be made by one or two men who spent weeks building one carriage completely before beginning another. With the advent of the horseless carriage, the automobile, Henry Ford developed the assembly line. The number of units manufactured per week skyrocketed. Not only did the factory-housed loom and the automobile assembly line speed up the manufacturing process, they also lowered the price per unit so that large segments of the population were able to afford cheaper manufactured goods.

Developments in industrial efficiency, we should note, created what economists call “real wealth” and distributed it in such a way that a middle class arose and mushroomed. Prior to modernity there were two classes: the noble or aristocratic class (very small in number) and the rural peasant class (very large.) In other words, there were a few rich landowners and hordes of poor land-workers. The few possessed immense wealth and power; the many possessed neither wealth nor power. Industrialisation, a major feature of modernity, gave rise to a middle class that was larger than either the rich or the poor. And of course together with the expansion of the middle class there occurred the representative democracy we all cherish.

The nation-state was a feature of modernity. The purpose of the state is to subdue lawlessness, punish evildoers, promote the public good. At the close of the Middle Ages it was noted that a people that had much in common could band together and thereby promote the public good much more efficiently. At the close of the Middle Ages there were 300 fiefdoms or principalities in Germany, with a prince presiding over each. It was obvious that if many German-speaking peoples forged themselves into a single German-speaking people, a nation-state would arise possessed of a domestic and international power that 300 fiefdoms could never hope to have.

By far the most readily recognised feature of modernity, I think, is what I mentioned first: technoscience. “Labour-saving devices” are only a small part of it. The devices that we now take for granted weren’t merely labour-saving (a tractor that ploughs in an hour what a horse ploughed in a day.) The technoscience we admire had to do with vaccinations, inoculations, surgeries (chest surgery was virtually impossible prior to the invention of the heart-lung machine). As well as the technoscience that provided safety: radar, electronic navigation, weather predicting. As well as the technoscience that “greened” large parts of the world with wheat that was impervious to rust, corn impervious to blight, fertilisers that multiplied crop yields a hundred fold, and methods of transportation that were quicker, safer, cheaper, more comfortable than anything our foreparents could have imagined.

Modernity was characterised by a belief in progress, a manifest mastery over nature, and the magnification of efficiency everywhere.

 

II: — Then what about postmodernity? What are its features? Let’s begin here where we left off: technoscience. There is now widespread loss of confidence in technoscience as a blessing. While nuclear science generates electricity more efficiently than steam turbines, nuclear science has spawned nightmare after nightmare. (Not to mention propaganda to cloak the nightmare: there are on average 500 major nuclear accidents per year, most of which are never reported to the public.) As for nuclear weaponry, we entered the cold war in 1945, seemed to pass out of it in 1989, and now appear to be on the edge of re-entering it. At the height of the cold war the USA and the USSR were aiming at each other nuclear weaponry that guaranteed what the military-industrial complex called “Mutually Assured Destruction”: MAD. Conventional weaponry had been used to win wars; nuclear weaponry guaranteed lost wars for everybody. Yet nuclear weaponry proliferated.

Developments in electronics were hailed as glorious. Electronic surveillance has eroded privacy already and brought depersonalisation and dehumanisation in its wake. And we haven’t seen anything in this regard compared to the Orwellianism we are going to see.

In the postmodern era pharmacology has become suspect. Drugs to relieve pain are one thing. What about drugs that don’t merely relieve pain, don’t merely elevate moods (from depression to contentment), don’t merely subdue agitation or compulsiveness, but alter personality? If drugs can alter personality, then what do we mean by “personality?” Since personality is intimately connected to personal identity, has personal identity evaporated? Then what has happened to the person herself? What do we mean by “self?” Is there a self? Furthermore, if self and personality are related to character, what has become of character?

While we are speaking of character we should be aware that the United States Armed Forces have developed drugs that eliminate fear. Courage, of course, is courage only in the context of fear. Drugs that eliminate fear also eliminate bravery. No American combatant need ever be awarded a purple heart! More to the point, drug-induced fearlessness renders someone a robot; robots are never afraid, and robots are never brave, just because robots are never human. That’s the point: the drugged soldier is no longer human.

What modernity called progress postmodernity deems anything but progress. Where is the progress in ecological damage so far-reaching that air isn’t fit to breathe or water to drink, while ozone-depletion renders us uncommonly vulnerable to skin cancer? Where is the progress in schooling that finds university-bound students unable to write or comprehend a five-sentence paragraph?

To no one’s surprise, postmodernity has suffered widespread loss of confidence in reason. We may call postmodernites cynics or we may call them realists; in any case postmodernites see human reasoning as a huge factor in the postmodern mess. They see reason (so-called) as simply a means to an end that isn’t reasonable itself.

One feature of the collapse of confidence in reason is the disappearance of truth. Truth is now reduced to taste. Postmodernity denies that there is such a thing as truth, or denies that we can access truth. Instead of knowing truth we express opinions, or we indicate preferences, or we “go with our gut.” Truth? What is truth, anyway? And if it existed, what makes us think we could know it? And even if we could know it, how would we know when we had found it? Truth? You have your opinion and I have mine.

Needless to say the disappearance of truth entails the disappearance of ethics. Postmodernites don’t speak of ethics; they speak of values. Everyone knows that different people hold different values. But this isn’t to say one value is superior to another. What any one person values is up to him or her. No one is to be told his values are defective or inferior. After all, there’s no disputing taste. Taste, preference, opinion, whatever – it all adds up to the out-and-out subjective.

If someone, nervous about all of this, speaks up, “But shouldn’t opinions or preferences be grounded in something, grounded in reality?”, such a person will be reminded, “Asking whether they should be grounded in reality is pointless when no one knows what reality is or how it might be recognised.” “But can’t the smorgasbord of opinions be considered and weighed rationally?” The question is pointless when reason is already suspect. Besides, to challenge someone else’s values or opinions is to excite emotion, and everyone knows that when emotion and reason meet, reason always takes second place.

Another feature of postmodernity is the weakening of the nation-state in the face of tribalism. All over the world tribalism is reasserting itself. It is especially strong in Africa. Quebec’s growing self-consciousness, however, is a form of tribalism too, as is the United Church’s all-aboriginal presbytery. The most vicious form of tribalism (“vicious”, of course, is a value-laden term, my value) is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is on the increase. Internally the nation-state is fragmenting; externally the nation-state is increasingly the pawn of international finances and multinational corporations.

Another feature of postmodernity is the mushrooming of consumerism, consumer-driven everything. In the modern era economics were producer-driven; in the postmodern era, consumer-driven. Consumerism determines what church-congregations offer, what pulpits declare, what school boards program. Reginald Bibby, sociologist at the University of Lethbridge, maintains that there’s a huge demand throughout the society for religious consumer-products. “If the church wants to survive”, says Bibby, “it should meet consumer demands.” In other words, the church should forget what it believes to be the truth and substance of the gospel. The church should merely prepare the religious buffet that allows consumers to pick and choose according to taste, whim, preference. It must never be forgotten, of course, that it’s consumers who fund the church. Consumerism? My daughter Mary has just finished her B.Sc.N. program at McMaster University. When she began the course she was told that patients are no longer patients; what used to be known as patients are now clients. Patients are sick; clients are consumers who are purchasing a service.

My wife, Maureen, came upon three grade one students writing obscene graffiti. She deemed this to be an “actionable” offence and immediately took action. Next day the parent of one of these three children came to see Maureen. The parent remarked, “How unfortunate it was that my daughter signed her name to the graffiti she wrote.” “It wasn’t unfortunate that your daughter signed her name, thereby giving herself away”, Maureen replied; “It wasn’t even unfortunate that she wrote the obscene graffiti in the first place. It was simply wrong; wrong.” The category “wrong” has no meaning for that parent. The parent has already disavowed everything that might be logically related to the word “wrong.” Her attitude encapsulates postmodernity. Besides, as a taxpayer she’s a consumer who is purchasing a service for her child. And since consumers are paying the piper, they are now calling the tune.

 

III: — Is postmodernity all bad? Has the sky fallen on Chicken Little? No. Think of something familiar to all of us: the writing of history. We all studied history in school. We all studied it thinking it to be the soul of objectivity. Postmodernites tell us something different. A few years ago I addressed a group of curriculum planners at the central office of the Toronto Board of Education. I was speaking about prejudice in general, racism in particular. I told the group that while racial segregation had always occurred spontaneously in Ontario, it had been mandated by law in one institution only: the school system. Yes, Ontario schools were segregated along black/white lines beginning in 1850. Most of the curriculum planners were completely unaware of this. Then I asked them, “In what year was the last racially segregated school in Ontario closed?” Two planners shouted, “In 1965.” They were correct. They were also black. The black educators knew about racially segregated schools in Ontario; the white planners had never heard of it and were aghast to learn of it. When I studied Canadian history in high school I was never informed of this matter. Were you? The postmodernites are going to keep asking us, “Who writes history? Whose viewpoint is reflected? Whose interests are advanced? And what despised group is silenced?” Here postmodernism is doing us a favour.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. Before we deplore the fast-approaching demise of the Church of Scotland (to name only one denomination on its way to death), the Church of Scotland being the national church in the land of the thistle; before we lament the morbidity of the kirk, we should remember that many people won’t be sorry to see it go down. My earliest Old Testament professor, Scottish himself but belonging to a church other than the Church of Scotland, told me that when he was young man in Scotland you couldn’t get work in the post office, a bank, or schoolteaching unless you were a member of the kirk. You didn’t have to attend; you didn’t have to worship; you didn’t have to believe anything; but your name had to be on the roll. This is disgusting.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. Admittedly confidence has collapsed in technoscience as something that can promote the human good. (Technoscience, of course, can always promote the technically efficient. But the technically efficient is a long way from the human good.) While technoscience has done much to ease physical toil and bodily discomfort, done much to promote longer life and reduce the likelihood of sudden death, Christians are aware that technoscience was never going to promote the human good. Then the public loss of confidence in technoscience is loss of confidence where Christians had none in any case.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. To be sure, postmodernites insist that reason (reasoning) is suspect, reasoning being little more than rationalisation serving any number of subtle or not-so-subtle ends. At the same time Christians have always known that sin blinds so thoroughly as to blind humankind to the speciousness of its reasoning. Christians have always known that only grace, God’s grace, frees reason and restores reason to reason’s integrity. In the era of the Fall, where reason itself is compromised, grace alone restores reason to reason’s integrity. Then postmodernity reminds us all of a human predicament that Christians know the gospel alone to cure.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. While tribalism is to be deplored, the radical relativising of the nation-state isn’t to be deplored. Surely the development of hydrogen warheads rendered the nation-state obsolete. Surely the nation-state has been a reservoir of old wounds and resentments and recriminations and national aggressions that we’re all better off without. Surely we don’t need a cess-pool whose toxic wastes seep into neighbouring aquifers.

 

IV: — Then what are Christians to do about postmodernism?

First of all we are to remember at all times and in all circumstances that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” (Psalm 24:1) “The Lord of hosts is the king of glory.” He is; he alone is. Christians aren’t dualists. We don’t believe that the cosmos is stuck fast in an interminable struggle between two equal but hostile powers, God and the evil one, neither able to defeat the other. We don’t believe that the Fall (Genesis 3) has obliterated the goodness of God’s creation. Yes, Jesus says that the creation lies in the grip of the “prince of this world”. But the prince is only that: prince, never king. The earth is the Lord’s, no one else’s.

The gospel of John, the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews, and Paul’s letter to the church in Colosse; all these documents declare that the whole world was made through Christ for Christ. He was the agent in creation, and the creation was fashioned for his sake. He is its origin and end. He is its ground and goal. And no development in world-occurrence can overturn this truth.

We are told in Colossians 1:17, “In Jesus Christ all things hold together.” However fast, however violently, the world spins (metaphorically speaking), it can never fly apart. “In him all things hold together.” Why doesn’t the creation fly apart (metaphorically speaking)? Why doesn’t human existence become impossible? Why don’t the countless competing special-interest groups, each with its “selfist” savagery, dismember the world hopelessly? Just because in him, in our Lord, all things hold together. What he creates he maintains; what he upholds he causes to cohere. “Hold together” (sunesteken) is a term taken from the Stoic philosophy of the ancient Greeks. But whereas the ancient Greek philosophers said that a philosophical principle upheld the cosmos, first-century Christians knew it to be a person, the living person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He grips the creation with a hand large enough to comprehend the totality of the world. In other words, the real significance of postmodernism can’t be grasped by postmodernites; the real significance of postmodernism can be grasped only by him whose world it is and in whom it is held together. The real significance of postmodernism, its bane but also its blessing, can be understood only by those who are attuned to the mind of Christ. The sky hasn’t fallen down.

What are Christians to do? If we are first to remember that the earth is the Lord’s, in the second place we are to meet everyday challenges and opportunities each and every day. Many Christians think that the first thing to be accomplished is a philosophical rebuttal of postmodernism’s tenets. I’m a philosopher myself, and I agree that a philosophical critique, a philosophical rebuttal, is appropriate and important. At the same time, there are relatively few people with the training and the equipment for this sort of thing. All Christians, however, can meet everyday challenges and opportunities each and every day.

You must have noticed that Jesus doesn’t merely illustrate his ministry with everyday matters (a homemaker sweeping the house clean in order to find her grocery money); he directs us to everyday matters as the occasion of our faith and obedience, trust and love. Discipleship isn’t suspended until philosophers can dissect postmodernism; discipleship is always to be exercised now, in the context of the ready-to-hand. We trust our Lord and his truth right now (or we don’t). We grant hospitality right now and discover we’ve entertained angels unawares (or we don’t). We uphold our Lord’s claim on our obedience in the face of postmodernism’s ethical indifference (or we don’t). We recognise the approach of temptation and resist it in the instant of its approach, or we stare at it like a rabbit staring at a snake until, rabbit-like, we’re seized. We forgive the offender from our heart and find ourselves newly aware of God’s forgiveness of us, or we merely pretend to forgive the offender and find our own heart shrivelling. The apostle John insists that we do the truth. We have countless opportunities every day challenging us to forthright faith and obedience and trust regardless of whether or not we can philosophically answer postmodernism’s philosophical presuppositions.

What can Christians do in the face of postmodernism? In the third place we can recover the Christian truth that human existence is relational. A few minutes ago I mentioned, for instance, that one feature of modernity’s modulation into postmodernity was the shift from production economics to consumer economics. We should note, however, that neither form of economics impinges upon a Christian understanding of human profundity. God intends us to be creatures whose ultimate profundity is rooted not in economic matters of any sort (contra Marx) but in relations.

Think of the old story concerning the creation of humankind. “God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he them.” (Gen. 1:27) Adam is properly Adam; Adam is properly himself only in relation to Eve. To be sure, Adam isn’t a function of Eve, nor Eve a function of him. Neither one can be reduced to the other; neither one is an aspect of the other. None the less, each is who he or she is only in relation to the other.

I am not reducible to any one of my relationships or to all of them together. I am not an extension of my wife or an aspect of my parents or a function of my daughters. I am me, uniquely, irreplaceably, unsubstituably me. Still, I am not who I am apart from my relationships.

Every last human being is a dialogical partner with God. This isn’t to say that everyone is aware of this or welcomes this or agrees with this. It isn’t to say that everyone is a believer or a crypto-believer or even a “wannabe” believer. But it is to say that the God who has made us can’t be escaped. He can be denied, he can be disdained, he can be ignored, he can be unknown; he can certainly be fled but he can never be escaped. Not to be aware of this truth is not thereby to be spared it. The living God is always and everywhere the dialogical “Other”, the relational “Other” of everyone’s life, even as there are countless creaturely “others” in everyone’s life.

Decades ago Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting.” He was right: what isn’t profoundly a “meeting” isn’t living; it’s death. What isn’t a “meeting” isn’t real; it’s illusory. Postmodernity is suspicious and cynical and bitter all at once, and often for good reason. It denies the category of the real. Right here there is challenge and opportunity a-plenty for Christians: the real is the relational.

What can Christians do? In the fourth place we have to work out much more thoroughly what we understand to be the human, the quintessentially human. Our society is beset on all sides with depersonalisation and dehumanisation. We are now facing the technological novelty known as “virtual reality” or “synthetic reality.” Soon we’ll be sitting in front of our TV screens with a contraption on our head that allows us to “experience” the sensations of touch, smell, taste. When so much of the human can be counterfeited electronically, what does it mean to be authentically human? Surely Christians have something to say and do here.

In the fifth place postmodernity forces us to come to terms with something the church has considered too slightly if at all: the polar opposite of evil isn’t good, not even the good. The polar opposite of wrong isn’t right, not even the right. The polar opposite of evil, rather, is the holy. The polar opposite of wrong is the holy. Plainly the holy and the good are not exactly the same. The holy and the right are not exactly the same. Wherein do they differ? The answer to this question comprehends everything that postmodernism brings before us. But since today’s sermon is already unusually long, the answer to this question will have to await another sermon on another day. What is postmodernism or postmodernity? Plainly we have to know what is meant by “modernity” before we can grasp “postmodernity.” Some people maintain that modernity begins with the French Revolution with its avowedly secularist, anti-religious outlook. Others date modernity from the Enlightenment with its development of science. Others still (here I include myself) date modernity from the Renaissance with, among other things, the rise of market-capitalism, the development of transnational banking, the nation-state. Modernity, then, runs from mid 15th century to mid 20th century, or from 1450 to 1945.

Let’s think first of modernity. There are several features of modernity that we all recognise as soon as they are mentioned: technoscience, for instance. Think of how the telegraph was followed by the wireless, followed in turn by sophisticated telephone systems, followed yet again by satellite communication, and so on. The same path, of course, is found from the printing press to the word processor.

Mass production is another feature of modernity. At one time goods were produced in what were known as “cottage industries.” Someone with a few sheep spun wool in her living room and then wove it, eventually having a garment of some kind she could sell. With mass production a newly-invented mechanical loom hummed night and day in a factory, producing wool far more quickly, and thus permitting a vastly more efficient means of manufacturing and distributing huge quantities of woollen goods. Horse-drawn carriages used to be made by one or two men who spent weeks building one carriage completely before beginning another. With the advent of the horseless carriage, the automobile, Henry Ford developed the assembly line. The number of units manufactured per week skyrocketed. Not only did the factory-housed loom and the automobile assembly line speed up the manufacturing process, they also lowered the price per unit so that large segments of the population were able to afford cheaper manufactured goods.

Developments in industrial efficiency, we should note, created what economists call “real wealth” and distributed it in such a way that a middle class arose and mushroomed. Prior to modernity there were two classes: the noble or aristocratic class (very small in number) and the rural peasant class (very large.) In other words, there were a few rich landowners and hordes of poor land-workers. The few possessed immense wealth and power; the many possessed neither wealth nor power. Industrialisation, a major feature of modernity, gave rise to a middle class that was larger than either the rich or the poor. And of course together with the expansion of the middle class there occurred the representative democracy we all cherish.

The nation-state was a feature of modernity. The purpose of the state is to subdue lawlessness, punish evildoers, promote the public good. At the close of the Middle Ages it was noted that a people that had much in common could band together and thereby promote the public good much more efficiently. At the close of the Middle Ages there were 300 fiefdoms or principalities in Germany, with a prince presiding over each. It was obvious that if many German-speaking peoples forged themselves into a single German-speaking people, a nation-state would arise possessed of a domestic and international power that 300 fiefdoms could never hope to have.

By far the most readily recognised feature of modernity, I think, is what I mentioned first: technoscience. “Labour-saving devices” are only a small part of it. The devices that we now take for granted weren’t merely labour-saving (a tractor that ploughs in an hour what a horse ploughed in a day.) The technoscience we admire had to do with vaccinations, inoculations, surgeries (chest surgery was virtually impossible prior to the invention of the heart-lung machine). As well as the technoscience that provided safety: radar, electronic navigation, weather predicting. As well as the technoscience that “greened” large parts of the world with wheat that was impervious to rust, corn impervious to blight, fertilisers that multiplied crop yields a hundred fold, and methods of transportation that were quicker, safer, cheaper, more comfortable than anything our foreparents could have imagined.

Modernity was characterised by a belief in progress, a manifest mastery over nature, and the magnification of efficiency everywhere.

 

II: — Then what about postmodernity? What are its features? Let’s begin here where we left off: technoscience. There is now widespread loss of confidence in technoscience as a blessing. While nuclear science generates electricity more efficiently than steam turbines, nuclear science has spawned nightmare after nightmare. (Not to mention propaganda to cloak the nightmare: there are on average 500 major nuclear accidents per year, most of which are never reported to the public.) As for nuclear weaponry, we entered the cold war in 1945, seemed to pass out of it in 1989, and now appear to be on the edge of re-entering it. At the height of the cold war the USA and the USSR were aiming at each other nuclear weaponry that guaranteed what the military-industrial complex called “Mutually Assured Destruction”: MAD. Conventional weaponry had been used to win wars; nuclear weaponry guaranteed lost wars for everybody. Yet nuclear weaponry proliferated.

Developments in electronics were hailed as glorious. Electronic surveillance has eroded privacy already and brought depersonalisation and dehumanisation in its wake. And we haven’t seen anything in this regard compared to the Orwellianism we are going to see.

In the postmodern era pharmacology has become suspect. Drugs to relieve pain are one thing. What about drugs that don’t merely relieve pain, don’t merely elevate moods (from depression to contentment), don’t merely subdue agitation or compulsiveness, but alter personality? If drugs can alter personality, then what do we mean by “personality?” Since personality is intimately connected to personal identity, has personal identity evaporated? Then what has happened to the person herself? What do we mean by “self?” Is there a self? Furthermore, if self and personality are related to character, what has become of character?

While we are speaking of character we should be aware that the United States Armed Forces have developed drugs that eliminate fear. Courage, of course, is courage only in the context of fear. Drugs that eliminate fear also eliminate bravery. No American combatant need ever be awarded a purple heart! More to the point, drug-induced fearlessness renders someone a robot; robots are never afraid, and robots are never brave, just because robots are never human. That’s the point: the drugged soldier is no longer human.

What modernity called progress postmodernity deems anything but progress. Where is the progress in ecological damage so far-reaching that air isn’t fit to breathe or water to drink, while ozone-depletion renders us uncommonly vulnerable to skin cancer? Where is the progress in schooling that finds university-bound students unable to write or comprehend a five-sentence paragraph?

To no one’s surprise, postmodernity has suffered widespread loss of confidence in reason. We may call postmodernites cynics or we may call them realists; in any case postmodernites see human reasoning as a huge factor in the postmodern mess. They see reason (so-called) as simply a means to an end that isn’t reasonable itself.

One feature of the collapse of confidence in reason is the disappearance of truth. Truth is now reduced to taste. Postmodernity denies that there is such a thing as truth, or denies that we can access truth. Instead of knowing truth we express opinions, or we indicate preferences, or we “go with our gut.” Truth? What is truth, anyway? And if it existed, what makes us think we could know it? And even if we could know it, how would we know when we had found it? Truth? You have your opinion and I have mine.

Needless to say the disappearance of truth entails the disappearance of ethics. Postmodernites don’t speak of ethics; they speak of values. Everyone knows that different people hold different values. But this isn’t to say one value is superior to another. What any one person values is up to him or her. No one is to be told his values are defective or inferior. After all, there’s no disputing taste. Taste, preference, opinion, whatever – it all adds up to the out-and-out subjective.

If someone, nervous about all of this, speaks up, “But shouldn’t opinions or preferences be grounded in something, grounded in reality?”, such a person will be reminded, “Asking whether they should be grounded in reality is pointless when no one knows what reality is or how it might be recognised.” “But can’t the smorgasbord of opinions be considered and weighed rationally?” The question is pointless when reason is already suspect. Besides, to challenge someone else’s values or opinions is to excite emotion, and everyone knows that when emotion and reason meet, reason always takes second place.

Another feature of postmodernity is the weakening of the nation-state in the face of tribalism. All over the world tribalism is reasserting itself. It is especially strong in Africa. Quebec’s growing self-consciousness, however, is a form of tribalism too, as is the United Church’s all-aboriginal presbytery. The most vicious form of tribalism (“vicious”, of course, is a value-laden term, my value) is ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is on the increase. Internally the nation-state is fragmenting; externally the nation-state is increasingly the pawn of international finances and multinational corporations.

Another feature of postmodernity is the mushrooming of consumerism, consumer-driven everything. In the modern era economics were producer-driven; in the postmodern era, consumer-driven. Consumerism determines what church-congregations offer, what pulpits declare, what school boards program. Reginald Bibby, sociologist at the University of Lethbridge, maintains that there’s a huge demand throughout the society for religious consumer-products. “If the church wants to survive”, says Bibby, “it should meet consumer demands.” In other words, the church should forget what it believes to be the truth and substance of the gospel. The church should merely prepare the religious buffet that allows consumers to pick and choose according to taste, whim, preference. It must never be forgotten, of course, that it’s consumers who fund the church. Consumerism? My daughter Mary has just finished her B.Sc.N. program at McMaster University. When she began the course she was told that patients are no longer patients; what used to be known as patients are now clients. Patients are sick; clients are consumers who are purchasing a service.

My wife, Maureen, came upon three grade one students writing obscene graffiti. She deemed this to be an “actionable” offence and immediately took action. Next day the parent of one of these three children came to see Maureen. The parent remarked, “How unfortunate it was that my daughter signed her name to the graffiti she wrote.” “It wasn’t unfortunate that your daughter signed her name, thereby giving herself away”, Maureen replied; “It wasn’t even unfortunate that she wrote the obscene graffiti in the first place. It was simply wrong; wrong.” The category “wrong” has no meaning for that parent. The parent has already disavowed everything that might be logically related to the word “wrong.” Her attitude encapsulates postmodernity. Besides, as a taxpayer she’s a consumer who is purchasing a service for her child. And since consumers are paying the piper, they are now calling the tune.

 

III: — Is postmodernity all bad? Has the sky fallen on Chicken Little? No. Think of something familiar to all of us: the writing of history. We all studied history in school. We all studied it thinking it to be the soul of objectivity. Postmodernites tell us something different. A few years ago I addressed a group of curriculum planners at the central office of the Toronto Board of Education. I was speaking about prejudice in general, racism in particular. I told the group that while racial segregation had always occurred spontaneously in Ontario, it had been mandated by law in one institution only: the school system. Yes, Ontario schools were segregated along black/white lines beginning in 1850. Most of the curriculum planners were completely unaware of this. Then I asked them, “In what year was the last racially segregated school in Ontario closed?” Two planners shouted, “In 1965.” They were correct. They were also black. The black educators knew about racially segregated schools in Ontario; the white planners had never heard of it and were aghast to learn of it. When I studied Canadian history in high school I was never informed of this matter. Were you? The postmodernites are going to keep asking us, “Who writes history? Whose viewpoint is reflected? Whose interests are advanced? And what despised group is silenced?” Here postmodernism is doing us a favour.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. Before we deplore the fast-approaching demise of the Church of Scotland (to name only one denomination on its way to death), the Church of Scotland being the national church in the land of the thistle; before we lament the morbidity of the kirk, we should remember that many people won’t be sorry to see it go down. My earliest Old Testament professor, Scottish himself but belonging to a church other than the Church of Scotland, told me that when he was young man in Scotland you couldn’t get work in the post office, a bank, or schoolteaching unless you were a member of the kirk. You didn’t have to attend; you didn’t have to worship; you didn’t have to believe anything; but your name had to be on the roll. This is disgusting.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. Admittedly confidence has collapsed in technoscience as something that can promote the human good. (Technoscience, of course, can always promote the technically efficient. But the technically efficient is a long way from the human good.) While technoscience has done much to ease physical toil and bodily discomfort, done much to promote longer life and reduce the likelihood of sudden death, Christians are aware that technoscience was never going to promote the human good. Then the public loss of confidence in technoscience is loss of confidence where Christians had none in any case.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. To be sure, postmodernites insist that reason (reasoning) is suspect, reasoning being little more than rationalisation serving any number of subtle or not-so-subtle ends. At the same time Christians have always known that sin blinds so thoroughly as to blind humankind to the speciousness of its reasoning. Christians have always known that only grace, God’s grace, frees reason and restores reason to reason’s integrity. In the era of the Fall, where reason itself is compromised, grace alone restores reason to reason’s integrity. Then postmodernity reminds us all of a human predicament that Christians know the gospel alone to cure.

Is postmodernity all bad? No. While tribalism is to be deplored, the radical relativising of the nation-state isn’t to be deplored. Surely the development of hydrogen warheads rendered the nation-state obsolete. Surely the nation-state has been a reservoir of old wounds and resentments and recriminations and national aggressions that we’re all better off without. Surely we don’t need a cess-pool whose toxic wastes seep into neighbouring aquifers.

 

IV: — Then what are Christians to do about postmodernism?

First of all we are to remember at all times and in all circumstances that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” (Psalm 24:1) “The Lord of hosts is the king of glory.” He is; he alone is. Christians aren’t dualists. We don’t believe that the cosmos is stuck fast in an interminable struggle between two equal but hostile powers, God and the evil one, neither able to defeat the other. We don’t believe that the Fall (Genesis 3) has obliterated the goodness of God’s creation. Yes, Jesus says that the creation lies in the grip of the “prince of this world”. But the prince is only that: prince, never king. The earth is the Lord’s, no one else’s.

The gospel of John, the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews, and Paul’s letter to the church in Colosse; all these documents declare that the whole world was made through Christ for Christ. He was the agent in creation, and the creation was fashioned for his sake. He is its origin and end. He is its ground and goal. And no development in world-occurrence can overturn this truth.

We are told in Colossians 1:17, “In Jesus Christ all things hold together.” However fast, however violently, the world spins (metaphorically speaking), it can never fly apart. “In him all things hold together.” Why doesn’t the creation fly apart (metaphorically speaking)? Why doesn’t human existence become impossible? Why don’t the countless competing special-interest groups, each with its “selfist” savagery, dismember the world hopelessly? Just because in him, in our Lord, all things hold together. What he creates he maintains; what he upholds he causes to cohere. “Hold together” (sunesteken) is a term taken from the Stoic philosophy of the ancient Greeks. But whereas the ancient Greek philosophers said that a philosophical principle upheld the cosmos, first-century Christians knew it to be a person, the living person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He grips the creation with a hand large enough to comprehend the totality of the world. In other words, the real significance of postmodernism can’t be grasped by postmodernites; the real significance of postmodernism can be grasped only by him whose world it is and in whom it is held together. The real significance of postmodernism, its bane but also its blessing, can be understood only by those who are attuned to the mind of Christ. The sky hasn’t fallen down.

What are Christians to do? If we are first to remember that the earth is the Lord’s, in the second place we are to meet everyday challenges and opportunities each and every day. Many Christians think that the first thing to be accomplished is a philosophical rebuttal of postmodernism’s tenets. I’m a philosopher myself, and I agree that a philosophical critique, a philosophical rebuttal, is appropriate and important. At the same time, there are relatively few people with the training and the equipment for this sort of thing. All Christians, however, can meet everyday challenges and opportunities each and every day.

You must have noticed that Jesus doesn’t merely illustrate his ministry with everyday matters (a homemaker sweeping the house clean in order to find her grocery money); he directs us to everyday matters as the occasion of our faith and obedience, trust and love. Discipleship isn’t suspended until philosophers can dissect postmodernism; discipleship is always to be exercised now, in the context of the ready-to-hand. We trust our Lord and his truth right now (or we don’t). We grant hospitality right now and discover we’ve entertained angels unawares (or we don’t). We uphold our Lord’s claim on our obedience in the face of postmodernism’s ethical indifference (or we don’t). We recognise the approach of temptation and resist it in the instant of its approach, or we stare at it like a rabbit staring at a snake until, rabbit-like, we’re seized. We forgive the offender from our heart and find ourselves newly aware of God’s forgiveness of us, or we merely pretend to forgive the offender and find our own heart shrivelling. The apostle John insists that we do the truth. We have countless opportunities every day challenging us to forthright faith and obedience and trust regardless of whether or not we can philosophically answer postmodernism’s philosophical presuppositions.

What can Christians do in the face of postmodernism? In the third place we can recover the Christian truth that human existence is relational. A few minutes ago I mentioned, for instance, that one feature of modernity’s modulation into postmodernity was the shift from production economics to consumer economics. We should note, however, that neither form of economics impinges upon a Christian understanding of human profundity. God intends us to be creatures whose ultimate profundity is rooted not in economic matters of any sort (contra Marx) but in relations.

Think of the old story concerning the creation of humankind. “God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he them.” (Gen. 1:27) Adam is properly Adam; Adam is properly himself only in relation to Eve. To be sure, Adam isn’t a function of Eve, nor Eve a function of him. Neither one can be reduced to the other; neither one is an aspect of the other. None the less, each is who he or she is only in relation to the other.

I am not reducible to any one of my relationships or to all of them together. I am not an extension of my wife or an aspect of my parents or a function of my daughters. I am me, uniquely, irreplaceably, unsubstituably me. Still, I am not who I am apart from my relationships.

Every last human being is a dialogical partner with God. This isn’t to say that everyone is aware of this or welcomes this or agrees with this. It isn’t to say that everyone is a believer or a crypto-believer or even a “wannabe” believer. But it is to say that the God who has made us can’t be escaped. He can be denied, he can be disdained, he can be ignored, he can be unknown; he can certainly be fled but he can never be escaped. Not to be aware of this truth is not thereby to be spared it. The living God is always and everywhere the dialogical “Other”, the relational “Other” of everyone’s life, even as there are countless creaturely “others” in everyone’s life.

Decades ago Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting.” He was right: what isn’t profoundly a “meeting” isn’t living; it’s death. What isn’t a “meeting” isn’t real; it’s illusory. Postmodernity is suspicious and cynical and bitter all at once, and often for good reason. It denies the category of the real. Right here there is challenge and opportunity a-plenty for Christians: the real is the relational.

What can Christians do? In the fourth place we have to work out much more thoroughly what we understand to be the human, the quintessentially human. Our society is beset on all sides with depersonalisation and dehumanisation. We are now facing the technological novelty known as “virtual reality” or “synthetic reality.” Soon we’ll be sitting in front of our TV screens with a contraption on our head that allows us to “experience” the sensations of touch, smell, taste. When so much of the human can be counterfeited electronically, what does it mean to be authentically human? Surely Christians have something to say and do here.

In the fifth place postmodernity forces us to come to terms with something the church has considered too slightly if at all: the polar opposite of evil isn’t good, not even the good. The polar opposite of wrong isn’t right, not even the right. The polar opposite of evil, rather, is the holy. The polar opposite of wrong is the holy. Plainly the holy and the good are not exactly the same. The holy and the right are not exactly the same. Wherein do they differ? The answer to this question comprehends everything that postmodernism brings before us. But since today’s sermon is already unusually long, the answer to this question will have to await another sermon on another day.

 

 

Victor Shepherd             

November 2000

What Does Jesus Mean by ‘Reward’?

  Matthew 6:1-6

Isaiah 25:6-10         Hebrews 11:32-39          Luke 14:1-14

 

I: — “How would you like to make $700,000 per year?” The question was put to me that starkly. I had been asked to make a house call. No reason for the call was given, but I assumed that there was difficulty or perplexity or pain of some sort. When I was seated in the living room it turned out the couple was involved in pyramid sales. They wanted me to become part of the pyramid. I was to work for them, in a sense; that is, they would profit from whatever I sold. But at the same time I was going to pick up $700,000 annually for myself. Their appeal was directed straight at my self-interest.

Everywhere we look we find self-interest ascendant, strident and shameless. Labour negotiations, admittedly sometimes undertaken to remedy injustice, are more likely to be a contest between two parties, each of which has only one consideration in mind: how can I gobble up as much as possible to feed my ease and satiate my acquisitiveness? – as if it could ever be satiated.

Politics is much the same. Any political party asks itself one question: “How can we give the people what they want so that we can get what we want? The bottom line for everyone is “what we want.”

The titles in the bookstores speak volumes. How to Pull Your Own Strings. How to Make Relationships Work to Your Advantage. How To Get Your Own Way Without Seeming To.

   Obviously scripture is correct when it says the root human problem is an innermost perversity wherein we make ourselves the measure of the whole universe; wherein we make ourselves lord of ourselves, as well as lord of everyone else. To say the same thing differently, the root human problem is plainly an ego so swollen that it corrupts and suffocates everything, an ego so very inflated that the only perspective we have on others is how they can render us even more inflated (and more ugly, we should add.) The last thing any of us needs is a bigger carrot dangled in front of us. A bigger carrot would only render us more grasping than we are already. Since super-swollen self-ism is the root human problem, then surely our Lord is concerned to do something about it, to reduce the swelling, to free us from the choke-hold we have on ourselves and deliver us from our schemes for feeding our self-interest. Surely our Lord intends to operate on us right here.

Then it’s right here that there seems to be a contradiction, for Jesus speaks so very frequently about rewards. “Count yourselves blessed when you are persecuted for my sake,” he says, “for your reward is going to be great.” “When you are giving a dinner party,” he continues, “don’t invite the socially prominent who will boost your social standing; and don’t invite the people just like yourselves who are going to invite you back next month. You won’t get any reward from God for doing that. Instead invite those whom the world overlooks, even despises, and at the last you will surely receive your reward.”

Again and again Jesus speaks of the rewards that are coming to his followers as dependably as night follows day. Then is he no different from the couple who suggested I join the pyramid and make a bundle of money for myself (not to mention a bundle for them?) Is he no better than this? If so, then in the guise of liberating me from my acquisitiveness he’s everywhere strengthening it. If so, then the TV preacher is right when he urges hearers to “invest” in God since God is no one’s debtor.

We must put all such misunderstanding behind us: our Lord does want to free us from the choke-hold we have on ourselves. He wants to repair the ugliness our self-importance has wrought in us.

We must hear him again when he repudiates utterly any suggestion of tit-for-tat. “When you are doing someone a kindness,” he insists, “don’t advertise it. Keep it secret. Don’t let anyone know. Don’t even let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Elsewhere he commands, “Lend whatever you can – and expect nothing in return.” He knows better than we that if we expect something in return, then soon we’ll be doing whatever it is we do in order to get something in return. Our self-ism will have been inflated yet again.

When my sisters and I were ten or eleven years old my younger sister, one winter’s day, shovelled the snow off the very short sidewalk of the elderly man next door. She said she was doing it simply to be helpful (although I have my doubts.) He gave her 75 cents. This was a substantial sum for a ten-year old in 1955. (Do you know what 75 cents in 1955 is worth in 2005? It’s $18.75. My sister had shovelled off the short sidewalk in three minutes.) She was so very taken with her newly discovered source of fabulous wealth that for the rest of the winter she was shovelling his sidewalk as soon as three flakes had alighted on it. “When you render help,” says Jesus, “don’t expect anything in return. Your left hand shouldn’t know what your right hand is doing.”

In our Lord’s parable of the sheep and the goats the element too often overlooked is the element of surprise. The sheep are those who have assisted the needy and comforted the suffering and renounced themselves for the disadvantaged and made whatever sacrifice they felt they had to make when faced with someone else’s hunger or loneliness or pain or perplexity or guilt. Their only motive has been the undeniable need of someone they couldn’t ignore. Reward for this? It has never entered their head. Because they have acted without thought of reward they are surprised, stunned in fact, at the munificent reward they now receive. They had been kind not because they were thinking to be kind; they had simply acted spontaneously, without calculation, when faced with human distress. Now they are speechless when God blesses them.

The goats, on the other hand, had calculated. Quickly. Experts in mental arithmetic, in an instant they had added up that by helping those whose privation and pain were gaping, they were going to gain nothing. The “goats” wouldn’t act unless a huge carrot was dangled in front of them.

Plainly the reward or blessing that Jesus promises his people is reward of an unusual sort: his reward is promised only to those who act without thought of reward. His reward is promised to those who can only be surprised at their reward. In other words, so far from reinforcing a reward-mentality, our Lord’s promise of reward contradicts reward-mentality.

You and I have taken a giant step toward Christian maturity (not to say spiritual profundity) when we can spend ourselves for someone else and keep on spending ourselves without expecting anything in return. Of course we’d never expect our kindness, even our sacrifice, to bring us money. But how about a little recognition? Just an acknowledgement. Wouldn’t a word of appreciation be in order? A nod of thanks? How much we are ‘expecting’ – even simply expecting appreciation – is evident in our reaction when we receive no appreciation. “That’s the last time I go out of my way for her,” we fume; “I’ve never seen anyone as ungrateful.” Jesus reminds us that his Father sends and keeps on sending rain on the just and the unjust alike, the appreciative and the unappreciative, the grateful and the ungrateful. Surely the test of authenticity in all we do is our continuing to do it when we aren’t recognized or thanked. Goodwill towards others is genuine goodwill, and patience with others is genuine patience, only when we aren’t recognized or thanked yet continue in goodwill and patience. Patience isn’t patience if we’re expecting something in return. If we’re expecting something then what looks like patience is merely an investment whose dividends haven’t yet paid. For how long has God poured out his mercy, on how many people, only to have them reciprocate with protracted hostility? Our Lord promises his people reward even as he forbids them to ponder reward.

 

II: — Then what does Jesus mean when he says that God, who sees in secret, will never fail to bestow reward? There are two aspects to note here. One, God rewards his people in the life to come. “Blessed are you when you are hammered for my sake,” says Jesus, “for great is your reward in heaven.” It will be ours in the life to come. The other aspect: God rewards his people now, in this life.

In the first instance Jesus means that whatever kindness we do, whatever integrity we refuse to surrender in the face of opposition, whatever truth we uphold in the face of self-interested “fudging” God will honour inasmuch as God treasures all of this in a world that is indifferent to kindness, contemptuous concerning integrity, and hostile to truth. The smallest cup of water given to relieve someone else God sees. Yet he does more than observe it. What God sees God adopts; God owns; and in his own way and in his own time he will bless the selfless giver of that cup in a manner we can’t apprehend at this moment.

We all understand how it is virtually impossible for historians to evaluate accurately the historical significance of events that are occurring right now. Something that appears crucial today may turn out, fifty years from now, to have been only a tempest in a teapot. On the other hand, something that seems a trifle today may turn out to have had momentous historical impact.

In the same way there are people who manage to get themselves noticed and congratulated, even feted by the prominent and the powerful. Do you ever look at the society page in Saturday’s National Post? The centre-fold spread features the socially privileged who were at last night’s ball to raise money for this or that project (no doubt worthwhile) and who are fawned over inasmuch as Mr. Snodgrass owns the fitness club that professional athletes frequent while Mrs. Snodgrass is Canada’s largest importer of rare gems.

And then there are other folk. Their lives unfold anonymously. Their faithfulness and goodness will never be heard of. Invited to last night’s ball? They wouldn’t know a daiquiri from a door knob. But the God who sees in secret sees. And what he sees he owns. In the life to come he will bless the person who thought she was behaving so very ordinarily that her ordinariness didn’t attract the recognition it didn’t deserve.

Shortly after Maureen and I arrived on our first pastoral charge in northeast New Brunswick (one of the most economically deprived areas of Canada ) a girl invited us into her home after morning worship. She and her mother lived in a shack. It couldn’t have been more than 300 square feet – about the size of a suburbanite’s bathroom. (Needless to say, the facilities belonging to this home were twenty-five yards away at the back of the backyard.) The girl had a learning disability: she was fifteen years old yet only in grade seven. Her mother was impoverished. The two of them were thrilled that we had come into their home, for no minister ever had. They insisted on feeding us. I demurred since food is money and money was manifestly scarce. They wouldn’t be deflected. And so they set before us bread, margarine, tea and tinned peaches. Maureen and I shall never forget their generosity and their joy at granting us hospitality.

Some people who were more privileged financially or culturally might have laughed at their deed had it been known. After all, what were people as poor as they thinking about to ask educated, big-city people into their shanty? And then to serve them bread and peaches for lunch? The worth the world assigns to this meagre. But the God who sees in secret sees, and he will honour their kindness he with his own reward. What is it? We can’t say; we await it. Still, we can be sure that he who keeps the promises he makes will bless them in a way we can’t anticipate and they never expected.

Jesus always urges transparency, truthfulness, honesty, integrity, compassion. I have seen men and women exemplify these only to be passed over for promotion; only to be exploited and rendered a stepping stone for the devious and the dissimulator; only to be expelled from the office clique. They have paid dearly to uphold what the world scorns. What they paid: has it simply been thrown away, like money rolling down a sewer? On the contrary, the God who sees and notes and remembers also keeps his promises.

The other aspect of the reward our Lord promises pertains to this life.   One form such blessing takes is a richer experience of God himself. To uphold truth is to be rewarded at least with stronger conviction of the truth and clearer perception of the truth. To have resisted the temptation to dissemble is to find oneself with stiffer spine and reduced vulnerability to the lure of dishonesty. To have remained faithful in any commitment is to find oneself that much more intimate with our Lord whose faithfulness to us has never flickered.

Our Methodist foreparents used to sing,

Thy nature, Lord, thy name impart,

This, only this, be given:

Nothing beside my God I want,

Nothing in earth or heaven.

 

Those people discovered that as they obeyed God regardless of cost or convenience, expecting nothing in return, they were given everything: the name of God was branded upon them (they were marked his) and the nature of God (his love) suffused them and they knew then if they hadn’t known before what Paul meant when he cried, “What God has prepared for those who love him God has revealed to us through the Spirit.” For the Spirit is God in his utmost intimacy and intensity rendering himself impossible for us to doubt and impossible for us to deny.

The truth is, scripture says far more about the believer’s experience of God than today’s church does. Peter exclaims, “Not having seen him, you yet love him…. And you rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy.” Reward? Greater capacity to love God and greater delight in being loved. Paul reminds the believers in Thessalonica that the gospel didn’t come to them in words only, but “in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full conviction …. You received the word in much affliction, with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.” One aspect of God’s reward is intensified joy inspired by the Holy Spirit, intensified so as to outweigh any affliction that would otherwise leave us thinking we were God-forsaken.

Most people find our Lord’s teaching on rewards difficult to understand in that they assume that reward is the same as payment. But reward and payment are categorically different. Payment is always something, a thing that has no logical connection with the deed it compensates. If I cut the grass and I’m told I may now go fishing, then fishing is payment for grass-cutting. There’s no logical connection between grass-cutting and fishing. Reward, on the other hand, is always related logically to what it rewards. What’s the reward for decades of marital faithfulness?   It’s not a new set of Tiger Woods golf clubs. The reward of marital faithfulness isn’t something logically unrelated to marriage. The reward for marital faithfulness is simply a richer, stronger, more resilient marriage. Payment for the student’s diligence at her homework is a ticket to the next rock concert. The reward for diligence at her homework is her capacity for more profound intellectual work, greater enjoyment in it, and satisfaction with it for as long as she lives.

What’s the reward that Jesus says our Father will never fail to give us?

Thy nature, Lord, thy name impart,

This, only this, be given:

Nothing beside my God I want,

Nothing in earth or heaven.

 

The reward for standing with Jesus Christ when his truth is mocked and his way derided and his invitation ridiculed and his people despised; the reward for standing with him there is that he, his truth, his way, his invitation and his people: these are made sweeter than honey to us. These are made transparently real and self-evidently right, even as our intimacy with him is made ever more wonderful.

Isn’t this reward enough?

                                                                                                     Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                             

February 2005

A Note on Hypocrisy

Matthew 6:1-6;16-18            James 1:19-27

“Hypocrite!” It’s the charge levelled fastest at someone who makes a religious profession and whose practice then appears not to measure up to the profession. The charge is levelled only at people who make a religious profession. It’s never levelled at people who make some other profession yet don’t measure up. It’s not levelled at politicians, for instance. In fact a discrepancy, even a huge discrepancy, between the politician’s promise and her practice is accepted because expected. But the same discrepancy between profession and practice is neither expected nor accepted in Christians. “Hypocrite!” We can’t imagine being called anything worse.

 

I: [a] What is a hypocrite anyway? The English word is derived from the Greek hupokrites. In Greek hupokrites is an actor, playing any role at all, in a Greek play. In the ancient Greek theatre each actor played four or five different parts in the course of one play. The actor wore a mask. When it was time to assume a different role, he stepped behind a screen and changed his mask. In addition, each false face the actor assumed had a device in it that magnified the actor’s voice. A hypocrite, in modern parlance, is someone who wears a false face, all the while talking in a loud voice. A hypocrite is considered a play-actor, a religious play-actor, who loudly advertises his phoniness. It’s no wonder we cringe when he hear the word used of anyone else and crumble when it’s used of us.

[b] Does hypocrisy have to be deliberate? Can there be an unknowing, unconscious hypocrisy? Is it right to use the label when someone isn’t even aware of glaring discrepancy between profession and practice? Let’s approach these questions one at a time.

We all agree that conscious, contrived hypocrisy is disgusting. A calculated two-facedness that parades itself, cynically exploiting others, callously furthering self-interest – this is simply reprehensible. One name that comes to mind from the world of American fiction is the name of Elmer Gantry. Gantry is a travelling preacher who professes allegiance to the gospel but who behaves deliberately in a manner that contradicts the gospel, regards people as suckers, and furthers his promiscuous agenda. Any such person who does this in real life properly arouses our disgust.

[c] Yet there’s also a discrepancy between profession and practice where the discrepancy isn’t intentional, isn’t cynically exploitative, and isn’t knowingly self-serving. In this situation we aren’t calculatingly hypocritical and we don’t want the charge levelled at us. At the same time, other people see only the discrepancy. They don’t bother asking us if we are aware of our inconsistency. They don’t bother finding out what gave rise to the inconsistency. They simply hang the label on us disdainfully and then dismiss us.

If we don’t want the label hung on us where we think it’s inappropriate, then we shouldn’t hang it on others where it is – or might be – inappropriate. We should make for others the same allowance we want made for ourselves.

Think about situations of fear. Fear can drive a wedge between anyone’s profession and practice where there’s no intentional two-facedness at all. Fear disorders people and impels them to do what they’d never do if they weren’t terrified.

One afternoon I was driving through a snowstorm in rural New Brunswick when I became stuck in a snowdrift. I was in a narrow rock-cut with twenty-foot high vertical walls. In no time more cars were stuck behind me. The wind was blowing a gale. The snow was blinding. Obviously nobody behind could move past me, and so the man behind me put his tire-chains on my car and I inched my way out of the snowdrift, out through the rock-cut. Once I past the rock-cut I was in a white-out, and could see only a few feet beyond the hood of my car. Yet I was determined to continue driving, however slowly. Obviously the motorists behind couldn’t get out of the rock-cut since I alone had tire-chains. I drove a little further. I wondered how I was ever going to return the tire chains to their owner. Stupidly I thought I would leave them dangling from a stranger’s fence when – if — I got to the next town. (When the storm cleared perhaps the owner would see them dangling there and recognize them as his.) Meanwhile I had deserted the other motorists. By now I wasn’t thinking cogently at all. I was rationalizing behaviour that was senseless and inexcusable. Suddenly a glimmer of reason returned. I stopped, removed the tire chains, and began walking them back to the owner. In seven seconds I was lost in the blizzard, utterly lost. I couldn’t see five feet. I knew I was going to freeze to death, and wondered how long it would take. In a few minutes two men appeared on a snowmobile. They took me to their home (which they could somehow find in the blizzard.) That evening I thought much about my abandonment of the stranded motorists, my apparent theft of the tire chains, my rationalized self-interest.

Abandonment; theft; self-interest: doesn’t it add up to the label “hypocrite”? I understood at that moment, as I have understood ever since, what fear does to people. Fear distorts thinking and bends people into a shape no one would recognize.

As a pastor I see people who appear to have acted hypocritically. Certainly they have behaved in a manner that contradicts their profession. Others are quick to point the finger and lay the charge. More often than not, however, the person accused of hypocrisy hasn’t been cunning or careless or self-serving. She’s simply been afraid, terribly afraid.

A friend and parishioner, highly placed in New Brunswick Hydro, told me how employee theft is detected. In one case a few dollars — $18, $35, $27 – was missing each day from an office where townspeople paid their hydro bills. There were four cashiers in the office. Which cashier was absconding with the money? Myself, I wouldn’t know whom to question first. My friend called in the head of NB Hydro Security, a former RCMP officer. This man said it was really very simple: you look first for someone who is afraid and who needs money to quell her fear. He sniffed around and learned that one cashier, a young woman, had recently been deserted by her husband. She was receiving no assistance from her dead-beat “ex.” She had several children to support. Fearing for herself and her children, she was desperate. She had pilfered money from the cash drawer. No one is excusing her. Still, how badly do we want to beat her up?

Fear. Wasn’t this Peter’s situation in the courtyard when his master was about to be lynched and someone said to him, “Heh! You and the Nazarene have the same accent!”?

Fear isn’t the only event that opens up a gap between profession and practice. Ignorance does this too. When we act out of ignorance we’ll be accused of hypocrisy, even though we aren’t deliberately two-faced. If we were raised in a vehemently anti-Roman Catholic or anti-Asian or anti-Black household then we’ve absorbed unconsciously the prejudice that Roman Catholics are subversive, Asians are sneaky (they never stop smiling, do they?) and Black people are violent. All of us have blind spots. The tricky thing about blind spots is that we don’t know where they are, until one day someone calls us a hypocrite and we don’t know why. To be sure, the truth that Jesus Christ is certainly remedies our ignorance and drives out prejudice. Still, this doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen until we’re confronted.

Not only ignorance and not only fear foster discrepancies between profession and practice: sin-vitiated vulnerability does it too. We may think we are possessed of resolute, resilient character. We may even feel strong. No doubt we are strong – in some areas of life; but not in all. Each of us has an Achilles heel. Temptation doesn’t “hook” us all in exactly the same place, but temptation hooks us unusually easily in some place. We aren’t all spiritually vulnerable in the same place; but we’re all spiritually vulnerable some place. When we point the finger at someone, we forget that his vulnerability is now displayed publicly while ours is known only privately. If ours becomes public knowledge (it becomes public knowledge only in a situation where we are publicly humiliated) we’ll maintain we shouldn’t be called hypocritical since we didn’t intend any duplicity. Then we should be less trigger-happy when faced with our neighbour’s inconsistency. The apostle Paul says, “If any one of you is overtaken in a trespass, you who are spiritual should set him right gently. Look to yourself, every one of you. You may be tempted too.”

At the same time, I’d never pretend that all hypocrisy is born of fear or ignorance or vulnerability. The people whom Jesus pronounced hypocrites in our gospel lesson this morning; they set out every day to misrepresent themselves and thereby deceive others. They were deliberate phonies and they aimed at profiting from their phoniness. In their case the disparity between profession and practice couldn’t be excused at all. It was despicable.

What about you and me? Is there any one among us who wants to say he hasn’t been despicable?     We aren’t going to deny the darkness that still lurks in us. We should simply admit that sometimes our residual perversity surfaces and we are hypocrites plain and simple.

 

II: — The truth is, just because you and I profess faith in Jesus Christ the charge of hypocrisy will never be far from us. In light of this, what should we do?

[a] In the first place we must ask ourselves if we are serious about our discipleship. Are we serious, sincere, or are we playing games? Do we view soberly the discrepancies between profession and practice? Or do we dismiss them cavalierly, excusing ourselves with lame extenuations: “Nobody’s perfect”; “I’m doing the best I can”; “What do people expect, anyway?”; “What makes them think they’re any better?” These are the stock evasions of the insincere. At all times and in all circumstances we have to ask ourselves, “Am I serious and sincere in my aspiration to be Christ’s follower?”

[b] In the second place we mustn’t flee into denial or denunciation or counter-accusation when we are confronted with the truth about ourselves. Don’t we thank the person who takes us aside and tells us our slip is showing or we have egg on our face or lipstick on our teeth or our zipper needs zipping? We thank people who spare us public embarrassment in matters as slight as this. How much more we ought to thank godly people who want only to spare us self-humiliation and advance us in godliness. What such people perceive in us is nearly always something we haven’t yet perceived in ourselves. For this reason the gentlest correction we hear we always find startling.

A very kind woman one day took me aside and gently, soberly said to me, “Victor, sarcasm riddles virtually everything you say. Regardless of what you intend, your sarcasm leaves you appearing bitter, contemptuous and snobbish. This doesn’t befit a clergyman.” Only a fool thinks she’s anything but an ally.

King David was married. One day he fancied Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife. Uriah wasn’t in the royal orbit. Uriah didn’t have David’s social standing or David’s political power or David’s admiring flatterers. Uriah had nothing to distinguish himself from countless others who had nothing – except, of course, his beautiful wife. David saw Bathsheba taking a bath. David was already married to Michal, daughter of late King Saul; to Michal, a blue-blood. Bathsheba was merely a commoner – but not common: she was gorgeous. David instructed his military commander to place Uriah in the front line of the next battle. Uriah perished. David had Bathsheba to himself, even as he never mentioned any of this to his wife. The shocking thing about the whole incident wasn’t merely that David had done it, but that he appeared not to be the slightest bit upset about it.

Then the prophet Nathan took David aside. “Tell me, your royal highness, how would you feel about a rich rancher who had a 10,000 acre spread, countless livestock, not to mention a freezer full of meat, and who then stole and barbecued the one and only lamb belonging to a poor subsistence farmer? How would you feel about that?” “I’d hang that mean-spirited creep from the tallest tree I could find,” David roared back. “When next you are walking past a mirror,” replied Nathan, “have a look.” What did David do next? When he had recovered enough to say anything he croaked, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Not when we are unfairly attacked but rather when we are confronted with the truth about ourselves; at such a time we shouldn’t fly off into vehement denial. We shouldn’t launch a counter-attack. We should own the truth about ourselves and say with David, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

[c] In the third place we must remember that the truth about ourselves we’ve just heard is the penultimate truth; it’s one stage removed from the final truth. The ultimate truth about Christ’s people is that our identity is rooted not in ourselves but in Jesus Christ. Ultimately we are those whom he names his younger brothers and sisters. As we are bound to him in faith he holds us so closely to himself that when the Father sees the Son with whom the Father is ever pleased, the Father sees you and me included in the Son.

John Calvin maintained that rightly to see Christ, properly to see Christ is always to see ourselves included in him. If in our mind’s eye we can see ourselves “here” and see our Lord “over there,” then what we’re looking at isn’t Christ, said Calvin. Reading scripture with remarkable perception Calvin said tirelessly, “Christ comes only to make us his.” Who then is Jesus Christ? He is the one who will never be without his people.

Towards the end of his earthly ministry Jesus told his disciples, “I have called you friends.” Just that. In other words, regardless of what others call us or we call ourselves, we are Christ’s friends. This doesn’t mean we’ve been given no more than a new name tag. Rather, what he calls us we are in truth. We are his friends; he “tells his people by the company they keep.” We belong to Christ; we live in his company; his arm around us binds us so tightly to him that he insists we are included in him.

Whenever Luther was attacked by others or found himself attacking himself – in other words, whenever Luther was feeling worst about himself – he recalled his favourite scripture verse. “Your life; your real life, is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3) Who you and I are, in the midst of all the inconsistencies about us that some people take malicious delight in pointing out; who you and I are ultimately – our identity, in other words – is rooted in Christ. Since it’s rooted in the Son of God it’s known to God alone. Yet because it’s known to God alone it’s secure there, guaranteed there, inviolable there, preserved there eternally.

When we are face-to-face with someone who is physically disabled and physically disfigured (for instance, someone with severe cerebral palsy) we admit that that person isn’t what she seems. Her body may be misshapen, grotesque even. Yet we know that no human being, no person can be reduced to her physical appearance. We should be as ready to admit that no one can be reduced to appearance of any sort. We aren’t ultimately as we appear. Ultimately we are our Lord’s friends, cherished, held onto, held up, secured. Since we are found in Christ we are known in Christ, know who we are in Christ; namely his friend, that friend whom he never abandons to our enemies and his, that friend whom he never fails or forsakes.

[d] Finally we must go to sleep at night with the word from the apostle James ringing in our ears: “Mercy triumphs over judgement.” We are judged, most certainly, for the hypocrisy we see in ourselves and the hypocrisy we’ve yet to see in ourselves. God’s judgement is indeed true. Yet it’s penultimate; his mercy is ultimate. The final word we hear God pronounce upon us is a word of mercy.

Then this is the final word we should pronounce over others. It’s even the final word we should pronounce over ourselves. “Mercy triumphs over judgement.”

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                  

March 2005

“Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”

Matthew 6:27   

I: — “Why do you worry?” asks Jesus, “Why are you anxious? Do you really think that worrying will let you live better or live longer? Then why worry?” Upon hearing our Lord’s question most of us find our anxiety — bad enough in itself — worsened now by guilt. After all, our Lord forbids us to worry and yet we continue to worry; in fact it seems we can’t help worrying. Plainly we aren’t measuring up to his word. We can only conclude that we are spiritually defective.

Then it’s all the more important to understand from the outset that our Lord’s word is meant to bring us relief and encouragement and hope. His word is never meant to bring us distress or despair. We should understand too that the anxiety of which he speaks in our scripture text isn’t anxiety of every sort; specifically it’s anxiety connected to acquisitiveness. This kind of anxiety is a spiritual problem. But not all anxiety is a spiritual problem. Some anxiety is a psychological problem.

Panic attacks, for instance. Panic attacks are a psychological disorder having nothing to do with one’s spiritual condition. A panic attack is a sudden onset of overwhelming anxiety for no apparent reason. One minute you feel fine; the next minute dread has iced your heart. Severe panic attacks are immobilizing. A clergyman standing in the pulpit on Sunday morning, suddenly unable to utter a word; a social worker looking into a department store window, suddenly unable to take a step; a man about to take his wife to a restaurant, suddenly unable to leave the house. As a pastor I have had all three cases brought to me. In all of these it must never be suggested that someone’s faith is weak or that someone is a shabby Christian.

If you ask me why some people are afflicted with panic attacks, I can only say, “Why do some people develop arthritis in their right knee? Why do some people develop astigmatism in their left eye? Why is it that when the Norwalk virus was going around two people out of ten came down with it, but only two?” Myself, years ago I discovered, quite by accident, that I am slightly claustrophobic and somewhat colour blind. But none of this has anything to do with my spiritual condition.

We must never suggest that if only those who suffer from sudden onsets of panic had greater faith, stronger faith, they would suffer no longer. We ought never to add guilt to their anxiety.

In the second place we should understand that another kind of anxiety is related to emotional injury. An able pastor whom I have known for years served in the Royal Navy during World War II. He was under fire dozens of times. Decades later he still wakes up in the night shouting, “My life jacket! Where’s my life jacket? I can’t find my life jacket!” His wife gets him up and they make tea. Then he goes to his study and commences work, since he knows he isn’t going to sleep again that night.

There are civilian equivalents of this. People who have survived house fires, survived train wrecks, survived automobile manglings, survived childhood traumas of every sort (abuse included); these people are wounded emotionally. Anxiety surrounds their wound. This kind of anxiety is not a sign of spiritual deficiency.

Moreover, the people who are afflicted with such anxiety display remarkable courage. It takes courage, immense courage, to keep stepping ahead in life when you know that the emotional landmine will blow up in your face from time to time. It takes courage to resist the temptation to self-pity. It takes courage to hobble or limp or stagger when everyone else seems to be galloping. These people can only be commended for their courage.

 

II: — If the kind of anxiety Jesus has in mind in our text isn’t the kind we have mentioned so far, then what does Jesus mean when he says, “Don’t be anxious; worrying won’t help you live longer or live better”? He means this.

There is a kind of anxiety we suffer because we persist in pursuing what isn’t of God’s kingdom. We persist in pursuing it and fear that we might not be able to get it, or fear that we might not be able to keep it, or fear that someone else might get the same thing thereby depriving us of our claim to distinction, even uniqueness, even superiority.

Jesus says, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” In other words, what we really cherish (as opposed to what we say we cherish); this is that to which we are going to give ourselves; and this is that from which we are going to expect the greatest returns. Then what do we cherish?

The adolescent reads the bodybuilding advertisements. He starts ‘pumping iron’, not because exercise is good and everyone should have an exercise program of some sort; he ‘pumps iron’ in that he thinks he will look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in six months. Once he’s looking like “Hulk”, all kinds of wonderful things are going to come his way. After six months he doesn’t look much different. He thinks there’s something wrong with him. He goes to his physician, who tells him there’s nothing wrong with him, and tells him too that he’s never going to look like a gorilla. The fellow disregards the advice and goes to a speciality store to buy pills and diet supplements guaranteed to maximize muscle.

Why does he want to look like “Mr. Big” in the first place? He has absorbed the cult of the physique from his society. He’s preoccupied with being pumped up just because the world at large is preoccupied with being puffed up. (Everything we’ve said about males and muscle we could say as readily about females and silicon.)

Our concern with self-magnification and inflated ego fosters anxiety. Envy fosters anxiety. Lack of contentment fosters anxiety. For the same reason I’m always moved at the paintings of the Jewish artist, Hibel. Hibel paints the wisdom that has permeated the shtetln for centuries, the shtetln being the east European Jewish villages now consumed forever. My favourite painting is a group of old-world east European Jewish men in their fur-rimmed hats and long earlocks, together with wives in their kerchiefs, dancing and cavorting in irrepressible joy. Underneath are the words, “Who are rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.”

Other things breed in us that anxiety which is a sign of spiritual ill health.   One such is a lack of singlemindedness concerning the kingdom of God or the truth of God or the righteousness of God. Any pastor regularly sees people whose anxiety has arisen over moral compromise. Now they are riding two horses at once. They could ride one or the other, but this would mean giving up something. Then they might as well keep on riding both for a while — except that the two horses, the two paths, the two commitments, are beginning to diverge and it appears that someone is going to be pulled apart.   The apostle Paul reminds young Timothy, “No soldier on active service gets sidetracked in civilian pursuits.” Exactly. Lack of singlemindedness concerning the kingdom of God , the truth of God, the righteousness of God; doublemindedness will always mire us in anxiety.

There’s something else spiritually important that causes anxiety to surge over us and settle within us: our refusal to admit that life is fragile. Because we won’t admit that life is fragile and therefore won’t come to terms with its uncertainty, we preoccupy ourselves with rendering life 100% certain and secure, only to find that we can never domesticate life like this. The attempt at rendering life foolproof, accident proof, disaster proof, disease proof, suffering proof, surprise proof; this attempt always fails in the end, but not before we have rendered ourselves anxious beyond telling and also warped ourselves profoundly. It’s always better to admit that life is fragile; nothing is permanent; bodily security is impossible, and our true security, profound security, lies in God’s care for us and our trust in his care. Many expressions in scripture point to life’s fragility and impermanence: “All flesh is grass;” “The form of this world is passing away”; “We are dust”; “Our years are soon gone; they fly away.” All these expressions mean the same: life is precarious. Yet the myth persists that life can be made perfectly secure. The preoccupation with making life secure merely makes us inwardly more insecure as anxiety multiplies.

 

III: — The gospel insists, in the midst of our fragility and anxiety, that there is a security which can’t be dislodged: “Seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness,” our Lord insists. Whenever I lose sight of what I’m to be about first; whenever I lose sight of what is first, I’m corrected by “beaming up” one or two men with whom I appear to have little in common yet by whom I’ve been helped profoundly over and over: alcoholics who have been rendered contently sober by the grace of God. The AA man or woman who knows and cherishes contented sobriety knows, and knows from terrible experience, that the roof can be falling in here or there or everywhere in life; still, no disruption can be allowed to threaten his sobriety. Yes, he may have lost his job; but the difficulties arising over losing his job won’t be helped if he loses his job and his sanity. He may find the boss insufferable; but chemically induced oblivion won’t rid the office of the boss. Of all the slogans that adorn the walls of the room where the AA meeting is held the three that speak so very tellingly to me are, “How important is it?” “First things first”, and “It’s not your drinking, it’s your stinking thinking.”

“How important is it?” However important “it” might be, it isn’t so important as to be worth the surrender of one’s sobriety and contentment.

“First things first.” The man or woman’s deliverance is plainly first and must be kept first just because it can’t be relegated to second. The sober alcoholic knows that if his contented sobriety is ever moved down to second, it won’t even be second for the simple reason that it won’t exist at all.

“It’s not your drinking; it’s your stinking thinking.” “Stinking thinking” is thinking that its perpetrator believes to be the soul of rationality and common sense, when any observer knows it to be the most blatant rationalisation and glaring stupidity.

And therefore every day when this concern or that concern threatens to multiply anxiety in me I have to recall the fact of God’s kingdom and righteousness and my commitment to that kingdom and righteousness. And as often as I recall God’s kingdom and righteousness, now threatened with being eclipsed by whatever has upset me, I have to say to myself as well, “How important is it? First things first. What you think to be pure rationality, Professor Shepherd, is the shabbiest rationalisation.”

I have learned something more from my friends who have been substance abusers. They live for one thing: helping another suffering person to the same experience, the same truth. The AA member can be a farmer, a physician, a truck driver, a homemaker. At least this is how a livelihood is earned. Living, however, is something else. Living is now a matter of helping a suffering person with messed up head and heart towards a new day, a bright day; a day in whose light the old day, dark day, evil day is repudiated even as God is enjoyed and praised forever. In other words, my friends live to introduce someone else to that deliverance for which they are eternally grateful themselves.

I find myself challenged by all of this, and often rebuked by it. I’m impelled to ask myself again and again, “What do I live for? Do I live to help a fellow-sufferer and fellow-sinner with messed up head and heart towards a new day, a bright day in which God is known and God’s reign becomes the atmosphere that sustains and satisfies even as God himself is praised forever? In other words, do I live to introduce someone else to that deliverance for which I am eternally grateful myself?

I can’t avoid asking this question. After all, the fact that that I’m called “reverend” doesn’t mean I’ve entered that gate which Jesus pronounces narrow or embarked upon that way which Jesus calls rigorous. I have no doubt that the clergyman’s daily trafficking in religion can render any clergyman impervious to the gospel. And then perchance I meet the AA member whose eyes shine just because he’s had, only yesterday, the opportunity of introducing someone to that blessing which only those who are acquainted with it can understand. I recall the word of our Lord: “Do you really want to be rid of your envious anxiety and your niggling moodiness and your childish resentment? Then seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. The other matters will then sort themselves out.”

A few verses before Jesus tells us to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness and therein shed our anxiety he says, “Don’t lay up for yourselves treasure upon earth, where inflation erodes it and governments tax it. You lay up treasure in heaven, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” We’ve already seen what this means; namely, what we cherish is what we pursue. Immediately Jesus adds, “The eye is the lamp of the body; if your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light. But if your eye is unsound, your whole body is full of darkness.”

The Greek word that our English bible translates “sound” has two dictionary meanings: “single” and “generous.” The Greek word that our English bible translates “unsound” literally means “evil.” “Evil eye” is a Hebrew expression that means grudging, miserly, stingy, ungenerous. According to Jesus to be miserly, stingy, ungenerous is to have our entire self darkened, while to be singleminded concerning God’s kingdom and generous as well is to have our entire self full of light.

God has given himself to us without condition, without measure, without reservation. His “eye” has been sound in that he has been singleminded in his search for us and generous in lavishing himself upon us. His “eye” has never been an “evil eye”; that is, he has never been grudging, miserly, stingy. He calls us to be “sound-eyed” ourselves, giving ourselves to him and to those whom he brings before us. If our eye is sound, says Jesus, then we ourselves shall be full of light. If our eye is evil (i.e., if we are stingy and miserly) then we shall be dark ourselves and incapable of bringing light to bear on anyone else.

“Do you think that by worrying you can live ten minutes longer?” asks Jesus. “Then seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. Where your treasure is, your heart will be. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light.” This is our Lord’s antidote to anxiety.

 

                                                                                                      Dr Victor Shepherd     

Feb. 16 2003

(NRSV)

 

We ‘Little-Faiths’

Matthew 6:30    14:31 ; 16:8

Several years ago there was made yet another bad film about the life of Jesus. The film was bad because it falsified our Lord. For instance, where Jesus says six times in Matthew 23, “Woe to you”,  the movie director depicted Jesus screaming in a rage; vindictive, venomous hostility. The impression created by the movie was that Jesus was bent on retaliation: “Just wait, fellows, you are going to get yours.” What the movie director obviously didn’t know was this: the word Jesus uses for “woe” isn’t a threat; it’s a lament. The word “woe” doesn’t express ill-temper or vindictiveness or denunciation; it expresses sadness. Our Lord’s heart is breaking for people who are confused themselves and can only confuse others. “Woe to you”, on the lips of Jesus, means, “Fellows, if you only knew how mistaken you are; if you only knew how wide of the mark you are; your situation is pitiable.” Jesus isn’t flaying them; he’s lamenting their blindness and its consequences for them and others.

The same sort of misunderstanding occurs in those situations where Jesus speaks of the disciples as “men of little faith”. Actually in the Greek text the word “men” doesn’t appear: “You midget-faiths”. Since boyhood I’ve listened to people read the gospel passages in a tone of sour contempt: “You jerks, you near-sighted nincompoops, you never get it right, do you. You can’t be counted on for anything.” The context, however, doesn’t suggest for a minute that Jesus is disgusted or angry or contemptuous. The context suggests surprise, amazement even: “Gosh, fellows, have you forgotten who I am and what I’ve promised? Have I ever let you down before? Haven’t you always found me true to my word? Why is your faith so tiny?” Our Lord speaks in a spirit of surprise, yes, but also compassion and gentleness and encouragement, not in a spirit of contempt or disgust.

Today Jesus Christ addresses you and me as “little-faiths”. He isn’t chiding us. He’s encouraging us. He wants our pipsqueak faith to swell until we know ourselves seized by his kindness and constancy. He wants our faith to expand as he both informs us and invigorates us.

Then what are the situations in which Jesus finds his followers, 1st Century and 21st Century disciples alike, to be people of little faith?

I: — The first is anxiety, anxiety concerning matters of everyday living: food, clothing, children, sickness, domestic relationships; responding to the demands of workplace, community, congregation; contending with incipient arthritis, failing eyesight and fading memory. In the Sermon on the Mount the Master says, “Don’t be anxious about life – what you will eat or drink or wear. Life, real life, consists in more than food or clothing. Therefore seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness; then the other matters will sort themselves out. Your Father knows what you need.”

“Nonsense”, someone reacts, “It’s pious nonsense. Whether our Father cares or not, the occasion of our anxiety remains. It could be that he cares; we’ll even assume that he does. Still, the difficulties in our lives remain difficult.”

I appreciate the objection.   There are people whose lives are riddled with such difficulty that telling them not be anxious would appear to be as effective as telling the wind to stop blowing. In fact most people are contending with much more difficulty than others perceive. Then most people are understandably anxious. We are anxiety-prone people just because we have reason to be.

One of the worst features of our anxiety is that it fragments us. We worry about this, worry about that. Mentally our imagination travels down this road, then down an alternative, then down another road again. Every time our mind moves down a road, heart and stomach follow. Before long it seems there’s part of us strewn along all of the roads we’ve been on in our mind’s eye. A hundred times a day we say “What if? What if this? What if that?” And every time we utter it another piece of us is broken off as we feel ourselves ever more fragmented.

We should note that our Lord doesn’t chide us, “Now, now; don’t be anxious; you know that you shouldn’t be anxious.” If this is all he said he’d be irritating and useless in equal measure.   Instead he reminds us that we are to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. We are ever to be oriented to his kingdom and his righteousness. Fragmentation isn’t overcome because we strain ourselves to suppress anxiety. Fragmentation is overcome as a new preoccupation captures us, even though our difficulties remain difficult. The new preoccupation is the King’s kingdom and the King’s righteousness.

The kingdom of God is that healed creation which Jesus Christ brings with him. It is discerned only in faith, to be sure, but it’s no less real for being seen only by the eyes of faith. Righteousness is what we do in light of the truth and reality we’ve recognized. Captured by the truth of the kingdom, and committed to doing the truth that we’ve recognized, our preoccupation here relativises the bundle of insolubles that always promotes anxiety.

In the year 1520 Martin Luther wrote a brief tract on Christian freedom where he discusses, tangentially, anxiety and its antidote.   Luther points out that trying to wrestle our anxiety to the ground simply renders our anxiety our preoccupation, with the result that our anxiety is worse than ever. Struggling to find within ourselves the antidote to our anxiety merely intensifies it. Therefore, says Luther, we shouldn’t try to live “in ourselves”; instead we must live “in another”. Specifically we live in two others: we live in Christ by faith and we live in the neighbour by love. To say the same thing differently, we live in the kingdom by faith and we live in the neighbour by acting self-forgetfully on her behalf. We seek first the kingdom and its righteousness – only then to find that our anxiety is displaced, relativised, shrivelled. We cease to be preoccupied with our persistent difficulties as we are taken out of ourselves and into these two others: Jesus Christ and the neighbour to whom he assigns us.

Please don’t think I’m advertising myself as someone whose faith has moved beyond “little”. My faith is little. I know it. And therefore if I strike you as someone whose fragmentation isn’t entirely overcome, so be it. I don’t claim to have made great progress on the road I’ve just described. I do know, however, beyond any doubt, that it’s the right road. It’s as we seek first Christ’s kingdom and his righteousness that faith grows and anxiety recedes.

 

II: — Another situation where our Lord recognizes our faith to be little and addresses us as “little-faiths” only to encourage us is the situation of fear. Paralysing fear. Fear of what? Fear of anything. For years now I’ve thought that there are fears peculiar to childhood, fears peculiar to adolescence, fears peculiar to maturity, fears peculiar to old age. What do people my age fear? Here’s one: we fear that the work we have undertaken on our Lord’s behalf and pursued doggedly for years; we fear it might dribble away leaving nothing. Here I have in mind anything we do in his name whether explicitly or implicitly; anything our commitment to him impels us to attempt; anything we do in church life or in community life on account of the profession we make. What if it all proves fruitless?

In a gospel incident that has long been one of my favourites Peter, caught up with the other disciples in a fierce storm, recognizes Jesus coming to him across the water. He cries, “Master, bid me come to you on the water”. He gets out of the boat and starts walking. Then he looks down at the waves around him and starts to sink. He starts to sink inasmuch as the waves now loom larger than does his Lord. Jesus catches him before he goes under and remarks, “O you little-faith, whey did you doubt?”

It’s easy to doubt. When I was newly ordained and began and appointed to my first congregation, I thought that unbelief would shrivel up noticeably, even dramatically, before the force of my ministry. Why, I was a gold medallist in theology; I could put words together; I’d be able to articulate gospel-truth so very compellingly that no sensible person would be left doubting or disobedient. But this didn’t happen. After a few weeks I found myself, one Sunday morning, thinking I must surely be stuck with a congregation of tuberculosis patients, because as soon as I started to preach they started to cough. I didn’t suspect a conspiracy; they hadn’t “packed” on me the way school children will “pack” on a supply teacher. They were simply unaccustomed to paying attention to the sermon, since they expected nothing to happen during the sermon: twenty minutes of vacant time to be filled up with coughing, nose-blowing, looking out the window, chatting with each other. I saw one man staring at the thermostat on the wall, minutes on end. When the service had ended I asked him why he was intrigued with the thermostat. “I saw a sunbeam moving toward the thermostat as the hour moved along”, he told me, “and I was waiting until the sunbeam hit it, for then the thermostat would turn off the furnace and the church would become cold.” The climax came one Sunday when I saw two adults in the back row passing a note like school children who think they’ve fooled the teacher. I stopped halfway through the sermon. I was on the point of saying what I’m everlastingly grateful I didn’t say. The moment was nothing less than a crisis for me, because I knew that if I terminated the sermon under those circumstances I was finished. I was a minister only because I had recognized the Master years earlier and said to him, eagerly, expectantly, “Bid me come to you.” He had bade me come to him. Now, however, I was looking not at him but at all the “stuff” around me that I was about to drown in. I knew that if I interrupted the sermon, I – not the sermon – I was finished.

Everybody knows that church life unfolds according to its own logic (or illogic). Church life is much more frustrating than the workplace or the service club or the professional organization. It’s easy for our frustration to mutate into anger, our anger to mutate into contempt, and our contempt to mutate into – our absence.

While the church is a more frustrating venue for our service and witness than is the world, very often the world is more vicious. It takes enormous persistence to honour integrity and insist on elemental decency and distance oneself from unjust favouritism and cruel exploitation and conscienceless cover-ups. It takes enormous persistence to remain resilient just because the price of it all is so high and the fruit of it all appears so meagre. Since we are people of little faith, we are tempted to capitulate.

While there’s every reason for us to capitulate, we must nevertheless ask ourselves if we are no more than children, no more than children who have to have instant results and instant gratification or they complain and quit. Are we going to allow not only the tidal wave but even the smallest ripple to have us sink? The One who calls us “little-faith” does so not to ridicule us and not to denounce us; he calls us “little-faith” only to remind us of the present truth about ourselves and to promise us a greater truth about ourselves: our little faith he will augment. And as he augments it we shall cease looking down at the turbulence around us and look more consistently ahead to him who is always coming towards us. At this point we can put our frustration behind us, and with it behind us, find that we can go on, cheerfully go on, unsoured and unembittered.

 

III: — The final situation exposing our little faith that we are examining today concerns discernment. The disciples have witnessed the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. A day or two later they complain that they lack bread. Jesus says two things: “Beware of the leaven of Sadducees and Pharisees;  you little-faiths, why do you say that you lack bread?” Through this pronouncement – “Why do you say that you lack bread?” – Jesus is reminding them, “I am the bread of life. You don’t lack bread. At the same time, be careful lest you absorb from the Sadducees and Pharisees what isn’t bread, what corrupts that bread of life which I am.”

We must be very, very careful here. For centuries too many Christians have read such verses in Matthew’s gospel and then concluded that everything about the Pharisees was bad; Judaism and Pharisaism are the same; therefore Judaism is bad and Jewish people can be ignored or despised or even mistreated. This is dreadful.

When Jesus appeared among the Jewish people in the year 4 BCE there were several different groups within Israel . The Sadducees recognized only the first five books of the Older Testament as scripture, and believed nothing about the resurrection of the dead. Plainly Jesus wasn’t a Sadducee. The Scribes recognized all of the Older Testament as scripture and ransacked it day and night, but weren’t particularly oriented to the Kingdom of God . Since Jesus was preoccupied with the Kingdom of God , plainly he wasn’t a scribe. The zealots hated the Roman Army’s occupation of Palestine . They were obsessed with assassinating Roman soldiers, fomenting revolution, and restoring self-government to the Jewish people. Plainly Jesus wasn’t a zealot. The Pharisees were teachers. They taught the Torah, that Torah which Jesus said he came to fulfil but never to deny. As a matter of fact there are may parallels between the teaching of the Pharisees and the teaching of Jesus. Jesus belonged to the Pharisaic movement. Therefore we must never see Jesus and Pharisees as having nothing in common. And we must never regard our Lord’s criticisms of his fellow-Pharisees as a pretext or excuse for disdaining Jewish people then or now.

Then what does the text mean? One day earlier Jesus had fed the multitudes. Now he is saying that his feeding of the multitudes is a sign of something more than himself as bread-maker. His feeding of the multitudes is a sign that he is the bread of life. His followers are to know it. As they come to know him in greater and greater intimacy they will find that their intimacy with him is self-confirming. Their intimacy with him will bring with it such conviction concerning its truth that they will need no other corroboration. Their intimacy with him will bring with it such confirmation and conviction that the kind of “sign” that some Pharisees sometimes asked for won’t be necessary for them, and in any case wouldn’t persuade people who aren’t intimate followers. “Signs”, so-called, are superfluous for those who know Jesus intimately and unconvincing for those who don’t. “Therefore”, says Jesus, “when the Scribes and Pharisees maintain that I can’t be who I am unless I provide a sign, understand that they’ve got it wrong. Your ever-deepening intimacy with me will provide you with all the confirmation and conviction and assurance you will ever need concerning me.”

Countless Christians have proved our Lord correct. That’s why they don’t look elsewhere. When people say to me (as many people have said to me), “But how do you know that ‘Christianity’ is true when you’ve never tried Buddhism or Shintoism? How do you know ‘Jesus is the Way’ when you’ve never probed the way of Hinduism?” I say to them, “When I came upon Maureen McGuigan and found in her even more than what I was looking for in a woman (since until I met her I scarcely knew what to look for); when I came upon her and knew that she was the one for me, I stopped looking.” Tell me, do you think I’d be more “broad minded” if I lived with a dozen different women and then concluded that while they all had their strong points, on balance I preferred Maureen?

Intimate followers of Jesus learn every day that who he is for them, who they can expect him to be in the future in view of who he’s been for them in past; such followers aren’t even tempted to look elsewhere. The profoundest relationship any human can have confirms itself with fresh force every day.

“Beware of the leaven of Sadducees and Pharisees”? Jesus means “Beware of those who tell you I can’t be who you’ve found me to be, on the grounds that I’ve never given proofs, signs, of the truth that I am.” Of course our Lord provides no such signs or proofs. In life, the profoundest truth authenticates itself. Nothing outside it can authenticate it.

 

And so it is with a smile on his face and an encouraging arm around his people Christ says to us, “Come on, you little-faiths:

Seek first the Kingdom and the Kingdom’s righteousness, and your faith will swell as anxiety recedes.

You are frightened of ever so much, frightened that the work you undertake in my name might turn out to be fruitless in view of the turbulence that threatens it? Keep looking at me, not at the turbulence and your faith will expand as fear evaporates.

You hear people telling you I can’t be Way and Truth and Life because no proof of this has                                    been given? Just go on living ever more intimately with me. Your faith will mushroom as you find your relationship with me mushrooming so as to leave you never doubting that you and have been grafted to each other.”

 

We are people of little faith. Our Lord doesn’t denounce us for it. He holds out greater faith for us, and will continue to hold it out until that Day when faith gives way to sight and we behold him face to face.

 

                                                                                                        Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                

June 2005

 

Workshop Teachings

Matthew 7:1-5         Deuteronomy 30:15-20        Ephesians 4:25-30

 

If there’s to be a national holiday for Queen Victoria ‘s birthday and Canada Day and “civic” whatever, how much more important is it that there be a national holiday that honours labour.  On Labour Day Canadians wisely acknowledge the place of work in our nation as a whole and in our individual lives.  We work not merely because we have to in order to survive; we work inasmuch as God has ordained us to work.  His command enjoining work is prior to the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. In other words, regardless of what frustration or pain or seeming futility might arise with respect to work in the wake of the Fall, work itself is good.  God’s command is always and everywhere good, always and everywhere attended with blessing. In recognizing work on Labour Day we are gladly owning the dignity of labour; we are saying that humankind is meant to work, is honoured through work, is to find work fulfilling.  We are also saying, by contrast, that there’s nothing demeaning about work, hard work.

We should know this in any case, for Jesus himself worked.  Prior to the work of his public ministry he worked with his father in their “rough carpentry” business, “Joseph and Son”, in Nazareth . From what we glean here and there in the gospels the two men made large, functional items like ox-yokes and ploughs. When Jesus begins his work of preaching and teaching, those who hear him are astonished and say, “Where did this fellow get his wisdom?         He’s only a carpenter, isn’t he?”   Yes, he is a carpenter from a sleepy town in Galilee , yet he’s more than a carpenter. He has more to say to us than up-to-the-minute woodworking advice.  At the same time, the “more” that he has to say to us is all the more credible just because we know he isn’t an armchair wordsmith.  His workshop days have given him down-to-earth, workshop wisdom.

 

I: — Think about his pithy comment concerning plank and sawdust.  Sawdust is always blowing around in a workshop.         Sooner or later a speck finds its way into someone’s eye.  It’s bothersome, and work can’t continue until the speck is removed. A fellow-worker who means well (of course), whose intentions are the best (of course) immediately offers help: “Here, let me take the speck of sawdust out of your eye, and then you’ll be able to see better” — all the while forgetting that he himself has a two-by-four, ten feet long, sticking out of his own eye. “First take the plank out of your own eye”, our Lord insists, “then you might be able to do something to help your neighbour with his sawdust-speck.”

Jesus insists that we, his disciples, mustn’t fall into the habit of fault-finding, carping, nit-picking, ceaseless criticism of matters small and smaller still, as we whittle our neighbour down until she has the stature of a toothpick (we think) when, by contrast, we appear larger than life ourselves, gigantic even, in our inflated self-estimation. The habit, the deep rut of constant, niggling criticism, is a habit that is as self-intensifying as any addiction.  It’s a habit easy to fall into just because we all want to think highly of ourselves, and the surest way of building ourselves up is to grind someone else down.

I have learned that many people perceive the wisdom and force of our Lord’s teaching yet are confused about its application.  At the same time as they hear Jesus speaking of plank and sawdust they also hear him saying, “Judge not, that you be not judged.”   Confusion arises when such people mistake judging (in the sense of hyper-critical faultfinding) with making sound judgements.  The two shouldn’t be confused: disdainful judgementalism has nothing to do with the formation of  sound judgements.

Everywhere in scripture God’s people are commanded to form sound judgements. God isn’t honoured when his people remain naïve, readily victimized or fooled or “fished in.” We have to discriminate between what enriches us profoundly and what appears to enrich but actually impoverishes. We have to discern what can be welcomed and what must be shunned.  We do everything in our power to foster such discrimination in our youngsters just because we know what disasters await those who lack sound judgement. To lack sound judgement anywhere in life renders people tragic concerning themselves and dangerous concerning others.  Jesus tells us we have to be as wise as serpents.         His apostles tell us we have to test the spirits, since not all spirits are holy. Once we understand the distinction between our Lord’s command to form sound judgements concerning ourselves and his prohibition of a contemptuous attitude concerning others; once we understand this distinction, confusion evaporates.

Jesus Christ speaks so very vehemently on this matter because he knows our hearts. He knows, for instance, our capacity for unconscious rationalization.  You and I can insist with genuine sincerity, genuine, conscious sincerity, that is, that the sawdust speck in someone else is real while the plank in our own eye is only imaginary.

A few years ago I was asked to conduct an afternoon communion service and to preach at Emmanuel College , U of T, the seminary where I was prepared for the ministry of Word, Sacrament and Pastoral Care. I took unusual pains with the sermon because I knew that theology students come to chapel with their sermon-dissecting knives super-sharp.  And besides, I wanted to impress the students with an uncommonly fine sermon. The week had been exceptionally busy. The morning had brought several pastoral upheavals before me.  The traffic on the way to Toronto was heavier than usual. And then of course I had to scramble for a parking spot.  Still, as I walked into the building I felt I was ready to meet the students and show them a thing or two.  Out of a student body of 150, six came to the service.  I preached and administered Holy Communion as scheduled. After the service a student who had attended said to me, gently, “You were hostile this afternoon.”  “I was not!”, I told her, “I’m not the slightest….”         “Victor, you were hostile today.”   “I may have been upset, but I wasn’t hostile.”  There’s the rationalization, as sincere as the day is long: when other people are hostile, they are hostile for sure and hostile without excuse; when I appear hostile, however, I am in truth merely upset. Our unconscious capacity to rationalize is so vast that we can magnify our neighbour’s sawdust-speck into an oak tree, even as we shrink our plank to a twig.  In it all we seem not to know how ridiculous we appear; more than ridiculous, how cruel.

Again our Lord speaks so vehemently on this matter because he knows that berating someone for her sawdust-speck often discourages her, then depresses her, and even immobilizes her.  In the face of relentless criticism she feels she can’t acquit herself. She gives up trying. She is simply crushed into immobility.

Our Lord knows too that our habit of faultfinding drives the person faulted farther and farther into self-righteousness (how else can he protect himself?), whereupon, of course, we fault him for being self-righteous. When our constant criticism drills him like a woodpecker’s beak drilling into tree bark until it finds the insect it’s looking for, he insists that he’s a better person than he’s made out to be.  What else can he do to ward off our painful pecking?  As he defends himself we find our approach to him confirmed, for now it’s plain that he can’t stand the truth about himself.  We forget that his self-righteousness swelled only in response to our savagery.

The worst consequence of our carping, however, is that it forces the victim to retaliate in kind. Carping begets carping, pecking pecking, savagery savagery.  Psychologically fragile people may crumble when ceaselessly faulted; the psychologically resilient, however, fight back.

When Jesus speaks to us about faultfinding he uses strong language: “hypocrite.” Hupokrites is the Greek word for the actor who wore a false face.  When we see the speck in our neighbour’s eye but not the plank in our own we are phonies. We have forgotten that we too are fallen creatures, as warped in mind and heart as the person in front of us whose depravity we find glaring.

Jesus ends his workshop teaching bluntly: “First take the plank out of your own eye; then you will see clearly to take the sawdust-speck out of your neighbour’s eye.” It is only as we admit frankly, even fearfully, our own inner depravity and corruption, and it is only as we do something about it that we will ever be able to help, correct and encourage our brother or sister.  To pretend anything else is to be a phoney, hupokrites.

 

II: — Another workshop saying, this time less severe and more comforting: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jesus made yokes every day. He knew that if the yoke were made well and were well fitted to the animal’s neck, the ox could pull the heaviest load efficiently and with minimal discomfort. If, on the other hand, the yoke were poorly made, it would rub the animal’s neck raw. Pulling the load would be a torment. Trying to pull the load might even strangle the animal.

Our Lord knew that some loads in life we simply cannot avoid.  We must pull them. “Since there are some loads in life you must pull”, he says, “why not pull them with a yoke that fits well? A yoke made by anyone other than me will only torment you, perhaps choke you. My yoke is easy.” When he says, “Come to me all who labour and are heavy-laden”, the word he uses for “labour” isn’t the normal word for “work.”  The word he uses for “labour” has about it the air of frustration, grief, weariness, the matter of being worn-down and worn-out, tired to the point of being utterly fatigued and fed up.

Earlier in the sermon I said that work as such is not a sign of the Fall but rather an instance of God’s blessing.         Frustration at work, however, grief over work, futility and self-alienation and frenzy: these are a sign of the Fall.         And all of us are fallen creatures living in a fallen world.  Therefore there is an element of frustration and futility and self-contradiction in the matters we “labour over” throughout life.

The ten year-old wants to be a firefighter or a police officer or physician or ballerina. The ten year-old can’t see anything negative about these jobs.  Why, working at any one of these jobs is tantamount to endless glamour and play. The same person, now 40 years old, has found more frustration in the job than he thinks he can endure. Now he wants to get away from it all and raise beef cattle or write novels — as if beef farming were without frustration and the literary world were without treachery! The truth is, frustration and fatigue won’t disappear with the next job.         They have to be pulled along throughout life.  Then with whose yoke do we pull them?  Jesus insists that his yoke fits best, for only his yoke lets us pull life’s burdens without torment or strangulation.

Think about grief. The only way we can avoid grief at the loss of someone dear to us is not to have anyone dear to us. The only way to avoid grief is to avoid love.  But to protect ourselves in this manner against losing someone dear to us is to have lost everything already.  In other words, to love is to ensure grief.  Then grief is another of life’s burdens that can’t be dropped.

As for burdens, one of the cruellest myths floated in our society is the myth that life can be burden-free.  The myth survives for one reason: everyone wants to believe it.  In our silliness we often think that our life is burden-riddled, but so many others’ is burden-free.  The truth is, no one’s life is burden-free.  There is no magic formula which, recited frequently and believed ardently, will evaporate burdens overnight.

Our carpenter-friend doesn’t specialize in magic formulas or mantras. He specializes in yokes. His yoke allows the burden that must be pulled to be pulled without tormenting us or ruining us. But there’s something more. Not only were oxen yoked to the burden they had to pull, oxen were always yoked to each other. Ox-yokes are always made in pairs. At the same that we are yoked to the load we have to pull, we are always yoked to someone who pulls alongside us.

Who? To whom are we yoked as our companion throughout life’s burden-pulling?  Christ’s people are forever yoked to him.  The yoke he fits to us he fits to himself as well.  In other words, there is no burden known to you and me that isn’t his burden as well. His yoke is easy, then, in two senses: one, the yoke he makes for us fits well; two, the yoke he makes for us he makes for himself in addition.  He has bound himself to us in all of life’s struggles.

 

III: — The last workshop teaching we shall examine today, a stark one this time: “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God .” There’s urgency about entering the kingdom through faith in the king himself.  There’s urgency about moving ahead in the kingdom, undeflected by distractions great or little. There has to be resolve, determination, to enter the company of the king and remain in it. Anyone who puts his hand to the plough and looks back ploughs a furrow that meanders in all directions, a hit-and-miss matter that would shame any farmer. Anyone who puts his hand to the plough and looks back resembles Lot ‘s wife: she looked back to the city she was leaving in that she thought there was greater security in what she was leaving behind than there was in what she was journeying towards.  Under God, however, in God, there is always greater security in what we are journeying towards than in what we are leaving behind.  The automobile driver who persisted in looking in the rear-view mirror alone would crack up in no time and go nowhere.

Jesus comes upon a man who gushes that he’d like nothing more than to be a disciple. “Then follow me”, says Jesus, “Follow me now.”

“I’ll follow as soon as I’ve buried my father”, the man replies, “I have domestic matters to attend to before I can begin following.”

“That’s an evasion”, says our Lord, “it’s a delaying tactic. Let the dead bury their dead. You come with me. If you put your hand to the plough and start looking around at this and that, the “this and that” will take you over and the kingdom will pass you by.  You’ll disqualify yourself.”

It’s difficult for us modern folk to appreciate our Lord’s urgency. We don’t grasp why his invitation to join him always has “RSVP” on it and why we mustn’t dawdle or delay. We overlook something that Jesus found transparently obvious and undeniable; namely, we can always delay making up our mind, but we can never delay making up our life. The man who says he hasn’t made up his mind about getting married is a bachelor. The woman who says she hasn’t made up her mind as to whether or not she should have children doesn’t have any. The student who says he hasn’t decided whether he should study tonight or take the night off isn’t studying. And those who have not yet made up their mind about following Jesus have not begun to follow. We can always delay making up our mind; we can never delay making up our life. Jesus won’t allow anyone he meets to deny this truth or forget it.  Again and again he stresses the urgency of entering the kingdom as we abandon ourselves to the king himself.

This third carpenter teaching, the starkest of the three we have probed today, has much to do with the first two, the ones about sawdust and yokes. It is only as we put our hand to the plough and do not look back; it is only as we resolve to live in the company of Jesus Christ and never reconsider; it is only as we continue to love him rather than fritter our affection on trifles and toys; it is only as we are instant and constant where he is concerned that we find ourselves free to hear and heed his word about sawdust and planks and the phoniness that laps at all of us; free to hear his word, we should note, and no less eager to do something about it.

In the same way it is only as we are serious about the yoke-maker, serious enough to move from detached mulling to ardent embracing of the one who has already embraced us; it is only when we are this serious that we find ourselves proving in our experience that his yoke is easier than any other, that what life compels us to pull is pulled better when his yoke both connects us to our burden and connects us to him.

We can always avoid making up our mind; we can never avoid making up our life. Either our hand is on the plough and we are looking ahead or we are looking around elsewhere, distracted, preoccupied with everything but him, perhaps majoring on minors, perhaps concerned with much that is good but with nothing that is godly.

 

Yes, our Lord was a carpenter. He knew about work, about salty sweat and sore muscles and slivers.  But he is also more than a carpenter.  He is the incarnate Son of God.  With the ring of authority, therefore, he urges us to come to him and never forsake him. In this we shall find ourselves both corrected and comforted.  Corrected when his sawdust-reminder challenges us to drop our carping born of pseudo-superiority; comforted when he yokes himself to us and pulls with us the burden that would otherwise torment us or strangle us.

Knowing all of this, today we should bind ourselves to him anew, and never, ever look back.

 

                                                                                             Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                  

You asked for a sermon on Conversion

Matthew 8:18

 

Everyone is aware that words change meaning as they are used everyday and bandied about. According to the Oxford English Dictionary to be stoned is to have rocks hurled at oneself. According to street-talk, however, to be “stoned” is to be intoxicated by marijuana. Only a few years ago the word “gay” meant merry or lighthearted; “gay” now has a meaning entirely unrelated to its previous meaning. What’s more, the recent meaning of “gay” is so deep in the North American psyche that the word will be a long time recovering its original meaning.

A similar change has befallen the word “conversion”. In scripture the word means “turning”, specifically a turning to God. Today, however, the word refers to a psychological development, an emotional experience. Biblically the word is associated with the human will. Today it’s associated primarily with feeling. Biblically “conversion” is entirely a response that God has equipped us to make and moved us to make. Today the word refers to something we initiate out of our own resources.

It’s important that we recover the biblical meaning of the word “conversion”. It’s even more important that we act upon our new understanding. This morning, then, I want us to probe together the significance of a threefold conversion.

I: — In the first place conversion is a turning toward Jesus Christ. Before I say another word about our turning toward him, let me state as strongly as I can a truth that we must always keep before us: we can turn toward him only because in him God has first turned toward us. The simple fact of the Incarnation, of God’s coming among us in Jesus Christ, demonstrates his turning toward us. Supremely in the cross God has turned toward us. Having turned toward us God will never turn away from us, never turn back from us, never turn his back on us, never abandon us, betray us or quit on us. Facing us now in Christ Jesus, God quickens in us the desire to turn and face him. More than quicken in us the desire to turn toward him, God fosters in us the capacity to turn toward him. Having given us both the desire and the capacity to turn toward him, God then invites us to do just that. There is no moment more crucial in any person’s life than that moment when the invitation is heard and the summons is unmistakable and the fork in the road is undeniable. Everything hangs on this moment. Let us make no mistake. God hasn’t turned toward us in Christ Jesus inasmuch as he has nothing better to do. He has turned toward us precisely in order to have us turn toward him. There is no more critical juncture than this.

Our Lord himself says, without hesitation, qualification, “I am Way, Truth, and Life. I alone am this.”

“Way” bespeaks road, pilgrimage, venture; it also bespeaks destination gained, arrival enjoyed, fulfillment guaranteed. Plainly our Lord insists that his invitation rejected means meandering, staggering, stumbling, groping, everything we associate with losing one’s way.

“Truth” (capital “T”) in scripture means reality. To face Jesus Christ is to know reality. To keep company with him, to be soaked in the Spirit that he pours forth, to live in that relationship with his Father to which he admits us: this is reality. It’s obvious that his invitation rejected means to forfeit reality and be left with illusion.

“Life” bespeaks responsiveness, responsiveness not only to him but also (as we shall see in a minute) responsiveness to others who have turned to face him, as well as responsiveness to those haven’t yet turned. It’s obvious that his invitation rejected leaves us with life spurned, life renounced, death.

In view of the fact that everything that issues from our turning toward Jesus Christ in response to God’s having turned toward us in Christ; in view of the fact that everything that issues from this is blessing, pure blessing, then how did “conversion” come to have such a bad press? How did people come to associate it only with endless negativity?

The word comes to have a negative connotation when the church loses confidence in Christ’s ability to turn people to himself, when the church feels that it has to do Christ’s work for him and create a point of contact for him in others. The traditional point of contact has been guilt. Undeniably there is a guilt that is proper before God; that is, there is that for which people should feel guilty because they are guilty. And to be sure our Lord knows what to do here and never fails to do it. Far removed from this situation, however, is artificial guilt that is worked up by assorted means of manipulation. Nothing has done more to discredit Christian proclamation than the psychological manipulation of people through inducing artificial guilt. Such manipulation doesn’t render the gospel credible. It may render a psychiatrist necessary, but it doesn’t render the gospel credible. We should cheerfully acknowledge right here that Jesus Christ alone can render his truth credible. And if he couldn’t our slick machinations wouldn’t help. Let’s admit for once and for all that to believe in Jesus Christ is to trust him to render compelling the truth that he himself is. Our emotional antics may amuse or distress other people; in no way do they render our Lord credible.

The second reason “conversion” has a negative connotation is that it has been hijacked by those who want to capture it exclusively for a coming-to-faith that is as sudden as it is dramatic. People who “saw the light in an instant”; people for whom it “all fell into place at once”; these people have tended to say that unless discipleship begins as theirs began it hasn’t begun at all.

This is not true. There are as many ways of coming to faith as there are ways of coming to be in love. To be sure, a few people, very few, fall in love “at first sight.” Far more people – most, in fact – take much longer to conclude that they are in love. Most people come to be in love through a protracted process replete with hesitation, doubts, misgivings, as well as enthusiasms, ardour and anguish. Nevertheless, one day they are overtaken by the awareness that they are indeed in love. Anyone who told them that they couldn’t be in love since they didn’t fall into love instantly would be dismissed with the wave-off he deserves.

I have never doubted that some people – a few – come to faith suddenly and dramatically. I have only one request to make of these people: that they stop casting aspersion on those whose coming to faith has stolen over them as quietly, yet as surely, as the dawn steals over a still-dark world. How long it takes to come to be in love isn’t important. How we come to be disciples isn’t important. Only one thing matters: that we begin to turn toward him who has already turned wholly toward us, that we set out (however tentatively at first) on the road of discipleship.

II: — In the second place conversion is a turning toward the church. Many people have difficulty grasping this point. They don’t see any connexion at all between Jesus Christ and the church. But of course they see no connexion in that they misunderstand the nature of the church. The church isn’t a club, albeit a club that is “a force for good.” The church – and the church alone – is the body of Christ. To turn toward Jesus Christ is always to turn toward all of him, head and body together. When we turn toward our Lord we aren’t turning toward a severed head; neither are we turning toward a headless torso. In other words, to be related to Jesus Christ is to be related to all of him, body as well as head. To abide in Christ, then, is to abide in his community. To cherish him is to cherish his people. To love him is to love his people, however disfigured they are.

Yet how reluctant people are to endorse this! Think of the attitude aided and abetted by television programming. TV religious broadcasting was intended originally for sick and shut-in people who couldn’t attend public worship. Now, however, it is shamelessly put forward as a substitute for public worship. You sit at home and click the channel-changer. You don’t worship; rather, you allow yourself to be entertained. After all, the channel-changer allows you to move from basketball to a talk-show to a soap opera (whose principal theme is always adultery) to a newscast (whose principal theme is usually house-fires) – to religion! You don’t assume responsibility in the local congregation; instead, you look on your hero with coifed hair from afar. It’s much easier to admire the TV star than it is to endure the local minister! If scandal beclouds the TV presentation, such scandal is incomparably easier to withstand than the anti-gospel currents and the shameful divagations of the local congregation.

Yet in the midst of all this there remains a truth we dare not forget: Jesus Christ isn’t divided. His head isn’t severed from his body. If we are going to face him and embrace him, then we are going to embrace all of him, head and body. Why is embracing all of him so very difficult? It’s difficult because of the jarring discrepancy between head and body. The head is fair to behold while the body is often ugly. The head is handsome while the body is frequently disfigured. The head is resplendent while the body is blemished. What we often forget, however, is this: every last person who is possessed of any faith at all in Jesus Christ came to such faith only through the body, the church. You and I are not the first Christians. Who preserved the truth of Christ for us? Church fathers in Egypt did, even as the church of that era was riddled with political intrigues that make politics anywhere today appear virtuous. Who preserved the truth of Christ for us? Mediaeval thinkers did, including those thinkers whose thinking often obscured the gospel as much as it honoured the gospel. Who preserved the truth of Christ for us? The Protestant Reformers did, even though they remained inexcusably blind to those overseas mission-fields for the sake of which Roman Catholic Jesuits bled to death or were burned at the stake. Who preserved the truth of Christ for us? John Wesley did, even though he was laughably eccentric and lacking in self-perception, as his failed marriage attests, Wesley being as upset at his wife’s departure as I am upset when a Jehovah’s Witness finally departs my house. More recently, who handed on the truth of Christ to me? Ministers did who couldn’t discuss philosophy with me; Sunday School teachers did whose sincerity didn’t quite hide their prejudices; my parents did even though they frustrated me with their failure to understand where I hurt and why. Yes, the body is frequently disfigured, always dishevelled, sometimes disgraced. Still, it is only by means of the body of Christ that anyone ever comes to know the master himself.

While we are dwelling on the fact that Jesus Christ isn’t a severed head but rather can be loved only as his body is cherished, we should review some scriptural truths that we are prone to forget. We should recall that God wills a people for himself, a people. To come to faith in Jesus Christ and to be added to the people of God, to the body of Christ, are two inseparable aspects of a single event. We should recall that innermost private faith in Jesus Christ and outermost public confession of him are always fused in scripture. Where there is no public confession (one dimension of which is public worship) there simply is no faith. We should recall that however weighty an individual’s gift or talent is, it’s useless unless it’s added to the talents of others in the congregation. A solitary piccolo player sitting by himself on a darkened stage in an unheated Roy Thomson Hall is useless.

That conversion which is a genuine turning toward Jesus Christ is always also a turning toward the church. To endorse our Lord in faith is always to endorse his people in love.

III: — In the third place conversion is a turning toward the world. Pollsters tell us that North America’s all-time favourite bible-text is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only¼” (you can fill it in yourself.) What so many seem to over look is that it’s the world that God loves, the big, bad world.

I’m aware that someone is going to remind me immediately of what the apostle James has to say: friendship with the world means enmity with God. I’m aware of what James says, and I agree with him without hesitation: there is an attitude to the world that is an uncritical admiration of the world, an unwitting appropriation of a fallen world, a naïve fascination with the world’s folly and a senseless seduction through the world’s corruption. James is correct. Uncritical friendship with the world is spiritually fatal.

The point is, however, that the Christian is no more to be uncritical of the world than his Lord is uncritical of the world, even as the Christian loves the world as much as his Lord loves it. God never allows his people to turn their back on the world for one unarguable reason: God himself never turns his back on it. It’s plain, then, that two attitudes to the world are forbidden the Christian. One attitude is that Pollyanna view that pretends everything is rosy or near-rosy or soon-to-be-rosy, newspaper-writers being no more than doomsayers who take perverse delight in exaggerating human foibles. The other attitude forbidden the Christian is despair of the world. God doesn’t permit his people to despair of the world, for God himself has appointed the world to a destiny more glorious than anything the world can imagine about itself: namely, a creation healed, the kingdom of God.

Few books in scripture grip me as much as the book of Revelation. I’m startled every time I peer into the book and come upon the two sharpest contrasts anyone could imagine. On the one hand, the people for whom John writes are suffering atrociously at the hands of the world, and John speaks of the world in the strongest terms: “dragon”, “whore”, “beast”, “blood-drinker”, “saint-slayer”. On the other hand, the very people who have suffered so much at the hands of conscienceless cruelty are forbidden to abandon the world. In the first chapter of Revelation John insists that Christians have been made “priests”. The function of priests, biblically, is to intercede. Christians are to intercede tirelessly on behalf of the world. Their priestly service, their intercession, certainly includes prayer but isn’t restricted to it. They are to intercede on behalf of the world in any way they can, intervene in the world in any way they can, however much that world disdains them and abuses them. In the Hebrew bible priests have another function: they offer up sacrifices. What’s the sacrifice John’s readers are to offer up? Themselves! Christians are priests who offer up themselves for the sake of the world. John can make this point, however, only because of a truth he has acknowledged in the preceding verse: Jesus Christ is “the ruler of kings on earth.” (Rev. 1:5-6) Our Lord rules the world, ultimately. No one else does. The Roman Emperor Domitian didn’t rule it when John was writing the book of Revelation, even though Domitian thought he did. Jesus Christ is “the ruler of kings on earth.” Then of course Christians have a priestly ministry, an intercessory ministry, to exercise on behalf of the world: because Christ rules the earth’s rulers ultimately, our priestly service to the world can never be fruitless ultimately.

You asked for a sermon on conversion. Conversion is a turning toward the one who has already turned toward us. To turn toward him, however, is also to turn toward and never forsake all that he has pledged himself to; namely, the church and the world. The church, of course, is God’s demonstration project, the first installment, of what he intends to do for the world; namely, recover a rebellious creation and render it that kingdom wherein the king’s will is done without exception even as the king himself is loved without end.

 

 Victor Shepherd

Bowels Knotting, Heart Breaking, Lungs Gasping: Can Our Compassion Be Less Than His?

Matthew 9:35-38

 

In the course of every-day conversation all of us refer to body-parts metaphorically. Without hesitating for a second we say of someone who has changed his mind about doing something bold, “He’s got cold feet”. If someone is born to the upper classes we say, “She’s a blue-blood”. If we object to something strenuously we say, “I can’t stomach that!” And if someone is utterly devoid of courage we say, “He’s gutless”.

In all of this we are speaking metaphorically. We are not commenting literally on the medical condition of anyone’s stomach or feet.

Our ancient foreparents spoke like this too. The ancient Greeks spoke of the SPLAGCHNA. The SPLAGCHNA were known as the “nobler viscera”. The nobler viscera consisted of the heart, the lungs and the bowels. Together these were regarded as the seat of our profoundest feeling, our deepest emotion, our most significant reaction and response to human need.

The Greek verb corresponding to SPLAGCHNA is SPLAGCHNIZESTHAI. The verb was used to speak of bowels that had knotted, a heart that had broken, lungs that had gasped for air. This verb was the strongest in the Greek language for compassion. When this verb was used its force wasn’t that someone was concerned or someone was sympathetic or even that someone was moved. Its force was that someone was so very compassionate that he was beside himself. He wasn’t moved; his heart was broken. He didn’t “feel for” someone else; his bowels convulsed. He didn’t inhale calmly before making a comment that would cost him nothing in any case; he gasped for air as though he were drowning.

This word is used over and over in the written gospels to speak of our Lord’s compassion. A word this extreme speaks of a compassion equally extreme; a compassion this extreme points to a human need no less extreme. What was the need before which Christ’s compassion shook him?

 

I: — The gospel-writers tell us that Jesus was shaken when he came upon crowds who were “like sheep without a shepherd”. Everywhere in the Hebrew bible “sheep without a shepherd” are sheep who are lost. When Jesus looked out over the crowds — ultimately the whole world — his heart broke at their spiritually lostness.

What is the spiritual condition of humankind, anyway? Back in the Victorian era our foreparents were concerned chiefly with moral matters. To no one’s surprise, the gospel was skewed in the direction of moralism. Pulpit pronouncements were skewed in the direction of moral instruction, moral advice, even moral threat. Plainly, the ultimate human need was thought to be moral need. The church aimed at supplying virtue. Faith was subtly skewed to be confidence in a moral order, and faithfulness meant loyalty to the Judeo-Christian moral code. The minister was to be a moral pillar of the community. To be “lost”, in the Victorian era, meant to be morally adrift.

Then the Victorian moral era gave way to the modern psychological era. Today we aren’t concerned chiefly with moral matters; we are concerned chiefly with psychological matters. Today the gospel is skewed in the direction of psychological assistance. The ultimate human need is deemed to be a psychological need. The human predicament is lack of psychological integration. Faith is subtly skewed to be confidence in psychological processes, while faithfulness is loyalty to one’s school of psychology or even to one’s therapist. The minister is expected to be a model of “togetherness”. To be “lost”, in our era, is not to “have it all together”.

Let us be sure we understand and acknowledge something crucial: both the Victorian era and the modern era have skewed the gospel, and with it the mission of the church and the meaning of Christian truths. Let us be sure we understand and acknowledge that when our Lord’s bowels knotted and his heart broke and he gasped for breath it was not over moral or psychological matters: it was because he saw the crowds to be spiritually lost. Yes, there are undeniable moral and psychological consequences to spiritual disorientation. Nevertheless, our Lord was clear as to which was disease and which was symptom, which was problem and which was manifestation of problem. He insisted that “lost” meant lost, and “spiritually lost” meant lost with respect to humankind’s situation before God.

Everyone has been lost geographically at some point. Likely we have all been lost geographically as children. Most of us have been lost geographically in the roads-network, unable to find ourselves on the roadmap and perchance too proud to ask for help.

To be lost is not to be able to find our way ahead to our destination, not to be able to find our way back to our origin. And yet the person, while lost, who knows he is lost is only a step away from help. The person most thoroughly lost, most helplessly lost, most unhelpably lost (for the time being, at least) is the person who doesn’t know he’s lost and therefore is incapable of admitting it.

One of the most haunting aspects of being lost is that we can be so very lost when we are so very close to where we should be, just around the corner, virtually next door — yet all the while as lost as if we were a thousand miles away.

I was five years old and living in Winnipeg when I became lost in the course of garnering candy on Hallowe’en. My two sisters and I had set out together. We had been traipsing up to one front door after another for 15 or 20 minutes when suddenly I realized that my fellow-traipsers were not my sisters. I didn’t know where my sisters were; and by now I didn’t know where I was. As it turned out, they hadn’t even missed me. When they had accumulated as much candy as they could carry they went home. “Where’s Victor?”, my mother asked. “Who cares?”, my older sister had replied. Whereupon my mother set out after me (my father was working late in the Canada Trust office), anxious; she tripped on the sidewalk and took the knees out of both nylons. No matter; she was going to find me.

It turned out I was only one block away from home. I was lost on the street that paralleled the street on which my family lived. In fact at that moment I was staring at the school that I attended every day. But I was looking at the back side of the school, the side I never entered or left; besides, it was dark and I had never seen the school in the dark. I couldn’t recognize the school at all and therefore couldn’t orient myself. I was as close to home as I could be without being home, yet I was thoroughly lost as well.

The apostle Paul, mind and heart forged by his experience of Jesus Christ and flooded with the gospel of Christ as well; the apostle himself, following his Lord, never hesitated to speak of humankind as spiritually lost. Yet he also told his not-yet-Christian hearers that all of humankind, at every moment, is sustained by the God it doesn’t know. Concerning all of humankind Paul said, “He [God] is not far from each of us, for in him we ‘live and move and have our being’.”

Back in Winnipeg I was as close to being home as I could be, yet I wasn’t home; I was lost. “In God we live and move and have our being” — how much closer can we get? “He is not far from each of us”. True. And who knows it better than Jesus? Yet as soon as he sees the crowd his stomach turns over: lost.

 

We have spent enough time on the matter of being lost. What is it to be found? It is to meet, love, trust and obey Jesus Christ himself. Centuries ago Phillip said to Jesus, “Just show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied”. “To see me is to see the Father”, our Lord had replied. In other words, Jesus Christ isn’t merely the way to getting home; he is our home; he is both the way and the destination. For in being found of him we are found of the Father. To behold the Lord as he is attested by the apostles; to see him only to find that we can’t help seeing him without seizing him; to embrace him and cling to him – this is to be satisfied. It is to be satisfied so very profoundly as not to be lost or feel lost again.

On the eve of his death Jesus prayed aloud, “Give eternal life to all those whom you have given to me. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and the One whom you have sent.”

 

The SPLAGCHNA word-group, always pointing to a compassion so gut-wrenching as finally to be inexpressible, is used in the New Testament of Jesus to describe him, or used by Jesus himself in his ministry. It is used of or by no one else. We have spoken at length of the word as it is used of Jesus to describe his reaction when he saw the crowds. The same word is used by Jesus in his parable of the prodigal son; it is used of the father’s compassion when he looked out the window and saw coming home his dear son who had long been lost in the “far country”. As soon as his son is on the front steps his father cries, “Dead, and now alive; lost, and now found!” — even as he runs to his son, hugs him and kisses him.

What is it to be found? It is to know the Father’s delight at our being home; it’s to have felt his hug; it’s to have overheard him shout to no one in particular but to shout anyway just because he can’t keep quiet, “Alive! Found!”

 

We must never skew the gospel so that “spiritually lost” comes to mean no more than “morally deficient” or “psychologically unintegrated”. We must always insist on the gospel’s self-consistent affirmation of truth: to be found is to be possessed of the assurance that the God in whom we live and move and have our being in any case is now the God whose address we have heard, whose pardon we have tasted, whose joy at our home-coming is greater even than ours.

We must never say that the primary role of the church is to provide a moral bulwark or to be the venue for psychological help. We must always insist that the church’s primary role is to sustain and nurture those sheep who are no longer shepherdless and to exalt the shepherd before those sheep who still are shepherdless. The minister isn’t a moralist or a psychologist; the minister is a prophet who voices the truth of the sheep-finding shepherd and who can voice it authentically just because he himself is manifestly found rather than lost. Faith isn’t confidence in a moral code or confidence in a psychological technique; faith is the bond binding us to the shepherd himself, while faithfulness is loyalty to him and his word and his truth in the face of distractions, would-be seductions, assaults and ridicule.

II: — In case we think all of this to be exclusively inward-looking; in case we think all of this to be one-sidedly individualistic, we should understand that Jesus was equally moved, with the same bowel-churning compassion, when he came upon people afflicted with material needs.

His heart broke and he gasped, we are told, when he saw people who lacked food. We aren’t talking now about the bread of life; we’re talking about bread.

He felt exactly the same when he came upon someone with leprosy. The greater horror of leprosy wasn’t the physical ravages of the disease, dreadful though these were; the greater horror was the social rejection, the ostracism; it was being shunned as the most revolting creature imaginable, the only sick person who had to shout a warning to villagers so that they could get out of the way. The result was that lepers banded together to support each other and care for each other and protect each other as much as they could. They formed a community of disease. “Ordinary” people were glad to have them bunched together, for then it was easier to keep an eye on them; to avoid one was to avoid them all.

Our Lord’s compassion drove him to touch lepers. In that one act he crumbled the walls of contempt and rejection and isolation. Who are the lepers (or near-lepers or somewhat-lepers) in our midst? What do we do? What should we do? Who are those, known to us, whom our society has shunned?

Our Lord’s stomach turned over again when he came upon two blind men. Two blind men, be it noted. In Israel of old it was said, “Wherever two Jews are found together, the whole of Israel is present.” In other words, when Jesus comes upon two blind men he is telling us that there exists a societal blindness, a communal blindness, a corporate blindness. Where is there such a corporate blindness in our society, in our community, in our congregation? And as disciples of Jesus Christ, what are we to do about it?

Our Lord’s heart broke with compassion when he came upon the widow of Nain. Her son had just died. To be sure, bereavement at any time is distressing; but in first century Palestine a widow (her husband was already dead) whose only son has just died is a person who is financially destitute; she has no means of supporting herself. That is what distressed our Lord. He had to do something about it. What are we to do, whether individually or by means of our political system?

A man whose child suffered from epileptic seizures brought the child to Jesus. According to the text of Mark’s gospel the boy’s father cried out, “Have compassion and help us!” Have compassion “on us”; not “on my son”, but “on us”. Who are the “we”? The boy and his dad? the boy and his dad and his mom? the entire family? Surely the entire family. Everyone knows that a child who suffers from a major disability is an enormous disruption to the entire family. How enormous? Several years ago I was visiting an elderly man who was dying. He spoke of his disabled son, long an adult, and how the entire family had been disrupted endlessly on account of the disabled son. At the height of his frustration the dying man shouted, “That boy has ruined our life”. “Don’t say that!” his wife shrieked, “Don’t say it!” But it was true. The man with the epileptic son who cried to Jesus for help already knew it. Who are such families in our midst? What do we do for them?

Earlier I mentioned that the SPLAGCHNA word-group was used only of Jesus himself or by Jesus in his ministry. Just as this word for the strongest compassion was found in our Lord’s parable of the prodigal son where it illustrated compassion for the spiritually lost, so it is used in the parable of the Good Samaritan where it illustrates his compassion for people who are materially deprived.

 

III: — There is one last point to be made in all of this. The ancient Greeks believed that the deity could not be moved. If the deity could be moved, then the deity could be bribed, manipulated, exploited.

We who have been taught in the school of Israel know that the Holy One of Israel can’t be bribed or manipulated or exploited. Yet we know something more. Just because the Holy One of Israel has incarnated himself in Jesus of Nazareth, just because Jesus is the outer expression of the innermost heart of God, everything we have noted about the compassion of Jesus must therefore be said of the Father himself. He whose judgement is undeflectable and whose intolerance of evil is unyielding and whose wrath is no more an exaggeration than his love is an exaggeration; this one is finally the God whose heart is broken at the sight of men and women in a fallen world who are spiritually “at sea” and/or materially deprived. He who has made provision for us in his son summons us to know for ourselves and to witness before the world that his provision is sufficient. For he who feeds us now is going to feed us until that day when we want no more just because we need no more.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                  

 July 2005

 

Mandate for a Congregation

Matthew 10:1-9

As soon as something in our society is seen to be out of order a Royal Commission is set up to deal with it. One day it is suspected that tax-revenues are being misspent or that medicare claims are being falsified or that organized crime is taking over legitimate businesses. At this point a commission is convened. Political appointees are given authority to investigate the area of concern. They are given a mandate; i.e., they are told how far their authority extends, what they are to investigate, and to whom they are to report.

When Jesus called the twelve disciples he appointed the first Christian congregation. That first congregation was thereafter the standard or norm for all Christian congregations in every era. The mandate our Lord gave to the twelve he therefore gives to any congregation in any era. Needless to say, it’s the mandate without which we wouldn’t be a congregation at all. We might be a religious group, or a middle class club, or a social circle; but we wouldn’t be a congregation called and commissioned by Jesus Christ himself and appointed to the same task and responsibility as our twelve foreparents in faith. In other words, it’s the mandate that makes the congregation.

There’s a crucial difference, however, between the mandate the government gives a royal commission and the mandate Jesus Christ gives us. The mandate given the royal commission authorizes its members to ask questions and produce reports. They do that. They produce innumerable reports. They make dozens of recommendations. But how much gets done? A great deal is said; very little is ever done. The mandate that Jesus gives a congregation, on the other hand, authorizes us to say relatively little, even as it insists we do a great deal. What’s more, what we say and do in obedience to our Lord he then adopts himself, takes it up in his name and uses it to so as to render it his speaking and his doing.

What’s the mandate? First the twelve are to announce, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is what they are to preach. Thereafter they are to do; specifically they are to do what reflects the fact that the kingdom is at hand. They are to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.

 

I: — Every congregation is commissioned to heal the sick. The sick are the unwell; the unwell are those incapable of doing well, those incapable of doing well anywhere in life for any reason. They can be sick in body, sick in mind, sick in spirit. Years ago in my seminary course with Dr. James Wilkes, a Toronto psychiatrist, one student lamented that in this age of agnosticism and secularism we were no longer sure of the church’s vocation. Wilkes stared at the student for the longest time as if the student were half-deranged and then remarked, “Are you telling me that you can have a suffering human being in front of you and you don’t know what the church’s vocation is?”

There is a low-grade suffering that is simply part of the human condition; it never goes away. There is also high-grade suffering, intense pain, that can come upon us at any time for any reason and remain with us for any length of time. To be sure, professional expertise is often needed for people unwell in both respects; but even as professional expertise is called for, we should never think our ministry isn’t. Last Monday afternoon I met at Streetsville “Go” station a 30-year old woman who has been diagnosed (correctly) as manic-depressive. As Maureen and I spoke with her we noticed as well several symptoms of schizophrenia. Plainly she is schizo-affective, to use psychiatric terminology. Maureen and I can’t cure her; we can’t even medicate her; but this isn’t to say we can’t do anything. We had been asked to meet her, feed her, accommodate her, and take her to the airport (and to the correct airport terminal) next morning. She lives 1700 miles away. If she lived closer to us there would be more — much more — we could do, should do, and would do.

Everyone knows that when intense pain comes upon us our suffering becomes a preoccupation: we can think of nothing else. Have you ever tried to do algebra or write an essay with so much as — so little as — toothache? If you had wanted for years to hear Pinchas Zukerman play his violin and you were told that a ticket was available for tonight’s performance and tonight you happened to have raging headache or unquellable nausea, you wouldn’t care less if Mozart himself were playing at Roy Thomson Hall. Intense suffering is a preoccupation that precludes us from attending to anything else. Then anything we do to alleviate someone’s Jobian suffering has gigantic significance.

For years now I have noticed how suffering alters people. A long time ago I learned that underneath the alcoholic’s bravado and self-aggrandizement and self-absorption there is a suffering human being who has suffered terribly for a very long time. Yes, I’m aware that he causes many others to suffer, and his doing so renders others impatient with him and angry at him. Nonetheless, his own suffering is monumental, and all the more terrible for being unrecognized. In the same way I have found that underneath the convict’s larger-than-life self-advertisement there is terrible suffering. Yes, I have met a few convicts with out-and-out criminal minds; but only a few. Most of the convicts I’ve met aren’t criminals at heart; they’re criminals as a consequence. Their criminal behaviour isn’t their besetting problem, it’s the presenting symptom of their besetting problem. Yes, they have behaved criminally; yes, there has to be a social response to their behaviour. At the same time, for instance, we all know that divorce destroys children; we know too that only 35% of marriages in Canada end in divorce; and we know that virtually 100% of young men afoul of the law have come from homes where marital grief has afflicted them with a suffering they couldn’t articulate and likely couldn’t even identify. After 28 years as a pastor I have concluded that nearly all self-injurious behaviour is rooted in suffering.

What about the suffering of those whose suffering we don’t see? We’d see it if we looked a little more closely. Not so long ago I used to watch a 70-year old man walk haltingly up and down Queen St. using a cane with four feet on it for stability, one arm folded across his chest and one leg dragging awkwardly. Plainly he’d had a stroke. On other days I’d see the young adult who is intellectually challenged, or the woman whose son is “doing drugs”, as she says (I know who these people are in Streetsville) or the mentally ill fellow whose wife has left him, or the ex-convict who can’t find employment, or the homemaker who would give anything for the smallest parttime job but isn’t hired inasmuch as she can’t read. I saw them all on different days. One afternoon I had reason to go to the Winchester Arms — and there I saw them all at once. They were all gathered together in one room! The stroke victim with the four-footed cane was trying to communicate in garbled speech with the retarded fellow, while the woman who couldn’t read was asking the forlorn mother to help her with the instructions on her pharmacy prescriptions. They were all together in one room in the Winchester Arms. It was as if a summit conference of Streetsville sufferers had been convened and individuals representing each different affliction were on hand to meet each other. And then I saw something more: the kingdom. The kingdom of God is the creation healed. Doesn’t Jesus mandate the congregation to announce that the kingdom is at hand, and then set about healing the sick?

All of which brings me to a matter that has haunted me for a long time. For years the outreach committee of this congregation has sighed in frustration. Who needs a committee to write a cheque once or twice a year to a humanitarian project oceans distant? I’m not denigrating the humanitarian project in any sense. Unquestionably it is a means of healing the sick. At the same time, if outreach work in this congregation is going to catch fire, we need to see human faces much closer to home; we need to open our eyes to what is in fact staring us in the face; we need to do something that is much less remote; we need to do something that is much more labour- (our labour) intensive. But first of all we need to identify the suffering in our midst.

“Are you telling me you can have a suffering human being in front of you and you don’t know what the church’s vocation is?” — so spoke a psychiatrist with surprise, anger and sorrow in response to a seminary student’s question.

 

II: — Next in the mandate we are commissioned to raise the dead. The written gospels inform us that Jesus raised several people from the dead, as did others in the early church, according to the book of Acts. Everyone who was raised in this manner, of course, had to die again. Then what was the point of being raised at all? These raisings from the dead were enacted illustrations, as it were, of the unique event in the New Testament: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Now the resurrection of Jesus Christ is very different from resuscitation, and different in several respects. For one, resuscitation is merely the reanimation of a corpse (someone has to die again), whereas the resurrection of Jesus exalts him beyond having to die; death can never reach out and reclaim him, ever. For another, the resurrection of Jesus includes our Lord’s capacity to share the truth and reality of his risen life with his people: we, his people, are made alive before God, and made alive in such away that death will never undo (won’t even affect in the slightest) our vivification before God. Paul exults as he reminds the Christians in Ephesus, “You he made alive when you were dead.” They had been dead before God, dead unto God, spiritually inert, when the risen Christ had seized them and rendered them alive in the Spirit.

Not surprisingly, then, death and resurrection, spiritual inertness and spiritual vivification, are the ultimate categories in scripture. To be sure, Jesus is healer; but his ultimate significance isn’t given by his ability to heal. To be sure, Jesus is teacher; but his ultimate significance isn’t given by his ability to teach. His ultimate significance is indicated in his triumphant cry, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” He who has been made alive now makes others alive; and those whom he makes alive he now commissions and uses as he continues to make still others alive. In other words, the core of the church’s mandate is the commission to raise the dead; we who have been rendered alive unto God ourselves are now to render others alive as well. How are we to do this? Of ourselves we have no power to raise the dead! In the book of Acts the apostles never pretend they have any power to do anything of themselves. Just as surely, however, they know that unless they act, albeit in the power of the risen one; unless they act, nothing gets done!

Many people are either puzzled by the word “evangelism” or put off by it. Either they aren’t sure what it means, or they think they are sure and are repelled by it. Evangelism in fact is a simple matter. Evangelism is simply attesting our Lord himself, in any way we can, with the result that he adopts our witness as he makes others alive unto him. Evangelism, then, is the congregation’s fulfilment of the mandate to raise the dead. People who are now spiritually inert are going to be rendered able and eager to respond to our Lord’s invitation, “Come unto me!” Evangelism is the congregation’s raising the dead as the congregation exudes the vitality Christ has lent it and exhales this vitality as surely as God’s breath is said to enliven inanimate clay and render that person God’s covenant partner ever after.

This congregation has been commissioned to raise the dead.

 

III: — Next in the mandate we are commissioned to cleanse lepers. Since leprosy is a disease, why aren’t the lepers simply included among the sick who are to be healed? The lepers are singled out to be cleansed just because the intolerable feature of leprosy, in the biblical era, wasn’t disease; the intolerable feature was defilement. Lepers were defiled, socially ostracized, outcast. Lepers have to be readmitted to the community as their defilement is dispelled and their repugnance is removed. Lepers are afflicted with a dreadful stigma. Their stigma is truly no disgrace. But society invariably equates affliction with stigma and stigma with disgrace.

During the middle ages there were aristocratic women, high-born, noble in every sense of the word, wealthy who, in the spirit of Jesus Christ and out of love for him, used to kiss the most horribly repellent lepers just to let them know that someone loved what everyone else regarded as defiled and found repugnant and wanted only to flee. Someone loved that person and would admit him at least to her and cherish him when others found him only hideous.

Shortly after I reported to my first pastoral assignment in rural New Brunswick, 1970, a villager suggested I visit the “Old People’s Home”, as it was called, in the neighbouring village of Neguac. (Neguac was only 7 miles from Tabusintac, but because it was French-speaking it was deemed to be light-years away. Leprosy wears many faces, doesn’t it!) I found not an “Old People’s Home” but a large residence that housed 23 people who were seriously mentally ill. They had been in assorted provincial institutions anywhere from 5 to 20 years. One woman, 25 years old, told me she took “dix-huit pilules par jour” (18 pills per day.) Her family lived in Moncton — two hours’ drive away — and never visited her. She was a leper.

A few years ago MDs were going to cure such people with brand-new neuroleptic drugs, and MSWs were going to ease them back into our society.

The neuroleptic drugs are certainly helpful but cannot cure; our society is already turing its back on these people; and the MSWs are being laid off as governments at every level indicate money is scarce and getting scarcer all the time. Meanwhile, the church stands around, complaining that it has no credibility in our secular age, wondering what is left for it to do, when all the while there has been delivered into the church’s hands a glorious opportunity to recover its historic diaconal ministry, its historic ministry of concrete caring. Will the church ever understand what opportunity has been handed it on a silver platter? Will it?

It didn’t understand what had been given it in Chatham, N.B., when I lived 40 miles from Chatham. One afternoon I was about to drive home to Tabusintac after visiting a parishioner in the Chatham hospital, when I noticed a large residential building whose many occupants were severely intellectually challenged. I went in, identified myself as a clergyman, and spoke with the staff. They told me the program had taken over a disused residence of a small Roman Catholic college. The building accommodated two dozen people aged 18 to 45, with I.Qs. of 50 or 60. An I.Q. of 100 is normal; an I.Q. of 20 is needed if someone is to be toilet-trained. An I.Q. of 50 or 60 permits people to do such things as thread beads on a string or cut up pantyhose and hook a rug with the pieces; but of course people with an I.Q. of 50 or 60 will never be gainfully employed. When I spoke with the staff I found many of them cold, even hostile. Finally one woman hissed at me, “We have been in business here for six months, and you are the first clergyperson we have seen.” I made a point of visiting these people every time I was in Chatham. One day I lamely suggested that perhaps Chatham’s ten or twelve clergy hadn’t come by inasmuch as they didn’t know about it. “Don’t know about it!”, one woman fumed at me, “they knew about it before it was developed; they learned what was coming and they fanned out in teams throughout the town urging citizens to resist this facility like the plague; they spread stories to the effect that intellectually challenged people were slobbering neanderthals with perverted propensities; that women and children would no longer be safe. They did everything they could to smear afflicted people and incite prejudice against them.” Weakly I asked the woman what a church group could do for the men and women so afflicted. Immediately she listed a dozen ways in which help could be rendered. Needless to say, any contact on the part of a church group, in an atmosphere so thoroughly poisoned, would have been nothing less than lepers cleansed. (Remember: the church is supposed to cleanse lepers, not condemn them.)

Before we can cleanse lepers we have to see them. Whether or not we can see lepers is a very good test, I’m convinced, of whether or not we can see at all.

IV: — Last in the mandate we are commissioned to cast out demons. When disciples are faced with evil, they are to identify it and deal with it. First they have to discern it; then they have to name it; then they have to fend it off. Most certainly they aren’t to wink at it or trifle with it or compromise with it or exploit it.

One day I found myself speaking with several university students who belonged to a zealous group of Christian students whose zeal for the gospel burned white-hot. As I listened to their fervour concerning the spiritual peril of fellow university students who remained unconverted I noticed how lightheartedly they talked about passing essays around. One person would write the essay; several others would then submit it and receive credit for it. I was appalled at their fraudulence and asked them how they squared their cheating with their burning Christian profession. One fellow cavalierly replied, “We Christians on the campus are so busy doing the Lord’s work we have no time to do school work!” Jesus commands the twelve to cast out demons, not profit from them.

At the same time our Lord cautions the twelve that he is sending them out as sheep among wolves, and so they are to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Because evil is so very evil, uncommon wisdom is needed to deal with it. It’s easy to hear our Lord’s command to cast out demons and forget that he also insisted we be wise as serpents. Many a strong person has hurled himself against evil frontally, assuming he could best it, only to find himself consumed by it. Many a subtle person has assumed she could disperse evil subtly, only to find months later she had been subtly seduced by it. Many an unwary person has concentrated so singlemindedly on one evil as to be overtaken by another evil from another quarter. In casting out demons, in resisting evil, we have to be wise as serpents.

We also have to be innocent as doves. Our opposition to evil can’t become the excuse for attacking people we don’t like. Our opposition to evil mustn’t be the disguise that cloaks our vindictiveness or our ill-temper. Our opposition to evil mustn’t become the occasion of our boasting that we are spiritually superior inasmuch as we are dragon-slayers. We are to be innocent as doves.

Yet even as we are to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, our wisdom and innocence mustn’t become an excuse for fear-induced immobility. We are to cast out demons; we are to resist evil; and we are without excuse if we don’t.

Our congregation has a mandate more important than that given any Royal Commission. We are to announce that the kingdom is at hand. And then our preaching of the kingdom must be confirmed as the kingdom is rendered visible in our midst. To this end we are to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.

I know that my Lord constrains me to fulfil this mandate. Does he constrain you too?

 

                                                                           Victor Shepherd
January 1998  

                                      

On Fearing God

Matthew 10:24-33      1st Kings 17:8-16      Romans 9:3-8     

 

What would it be like to read the New Testament fresh, without any of the preconceptions and prejudices that we bring to it unknowingly? What would leap out at us if we came to it without our minds already half made-up or misinformed? When C.S. Lewis moved from unbelief to faith he found out for himself. “The New Testament,” said Lewis, “is a peculiar blend of unimaginable comfort and unspeakable terror.”

Unimaginable comfort and unspeakable terror? Our foreparents spoke much of the fear of God. When someone was described as God-fearing, everyone knew what was meant. The truth is we are to fear God; we are meant to fear God; we are even commanded to fear God. There is enormous blessing in fearing God, for as long as we fear God we shall never have to be afraid of anything or anyone else. To be sure, the command to praise God is the most frequently stated command in scripture, while the command to be holy is the most elemental command. The command to fear God, however, is related to both of these, and in fact we are told that to fear God is to be wise, while not to fear him is to be foolish. John Calvin insisted that anyone who loved God genuinely also feared God appropriately. Calvin was much sounder than the parishioner who smiled at me at the door of the church and attempted to correct the sermon I had just preached. “I don’t fear God,” she said in her groundless superiority, “I love him.” Calvin knew that unless we fear God our love for God, so-called, will be nothing more than sentimental twaddle.

Now to say that we are to fear God isn’t to say that God is a tyrant, comparable to a Latin American or African dictator with malice in his heart and blood on his hands. It isn’t to say that God is monstrous, devouring any and all who irk him. It certainly isn’t to say he resembles the Siberian tigers in the Metro Zoo. A newspaper photograph depicted a Siberian tiger eleven feet long from nose-tip to tail, with its jaws wide open and its four-inch fangs bared. I thought that the animal looked magnificent. I went on to read the caption accompanying the photograph. It informed readers that tigers in the Metro Zoo are fed cattle heads every day. Immediately I was appalled just thinking about the spectacle. Reading about it put me off.

Albert Camus, the French existentialist philosopher and novelist, maintained that the God of whom Jews and Christians speak, the God who towers over the world infinitely can only dwarf and diminish human beings until they are obliterated before him as thoroughly and as thoughtlessly as tigers devour cattle heads unthinkingly.

Camus was a better novelist than he was a theologian, for he didn’t understand why scripture insists that we fear God and what is meant by fearing God. Camus thought that to fear God is to cower before God like a whipped dog, to cower before God in nightmarish horror, to crumble before God in terror. Camus thought that this was all “fear of the Lord” could mean, and for this reason, he said, he was an atheist and rejected every last aspect of biblical faith.

Camus never understood something that biblically informed people know profoundly; namely, there is no possibility of not fearing. Either we fear God and fear nothing else, or we don’t fear God and fear everything else. But in any case there is no possibility of being fear-free. John Wesley found the awakening in 18th Century England surging around him as, in his words, “I offered them Christ,” and despised, degraded men and women enjoyed both a Lord who loved them and a community that cherished them. Wesley found too, and found quickly, that not everyone cherished the awakening. Frequently mobs disrupted his preaching and assaulted his supporters. Wesley knew that only resilient, undiscouragable Christians would continue to hold out Jesus Christ to the needy and continue to hold up those who responded to him. In other words, the awakening would collapse if the mobs cowed Wesley’s people. His plea was both simple and profound: “Give me a dozen people who hate nothing but sin and fear no one but God and we can turn England upside down.” Wesley himself, beaten up more than once, feared no human being; neither magistrate nor bishop nor thug. “Hate only sin,” he said, “fear only God, and you will then fear nothing else.”

Jesus said, “don’t fear those who can kill only the body; fear him (i.e., God) who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” Then is God cruel? tyrannical? On the contrary, Jesus adds immediately, “Two sparrows are sold for a penny. Yet God sees them and cares for them. How much more does God care for you. Why, God cares so much for you that even the hairs of your head are numbered.” In Palestine of old sparrows were eaten just as we eat chicken. But since there’s little meat on a sparrow, it takes many sparrows to make a meal. If you bought ten sparrows for a dollar, the bird-seller might just throw in an extra bird, so small and nearly insignificant was it. The point of our Lord’s pronouncement is this: if God cares hugely about the smallest, throwaway sparrow, how much more does he care about us who are made in his image and whom he has named his covenant-partner?

I want to say something more about “the fear of the Lord.” Ninety-eight per cent of the time when the bible speaks of our fearing God it doesn’t mean servile, cowering terror. It means awe, reverence, respect, veneration, obeisance, adoration. Scripture makes it plain that God loves us and wants us to love him. Servile, cowering terror alone would only mean that God was monstrous and couldn’t be loved. Scripture, however, is also aware that you and I are prone to trade on God’s goodness, prone to become presumptuous, prone to regard his mercy as indulgence and his patience as tolerance. For this reason 2% of the time when scripture speaks of fearing God it doesn’t mean awe or reverence or respect; it means plain, simple, ordinary fear.

Let’s think for a moment of the people who know us best yet love us most. Here of course I have to mention my wife. Do I fear her? I don’t fear that she’s going to beat me up. (After all, she weighs only 100 pounds and is anything but confrontational.) Therefore I don’t cower before her. But I do fear her. I fear offending her. I fear wounding her. Above all I fear breaking her heart. That’s it. I fear breaking her heart. And this is what scripture has in mind when it insists we are to fear God: we are so to reverence and adore him as to fear breaking his heart. At least this is what scripture means 98% of the time. The other 2% it means we are to fear him in the ordinary sense of fear lest we become palsy-walsy presumptuous, just as 2% of the time I fear my wife in that I fear behaving in such a way as to cause her to forsake me. And if my fear in this “2% sense” keeps me on the “straight and narrow,” so much the better. I want to be afraid of her if this means I shall avoid alienating her and losing her.

We are to fear God. Inasmuch as we rightly fear him we shan’t have to be afraid of him in the sense of undifferentiated terror. Inasmuch as we fear him we shan’t have to fear anything else or anyone else.

In the time that remains this morning I should like us to look at several instances in scripture where God’s people did indeed fear him, and therefore could hear and obey his command, “Fear not!”, in the midst of life’s turbulence and trial.

I: — The first is from the story of Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet. A drought has dried up the land. People are starving. Elijah asks a widow to make him the smallest piece of baked bread, a bun. She tells him she has only a small jar of cornmeal and a cruse (a small flask) of oil. With the cornmeal and the oil she’s going to prepare a smidgen of food for herself and her son (their last meal), and then mother and son will die together. “Include me in your meal,” says Elijah; “you will have enough. Fear not! The cornmeal and the oil won’t run out until it rains and the drought ends.” Not run out? The resources they need will be supplied?

I used to snicker at this story, since the story seemed to traffic in magic. Then one day an old minister (he also happened to be my first professor of Old Testament, and of course he esteemed the Old Testament prophets); this old minister told me what happened to him years ago. He was a pastor in Scotland. For years he was convinced that pacifism was an implicate of the gospel. One Sunday per year (but one only) he preached on what he deemed to be the Christian duty of pacifism. There was no trouble over this, even though many church folk disagreed with him. Then World War II broke out. Now there was lots of trouble. An elder flayed him because he hadn’t had the congregation sing the national anthem in worship the Sunday war was declared. He went ahead with his customary annual sermon. Trouble in the congregation worsened. Soon the congregation’s treasurer informed him that there was no money with which to pay him, and told him as well that the congregation would fire him post haste. He had seventeen pounds on hand, no other savings. He also had on hand one wife and two children. Henceforth there would be no salary. Almost immediately, however, small contributions found their way to him, frequently accompanied by an encouraging letter. Occasionally near-by congregations used him as pulpit supply. He and his family lived like this, hand-to-mouth, for eight months, at the end of which they possessed exactly seventeen pounds. Then a neighbouring congregation lost its pastor to the Royal Air Force. It called my friend as interim minister. Let him tell you about the entire incident in his own words:

It was literally true that throughout this time we had been anxious for nothing. I do not remember that we ever wondered whence our next meal would come. Our needs were amply met. The flow of mercies never ceased; the cruse of oil never failed.

My friend never maintained that the providence which blessed him and his family “proved” that God endorsed pacifism. In fact he was careful to say that we mustn’t draw such a conclusion. He simply knew that whether he was right or wrong about his pacifism, the widow’s cruse of oil didn’t run out.

After my friend had related this incident to me I found the vocabulary of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Ephesus leaping out at me. I noticed that Paul spoke of “the unsearchable riches of Christ”, “the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in kindness,” “the immeasurable love of Christ,” “the greatness of God’s power in believers,” “the many-splendoured wisdom of God” — and all of this from the apostle who spoke of himself as “having nothing, yet possessing everything.” Plainly the apostle is speaking of his own experience. My experience, limited as it is, doesn’t contradict either the work of Elijah or the testimony of Paul or the experience of my friend. To fear God is to fear nothing else, to know that the widow’s cruse won’t fail.

II: — Let’s look at Joseph now. His brothers were jealous of him, abused him and sold him to some travelling merchants. He ended up in Egypt where he became the highest-ranking civil servant. When famine overtook his family and his family was desperate, his brothers travelled to Egypt in hope that Joseph could help them. Joseph could have said, “Sorry fellows, you abused me years ago and I’m not inclined to do anything for you now. In fact this is the moment I’ve waited for for years. You can stew in your own juice.” He could have said this, but instead he cried, “Fear not! What you did to me you certainly meant for evil, but God meant it for good. You will eat.”

Insofar as you and I are determined to fear God, we can then fear not, since whatever evil befalls us God turns to some good, somehow. Hundreds of years ago people were concerned with alchemy. Alchemy attempted to turn base metals (like lead) into gold, a precious metal. No one was ever able to do this. Yet how people tried! They dreamt of how rich they’d be if only they could turn lead into gold. Little did they understand that if they had been able to turn lead into gold, they wouldn’t have been one cent richer. After all, gold is precious precisely because it’s rare. If they had succeeded in turning lead into gold then gold would have been as plentiful as lead, and therefore devalued. Had alchemy “worked” it could only have produced what is worthless anyway.

God is in the business of transmuting what’s base into what’s precious. But what God works in our lives is never cheap, never devalued. God’s work with the raw material available to him, including the evil that befalls us, is work whose worth never decreases.

I’m sure that you can tell me of developments in your life that have confirmed this truth over and over. And because it’s been confirmed in your life and mine so very frequently, we are never going to doubt the force of the command, “Fear not!”

At one point I was junior minister in a congregation where I felt the senior minister victimized me repeatedly. There was no one to whom I could turn for vindication and help. When I was in slight-to-moderate trouble, the senior minister took me to Swiss Chalet for lunch. When I was in big trouble, he took me to the Board of Trade Country Club.

One day the senior lay officer of the congregation, president of a large Canadian corporation, told me where to head in and reminded me that in his corporation the office boy always knew his place. “I am not the office boy here or the equivalent of the office boy,” I fumed, I am the associate minister. He smirked, “You will learn just what you are here regardless of the title on your office door.” I was at the Board of Trade Country Club many times that year.

I wish I could tell you that in all of this I “feared not”, but I have to admit that I did fear. Still, in the years since I have had a fruitful pastoral ministry to people in the very congregation where I had felt like a squashed grape. People there have reached out to me again and again. They have come to me, and still do, in moments of tragedy or anguish or perplexity. Back then I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t fear and couldn’t stop fearing in any case. Now I can see why, and therefore have something to carry forward with me in new situations.

We must fear not, for the evil that befalls us, whether great or little, never handcuffs God. And the “alchemy” that God works in all of this never yields something of diminished value but rather something of genuine worth.

III: — Our final word today comes from Moses: “Fear not! The Egyptians you are seeing today you shall never see again.” The children of Israel are struggling to get away from their Egyptian tormentors. Assaulted time after time, they are being worn down. Discouragement is seeping into them, discouragement that will soon result in paralysis. “Fear not!” cries Moses, “the Egyptians you see today you shall never see again.”

Was this promise made good? Did God keep the promise Moses spoke on God’s behalf? To be sure, those particular Egyptians with all their nastiness were never seen again: they drowned. But what about Israel’s other enemies? What about the Assyrians centuries later, followed by the Persians, and then the Babylonians, and then the Romans, wave upon wave. Was there ever to be deliverance from their enemies, final deliverance?

Will there ever be final deliverance from all that assaults us and threatens us with paralysing discouragement? Yes, there will be. There will be final deliverance from all that afflicts God’s people, for on the Day of our Lord’s appearing all that contradicts our Lord Jesus Christ and his rule will be dispelled.

The minister with the pacifist convictions I mentioned earlier in the sermon; he is Robert Dobbie, and several of his hymns are found in the second last United Church hymnbook. Dobbie himself always spoke so very convincingly, authentically, just because he had proven over and over in his own life that the widow’s cruse of oil didn’t run dry. Dobbie died three years ago, at age ninety-nine. When last I saw him he was ninety-plus, and he behaved like a nine year-old, so very senile was he. He wandered; he babbled; he couldn’t remember where he was or who he was. His wife was worn down running after him. When I last saw him I asked myself, “What is their future?” and asked it only because I already knew the answer: they could fear not and they should fear not just because the harassments dogging them that day they were never going to see again.

The book of Hebrews promises a Sabbath rest for all the people of God. “Sabbath rest” doesn’t mean inactivity, “vegging” as we like to say. Rest, for the Hebrew mind, always has the force of restoration, the restoration of God’s creation. There is a restoration promised; there is a restoration coming; there is a restoration that guarantees the deliverance of all God’s people from everything that afflicts, assaults, threatens, disfigures or warps them. None of God’s people will be left distressed, deranged, or damaged in any way. The “Egyptians” that we see today we shall never see again. Then we may and we must fear not.

John Wesley was right. Either we don’t fear God and find fears without number filling us, or we do fear God and find we have nothing else, no one else, to fear.

King Solomon was right: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It’s also the mid-point of wisdom and the end of wisdom. In fact the fear of the Lord is wisdom itself.

Victor Shepherd   

September 2002

 

You asked for a sermon on The Sin Against The Holy Spirit

Matthew 12:22-32      Isaiah 5:20       Romans 14:17

[1] The words are frightening, aren’t they. “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever says a word against the Son of man [i.e., Jesus himself] will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” Any sin, however lurid, however heinous, however horrible, however cruel — any sin can be forgiven, except the sin against the Holy Spirit. It will never be forgiven, never. There’s no doubt that Jesus said it. Matthew, Mark and Luke record it. There can be no doubt that Jesus meant it. Still, precisely what did he mean?

 

[2] My heart sinks every time I think of the people who have been tormented by this text. As a pastor I have found many people tormented whom I wanted only to relieve, haunted as I have been by those for whom the text was never intended.

People tormented by scrupulosity, for instance. Scrupulosity is a psychological condition (a neurosis, to be exact) wherein someone is afflicted with a hair-trigger conscience; moreover, a hair-trigger conscience that screams over matters that are spiritually insignificant. The person suffering from scrupulosity has a conscience like a fire-alarm system so super-sensitive as to be set off by anything at all, and constantly set off by what isn’t even a fire. In other words, such a person’s scrupulous conscience, his built-in alarm system, is always sending in false alarms. As false as these false alarms are, however, they are distressing; distressing to him, and upsetting to everyone who has to live with him. False alarms anywhere in life are always disturbing and dangerous.

Our Lord’s pronouncement also haunts people whose theological grasp is inadequate. These people draw up a list of sins and rate them in order of seriousness. Their theological grasp is inadequate in that they think that sins can be listed, enumerated, like a shopping list of things we shouldn’t buy. But of course sin as the systemic human condition can never be comprehended in terms of lists and lists of lists. The second aspect of their inadequate theological grasp is that they evaluate the sins they have listed. The third aspect of their inadequate theological grasp is that the one sin in them they have evaluated as most serious they then label unforgivable, and unforgivable just because they deem it the most serious. Now they conclude that they are beyond the reach of God’s mercy. Beyond the reach of God’s mercy, they conclude that their situation before God is hopeless. Soon they are spiralling down in ever-worsening self-loathing and self-rejection. My heart aches for them.

And then there are the folk who suffer from endogenous depression. Endogenous depression is depression rooted in biochemical imbalance. Endogenous depression must always be distinguished from reactive depression. Reactive depression is the sadness we experience whenever we undergo major loss. If we are bereaved we become depressed. We may be bereaved of someone we love, of our job, of our reputation, of an opportunity that seemed within grasp only to be snatched away; when we are bereaved — i.e., suffer loss — we are depressed. This is normal. Such depression abates as situations change and life goes on.

Endogenous depression, however, biochemically induced depression, is something else. People suffering from it must seek medical help and must be treated pharmaceutically. Until they are treated they sink lower and lower, all the while regarding themselves as worthless. I have had much to do with endogenously depressed people whose depression convinces them that they have committed the unpardonable sin. Soon they are saying ominous things, such as, “I might as well end it all since I’m wretched now and the future can only be worse.” If these people were to receive adequate medical care they would cease speaking like this and laugh at the emotional space they occupied six months ago.

 

[3] As we circle around the text this morning in order to look at it from all angles the first thing I want to point out is this: our Lord never spoke of “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; he never said, “…whoever sins against the Holy Spirit…”. He said, “…whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit…”. We must keep this distinction in mind for the duration of the sermon — and after the sermon as well.

The second thing I want to emphasize as forcefully as I can is this: whenever, in the course of his earthly ministry, Jesus speaks of sin, he always speaks of mercy and pardon in the next breath and he always magnifies the forgiveness of God.

Peter asks Jesus how many times a disciple should forgive the person who offends. Seven times would surely be more than enough. “Seventy times seven is more like it”, says Jesus, “there’s no limit to the forgiveness we must press upon those who offend us.” If Jesus insists there’s to be no limit to our forgiveness, it’s absurd to think there would be any limit to God’s. Jesus reinforces this point through the parable of the unforgiving servant. The bottom line of the parable is lucid: the servant ought to have forgiven his neighbour simply because God had already poured limitless forgiveness, inexhaustible forgiveness, upon the servant himself. So vast is God’s mercy in forgiving the servant that alongside God’s oceanic forgiveness of the servant, the neighbour’s violation of the same servant is a trifle. In other words, God’s pardon is immeasurable and inexhaustible. Wherever Jesus speaks severely, he speaks tenderly in the very next breath.

Wherever Jesus goes in his earthly ministry he lavishes pardon on anyone at all who looks penitently to him. In fact, it’s his joyful welcome of notorious sinners, his large-hearted, open-handed acceptance of them, that lands him in so much trouble. Mean-spirited people don’t want to see notorious sinners forgiven; mean-spirited people want to see sinners suffer. (Mean-spirited people, of course, never understand that their proud, superior, shrivelled hearts advertise them as the greatest sinners of all.) Mean-spirited people are outraged at Jesus: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” It was his eating with sinners that brought murderous rage down on the head of Jesus. To eat with someone meant, in first century Palestine, that you and he were knit together in undeflectable intimacy; there was no open or hidden impediment to your cherishing each other.

Notorious sinners always know what it means to share a meal with Jesus; they know it and relish it and glory in it. That’s why they respond so openly and generously themselves. Think of the woman who pours her perfume (really, it was high-priced body-deodorant much valued by “hookers” in a land that had few bathtubs) out over the feet of Jesus. She doesn’t care that tongues are wagging. She knows only that she’s received a pardon of incomparable worth. She knows that Christ’s embrace embraces everything about her, sin and all, before his embrace begins to squeeze her sin out of her.

The truth is, you and I are sinners to the core. Our Reformation foreparents spoke of us all as totus peccator, sinner throughout. There is no one part of my being or personality that is sin-free and by means of which the rest of me can be saved. Because my thinking is sin-disordered my thinking can’t save my will and my affections. Because my will is disordered I can’t will myself into correcting my thinking or my affections. Because my affections are disordered (I love what I should repudiate and repudiate what I should love) my misaligned affections can’t correct my distorted thinking or my perverted willing. I am simply totus peccator, sinner throughout.

What’s more, the older I become the more aware I am of my thorough-going depravity. I used to think of myself as a modest sinner, at worst. Now, when I reflect on myself with as much honesty as I can muster (not a great deal of honesty), I’m sobered when I realize what overtakes me when I’m careless or foolish, how big a “hook” certain temptations still have in me, how great the savagery that can flash out of me when I’m irked or pricked or frustrated. Modest sinner? I’m totus peccator, sinner throughout!

At the same time, I rejoice with my Reformation foreparents who knew that all Christ’s people are also totus iustus, forgiven throughout. There is no part of our being or personality that God’s pardon doesn’t reach. God’s mercy is like penetrating oil: it gets into cracks and crevices and recesses of all kinds, most of which, in fact, can’t be seen by even the sharpest-sighted. Yet his mercy unfailingly penetrates to the core, the same core that our sinnership taints. God’s pardon always outstrips our perversity.

I have been a pastor for 27 hears. In that time I have had scores of people huddle in my study and confess what they could barely bring themselves to mention: falteringly they have croaked out what they regard as heinous, so heinous as to have been mentioned to no one else. They have poured out vile mixtures of vice, immorality, folly, even criminality. And I have told them with conviction that as wide and deep as their depravity is, God’s forgiveness is wider and deeper still. And I have assured them that however inexcusable, horrific, and even despicable the sin they have committed, they have not committed the “sin against the Holy Spirit.” And I have told them that Jesus Christ himself authorizes me to press all of this upon them.

 

[4] Then what does our Lord mean when he speaks of that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit which will not be forgiven? We must examine the context of his pronouncement. Throughout his public ministry Jesus has been freeing people from the grip of evil. He has done so in the power of the Holy Spirit (which is to say the power of God in our midst). And then he comes upon some hostile people who maintain that he isn’t freeing people in the power of the Spirit. They maintain that so far from freeing people from the grip of evil in the power of the Spirit, Jesus is in league with evil and is victimizing gullible people in the power of evil. In other words, our Lord’s enemies are slandering his work. What Jesus insists is a work of God (the Spirit being the power of God in our midst), his enemies pronounce evil.

They are slandering Christ’s work. Blasphemeo is a Greek verb meaning “to slander”. Our Lord’s enemies are slandering his work; and since his work is done in the power of the Spirit, they are blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. What is in truth of God, they label devilish; what is truly good, they perversely call evil; what is genuinely restorative, they denounce as deceptive and destructive. They are doing exactly what Isaiah had spoken of 700 years earlier: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

Please note: it’s not that our Lord’s enemies are slow to see the light. All of us are slow to see the light. Rather, having glimpsed the light they call it darkness; having glimpsed the truth they call it falsehood. They are not spiritually retarded people (all of us are spiritually retarded) who are slow to grasp the truth and slower still to do it, all the while deploring the spiritual impediments they find everywhere in themselves even as they cry to God for help every day. Not at all: they hate so much the truth Jesus brings and the truth he is that they harden themselves against the truth. They slander God himself (the Spirit, remember, is the power of God in our midst); they slander God himself, denying that God himself is the power by which the Son of God does the work of God. The unforgivable sin is the utter rebellion against God that denies God to be the doer of his own deeds. The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is a deliberate, wilful smearing of the power of God as the force of evil. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a deliberate, wilful, ever-hardening denial of what is undeniably the work of God. And such hardening, says Jesus, eventually is irreversible.

To treat as false what one knows deep-down to be true; to treat as true what one knows deep-down to be false; what is this but to steep oneself in falsehood? To treat as glorious what one knows to be shameful is to steep oneself in shame. To treat as blessing what one knows to be accursed is to cement oneself into curse. Eventually cement hardens. Not the semi-faith and the semi-groping of the man who cried to Jesus, “I believe — as much as I’m able; make me more able!”; not the godly sorrow of the person who never doubts that sin is sin even as for now she seems to be forever defeated by it; not the person whom life’s tragedies have rendered incapable for now, it would seem, of faith in the God whose mercies endure forever; not the person who has been surrounded since birth by atheists who despised the faith openly or by church-folk who contradicted it hypocritically; not any of these but rather the person who has most certainly glimpsed the work of God in the works of Jesus and who, hating the master for who knows what reason, slanders his work as a manifestation of evil; that person, says our Lord, will find himself left with the Christlessness he has said repeatedly that he wants. But Christlessness, of course, entails forgivenessless. That person, says our Lord most certainly, but that person only, says our Lord most compassionately.

Compassionately? Yes. Not only does Matthew tell us of our Lord’s pronouncement concerning the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit; in the very same chapter Matthew tells us of something else about Jesus. Quoting the prophet Isaiah Matthew says of Jesus, “He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smouldering wick…”. The weakest faith; the most faltering discipleship; the most hesitant, doubt-filled following; honest doubt and genuine perplexity; all of this our Lord sees and notes and helps. None of it will he scorn or dismiss. And none of it must we ever, ever suggest to be anything approaching the blasphemy against the Spirit. Weak faith he strengthens; faltering faith he makes resolute; genuine perplexity he addresses. He doesn’t break bruised reeds or quench smouldering wicks. He has nothing but compassion and help for all who cry that their struggle for faith is just that: a struggle. At the same time, he has nothing but condemnation for those who persist unrelentingly in maintaining that light is darkness and darkness light, that evil is good and good evil.

 

[5] I trust I have said enough this morning to help any who might be haunted on account of misunderstanding our Lord’s pronouncement. I trust I have said enough to comfort any who might be afflicted with scrupulosity or bad theology or severe depression. Anyone who is the slightest bit apprehensive about her having committed the “unpardonable sin”, as it is so often put, must know by now that her apprehension is proof positive that the Holy Spirit hasn’t been blasphemed and the power of God maligned. Merely to be sobered upon hearing our Lord’s solemn word is proof positive that one is spiritually sensitive.

 

[6] We must always remember that Jesus speaks a severe word always and only for the sake of a kind word. In other words, his undeniable warning is spoken for the sake of his undeflectable purpose in coming among us; namely, the kingdom of God. He warns us only for the sake of keeping us fixed upon the kingdom of God. He wants only to have us find that kingdom to be like a pearl so attractive as to make everything else appear tawdry.

The kingdom of God, Paul reminds us, is “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Since we have already been talking about the Holy Spirit today, let’s talk now about the Holy Spirit in terms of righteousness, peace and joy. The Spirit, remember, is the power of God in our midst; as Jesus bestows upon us that power which he bears himself, we are set free for righteousness, peace and joy.

Righteousness, in Romans 14, is our life of discipleship; righteousness is our daily life in all its ordinariness and occasional extraordinariness lived out of our righted relationship with God and lived so as to adorn his name.

Peace is contentment, for now we are relieved of guilt, anxiety and frenzy. Our past doesn’t drag us under; neither does our future paralyze us; for our past God has forgiven and our future is in his hands.

Joy is the deep-down throb that pulsates in us just because we know we are citizens of that kingdom which cannot be shaken. It all overtakes us as Jesus Christ draws us into the orbit of God’s Spirit; no longer spiritual orphans, we are the cherished children of God. The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. It’s for the sake of this; it’s to ensure that we don’t miss this that our Lord has cautioned us about blaspheming the Holy Spirit. For above all he wants us to respond eagerly to the subtlest nudge as the Spirit of God acquaints us with our need of a righted relationship, moves us to live from this relationship, brings us the profoundest contentment, and crowns it all with a joy that unbelievers can neither explain nor deny. The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

You asked for a sermon on “the sin against the Holy Spirit.” Let’s use the vocabulary our Lord uses: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, persistent slander of that power of God by which Jesus Christ acted and still acts. Such blasphemy or slander is to call a good work evil, evil good, light darkness and darkness light. People are tempted to do this for any number of reasons, none of which is excusable. Such slander or blasphemy, such perverse defiance, persisted in can be persisted in until correction becomes impossible.

But we are here today inasmuch as we crave even greater sensitivity to God’s Spirit. We are here today inasmuch as we welcome any work of God within us that untangles our sin-twisted heart, any work of God without us that advertises his presence and power. We are here today inasmuch as we welcome the approach of that God whose power intends only our blessing. Repudiating any temptation to call light darkness and darkness light, we want only to acknowledge yet again and exemplify yet more consistently that kingdom which is now and always will be righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

 

                                                                           Victor Shepherd
April 1997

 

The Crucial Encounter: Peter (5)

Matthew 16:13-20        2nd Samuel 22:1-4        Psalm 19:7-14       Acts 5:12-16      Mark 14:66-72

First it was Rocky I; then came Rocky II; then III and IV. There appeared to be a limitless market for the Sylvester Stallone movies about the seedy, brutal world of boxing. The boxing scenes in the movies were entirely unrealistic, as phoney as a three-dollar bill. Yet people flocked to the movies, and continue to watch them by means of videos. Plainly people think they can identify with the come-from-behind fighter, almost out on his feet yet managing to stagger through to the end when he wins it all in the last few seconds of the contest. I’m surprised that people identify with a story so very unrealistic. Rocky’s story, frankly, will never be their story.

We ought to identify instead with another story about another “Rocky,” for this story, by God’s grace, is our story. For we, like this “Rocky,” are disciples of Jesus Christ. Peter is his name, or rather his nickname. Petros is Greek for “Peter;” Petra for “rock.” His real name was Symeon. The Gentile children with whom he played in Galilee had trouble with a Hebrew name like Symeon, and so it was shortened to Simon, a name that Greek-speaking Gentiles could readily pronounce.

Next it was Jesus who named him Peter. Was he really a rock, or was Jesus merely joking, the way we joke when we nickname a fat person “Slim?”

Peter’s story is our story. He was neither unusually wealthy nor unusually poor, but rather a middling middle class type like us. He owned a small fishing business in partnership with his brother. He was married; in fact his mother-in-law lived in his home. He wasn’t a clergyman; there’s no evidence he had rabbinical training of any sort. Neither did he belong to any religious special interest group, like the Zealots or the Sadducees or the Scribes. He was ordinary with the ordinariness with which all of us are ordinary.

One day Jesus called him to be a disciple. Thereafter Peter was always depicted as the spokesperson for the group of disciples. He represented them and spoke for them. But to say that he spoke for all disciples then is to say that he speaks for all disciples now. In other words, he speaks for you and me. We are those whom Jesus has called into his company. We can find ourselves mirrored in Peter. Then what is it of ourselves that we see reflected in him?

 

I: — First of all it’s our confession concerning Jesus Christ; it’s our acknowledgement of our Lord’s uniqueness – the very thing that non-disciples find narrow and intolerant and extreme. Having been seized by our Lord, and having confessed to this seizure in public, we cry aloud with Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. In you the presence and power and purpose of God are concentrated. You are the beacon to whom we look, the anchor we may move around but away from whom we don’t drift. You are light in the midst of darkness, truth in the midst of falsehood, reality in the midst of illusion.”

Many people tell us that they believe that God is, in some sense. The problem, of course, lies in the “in some sense.” Precisely in what sense? The God they tell us they believe in is vague, fuzzy, unfocussed – and useless. What, after all, does a fuzzy deity do? No answer. What does “it” effect in people? No answer. What does he require of those who call on him? Who says he requires anything?

Such a deity is like a blurred picture on a movie screen. No one doubts that there actually is something on the screen; at the same time what’s there is so very unfocussed that no one can say what it is, and no one can state what is being conveyed. When, however, the lens of the movie projector is turned, the picture suddenly stands out in sharpest detail.

When a youngster wants to burn his initials into a bench the power source readiest-to-hand is the sun even though the sun is 93 million miles away. Still, the sun’s power is too diffuse to be effective. A magnifying glass focuses the sun’s rays at one point. Thereafter someone’s initials will be found on the bench as long as the bench lasts.

In Jesus Christ God has concentrated himself to pinpoint intensity. Now we can perceive what he is doing and how we are to respond. And it is precisely this point that a pluralistic society finds obnoxious. Christians are then accused of a narrowness that ill suits the diversity we are supposed to extol everywhere in life. Surely it’s insufferable arrogance, we are told, to claim that God has concentrated himself precisely in the one Nazarene.

But doesn’t the effectiveness of a knife depend on the narrowness of its cutting edge? Can’t the movie be seen and enjoyed only if the focus is as precise as possible?

Christians are faulted because the confession they make concerning Jesus Christ is deemed to render them exclusive. But when we say with Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” we are not saying that God acts only here; we are saying, rather, that God is known to act here for sure. We aren’t saying that we alone are the beneficiaries of God’s care; we are saying, rather, that we know here precisely how God cares for us and to what end. We aren’t saying we have all the answers; we are saying, rather, that here we can distinguish life’s genuine questions from pseudo-questions. We aren’t saying that God hasn’t communicated himself anywhere else; we are saying, rather, that in Jesus of Nazareth God has given us himself and illumined us concerning the truth and meaning and force of his self-giving.

Knowing Jesus to be the cosmic creator’s pinpoint self-concentration won’t tell us whether we should be accountant or teacher or nurse; i.e., it won’t settle the matter of career. But it will settle the matter of vocation. Career is how we happen to earn a living; vocation is our summons to reflect the discernment, compassion, and triumph of our risen Lord wherever we happen to earn a living.

Evil is relentless. It surges everywhere, molesting God’s creation in all its dimensions at once. How can evil be recognized? Don’t say, “People recognize it as soon as they see it.” My experience is that most people have a very anaemic understanding of evil and a very poor apparatus for discerning it and very little desire to do anything about it. To know Jesus Christ, on the other hand, is to find deficits in our approach to evil on the way to being remedied. Those whose recognition of Jesus mirrors Peter’s recognition – “You are the Christ” – know that their ignorance concerning evil is overcome and their paralysis before it is undone even as they know they are summoned to render visible their Lord’s victory over evil in the midst of its refusal to give up.

To cry with Peter, “You are the Christ, and you alone,” isn’t to parade ourselves as having “arrived.” It is, however, to rejoice that we are no longer groping for the road.

 

II: — We find ourselves mirrored in Peter, in the second place, as we look at Peter’s treachery. Peter, spokesperson for all disciples in all eras, is depicted in the written gospels as weak, faltering, fumbling, stumbling, falling down. And we’ve all been there. Peter, impulsive, impetuous, mouth moving lightning-fast; Peter says to Jesus on the eve of the betrayal, “Everyone else may let you down. But me? Never. You can always count on me. I don’t lack the fortitude of these weak-kneed followers who fail again and again.”

“Peter,” Jesus cautions, “before that old rooster crows twice tomorrow morning you will be falling all over yourself to convince those who frighten you that you have never so much as laid eyes on me.” Next morning it takes only a fifteen-year old servant girl to crumble a mature, successful businessman. “Your accent,” she says; “for someone who says he’s never met the man from Galilee – your accent has a Galilean flavour to it. You must be from Galilee yourself. Then you must know the fellow who’s about to be executed.” Peter begins to swear. All my life I’ve wondered what swear words he used. What kind of swear words do fishermen use? In any case swearing comes easy to explosive, impulsive people. The oaths and obscenities spew out of him as he tells the fifteen year old twerp where to go. Then the rooster is heard to crow again, and the tears stream down Peter’s face like – like what? – like water pouring down the side of a rock.

I have heard the rooster crow. So have you. We have made public profession of our loyalty to Jesus Christ (as we should.) And then we have contradicted it all in thirty minutes. “I’ll never deny you,” exclaimed Peter. The gospel writer adds, “And all the other disciples said the same.” The picture is almost laughable: little boys in their cardboard carton clubhouse promising great promises and boasting great boasts when little boys don’t know what lies around the corner.

We remember the time we erupted with a put-down so savage that we shocked ourselves even as we whipped the skin off someone else. It came out of us so fast it seemed natural. Yet it isn’t supposed to be natural to disciples.

We recall the time someone found us out concerning something we didn’t want publicized. Desperate, we lied, only to have to lie again.

And then there’s that business trip where something besides business was carried on, and only two days later a church meeting had to be addressed. You felt as if someone had taken a pneumatic drill to your stomach.

Or we fell down badly in front of our children. Stupidly thinking it virtuous to save face, and still more stupidly thinking we could save face, we tried to excuse the inexcusable and succeeded only in making dishonest fools of ourselves before our children.

Stunned at any of this we said to ourselves, “But I’m supposed to be a disciple.” And like Peter we wept bitterly. (If we didn’t, then we have turned a deaf ear to the rooster’s cry.

It is surely a sign of our Lord’s patience and mercy that he continues to count us disciples. As we find our compromised discipleship mirrored in Peter’s we know that it is by grace, only by grace, that we are Christ’s forever.

 

III: — Finally we see reflected in Peter the use that our Lord makes of us and will always make of us. Following the crucifixion the risen one appears to Peter and asks him three times, once for each denial, “Do you love me – more than these other disciples love me?” Now Peter isn’t impetuous or impulsive. He doesn’t blurt out, “Of course I do; I love you more than all of these put together.” He can’t say this in the wake of his denial. What disciple with even a smidgen of self-perception would claim to be a better disciple than someone else? Peter can barely say anything, but he does manage to croak out, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” And then for the third time Jesus replies, “Feed my sheep.”

Our Lord is entrusting Peter with the task of nurturing others in the Christian community. Peter’s stumble hasn’t disqualified him. To be sure it has sobered him, and rightly so. Never again will he shoot his mouth off as he did in the courtyard. But neither is he going to wallow in what he did, for he has been set on his feet. “Feed my sheep.” He has been commissioned to nurture and guide and edify other disciples and soon-to-be-disciples.

In order to be used of God we don’t have to be faultless. Because we don’t have to be perfect we can stop thinking that we have to be perfect. We don’t have to impress anyone, especially ourselves, with extraordinary anything. Our Lord commissions us to a task on behalf of his people and promises to honour and use any effort we make in his name. Please note: he promises to honour and use the effort we make, not the success we achieve.

He never asks us what qualifications we have for the work we undertake. He asks us one question only: “Do you love me?” Our earnest reply, even if we can barely whisper it, “You know that I love you;” our reply is the qualification. His commission, “Feed my sheep,” is the guarantee of usefulness, for what our Lord commissions us to do he unfailingly blesses himself.

To be sure, all Christians have heightened hearing. Because we have heightened hearing we hear several sounds at once. Yes, we do hear the raucous crow of the rooster; but we hear even more loudly, more distinctly, his gentle question to us: “Do you love me?” And then we hear ourselves answer, “You know that I love you.” Ultimately we hear most loudly of all, and most compellingly, “Feed my sheep.” Our Lord’s definitive word to all of us is his commission and promise that he deems us fit to feed his sheep and promises to render it effective.

Luke tells us that in the early days of the church people in Jerusalem laid their sick friends in the street so that Peter’s shadow might fall on them. What did they expect from a shadow, even if it was Peter’s shadow? Mightn’t there have been an element of superstition here? There might have been. The point is this: everyone in Jerusalem knew Peter’s history, yet so very esteemed is Peter in the wake of Christ’s commission, so highly trusted is he as someone through whom the bread of life has been brought to others, that Peter is now deemed exemplary. And if those who love him throng him so that the sick can’t touch him as he passes by, then the next best thing, they insist, is having his shadow fall on them. All the Christians in Jerusalem know that Peter’s unrestrained love for his Lord eclipses everything in his past.

 

IV: — We must conclude by answering the question we didn’t answer twenty minutes ago. Was Jesus joking when he called Peter “rocky?” Was Jesus speaking ironically? The truth is, naming was such an important matter to Jewish people that they never joked about it. Jesus meant exactly what he said: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. And the powers of death shall not prevail against it.”

The rock is Peter himself together with his confession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The rock is Peter himself together with his penitent reply to the Master’s question, “You know that I love you.”

At the beginning of the sermon I said that the Sylvester Stallone movies, “Rocky I, Rocky II, Rocky on-and-on,” told a story that was never going to be our story. The story of Peter, however, is a story that Jesus intends to be our story. We, together with our confession of our Lord and our love for him; we are that rock on which the church is built as it continues to gather people to it, even as the powers of death shall never be able to undo it.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                                                    

June 2004

“But who do you say that I am?”

Matthew 16:15

 

I: — I wince whenever I hear jokes about the mainline churches that appear to have become “sideline.” I wince for several reasons: one, it’s painful to have to watch one’s denomination decline day after day; two, the mainline denominations began centuries ago with great promise as they exalted the gospel and magnified Jesus Christ and met human need; three, I still hold out hope for the mainline denominations. Dr. Ian Rennie, a Presbyterian minister (now retired) who used to be academic dean of my seminary; Ian Rennie told me he prayed every day for the restoration of The United Church of Canada. “I pray every day for the revival of faith within the Canadian nation,” he said, “and in light of the place the United Church occupies in our nation, revival can’t appear in Canada unless the United Church is restored.”

As a United Church minister I have been embarrassed as moderator after moderator made pronouncements that were theologically indefensible, pronouncements that denied what the apostle Jude calls “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” It’s no surprise that for 30 years the United Church has been the fastest declining denomination in Canada , its book membership today being what its book membership was in 1927. Right now it leads the nation in ecclesiastical haemorrhaging. Other mainline denominations, however, aren’t far behind.

Of course there are church spokespersons who want to make the haemorrhage appear less frightening. Figures can be juggled to ease the shock; altering year book totals, for instance, to include all the families on any military base where a denomination has one chaplain. It all reminds me of Admiral Nelson’s order to have the decks of his warships painted blood red; that way, in the heat of battle sailors would be slower to recognize and be shocked at the blood of shipmates running on the decks.

From time to time I hear nervous church leaders quoting Christ’s promise to Peter: “On this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death will never triumph over it.” They quote the promise to relieve their anxiety. They assume that the promise guarantees the preservation of an institution.

And they are wrong. Our Lord has promised no such thing. His promise — always to be counted on — was never made to an organization. His promise, rather, guarantees that he will ever cherish, protect and preserve his people, his followers, his community, his fellowship. He will protect and preserve the fellowship that looks to him and clings to him in the midst of an unbelieving world. We shouldn’t think, however, that this means he’s going to preserve any denomination. History is littered with the dry bones of long-dead denominations.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that we can’t coast on the faith and faithfulness of our foreparents. “Everyone must do his own believing,” Luther liked to say, “just as everyone must do his own dying.” In fact I have long felt that as the Spirit of God brings to birth a new manifestation of the church — eager, ardent, compassionate, self-renouncing — this new manifestation has about one and a half generations before it slides into “Let’s coast on our grandparents”, only to find that it can’t.

Francis of Assisi melted hearts as he and his band of men revitalized the church through their cheerful evangelism (forget Assisi ‘s nature-mysticism; he was chiefly an evangelist) and through their self-forgetful service. One hundred and fifty years later Franciscan friars were notorious for their greed, their corruption, their lechery. When Franciscans appeared in a village parents kept their daughters indoors. John Wesley and his followers flared into a fire that Anglicanism could neither welcome nor douse. Yet within seventy years of Wesley’s death Methodism had grown so cold, so callous, so spiritually inert that Methodism couldn’t accommodate William Booth.

Christians of every generation are slow to hear that God has no grandchildren. God certainly has children: we become God’s children as we seize Jesus Christ in faith and vow never to let go. Grandchildren, however, are those who try to ride on the coattails of their parents’ faith, sooner or later to find that what they assumed to be possible — faith at arm’s length, on the cheap — isn’t possible.

Jesus Christ puts the same questions to every generation. His community lives, thrives, only as it answers these questions for itself in every generation.

 

II: — One of many questions which our Lord puts to each of us is, “Who do you say that I am? Never mind what anyone else is saying; who do you say that I am?” When the first disciples were addressed they gave the answers that they were hearing all around them, answers that they overheard others proffer. “Some people say you are Elijah all over again.” Elijah was to herald God’s new age. “Some people say you are John the Baptist.” John had fearlessly urged repentance on his hearers. “Some people say you are a prophet.” A prophet announces God’s judgement as well as God’s mercy and the future only he can give his people. “Never mind what ‘they’ are saying,” replies Jesus, “it’s time for you to speak for yourselves. Who do you say that I am?” Speaking for the twelve Peter cries, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

To be the Son of God is to possess the very nature of God. And to possess the very nature of God is to incarnate God’s purpose, God’s will. When Jesus pronounces the paralysed man forgiven, critics accuse him, “But only God can forgive sin.” “You’re right”, says Jesus, “only God can forgive sin, and I have just forgiven it. Either I am the crudest blasphemer or I speak and act uniquely with the authority of God himself. Now which is it?” Months later Thomas will cry out in the midst of confusion and frustration, “Just show us the Father and it will be enough.” Jesus will reply, “To see me is to see the Father.”

We who are disciples of Jesus Christ are not Unitarians. We do not believe that the truth, the decisive truth, the whole truth is told about Jesus when he said to be a helpful teacher and a moral guide. The Church has never been built on the suggestion that Jesus is the high point of humankind’s aspiration after the good, the true and the beautiful. We do not believe that Jesus is the lucky winner in that treasure hunt that is sometimes called “The Human Search for God.” The community of disciples does not arise from a public admission that Jesus is a spiritual genius, the random development in the religious world that Mozart was in the musical world.

Without denying the humanness of Jesus in any way; without denying the fact that from a human perspective Jesus was a child of his times, in some respects, disciples of Jesus yet are constrained to cry with Thomas when Thomas looked upon the crucified one raised and exclaimed, “My Lord and my God.”

Frankly I am offended and dismayed at the doctrinal slovenliness of so many denominational statements. Recently I was given a pamphlet on worship stating that worship is chiefly a matter of feeling good about ourselves. No, it isn’t. Worship is giving public expression to the unsurpassable worthiness of God. I am weary of receiving Christian Education literature at Christmas time telling me that the purpose of Christ’s coming was “to tell us that God loves us”, as though lack of information were the root human problem. The root human problem isn’t lack of information; it’s a corrupted heart. The good news of great joy that thrilled early-day Christians was that they’d been given a Saviour; a Saviour, not an encyclopaedia.

Doctrinal slovenliness always breeds ethical confusion. It’s no wonder I’m told that the life of a murderer is so precious before God that it mustn’t be taken, while the life of the unborn child is so insignificant that it needn’t be protected. This kind of confusion is what I’ve come to expert from those who dismiss Peter’s confession, “You are the Son of the living God.”

“Peter said more than this,” someone wants to remind me. Indeed, Peter said, “You are the Christ; i.e., the anointed One, the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Ever since Isaiah 53 — “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter… — ever since Isaiah 53, discerning Israelites who knew God’s way and will knew that to be an obedient servant of God would always entail harassment and suffering. Peter knew this.

Yet Jesus seemed so alive, so fresh, so full of life that he appeared indestructible. Jesus had to be an exception. Other servants of God may be set upon, but not the servant. Surely the Messiah is here to end human distress, not become another victim of it. Peter argues in this way with Jesus until Jesus finally shouts at him, “Satan! You, Peter, are satanic.” Satan is the one who frustrates God’s work. Satan is the deceiver. Plainly Jesus is telling Peter that not to acknowledge him, Jesus, as suffering Messiah is to deceive oneself and to frustrate the work of God. Jesus speaks to Peter as harshly as he does because he can’t allow his disciples to persist in a misunderstanding that misleads people and impedes the work of God.

Jesus isn’t finished with the twelve. After he has jarred them by insisting that he is no exception to Isaiah 53, he jars them again by telling them that they are no exception. “If you want to be my disciple,” he insists without qualification, “you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” Followers of Jesus simply cannot avoid self-renunciation. For being a disciple means that we both cling to him as Son of God and identify ourselves with that Messianic community whose self-renunciation is quickened by that of the Messiah himself. These two aspects are welded together inseparably.

Yesterday the Globe & Mail published an article on the new, six million dollar fence that will soon appear on the Bloor Viaduct. It will prevent any more people from leaping to their death. Four hundred and fifty have done so already. My sister is a volunteer in a program that provides assistance for people who are distressed on account of sudden, untoward disruption: car accident, house fire, drowning, suicide, etc. On one occasion my sister had spent the night bringing what comfort she could to a twenty-eight year old fellow who was tormented by what he had seen that afternoon. He had been driving across the Bloor Viaduct when he noticed a man standing on the railing with a rope around his neck. Immediately the young fellow wheeled his car around in a “U-turn,” leapt out and ran towards the man on the railing — who jumped off the Viaduct at that moment.

Until my mother was felled by a major heart attack she belong to the same assistance program. At age 70 my mother often headed out into the night to sit with someone she had never seen before, someone whose house had caught fire or whose husband had died at work or whose child was missing. Last Wednesday in our mid-week discussion group I mentioned that my parents had lived in Edmonton for eleven years (1938-1949), and during that eleven-year period my father visited convicts in Fort Saskatchewan Penitentiary every Sunday afternoon. I grew up in a family, which knew that discipleship always entails self-denial.

For this reason I was all the more stunned on my first pastoral charge when I stumbled upon a government facility in Chatham , NB (now the city of Miramichi .) My charge was forty miles from Chatham ; I went in and out of the town principally to visit parishioners who were hospitalized there. One day I walked around town instead of getting into my car and heading home, only to come upon a large residence that housed intellectually challenged adults whose I.Q. was 55 (more or less.) With an I.Q. of 55 they could be toilet trained (you need 20 for that); they could be taught to thread beads on a string or cut up panty-hose and hook a rug. But of course they were never going to be gainfully employed. It should be noted as well that they were harmless.

I entered the residence and workshop. Icily a staff worker stared at me and hissed, “We have been operating five moths now and you are the first clergyman to appear in this facility.” When she had recovered her composure she told me that upon hearing that the government planned to accommodate these handicapped adults in Chatham , townspeople (church people included) had circulated petitions throughout the town asking the government to locate these disadvantaged persons somewhere else, anywhere else. She also told me what joy and what help church groups could have brought to these people: musical entertainment, dancing, men to kick around a soccer ball with residents, and so forth. I visited the facility once a week thereafter and discovered that I had as large a ministry to the staff as I had to the residents.

At the next meeting of the Ministerial Association I said gently, “Folks, there’s a facility in this town full of people whom the world disdains, together with a staff whose work no one appreciates — and it seems the local clergy doesn’t care.” Gently I commented on the town’s attempts at disbarring wounded people who, unlike most of us, can’t speak for themselves. How did the chairman of the ministerial association respond? He called for the next item on the agenda.

To be a disciple is to cling to the One who is uniquely the Son of the living God, the suffering, self-renouncing Messiah. To cling to him, therefore, will always be to deny ourselves in a self-renunciation born of his as we are found in that Messianic community which knows and loves and obeys the Messiah himself.

 

III: — What finally comes of it all? Jesus promises that the keys of kingdom are entrusted to that community which is unashamed of its Lord and unhesitating in its self-renunciation.

What are the “keys of the kingdom”? Do we have magical power? Does it mean that we (or at least some of us, perhaps the clergy) have commandant-like power whereby we can decide who is admitted to the kingdom and who not? Of course not. It means that the ongoing event of the congregation’s faith and faithfulness and self-renunciation are precisely what Jesus Christ uses as the vehicle of his bringing others to know and cherish what he has already brought us to know and cherish. Our lived awareness of his forgiveness, for instance, will be the event whereby he brings others to the same reality. Our self-renunciation will be the means of his bringing others, now fellow-disciples like us, to know the “open secret”: service is freedom, self-forgetfulness is self-fulfilment, crossbearing binds us to the crucified One himself whom we have come to know to be life. As we have stepped through the doorway into the household of faith, other people will find through our faith and obedience and service the same doorway unlocked, and shall then run to join us on the way.

The symbolism of scripture is endlessly rich, so very rich that many different symbols are used to speak of the same reality. Instead if thinking about doorways and keys, let’s think about boats. In Mark’s gospel there’s a great deal of water, and Jesus is always getting into and out of a boat. (The boat is an early Christian symbol for the Church, and was widely used as a symbol by the time Mark’s gospel was written — 65 C.E., approximately.) In Mark’s gospel, only Jesus and the disciples are ever found together in the boat. The crowds, the “multitudes,” are never found in the boat. In other words, there is a special relationship, a unique relationship between Jesus and his followers. At the same time the boat, rowed by the disciples, “conveys” Jesus to the crowds who aren’t disciples at present but have been appointed to become disciples. The boat (the Church) conveys Jesus to the deranged man whom Jesus restores. The boat conveys Jesus to the hungry listeners whom he feeds. The boat conveys Jesus toe the agitated and perplexed whom he describes as “sheep without a shepherd” even as he becomes their good shepherd.

To be given the keys of the kingdom is the same as being used by our Lord to row the boat that carries that him into the midst of those who are on the way to becoming disciples.

 

I have never doubted Christ’s promise, “I will build my Church, and the powers of death shall never submerge it.”

I have never doubted the confession to which the promise is made, “You — alone — are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

I have never doubted the commitment that must accompany the confession, “If anyone wants to be my disciple, let her deny herself, renounce herself, take up her cross, follow me, and never look back.”

 

                                                                                               Dr Victor Shepherd      

January 03

The Congregation’s Ministry to the Congregation: Four Essential Aspects

Matthew 18:1-14       Ezekiel 36:22-26      1Peter           1:23 -2:3   1 Timothy 6:6-12

 

I: — First of all, the congregation is a nursery for the newborn. Peter writes, “Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.” (1 Peter 2:2-3) When Peter addresses certain Christians as “newborn babes” he isn’t finding fault at all. He isn’t saying that newborn babes shouldn’t be newborn or shouldn’t be drinking pure spiritual milk.  In everyday life nobody faults a baby for being a baby; nobody faults the 3-month old because he isn’t 30 years old.  It’s normal for a baby to be a baby and be treated like a baby; it’s wonderful to see a baby eager to drink pure milk.

Several times in Matthew’s gospel Jesus angrily denounces those who make things difficult for the “little ones”.           “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin; it would be better for him if concrete blocks were tied to his feet and he were pitched into Lake Ontario .” Ten seconds later Jesus, still upset, lets fly again.           “See that you do not despise one of these little ones…it is not the will of my Father in heaven that one of these little ones perish.” The “little ones” Jesus speaks of over and over and concerning whom he’s so very protective; these “little ones” aren’t 5-year olds; the “little ones” are adult men and women who happen to be new in the faith; the “little ones” are adults — 30, 45, 60-years old — who have only recently “bonded” with Jesus Christ.  As old as they might be chronologically, they are yet spiritual neonates. They need milk, milk only for now, so that they may develop spiritually.  Jesus never faults them for being mere “little ones”.  On the contrary, he deems them so very precious that he guarantees the severest retribution to anyone who inhibits in any way the spiritual growth of the newest disciple.

The babes-in-Christ have to be nursed.  And the church is the nursery for newborns.

 

What do we expect from a nursery, any nursery?   What would we expect if we were taking our own child to a nursery?

[1]           Safety; safety first of all; safety above everything else. Safety is so very crucial within the congregation if only because danger abounds without it. Think of the most elemental confession found on the lips of the earliest Christians; “Jesus is Lord.” But early-day “little ones” (and not-so-little ones) clung to this truth when “Caesar is lord” was being screamed at them every day.  When political authorities sneered, “We’ll show you who’s lord. We’ll show you in the coliseum where wild animals haven’t yet learned that Jesus is Lord; we’ll show you in the mines in whose damp darkness you are going to spend the rest of your lives; we’ll show you on unpopulated islands where you are going to be exiled until you rot” — when this happened our Christian foreparents could only gasp out three simple words. And centuries later, when it was announced throughout Germany that “Hitler ist Fuehrer”, the same faithful cry went up from the same faithful few. What those who dislike saying “Jesus is Lord” seem not to understand is that to say “Jesus is Lord” is to say something about him, to be sure, but not only about him; it’s also to say something about us who utter it (by the grace of God we have been admitted to truth); it’s also to say something about the world (the world is not the kingdom of God but is riddled with falsehood, treachery and turbulence at all times).

In the midst of all the talk today about spirituality (how I wish we’d return to talking about faith, because “faith” always implies “Jesus Christ”) we must always remember that not all the spirits are holy. Unholy spirits are always ready to infest and infect.  In many hymnals the words of the old hymn, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so” have been changed to “Jesus loves me, this I know, and the bible tells me so”. The change of wording indicated that scripture is no longer acknowledged as the source and norm of our knowledge of God; at best scripture can only reflect what we think we can learn of God elsewhere.  This is paganism.

Therefore the members of a congregation must ensure that there is safety in the congregation. It’s crucial that the congregation be a nursery where “little ones” are safe; crucial that this congregation be a nursery where “pure spiritual milk” is kept unsoured; crucial that this congregation nourish — and never cause to stumble — those “little ones” who have “tasted the kindness of the Lord” and who want only to become spiritual adults.

 

[2]         Speaking of nourishment, nourishment is plainly the second thing we look for in a nursery. After all, babes remain in a nursery for quite a while; they have to be fed while they are there or else they won’t thrive.

Babes don’t get fed once; babes get fed small amounts frequently; babes get fed small amounts so very frequently that “frequently” amounts to “constantly”.  They absorb nourishment cumulatively; the more they are fed, the greater their capacity to absorb; the greater their capacity to absorb, the more they are fed. Plainly there’s an incrementalism at work in the nourishing of babes.

Let’s remember that however sophisticated most people are (and nearly everyone is sophisticated in at least one area of life), more often than not they are babes in Christ, “little ones”.  The nursery has to ensure nourishment.         Pure spiritual milk must always be ready-to-hand.

[3]         As much as safety and nourishment must be found in a nursery, so must affection. Everyone knows of the experiments — and the conclusions of the experiments — concerning babies who were picked up and those who were left crying; babies who were cuddled and those who were isolated; babies who were caressed and kissed and cooed to and those whose physical needs were attended to unfeelingly. Everyone knows the difference it made to the babies at the time, and more tellingly, what difference it came to make to the same person, now an adult, years later. Everyone knows that affection warming an infant makes the profoundest difference to the adult’s self, the adult’s self-esteem, self-confidence, resilience and adventuresomeness.

It’s no less the case in the nursery of faith.  The babes among us have to be safeguarded, yes; nourished, yes; but always and everywhere cherished.  Affection is as essential as food.

 

II: — The congregation isn’t nursery only; it’s also a school where we are to be taught. Schools exist for teaching. Which is to say, someone has to be taught, and something has to be taught. Frequently we hear it said, “Faith is caught, not taught.”   It’s said as though it were self-evidently the soul of wisdom.  But it isn’t self-evident; neither is it the soul of wisdom.  At best it’s a half-truth.  The half-truth — “faith is caught” — is true in that faith is a living relationship with a living person, not an intellectual abstraction. “Faith is caught, not taught” is a half-truth true in that no relationship of person-with-person can ever be reduced to a teaching. But it’s only a half-truth in that unless something is taught — in fact, unless much is taught — the person whom the truths describe can never be known.  Those who insist that faith is caught, not taught; why do they never ask themselves why Jesus taught day-in and day-out throughout his earthly ministry? Jesus spent more time teaching than doing any other single thing.         Shouldn’t this tell us something?

At the very least it should tell us that events are not self-interpreting. No event in world-occurrence is ever self-interpreting.  Jesus could never merely do something and then assume that everyone who observed him took home the correct meaning of what he had done.  Quite the contrary: he always assumed that they weren’t going to take home the correct meaning of what he had done unless he told them. Prior to his death and after it Jesus taught any who would listen the meaning of his death.  If he hadn’t taught them the significance of his death they would assume that his death meant no more than the deaths of the two criminals crucified alongside him; no more than the deaths of miscreants whom the state executes. Not only would people not take home the correct meaning of Christ’s activity; they would certainly take home the wrong meaning.

There’s a story about Francis of Assisi that warms everyone’s heart; it may or may not be a true story about St.Francis, but in any case it’s a story that I don’t like.  A fellow-friar asked Francis to join him in preaching outdoors throughout the city. Francis consented, and then added, “But before we preach we are going to walk through the city.” When they had finished walking through the city the fellow-friar asked him, “But when do we preach?” “We just did”, replied Francis, “we just did.”   Oh, it’s a honey-sweet story dripping with sentimentality, but it’s only half-true. The half-truth, of course, is that the preacher’s utterance and the preacher’s life ought to be consistent.  Fine. But no person’s life, not even a saint’s (Francis), not even Jesus Christ’s unambiguously declares the gospel!  If Christ’s life had bespoken the truth unambiguously, why would he have bothered to teach?

The mistake Francis is said to have made in Italy Mother Teresa never made in India . When Mother Teresa was awarded a Nobel Prize a Yugoslavian journalist (Mother Teresa was Yugoslavian herself) asked her why she rescued throwaway babies every night from garbage cans and took them to the Sisters of Charity orphanage. Mother Teresa didn’t say, “Need you ask why?” She didn’t say, “Isn’t why I do it obvious?   The meaning and motive of what I do; isn’t it all self-evident?” Instead she replied in her trademark, measured manner, “I rescue throwaway babies for one reason: Jesus loves me.”   To be sure, it was only a one-sentence reply.  None the less, she knew she had to say something to interpret her action to the journalist.

We always have to be taught.  We have to be taught answers to life-questions inasmuch as the answers are important; crucial, in fact.  And if the answers are crucial, so are the questions.  Think of the questions, of some of them:

*Who is God? He’s the creator.  However, scripture also insists God is the destroyer.  What does this mean?

            *Why is it that Jesus describes his most intimate followers as possessed of the tiniest  faith?

*Why do Christians regard as normative for faith and life an “older” testament that is five times longer than the “newer”?   Why do we need the older at all?   What would happen if we set it aside?

*Why is it that the only physical description of Jesus that the apostles furnish is the fact that he was circumcised?

*Why did our Hebrew foreparents regard idolatry, murder and adultery as the three most heinous sins? Why do we modern degenerates regard murder as criminal, adultery as trivial, idolatry as nothing at all, and none of them as sin?

Jesus assumed that truth isn’t self-evident. Jesus assumed, in other words, that the meaning of the most obvious event isn’t obvious at all.  Jesus assumed that we always have to be taught.  The congregation is a school in which Christ’s people are taught.

 

III: — The congregation is also an army that fights. Christians today aren’t ready to hear this. We don’t mind being a nursery or a school; but an army! an army that fights! Aren’t we followers of the Prince of Peace? Aren’t we called to be peacemakers?

I have noticed that those who are repelled by any suggestion that the congregation is an army are repelled by the notion of fighting.  I have noticed too, however, that the same people who abhor any Christian reference to fighting will fight instantly if Canada Revenue Agency gets their income-tax assessment wrong (or is suspected of getting it wrong). They will fight instantly if their child is awarded a low grade on a school-project. They will fight instantly as soon as they hear that their employer has plans to alter working conditions or compensation or holidays.         After all, their cause is right and therefore righteous.

How much more is at stake when the truth of Jesus Christ collides with the falsehoods of the evil one.  How much more is at stake when someone is victimised and rendered a casualty in the midst of that spiritual warfare she was never even aware of — or may have been aware of.  No wonder Paul picks up the metaphor of soldiering and urges the congregation in Ephesus to put on the whole armour of God: shield, shoes, helmet, breastplate, sword. (Eph. 6:10-17)   There’s nothing God-honouring about being an unnecessary victim.

No wonder too that Paul reminds young Timothy that soldiering entails hardship, sacrifice, singlemindedness, “training in godliness”. No wonder he gathers it all up by urging the young man always to “fight the good fight of the faith.” (2 Tim. 2:3-4; 1 Tim. 6:12; 4:7) We can’t fight unless we have first trained!

Training? Many church-folk today see no point to training just because they see no virtue in fighting. They think that conflict is always and everywhere sub-Christian because non-loving. And they are wrong.

(i)         In the first place our Lord leaves us no choice: if we are going to be disciples then we are going to be soldiers in that conflict which erupts the moment his flag of truth is planted in the citadel of a hostile world.  Since the master was immersed in conflict every day, what makes his followers think they won’t be or shouldn’t be?

(ii)         In the second place those who regard all conflict as sub-Christian because unloving fail to see that spiritual conflict arises on account of love’s energy.  God is love; Jesus is the Incarnation of God’s nature; Jesus is immersed in conflict every day just because love is resisted every day, love is contradicted every day, love is savaged every day. What kind of love is it that won’t persist in the face of opposition? won’t contend to vindicate the slandered and relieve the oppressed? won’t fend off every effort of lovelessness to victimise and abandon?   Love that won’t persist and contend; love that refuses to fight is simply no love at all.

(iii)         In the third place the most love-filled heart knows that there is a place for godly resistance.  There is a time and a place to dig in our heels and stiffen our spine in the name of Jesus Christ. When Martin Luther, grief-stricken at the horrible abuses in the church of his day, finally stopped weeping and decided to do something, he discussed what he planned to do with Professor Jerome Schurff of Wittenberg University. Schurff was professor in the faculty of law.         He was one of the brightest stars in the Wittenberg U. firmament. Professor Jerome Schurff agreed with Luther that the abuses were dreadful.  Schurff, however, was aghast at what Luther planned to do.  “Don’t do that!” he cried, “You’ll renders us all targets here; we’ll all be in trouble in Wittenberg . The authorities will never put up with it!” “And if they have to put up with it?” Luther replied, “if they have to?”

To live in the company of Jesus Christ is never to relish conflict for the sake of conflict; but it is to share his conflict.  To live in the company of Jesus Christ is to share love’s struggle in the face of un-love’s aggression.

 

IV: — The congregation is also a hospital for the wounded. When the apostle Paul discusses the different ministries to be exercised in any one congregation he mentions healing. (1 Cor. 12)  If healing is to be exercised within the congregation, then the congregation is a hospital.

We must be sure to understand that there is no shame in being hospitalised just because there is no shame in being wounded. The fact that we are wounded simply confirms the truth that we are soldiers in Christ’s army and have recently been on the front lines. Spiritual conflict is no less debilitating than any other kind of conflict.

One military facility for the battle-worn is the Rest and Recreation Centre. “R&R” centres are not merely for military personnel who have broken a leg or fractured a skull; “R&R” centres principally accommodate those who have been under immense stress, are frazzled, and need to move behind the front for a while in order to recuperate.         During the last great war all submarine crews were given as much time off to recuperate as they spent on patrol.         A month-long patrol at sea was always followed by a month’s rest ashore. No one ever suggested there was something shameful in the men’s need for rest.

Rest. Jesus invites us, “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:30) “Rest”, however, has a special force in scripture; “rest” in scripture doesn’t have the modern sense of “vegging”, utter inactivity.  Rest, rather, has to do with restoration.  “Come to me, all who are bone-weary and worn down and frazzled and fractured and frantic; come to me, for with me there is restoration.”

We should note that our Lord’s winsome invitation, “Come unto me…”, isn’t really an invitation at all; it’s a command.  “Come”, “you come”, “you come now” — it’s plainly an imperative; he commands us to come to him for restoration. To say that it’s a command is to say there’s no option here.  We must go to him for restoration, just because he knows that his soldiers are beaten up, and once beaten up aren’t much use until restored.

In other words, providing hospital care for Christ’s wounded is as much the congregation’s ministry to the congregation as is being a nursery where newborns are nurtured, and a school where learners are taught, and an army where soldiers are trained and in which they fight the good fight of the faith until that day when we say with the apostle,

                        I have fought the good fight,

                                    I have finished the race,

                                                I have kept the faith.          

                   

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd  

July 2006                                                                                                                                              

 

Forgiveness of Others, Forgiveness of Self – Where Do We Begin?

Matthew 18:21-35                      Micah 7:18-20                         Psalm 32                  Colossians 3:12-17

 

1]         We begin with the cross. There is nowhere else to begin. The cross looms everywhere in scripture.  All theological understanding is rooted in it.  All discipleship flows from it.  It’s what we trust for our salvation.         It transforms our thinking, ridding us of the mindset that characterizes the world. The cross is the only place to begin.

To begin anywhere else means that we have begun with calculating: “Should I forgive?  How much should I forgive? Under what circumstances should I forgive?”   Now we are calculating.

Calculation in matters that concern us fosters self-interest.  We go to the bank to purchase our RSP for 2010.         The interest rates are 2% for one year, 2.25% for two, and 3% for three. We estimate how the interest rate is going to fluctuate in the next few years, and we calculate which combination of locked-in RSP rate and time period is best — best for the bank? Of course not. Best for us.  Calculation in matters that concern us fosters self-interest.

In the second place calculation is frequently a conscious cover-up for unconscious rationalization.  At a conscious level I calculate whether I should forgive, how much I should forgive, whom I should forgive.  But all of this is a smokescreen behind which there is, in my unconscious, a heart set on vindictiveness, a desire to even a score which has remained uneven (I think) for umpteen years, a wish to see someone who has pained me suffer himself.         Unconscious rationalization, like any unconscious proceeding, is a process which spares us having to admit nastiness about ourselves that we don’t want to admit, spares us having to acknowledge what we prefer to hide. Calculation is a conscious matter which cloaks an unconscious development, even as we are left thinking we are virtuous.

In the third place calculation traffics in the unrealistic.  What I am prepared to forgive in others (feeling virtuous about it too) will in fact be slight, while what I expect others to forgive in me will in fact be enormous.  This is unrealistic.

In the fourth place calculation both presupposes shallowness and promotes shallowness. It presupposes shallowness in that I plainly think that sin is something I can calculate or measure like sugar or flour or milk.         Calculation promotes shallowness in that it confirms over and over the shallowness I began with.

We ought never to begin our understanding of forgiveness with calculation. We must begin with the cross; and more than begin with the cross, we must stay with the cross.

 

2]           Nobody uses a twenty-member surgical team to clip a hangnail.  No government sends out a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to sink a canoe. The air-raid warning isn’t sounded because a child’s paper glider has violated air-space.

When the twenty-member surgical team is deployed the patient’s condition is critical. When the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier puts to sea the threat it’s dealing with couldn’t be greater.  When the air-raid warning is sounded destruction is imminent.   And when God gives up his own Son humankind’s condition is critical, the threat facing us couldn’t be greater, and our destruction is imminent.

As often as I read scripture I am sobered to read that God’s forgiveness of you and me necessitated the death of God’s own Son.  I try to fathom what this means.  In trying to fathom it from the Father’s perspective I ponder the anguish of our foreparent in faith, Abraham.  Abraham and Isaac. Abraham collecting the firewood, sharpening the knife, trudging with leaden foot and leaden heart up the side of Mount Moriah . He and Sarah had waited years for a child, had had none, had given up expecting any.  Then when everyone “just knew” that the situation was hopeless Sarah conceived. Was any child longed for more intensely or cherished more fervently?  Now they have to give up this child, give him up to death.

I have been spared losing a child.  I do know, however, that when a child dies the parents of that child separate 70% of the time. Wouldn’t the death of their child bring the parents closer together?   The truth is, so devastating is the death of a child that calculation concerning it is useless; we can’t begin to comprehend what it’s like.

Abraham again. At the last minute the ram is provided. Abraham’s relief is inexpressible: his son doesn’t have to die. But when the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ walks his Son to Calvary there is no relief: his Son has to die.         Here the Father bears in his heart the full weight of a devastation that couldn’t be greater.

Next I try to fathom what the cross means from the perspective of the Son. On the one hand I don’t minimize the physical suffering he endured for our sakes.  On the other hand, countless people have endured much greater physical pain. (It took Jesus only six hours to die, remember.)   It’s the dereliction that ices my bowels.  What is it to be forsaken when the sum and substance of your life is unbroken intimacy with your Father?  As a child I was lost only two or three times.  It wasn’t a pleasant experience; in fact it was terrifying.  Nonetheless, even when I was lost (and terrified) I knew that my problem was simply that I couldn’t find my parents; I never suspected for one minute that they had abandoned me.  A man who is dear to me told me that when his wife left him and he knew himself bereft, forsaken by the one human being who meant more to him than all others, he turned on all the taps in the house so that he wouldn’t have to hear her driving out of the garage, driving out. Before our Lord’s Good Friday dereliction I can only fall silent in incomprehension.

 

3]         As often as I begin with the cross I am stunned at the price God has paid — Father and Son together — for my forgiveness.  In the same instant I am sobered at the depravity in me that necessitated so great a price. It’s plain that my depravity is oceans deeper than I thought, my heart-condition vastly more serious than I guessed.  It’s incontrovertible that when I have trotted out all my bookish, theological definitions of sin I still haven’t grasped — will never grasp — what sin means to God.

When I was a teenager I thought our Lord to be wrong when he prayed for his murderers, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” I thought him to be wrong inasmuch as it seemed to me (at age 17) that they did know what they were doing: they were eliminating someone they didn’t like. They had to know what they were doing simply because they had plotted and schemed and conspired for months to do it. Furthermore, our Lord’s plea, “Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they are doing”, had to be self-contradictory — I thought. After all, if they didn’t know what they were doing then they didn’t need to be forgiven; they could simply be overlooked.  Now that I’m old I perceive that our Lord was right.  His assassins didn’t know what they were doing, ultimately; didn’t know they were crucifying the Son of God.  They didn’t know that their sinnership had impelled them to do it, didn’t know that while they thought they were acting freely they were in bondage to sin more surely than the heroin sniffer is in bondage to dope. In my older age I see that our Lord was right. They can’t be excused; they can only be forgiven, since what they are doing comes out of their own disordered heart. To be sure, they don’t fully grasp what they are doing, can’t fully grasp it. But the reason they can’t grasp it is that they are blind to their own depravity. Of course they are; the worst consequence of our spiritual condition is that we are blinded to our spiritual condition.  But being blinded to it doesn’t lessen our accountability for it, as the day of judgement will make plain.  But why wait until then? Why not own the truth of the cross now; namely, that a cure this drastic presupposes an ailment no less drastic?   A cure whose blessing is richer than we can comprehend presupposes a condition whose curse is deadlier than we can imagine.

 

4]         Is everyone convinced that we should begin with the cross?   Then everyone must agree that our understanding of forgiving ourselves and others unfolds from the cross; the light that the cross sheds will ever be the illumination by which we see everything else concerning forgiveness.

For instance, it’s the consistent testimony of the apostles that our forgiving our enemies is the measure of our closeness to God.  When this truth first sank home with me I sank to the floor.  Surely I could enjoy intimacy with God while enjoying the fantasy of my worst enemy going from misery to misery, misfortune to misfortune.  Then in that light which the cross sheds I saw that I couldn’t.  How could I claim intimacy with the One who forgives his assassins and at the same time relish ever-worsening misery for those who have not yet assassinated me? How can I say I crave being recreated in the image of the God for whom forgiving costs him everything while I make sure that my non-forgiving costs me nothing?

Two hundred and fifty years ago John Wesley wrote in his diary, “Resentment at an affront is sin, and I have been guilty of this a thousand times.” We want to say, “Resentment at an imagined affront would be sin, since it would be wrong to harbour resentment towards someone when that person had committed no real offence at all; but of course it would be entirely in order to harbour resentment at a real affront. After all, who wouldn’t?” To argue like this, however, is only to prove that we have not yet come within a country mile of the gospel. Resentment at an imagined affront wouldn’t be sin so much as it would be stupidity.  Because resentment at a real affront, at a real offence, comes naturally to fallen people we think it isn’t sin.  How can we ever be held accountable for something that fits us like a glove? But remember the point we lingered over a minute ago: not merely one consequence of our sinnership but the most serious consequence of it is our blindness to the fact and nature and scope of our sinnership.         Then what are we to do with our resentment?  Do we hold it to us ever so closely because its smouldering heat will fuel our self-pity and our self-justification?   Or do we deplore it and drop it at the foot of the cross, knowing that only the purblind do anything else?

Our Lord’s parable of the unforgiving servant leaves us in no doubt or ambiguity or perplexity at all.  In this parable the king forgives his servant a huge debt; the servant, newly forgiven a huge debt, turns around and refuses to forgive a fellow whatever this fellow owes him.  The king is livid that the pardon the servant has received he doesn’t extend in turn. The king orders the servant shaken up until some sense is shaken into him.  If the servant had refused to forgive his fellow a paltry sum, the servant would merely have looked silly.  But the amount the servant is owed isn’t paltry; 100 denarii is six months’ pay. Then the servant is readily understood, isn’t he: the forgiveness required of him is huge. But the point of the parable is this: while the 100 denarii which the servant is owed is no trifling sum, it is nothing compared to the 10,000 talents ($50 million) that the king has already forgiven the servant.

That injury, that offence, that wound which you and I are to forgive is not a trifle. Were it a trifle we wouldn’t be wounded.  The wound is gaping; if it were anything else we wouldn’t be sweating over forgiving it. We shall be able to forgive it only as we place it alongside what God has already forgiven in us. Please note that we are never asked to generate forgiveness of others out of our own resources; we are simply asked not to impede God’s forgiveness from flowing through us and spilling over onto others. We don’t have to generate water in order for it to irrigate what is parched and render it fruitful; all we have to do is not put a crimp in the hose. Either we don’t impede the free flow of God’s forgiveness from him through us to others, or, like the servant in the parable, we shall have to be shaken up until some sense has been shaken into us.   (We must never make the mistake of thinking our Lord to be a “gentle” Jesus “meek and mild”.  Gentle and mild he is not.)

 

5]         Before we fall asleep tonight we must be sure we understand what forgiveness does not mean.

(i)         It does not mean that the offence we are called to forgive is slight.  As we’ve already seen, it’s grievous.         Were it anything but grievous we’d be talking about overlooking it instead of forgiving it — if we were even talking about it at all.

(ii)         Forgiveness does not mean that the offence is excused.  To forgive is not to excuse.  We excuse what is excusable.  What is not excusable, will never be excusable, is also never excused. It can only be forgiven. The day you tell me you have forgiven me is the day I know that I am without excuse.  To forgive is never a shorthand version of, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” To forgive is to say it matters unspeakably.

(iii)         Forgiveness does not mean that we are suckers asking the world to victimize us again.  To forgive is not to invite another assault.  To forgive is not to advertise ourselves as a doormat.  To be sure, there are people who are doormats, people whose self-image is so poor and whose ego-strength so diminished that they seem to invite victimization.  Forgiveness, however, isn’t the last resort of the wimp who can’t do anything else in any case.         Forgiveness, rather, is a display of ego-strength that couldn’t be stronger. Jesus can forgive those who slay him just because he has already said, “No one takes my life from me; I may lay it down of my own accord, but I lay it down; no one takes it from me.”

(iv)         Forgiveness does not mean that the person we forgive we regard as a diamond in the rough, good-at-heart. Forgiveness means that the person we forgive we regard as depraved in heart.  After all, this is what God’s forgiveness means about you and me.

(v)         Forgiveness does not mean that the person we forgive we must thereafter trust.  Many people whom we forgive we shall never be able to trust.  The only people we should trust are those who show themselves trustworthy. Forgiveness does mean, however, that the person we can’t trust we shall nonetheless not hate, not abuse, not exploit; we shall not plot revenge against him or bear him ill-will of any sort.

Remember, all that matters is that we not impede the forgiveness which God has poured upon us and which he intends to course through us and overflow us onto others.

 

6]         Any discussion of forgiveness includes forgiving ourselves. Often the person we most urgently need to forgive is ourselves.  And since all forgiveness is difficult to the point of anguish, then to forgive ourselves may be the most difficult of all.

Suppose we don’t forgive ourselves; suppose we say, “I can forgive anyone at all except myself”.  Then what’s going on in our own head and heart?

(i)         Surely we have puffed up ourselves most arrogantly.  There is terrible arrogance in saying to ourselves, “I’m the greatest sinner in the world; the champion.  I can forgive others because they are only minor-league sinners compared to me. When it comes to depravity I’m the star of the major leagues.”

Not only is there a perverse arrogance underlying such an attitude, there is no little blasphemy as well.  “The blood-bought pardon of God, wrought at what cost to him we can’t fathom — it isn’t effective enough for me.         Where I’m concerned, God’s mercy is deficient, defective, and finally worthless.” This is blasphemy. Our forgiveness, which cost God we know not what, you and I shouldn’t be labelling a garage-sale piece of junk.

(ii)           If we say we can’t forgive ourselves then we want to flagellate ourselves in order to atone for our sin.  But don’t we believe the gospel?   The heart of the gospel is this: atonement has already been made for us. We neither dismiss it nor add to it. We simply trust it.

Perhaps this is where we should stop today; at the cross, where we began. For it is here that we see that God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven us.  And here we see that we therefore must forgive others, and forgive ourselves as well.

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                      

March 2010

preached March 14, 2010, Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto

 

The Lord’s Supper: Last Supper, Family Supper, Future/Final Supper

Matthew 26:20-29      Luke 15:1-2          Exodus 24:1-11      1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Following a Sunday morning service of Holy Communion in the congregation I served for 21 years in Mississauga an 85-year old woman greeted me at the door of the church.  She smiled sweetly (and kept on smiling) as she said, “Today was communion Sunday.  I didn’t understand anything of what it was supposed to be about.  I never have.  I’ve been in church all my life, and the service means as little to me now as it did when I was a child.  I thought you’d want to know.”
Having chatted pastorally with church folk for 43 years I’ve discovered this woman isn’t alone.  Many church folk attend services of Holy Communion frequently but will admit, in appropriate contexts, that they are largely uncomprehending as to what the service means or what it is supposed to do.
For the edification of all of us this morning let’s think of the service of Holy Communion, or Lord’s Supper as it is more frequently called in Protestant orbits, in terms of Last Supper, Family Supper, and Future/Final Supper.

I (i) —   At the Last Supper Jesus poured out wine and said (no doubt solemnly), “…this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins….”  Our Hebrew ancestors knew that “blood” was shorthand for “life given up sacrificially”.  Now unlike our Hebrew ancestors we are creatures of modernity; we are fastidious; we like things clean and neat, always in good taste.  Our foreparents, on the other hand, weren’t concerned with good taste at all; they were concerned with godliness; not concerned to see something aesthetically polished, but preoccupied with knowing that their sin had been pardoned.  Therefore they didn’t shrink from those vehicles of worship which they knew God had appointed, such as the sacrifice of a lamb in the temple.  In the temple mystery of atonement (“atonement” means the making “at one” of sinful people and holy God) worshippers brought their best lamb to church; the priest cut the animal’s throat, collected the blood in a basin, and threw the blood against the altar.
A well-known, popular New Testament commentator, more fastidious than he should be and with more than a streak of anti-Judaism in him (William Barclay), speaks of the repugnance of it all: odour, flies, unsightliness; the slimy, slippery, gooey, filthy mess.  He praises Jesus for having got us beyond this bloody primitivism.  Alas, he overlooks one thing: Jesus endorsed the bloody primitivism.  Whenever Jesus was in Jerusalem at Passover he worshipped at the temple too — which is to say whenever our Lord went to church in Jerusalem he showed up with his lamb under his arm.  Of course he knew something no one else knew: he knew that what the temple liturgy pointed to would soon be gathered up in his own poured-out blood, since he knew himself the lamb of God.
Repugnant?  Our Hebrew foreparents weren’t repelled by gore; they were repelled by their own depravity.  They weren’t jarred by a spectacle that lacked refinement; they were jarred by a spectacle that lacked righteousness — the spectacle of themselves in their systemic sinnership facing a Holy God who couldn’t be fooled and whose truth couldn’t be “fudged”.  Fastidiousness is the farthest thing from the mind of corrupt people whom the just judge has condemned.
I admit that the category of sin (that is, the predicament of rebellion against God and the spiritual perversity arising therefrom) isn’t a category in which people today think.  People today think instead in the categories of vice and immorality and criminality.  If a deed violates what a particular society deems good, the deed is called vice.  If the same deed violates what is regarded as the universal human good, it is called immorality.  If the same deed violates a stated law, it is called crime.  What it is called is determined entirely by the context which interprets it.  From a gospel-perspective the context which interprets us (not merely our deed) and interprets us ultimately; this context is the holy God himself.  Not only is the holy God the ultimate interpretative context; this context is also unique in its profundity. So profound is it that when we understand ourselves in it we also understand that what is interpreted now is not deed but being.  In other words the ultimate issue isn’t what we do but what we are.  Our ancient foreparents knew this.
According to apostolic testimony our Lord, at the Last Supper, poured wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood”; that is, it is the one covenant of God renewed by the blood of Christ.   Why is blood attached to God’s covenant or promise never to abandon us, never to fail us, never to forsake us, never to quit on us in anger or give up on us in disgust?  Why is blood attached to God’s covenant or promise not to let anything, not even humankind’s outrageous insolence and ingratitude, loose him from his bond with us?  In short, if God wants to promise himself to us, why doesn’t he simply declare it and spare himself the expense of his Son?  Because everywhere in life where promises are made to people of perverse hearts (which is to say, everywhere in life where promises are made), the same promises can be kept only at enormous cost.  It costs nothing to make a promise, nothing to declare a promise (talk is cheap); it costs everything to keep a promise.
We promise not to forsake spouse or friend.  The promise made costs nothing; but as soon as that person provides incontrovertible grounds for giving up on him, the same promise kept costs everything.  God has promised forever to be God-for-us.  In the Garden of Eden his promise cost him nothing; but when humankind found itself in the “far country”; i.e., when God’s promise meets our rebellious hearts, his promise kept — still to be God-for-us — wraps him in anguish.
Then what mood pertains to the Last Supper aspect of our communion service?  Surely a mood of solemnity; a mood of sober reflection, of realistic self-assessment; which is to say, a mood of penitence.

(ii): — But the Last Supper isn’t the only aspect of our communion service; there is also what I have called the family supper aspect, the ordinary, everyday meals Jesus shared with people in the course of his public ministry.  The written gospels tell us on page after page that Jesus spent a great deal of time in kitchens and restaurants.  Why did he spend so much time there when he knew he had so little time for his public ministry?  Because he wanted his meal-companions to know peace with God.  In first century Palestine to eat with someone was a public declaration of amnesty; to eat with someone meant you harboured no enmity toward that person; you were plotting nothing malicious; you intended, rather, only that person’s well-being and blessing.
A sign of amnesty (supposedly) in our culture is the handshake.  When we shake with our right hand the person attached to the handshake knows that our hand holds no weapon and therefore we aren’t going to attack.  Boy Scouts and Girl Guides shake with their left hand.  In the pre-firearm days of sword and spear the left hand held one’s shield.  To shake with our left hand means we have discarded our shield; we have renounced self-protection.  What would it mean to shake hands with both hands?  It could only mean that we had foresworn both attacking someone else and defending ourselves; it could only mean, in other words, that we were giving ourselves totally to another person without condition or hesitation. Surely shaking hands with both hands is what we do, in effect, whenever we hug or embrace another human being. To hug someone, embrace someone is simply to shake hands with both hands.  Our affection, our intention, our concern, our heart’s unarticulated welcome; it’s all poured out on this other person at the same time that there is nothing held back to plot either manipulation of him or armour-plating of ourselves.  When Jesus ate with people, in first century Palestine, he embraced them — both hands.  He cherished those people and visited upon them that amnesty with God which was nothing less than their salvation.  They sponged it up with that heart-hunger which every last one of us has.
It sounds so wonderful that we can’t imagine a downside to it.  But there was.  Our Lord’s eating habits ‘did him in.’  Those he ate with loved him, while those who refused to eat with him savaged him.  We must never forget that Jesus uttered many of his parables in reply to those who faulted him for his table manners.  We must never forget that the best-loved parables — lost sheep, lost coin, lost son — Jesus spoke when those who were to savage him hissed, “This man receives sinners and eats with them!”
Nonetheless our Lord never backed down.  He knew that the provision in the cross, while sufficient to grant people access to God, wouldn’t of itself induce them to suspend their suspicion and abandon their assorted safe ‘tree perches’, like Zacchaeus.   He knew that because of the cross sinners could approach the holy One.  But would they?  Would they want to?  Only if through the holy One Incarnate they knew a welcome beyond anything they had found anywhere else.  They found such a welcome in Jesus and loved him for it.
Then why did others attack him on account of his dinner-companions?  Because he broke down all the conventions by which they, his enemies, had always ordered their lives, all the conventions by which they assigned themselves a superior place in the ‘pecking order’ and credited themselves with a superior righteousness.  It is a social convention to classify people as moral or immoral (and no one this morning is arguing the difference between moral and immoral).  It is a social convention to classify people as successful or dismissible, religious or irreligious. Social conventions have their place.  Nevertheless, when Jesus Christ appears, social conventions are exposed as less than ultimate; decidedly less than ultimate.
Jesus eats with the immoral and they know themselves cherished; he would be every bit as happy to eat with the moral too, but moral people won’t eat with him as long as he insists on eating with those who are regularly regarded as ill-behaved.  Jesus eats with the dismissible, those deemed unimportant.  He would gladly eat with the successful, the powerful, too, but they don’t want to rub shoulders with the dismissible.  He eats as well with the irreligious.  He would gladly eat with the religious too, but they can’t stomach the thought that their reward is no greater than the reward of those who have made no religious effort at all.
Social conventions are a way of ordering society.  They have their place. But when Christ the King appears they are exposed as pre-ultimate; they have now been superseded by a new order, the Kingdom of God.
Social convention and the Kingdom of God are simply not the same.  Then it’s quite plain that either we cling to the social conventions, assuming that the social order they point to is ultimate, or in the presence of Jesus Christ we look beyond social convention to “seize with both hands” (Calvin’s expression) the One who has already seized us.  Either we regard social convention as ultimate or we abandon ourselves to the rule of God exemplified in a welcome we are never going to find anywhere else.  It is not the case that Jesus exalts immorality above morality or failure above success or irreligion above religion (as some left-wing preachers try to tell us.)  It is rather the case that all such distinctions and categories and evaluations and pigeonholes are left behind as we forget them in favour of a kingdom which transcends them.
Yet we must always remember that men and women are persuaded to forget them and leave them behind, are free to forget them and leave them behind, only as they find both hands shaken, only as they know themselves embraced and want above all to hug forever the one who has first hugged them.
Jesus welcomed his dinner-companions to a new family, what Paul calls “the household and family of God.”  His family meals landed our Lord in much trouble, but he refused to give them up.  Those who joined the family and ate at its table rejoiced and exulted in their new-found exhilaration.  Not even the pouting and the sulking and the petulance of those who wouldn’t sit down with them could diminish their joy.
The mood of exultation, then, the mood of joy, is another mood we should bring to the communion service.

(iii): — There is yet another supper aspect to the Lord’s Supper, the anticipation of the Messianic Banquet.  There is a supper to come, a future supper which will also be the final supper which never ends.  The Messianic Banquet will celebrate one glorious truth: the destruction of all that opposes God’s kingdom and violates his rule and disputes his sovereignty.  Christians are convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, God’s agent in restoring a creation warped, a creation disfigured, a creation significantly disabled and frequently grotesque; a creation rendered all this through the multi-tentacled grip of evil.  At the same time, as our Jewish friends remind us, when Messiah appears he has to bring the Messianic Age with him.  Without the arrival of the Messianic Age it’s absurd to speak of the arrival of the Messiah.  In the Messianic Age swords will be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks; war will no longer preoccupy us even as poverty, disease and exploitation no longer afflict us.
Have swords been beaten into ploughshares?  (Think of Syria and Egypt.)  Not only does war (terrorism is war by another name) rage throughout the world; at this moment there are approximately fifty civil wars raging throughout the world: fellow-citizens are slaying each other.  Have poverty, disease and injustice ceased to afflict us?
Let’s be sure to admit this much: those who dispute the sovereignty of Jesus Christ have a case.  Unquestionably they have a case.  Nevertheless Christians may and must say this much: in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead the risen Messiah has brought the Kingdom with him and superimposed his Kingdom on a fallen creation.  To be sure, his Kingdom is not yet fully manifest (if it were it wouldn’t be disputable); but it arrived as the risen one himself triumphed over every principality and power, over every human sin and cosmic evil which are bent on denying their defeat and molesting whom they can with their last gasp.  In his resurrection from the dead our Lord has guaranteed the healing of the creation’s gaping wounds.
Thinking pictorially as they were trained to do, the earliest Christians depicted this God-ordained event as a feast that never ends.  The bedraggled of the world, a bedraggled world itself, will shine forth resplendently as the creation restored redounds to the glory of the God who made it, who sustained it through its afflictions, who wrested it out of the hands of the molester who warped it, and who has freed it for the blessing of his people; which people in turn will praise him everlastingly for it.  Then the mood we must bring to this aspect of Holy Communion is the mood of eager anticipation and steadfast confidence.

II: — The service of Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper gathers up three distinct but related meals:
– the Last Supper, where Jesus signed in his own blood the promise of God that there will always be more mercy in God than there is sin in us;
– the everyday meals our Lord ate with those whom he gathered into his household and family as he embraced and welcomed all who craved him and his rule more than they clung to social convention;
– the messianic banquet, the final supper of the future where all that contradicts the kingdom of God will be dispersed.
The mood of the communion service should reflect all three aspects: sober penitence, unrestrained joy, confident anticipation.

Today, in our worship service, we have already tasted the Word of God in scripture and sermon.  Now we are to taste the selfsame Word in sacrament.
Our Lord Jesus invites us to his table. Soberly let us renew our repentance in the wake of his astounding mercy.  Joyfully let us embrace again him who rejoices to embrace us.  Confidently let us anticipate that glorious Day when together we behold the holy city, the New Jerusalem, the creation healed; for on that Day the former things will have passed away and there will be neither mourning nor crying nor pain any more.

Victor Shepherd

August 2013

Church of St Bride

 

A Gospel at a Glance: The Witness of Mark

Mark 1:1 

I: — Several years ago a young British surgeon, Sheila Cassidy, moved to Santiago, Chile. Once there she found herself in the midst of political strife. Since she was a newcomer and didn’t understand the history behind the strife, she didn’t take sides but simply tried to get on with her medical work. One day a patient with an injured leg came to her. Without a second thought she treated him. Next day she was arrested and imprisoned. It turned out the patient had been a supporter of Salvator Allende, a social and political reformer in Chile whose work the ensuing dictator, General Pinochet, beat down brutally. Sheila Cassidy was interrogated for hours even though she had no information to divulge, and then was tortured on and off by electrification for one month. When she wasn’t being tortured herself she could hear the screams of others nearby who were.

One afternoon at a conference in downtown Toronto a fellow conferee introduced to me, in tones of awe, a Mrs. Xyz from Argentina whom I was plainly expected to have heard of but hadn’t. I sat down beside Mrs. Xyz and together we began watching a documentary about “disappeared” people in Argentina. Suddenly I realised that the woman featured in the documentary was the Mrs. Xyz who was sitting beside me. She had (that is, she had had) two sons and a daughter: lawyer, physician, social worker. All three were among the “disappeared”, those who attempted to alleviate the distresses of totalitarianism in Argentina and were abducted in the dead of the night. All three were certainly dead.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a teacher of physics and mathematics, and subsequently an artillery officer in the Soviet Army, when at war’s end he was suddenly removed to a forced labour camp in Siberia. He spent eleven years there in terrible hardship. He lived to write about it. Many of his colleagues, the men and women he described in his Gulag Archipelago series of books, didn’t survive.

For several years two Dutch women, Corrie Ten Boom and her sister Betsie, exercised a ministry on behalf of intellectually challenged children, children whom they cherished and whose value before God they never doubted. Then the Nazis occupied Holland. Soon the two sisters were assisting other despised people, Jewish adults this time, even though they knew that assisting these people incurred terrible risk. Eventually the two sisters were detected, apprehended, and incarcerated in the most notorious camp in Holland, Ravensbruck. Corrie survived; Betsie perished.

All the people I’ve mentioned so far are people of the most impassioned faith. They found the world inhospitable. The truth is, the world is inhospitable; cruel, in fact. Unlike us North Americans who live in Lotus Land (at least for now), most of the world’s people live where life unfolds with much greater difficulty and much greater suffering. You don’t need me to remind you of life behind the iron curtain or life in Nazi-occupied Europe only a few years ago. But I suspect you do need me to acquaint you with the carnage in Cambodia and Indonesia and Algeria, not to mention so many other places. In the course of the Indochinese conflicts of the past few years the government of Cambodia has slain three million of its own people. Former President Sukharno of Indonesia (front and centre in the news in 1999 over the action of the RCMP in British Columbia during his most recent visit to Canada) always managed to smile at the western press with his beaming brown face while his underlings mutilated and slew. All the time that French forces were torturing and killing thousands in Algeria General Charles de Gaulle, the man who had led France’s struggle against German atrocities, spoke softly of the need for political expedience in Algeria. We live in North America. The rest of the world, however, lives where the world continues to behave like the world; where the world behaves as it has characteristically behaved for as long as there’s been a world.

Think of Rome when Mark was writing his gospel. The city of Rome had one million inhabitants. Like any huge city, it had large slum areas. In July, 64, fire broke out and destroyed 70% of the city. Nero, the emperor, set about rebuilding the city on a grandiose scale, hoping to make the new construction a monument to himself. Rumour had it that he had started the fire. Fire, after all, is always the quickest and cheapest method of slum clearance. The poor people of the city, homeless now, despised him for his callousness. Nero wanted above all to regain his heroic stature with the people. He had to shift the blame for the fire to a group, a scapegoat, so marginalised that it couldn’t protest. He blamed the Christians. He accused them of “hatred against humankind” and began punishing them in three different ways. They were crucified; they were clothed in animal skins and then set upon by hunting dogs; or they were covered in tar and then ignited so that they burned like — like him who is the light of the world! — Nero smirked in derision. Two outstanding Christian leaders, Peter and Paul, perished in this wave of persecution. Nero had his day of glory.

Shortly thereafter a man named Mark came to Rome (courageous, wasn’t he) and wrote a tract to encourage the Christians he met. These Christians followed a crucified Messiah themselves and therefore didn’t expect any better treatment than their Lord had received before them. This tract (what we call “The gospel according to Mark”) was written to sustain beleaguered Christians who could be and were harassed and tormented at any time depending on Nero’s mood. You and I, remember, live in the Lotus Land of North America. Mark’s readers didn’t. They needed his “good news” about Jesus.

II: — Let’s familiarise ourselves with some of the characteristics of Mark’s work. First of all it’s a gospel of action. There’s very little teaching in Mark. In fact all of our Lord’s parables (with one exception) are found in one chapter, the fourth. The action is always fast-paced. Mark’s favourite Greek word is euthus, “at once”, “immediately”, “right away.” Jesus travels to a place and does something. “Immediately”, says Mark, he goes somewhere else and does something else. To read Mark’s gospel at one sitting is to be breathless, as Jesus and the twelve are always on the move “at once.”

Another characteristic: this gospel was written for Gentile Christians. To be sure, there were Jews as well as Gentiles in the church in Rome, but it’s the latter whom Mark has in mind. For this reason Mark always explains Jewish customs and traditions that Gentiles like us can’t be expected to know.

We mustn’t think that any of the written gospels is a biography of Jesus in the conventional sense of the term. Biographies always spend much time probing childhood influences, psychological developments, various factors that shape someone’s character and self-consciousness. None of the written gospels bothers to discuss these. We know nothing of our Lord’s childhood. We know nothing of the fellow-adults he met as a young man. In fact, if you set end-to-end all the events in the life of Jesus that Mark discusses, you would find that they took up three months of Jesus’ life at most and as little as one month. No biographer ever wrote a biography covering one to three months only of someone’s life.

Then why does Mark relate the incidents in our Lord’s life that he does relate? Of the hundreds of incidents in the public ministry of Jesus, why does Mark bring forward only two dozen? To be sure, Mark is familiar with the scores of stories arising from the ministry of Jesus, stories that have circulated orally and have been handed down for 35 years. From among the hundreds he could have selected Mark selects those stories from the life of Jesus that he thinks will be of greatest help to the Christians in Rome in view of the particular trials and torments of the Christians there. For instance, among the many stories concerning Jesus available to Mark, Mark selects the one about the stilling of the storm. He knows that this incident in the public ministry of Jesus will help persecuted Christians on whom a dreadful storm has descended and who may feel as abandoned in it as the disciples felt when Jesus was asleep in the boat.

Whenever we read Mark’s gospel, then, we must ask ourselves two questions: what did the gospel-incident mean to the people who witnessed the original event, that is, who were part of the event in the earthly ministry of Jesus 35 years ago? and what did the story mean 35 years later for the tormented Christians in Rome who believed that the same Lord, risen and ruling among them, was available to them then and there? Actually, whenever we read Mark’s gospel there’s a third question we must ask: what does this story about Jesus mean for you and me today, for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for beleaguered Christians in China and Korea and Burundi and the savage slums of Birmingham and Belfast, Miami and New York? What does this story mean for you and me whose situation isn’t quite that of others, even though our situation would certainly intensify if our discipleship were a little more intentional?

Mark wrote his gospel, then, in the year 66, shortly after Nero’s cruelties had begun to brutalise Christians in Rome. Mark wrote it believing that the One from Nazareth who had sustained harassed people during his earthly ministry in Palestine was still present, 35 years later, to sustain men and women in the empire’s pressure-cooker.

III: — And now to the gospel itself. The gospel of Mark is richly textured, and therefore there are many themes coursing throughout it. Nevertheless, there’s one major theme and one only: Jesus Christ is victor. Wherever Jesus comes upon sin, sickness, sorrow, suffering, the demonic and death, he conquers them. Jesus triumphs. He vanquishes the hostile powers that break down men and women, push them toward despair, impoverish life, undermine hope, collapse resistance. Jesus vanquishes every hostile power that afflicts us, torments us, fragments us. Jesus is victor.

You must have noticed that one-half of Mark’s gospel concerns only one week of Christ’s life, the final week, the week that builds toward the climax of his death. In other words, death is the big event, the big power, the biggest enemy of all.

Now while death is “Mr. Big”, Mr. Big is not alone; Mr. Big has errand boys, “flunkies” who do his bidding and anticipate his work. Mr. Big’s errand boys soften us up so that Mr. Big himself can intimidate us throughout our life and pulverise us all the more readily at the end. Death’s “flunkies” are sin, sorrow, suffering, the demonic (radical evil.)

Think of how suffering, especially protracted suffering, wears us down and distorts our thinking and usurps time and energy, simply preoccupies us, until we seem to have nothing left to give away, nothing left for Kingdom concerns, nothing left with which even to try to gain perspective on our suffering.
Sorrow continues to afflict bereaved people long after they thought sorrow would have ceased haunting them. Sorrow steals back over them and even whispers propaganda in their ear: “Your life is over; you will remain miserable; now that the person dearest you has died, you might as well die too; in fact you already have.”

Sin hammers all of us. If we are Christians of little maturity we think we are making wonderful progress in putting it behind us. If we are Christians of moderate maturity we are disturbed that the sin we sincerely repudiate crops up again and again until we wonder if we aren’t stalled spiritually. If we are Christians of greater maturity we know that the sin we recognise in us and genuinely deplore is yet only the tip that we and others can see; underneath, hidden from sight, is a depravity whose range and depth always surprise us anew.

The demonic? Widespread, virulent evil that seems to extend itself everywhere and claims unwary victims as easily as a con artist “fleeces” the unsuspecting and the senile? Evil for the sake of evil; evil for the perverse pleasure of sheer evil? Ten minutes’ reflection on the state of the world and its convulsions in the twentieth century alone and we ought to be convinced about the fact and virulence of radical evil.

All of these powers, says Mark, are gathered up in the power of Mr. Big, death. They are death-on-the-way, death-around-the corner, death as the ruling power throughout the universe — except for Jesus Christ who bested it once and brandishes his victory in the face of death’s refusal to quit although defeated. For this reason while Mark never undervalues, makes light of, or trifles with Mr. Big and his many manifestations, Mark always has more to say, and more to say more emphatically, about the conquering one whose victory is the ultimate truth and reality of the universe and whose victory, now known only to faith, will one day be known to sight as the defeated one is finally dispersed. We call Jesus “Master” just because he has mastered the powers that otherwise master us.

When the secret police broke down the door of a Roman Christian’s home at 3:00 am in the year 66; when wild animals dismembered believers as crowds cheered; when Nero ignited them and called it a fireworks display — in the midst of it all they knew their Lord, victorious himself, hadn’t abandoned them and wouldn’t forget them. He cherished them and gripped them so that they’d never be lost to him. They knew that their faith hadn’t been in vain, and their glorified life to come would be so very glorious as to eclipse their pain forever.

What about us? Myself, I read Mark’s gospel at least once each year. I happen to be a pastor. Every week my work takes me to the man whose industrial accident has left him with permanent disability and chronic pain, then to the schizophrenic woman who has been victimised by her body-chemistry and who knows her outer life is as awkward for everyone around her as her inner life is a horror to herself. Every week I have to go to the bereaved person who is finally emerging from “the long night” when he learns that he’s seriously ill himself. Next I see the person whose pain, of whatever kind for whatever reason, has driven her to feel she would rather die and therefore has attempted suicide. At least, she has made either a suicide attempt or a suicide gesture. If an attempt, it obviously failed. If a gesture, meant to attract attention, it has attracted so little attention it too might as well be labelled a failure. To her depression she’s now added failure. And of course there’s the person whose neurological disease is irreversible.

You people also find yourselves among friends and neighbours and relatives who suffer similarly. What is the nature of our ministry on behalf of all such? A few words of pre-packaged cheer? A quick-fix formula? But there are no quick-fix formulas in life. If our ministry consisted of waltzing in and saying, “Never mind; it’s not as bad as you think”, they’d ask us to leave. On the other hand, if we appeared with a face as long as a horse’s they would tell us we were of no help. There’s relatively little that we can say, relatively little that we can do, but ever so much that we must be. We must be those whom the triumph of Jesus Christ possesses so genuinely, so thoroughly, so profoundly that our presence bespeaks his victory for those who otherwise feel they are nothing but victims.

So far I have spoken only of those afflictions that come upon us as part of our human lot, come upon us precisely to the extent that they come upon everyone else. Mark was more startled, however, by those afflictions that come upon us just because we choose to identify ourselves with our Lord, choose to stand up and be counted among his people. Mark tells us that when Jesus began his public ministry his family came to take him home because his family thought him deranged. Mark brings forward this incident from the earthly life of Jesus and weaves it into his written gospel in that he wants his Christian friends in Rome to know that they can expect their families to think them deranged; they can expect their families to disown them and abandon them when their discipleship divorces them from a family that doesn’t share their faith. Mark also wants them to know that just as Jesus found new “family” in his disciples, so the Roman Christians will find a new “family” in the Christian fellowship.

Mark incorporates the story of John the Baptist as well. John is a prophet, in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets of old. Like them, John speaks truth to power; John addresses the truth of God to the political and social and economic power that Herod wields. Herod has John killed. Later Jesus appears before Pilate. Pilate has Jesus killed. Hostility, Mark tells his readers, is what any Christian of any era can expect from the state as soon as that Christian articulates the truth of God to the politically powerful.

I’m always moved when I read of Martin Niemoeller, a church leader in Germany during the Nazi era. Niemoeller had been a submarine commander in World War I, a loyal citizen of the Fatherland. When Hitler came to power in 1933 and authorised the state to encroach upon the church, and next to molest the church, Niemoeller (now a Lutheran pastor) protested. One day he was introduced to Hitler personally. He used the opportunity to tell Hitler exactly what he thought of him. By 1937 Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, had interrogated Niemoeller several times. One day he was thrown into a truck and taken this time not to the interrogation room but to a prison where he was to remain for the next eight years. The day he went to prison the prison chaplain met him and recognised him instantly, for the prison chaplain too had been a naval officer in the first war. “Pastor Niemoeller, why are you in prison?”, the chaplain had asked. “And why are you not?”, Niemoeller had replied.

The Christians of Mark’s era never had to ask why Nero was victimising them. They knew. They knew something else, however, and knew it more tellingly; they knew that the One who had stilled the storm on behalf of terrified disciples could still the panic that lapped at them. They knew that the Lord who had remained steadfast even when a disciple who pretended to be loyal (Judas) had proved treacherous; this Lord would fortify their steadfastness even as some in their fellowship would prove treacherous and betray them to Nero’s secret police.

Above all, the Christians of Mark’s era knew that the One who had been raised from the dead in defiance of Mr. Big would see them through their dying and would share his glory with them eternally.

When next we read Mark’s gospel we should think of a handful of Christians in a city of one million, tyrannised by an emperor whose cruelty the world will never forget. And then we should think of Jesus Christ our Lord, a villager from a one-horse town in Palestine who, being the Son of God, strengthened urban followers in the capital city of the empire. And then we should think of suffering, courageous Christians of any time or place, even as we praise God for the gospel of the One whom no power can defeat and from whom nothing can separate us, ever.

Victor Shepherd       

January 2002

 

You asked for a Sermon on Angels

Mark 1:13         Judges 6:19-24     Luke 2:8-14           Luke 22:43-44      Hebrews 13:2

They were always an embarrassment when I was a youngster. How could any boy who aspired to be a red-blooded male believe in angels? Besides, what exactly was I supposed to believe in? ghosts who also happened to be do-gooders? Only hysterical people believed in ghosts, and only silly people had any use for do-gooders! For most of the year I could remain relatively unembarrassed since angles didn’t appear in church-life for most of the year. But Christmas and Easter were especially embarrassing because on these festivals angels were especially prominent. In my old age, however, embarrassment has given way to wonder and gratitude. I shouldn’t want to be without the angels now. How do you feel about them?

 

I: — The Hebrew and Greek words for angel (malak and aggelos) simply mean “messenger”. In some cases what is in a writer’s mind is God himself acting as his own messenger. The clue to this use of “angel” is the expression, “the angel of the Lord”; not “an angel”, not “angels” but “the angel of the Lord”. If we examine the incidents surrounding this expression we see a common pattern emerge. Someone wrestles with the angel (like Jacob at the riverbank), or argues with it, or flees from it, or shouts at it, or trembles before it; then this person discovers, a day or two later, that she had been contending all along with the living, lordly, sovereign God himself. At the time she didn’t know exactly what she was contending with; a day or two later she knows she has been engaged in the most energetic struggle with God himself.

Another feature of the common pattern is this: when the person who was wrestling, arguing, fleeing, shouting or trembling finally grasps that it was GOD she had collided with, her experience of God stamps itself upon her so profoundly, so indelibly that she will never be able to doubt or deny that it was GOD. She will never be able to doubt or deny that this encounter has rendered her life forever different. “The angel of the Lord” is a Hebrew way of saying “I was seized by the living God himself; I didn’t know it at the time, but later I knew it to be God; this awe-ful experience has left me unable to pretend anything else; it has also left me unable to go back to what I was before the experience”. “The angel of the Lord” is God himself acting as his own messenger, stamping himself so startlingly, so clearly upon someone that this person will bear the impress of his stamp ever after. This person will never confuse the Holy One himself with any God-substitute.

Let us make no mistake: God-substitutes abound. In ancient Israel one such substitute was the golden calf. The spiritually obtuse knelt down before the golden calf. But did they? As a matter of fact no Israelite, however spiritually obtuse, pointed to a hunk of metal and said, “That’s my god”. What the Israelite worshipped was what the golden calf represented. The hunk of metal represented much. It represented a deity which the people could control. It represented a deity made in their image. No longer did they understand themselves as made in God’s image, subject to God’s judgement because of the discrepancy between what they had been made and what they had become. Now that they had a deity made in their image the deity was docile, harmless; it could even be manipulated.

The golden calf also represented ethnic advantage. After all, the Hittites had their deity, the Amorites theirs, the Philistines theirs; each of these ethnic groups claimed that their own deity gave them extraordinary advantage. Plainly Israel was not to be left behind. Israel was only too happy to exchange the sovereign ruler of the entire creation for an ethnic booster; at least the latter would give them whatever advantage they needed over their neighbours.

What about us modern types? We say, “He worships his car; she worships her house”. But of course he and she do nothing of the sort. She doesn’t worship her house; she worships what the 11,000 square foot home represents. It represents social superiority; which is to say, human superiority. He doesn’t worship his $80,000 automobile. He worships what it represents. Why, only two generations ago his grandfather had cow-manure on his boots. Today the 32 year old grandson displays his automobile as a monument to his achievement. Just think, a self-made man at 32, for which no one else need be thanked, a tribute to himself. When I was a teenager my minister remarked to me, “Imagine, Victor; your grandfather was a bricklayer and your cousin is a urologist!” Is my cousin somehow godlier, holier, better in any sense than my grandfather-bricklayer for possessing expertise at the water-works? In becoming a clergyman have I stalled the Shepherd family’s social ascendancy? We love the gods of our own making. They represent what we give ourselves to and give to ourselves; they reward us with what we have always craved.

Only a massive assault; only God’s own massive assault can shatter the gods of our own making, the delusions with which we delude ourselves. God’s own massive assault upon someone, leaving that person forever unable to doubt or deny — days later — that it was God; this is what scripture calls “the angel of the Lord”.

Professor Paul Vitz teaches psychology at New York University. As his work moved along, several years ago, he began to notice that psychology had ceased to be a description of how the human psyche functions; psychology had deified itself, elevated itself to the status of religion. Psychology had become a golden calf. People bowed down before it and did obeisance to what it represented. It put itself forward as the final judge of what is true and good; to probe one’s psyche was to engage ultimate reality; it had its own high priests, its own sacred vocabulary. Vitz — still an unbeliever at this point — was disturbed. He didn’t know yet precisely what, profoundly what it was that was disturbing him. A year or two later, as he came to faith in Jesus Christ (chiefly through reading C.S. Lewis), he knew what had been disturbing him all along: the angel of the Lord. His life has been different from that point and will be different forever. (When next you are looking for something to read pick up a copy of his book, Psychology as Religion.)

One of my friends grew up more or less agnostic. As a teenager he became aware that a cloud of unreality surrounded what most people regarded as substantial. As he came upon item after item of seeming substance riddled with unreality he set it aside. He set more and more aside until he was face-to-face with the one thing that he thought to be more substantial than it even appeared: evil, sheer evil, utter evil. He couldn’t doubt this; unable to doubt this alone, he found himself living in a world virtually unendurable. He languished in a dark night which he thought would never end. (After all, to be convinced only of the presence and pervasiveness of evil is to live in a very bleak world; to be convinced of this as a teenager when all of one’s adult life is still in front of oneself is that much worse.) Finally his languishing gave way to an encounter with the God who has triumphed over evil in his Son. All along — particularly in the bleak days when my friend thought he was contending with nothing more than evil — he was wrestling with the angel of the Lord. He came to see this, know it unshakably, and find himself altered by it forever.

 

II: — Now that you have a firm grasp of what is meant by “the angel of the Lord” — namely, not an angel at all but God himself forging himself upon us — let me tell you that this use of “angel” is not the more common use in scripture. More commonly throughout scripture “angel” means angel. More commonly “angel” means not God but rather a creature of God; not God himself but someone distinct from God.

One thing we notice right away in the bible’s portrayal of the angels is how many of them there are: there are swarms of angels. “Heavenly host” is how the description reads; “heavenly host” suggests innumerable angels, myriads.

Another feature of the angels: they are creatures of pure spirit; they do not have bodies of flesh like us. Like us they are creatures, not divine; unlike us they are not fleshly. Another thing we notice: their function is to witness to God by being servants of God. Because they unfailingly serve God they invariably witness to God.

What are you and I to make of all this? It is obvious, isn’t it, that in view of the heavenly host God’s creation is rich, richer than we have always thought. It’s obvious too that the creation is profoundly spiritual, pervasively spiritual, finally spiritual.

Most people think not. Most people insist that the material is real. To be sure, Christians would never deny that the material is actual. Trees and mountains, buildings and bridges are not imaginary. Nonetheless, Christians would also insist that there is a spiritual dimension to the creation much deeper than trees and mountains. Some people would argue that the realm of aesthetics is more real than the real of the material. Mozart’s music, Robert Frost’s poetry, Tom Thomson’s painting, Veronica Tennent’s dancing: all of this is oceans deeper than sticks and stones. Oceans deeper that it may be, it is yet not deep enough: the really deep depths everywhere in the creation are not finally aesthetic; they are finally spiritual.

Since this is the case, then everything we deal with every day has profound spiritual significance; everything has profound spiritual significance just because the heavenly host, the angels, surround everything at all times. Take the matter of hospitality. The unknown writer of the epistle to the Hebrews states, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares”. With our shallower understanding we tend to think that hospitality — feeding someone in our home on Saturday evening — is to meet a physical need (for food), as well as a social need (for company), as well as a psychological need (for interchange with other minds). But if the universe is pervasively spiritual, profoundly spiritual (this is what the notion of angels means) then hospitality is fraught with spiritual significance. Our hospitality, after all, is an act which unfolds before God; it has to do with people who are creatures of God, people whom God longs to know and bless as they in turn know him. Therefore our hospitality has sacramental significance; our hospitality is used of God in ways not known to us as God secretly infiltrates the lives of those who sit at our dinner table. The mystery of God’s secret infiltration is something we cannot control, something we cannot measure, something we cannot even see immediately. But according to the apostles hospitality is the occasion of God’s secret infiltration as few other things are. Remember, to speak of the angels is to confess that the universe is ultimately spiritual.

Think about conflict. The marxist maintains that human conflict, at bottom, is the result of economic forces as the “haves” and the “have-nots” wage war. I should never want to deny the economic dimension to human conflict. The psychoanalyst maintains that human conflict, at bottom, is the result of primal intrapsychic drives which render our unconscious minds a battleground. I should never want to deny the psychoanalytic dimension to human conflict. The existentialist philosopher maintains that human conflict, at bottom, is the collision of competing wills as each person’s will is a will-to-power, a will-to-domination. I should never want to deny this dimension to human conflict.

All of these approaches have a measure of truth and therefore a measure of depth; but none goes deep enough, none is ultimately true. Human conflict, ultimately, is a spiritual problem, including the conflict within one’s self, the conflict with one’s self.

You must have noticed that Jesus is sustained by angels on two occasions of terrible conflict: when he was tried in the wilderness and when he was abandoned in Gethsemane. Conflict rages within him on these two occasions; and the conflict isn’t economic or psychoanalytic or philosophical: it is nakedly spiritual. In the wilderness he is tempted to undermine the kingdom of God; he is tempted to act on the seduction that there is a shortcut to the kingdom of God when in fact there is none; that his Father’s triumph can be won painlessly when in fact it cannot. What was at stake in his temptations? The salvation of every last one of us was at stake. Had he succumbed, you and I are lost eternally.

His temptation to avoid the cross and the dereliction is temptation to second-guess his Father. (This is outright unbelief.) It is temptation to secure first and last his own comfort and ease. (This is outright disobedience.) It is temptation to forsake us, the very people he has said he came for. (This is outright betrayal.) In Gethsemane his disciples sleep because they think that nothing is going on, when in fact spiritual conflict is raging. It rages so fiercely that our Lord needs additional resources, unusual assistance, to survive it — as he did in the wilderness three years earlier. When the gospel-writers tell us that he is assisted by angels they are telling us that his conflict is ultimately spiritual and unimaginably intense. If you and I think that our conflicts are anything other or anything less then we are shallow.

I have already spoken of the angels in connection with the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God occurs wherever God’s will is done perfectly. Every Sunday we repeat together, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s will is done, done perfectly, in heaven right now. Scripture speaks of the heavenly host which bears witness to God’s kingdom. In other words, God has innumerable witnesses in heaven before he has so much as one witness on earth. The kingdom of God has come to earth, we know, in the person of Jesus Christ, for in him God’s will is done perfectly. The kingdom which he brings to earth with him is witnessed to by the myriad of angels. This means that God will always have innumerable witnesses on earth even if earth-born witnesses like you and me are sadly lacking in quality and quantity. I find immense comfort in what scripture says about the angels. However much I may fail my Lord in serving and attesting that kingdom he brings with him, there are other creatures whose service and witness never fail. And therefore the kingdom of God will eventually superimpose itself upon and subdue the kingdoms of this world.

Listen to Karl Barth, the pre-eminent theologian of our century, a thinker of the same stature as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin. Barth writes, “Because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the apparently or genuinely troubled state of things on earth”. He wrote this a few years after World War II. Just before war had broken out Barth had been apprehended at his Saturday morning lecture in the University of Bonn, Germany. He had been deported immediately from Germany to his native Switzerland. As soon as hostilities with Germany had ceased the cold war with the Soviet Union had begun. While there was no war, hot or cold, in Switzerland, Barth never pretended that the Swiss were uncommonly virtuous; he readily admitted that his own country funded itself by harbouring the ill-gotten gains (the infamous unnamed accounts in the Swiss banks) of the most despicable criminals throughout the world. Nevertheless, “because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the…troubled state of things on earth”.

While we are speaking of the kingdom of God in the midst of a troubled earth you must have noticed that the two most angel-saturated developments spoken of in the New Testament are Christmas and Easter, the incarnation and the resurrection. Of course! The incarnation is God’s incursion of that world which he loves profligately yet which resists him defiantly. To see how much it resists him we need only look at Herod, who will go to murderous lengths in order to undo the beachhead God has established as he invades his world in his Son in order to reclaim it. So intense is the resistance that all of heaven’s resources must be mobilized to secure the beachhead and bear witness to it. At the resurrection of our Lord the angelic hosts appear again inasmuch as the victory God has won in raising his Son triumphant over the powers of death must be made known, witnessed to, throughout the cosmos. In view of the beachhead invasion which, once secured, is never retreated from; in view of the victory which, once won, is never undone on this troubled earth; in view of all this I think once more of Barth’s ringing declaration: “Because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the apparently or genuinely troubled state of things on earth”. Isn’t it worth learning about the angels just to go home this morning with our hearts full of that?

In conclusion I want to make three brief statements which I do not have time to develop.

 

ONE Because the heavenly host reminds that in everything, everywhere in life we have to do with the spiritual, the single most important thing any of us can do is pray. Because we are dealing with the spiritual whenever we deal with any aspect or dimension of life, the quintessential human act is prayer.

 

TWO Because the angels bear witness to God, always pointing away from themselves to him whom they serve, the most angelic character the world has seen is John the Baptist. John lived only to point away from himself to Jesus Christ. John neither wanted nor expected an honourary degree nor a civic reception nor public recognition nor a special fuss made of him. He wanted only to direct everyone’s attention away from himself to his Lord, saying, “He must increase and I must decrease”.

 

THREE Because the angels magnify the glory of God on earth, therefore the earth, the world, human history are never ultimately bleak. Evil-ridden, yes; pain-ridden, yes; incapable of saving themselves, yes. Nevertheless because “our great God and Saviour” (to quote Paul) cherishes his creation, and because the angels magnify God’s glory on earth, God’s glory in our world, God’s glory in the midst of our history, our situation is never finally bleak. For that glory which the angels find everywhere we are given eyes to see here and there, and one day we too shall see it everywhere as the kingdom of God, hidden now, is made manifest to all.

When next you come upon the word “angel” you will know that either it refers to “the angel of the Lord”, God himself acting as his own messenger, stamping himself unmistakably upon us and altering us forever after; or the word “angel” refers to that spirit-creature whose witness to God is unambiguous just because its service of God is unrelenting. Then you must think of the heavenly host, myriads of angels which surround us especially during those episodes when our own resources are slender and only the resources of him who sustained his Son will do for us. And then you must remember that wherever we struggle in life, our struggle is finally spiritual, and will be until that day when the earth is no longer troubled and the kingdom of God has eclipsed the kingdoms of this world for ever and ever.

F I N I S

Victor A. Shepherd

April 1993

 

The Message on a Billboard


Mark 1:14-15

I: — I often find myself feeling haunted. Much haunts me these days.I am haunted by the “free-fall” decline of our national denomination, The United Church of Canada. I don’t pay much attention to membership statistics, for I know how inaccurate membership figures are and how easy they are to inflate. I take much more seriously the figures concerning Sunday worship attendance. No doubt they can be (and are) somewhat inflated too, but with them there isn’t the same tendency to gross exaggeration. In 1965 the average Sunday worship attendance was one million and sixty thousand; in 1996, thirty years later, it is 300,000. The Sunday worship attendance of our denomination today is only 28% of what it was thirty years ago. We have declined 72%. What is the future of our denomination? Since Sunday worship attendance declines by 25,000 people per year, how long will it be before no one is left? I shall leave the arithmetic to you.

I am haunted by the pronouncements of denominational spokespersons. In a recent position paper on scriptural authority the strongest affirmation the spokesperson could make concerning Jesus was that he is “mentor and friend.” Mentor and friend? This falls abysmally short of what the apostles knew Jesus Christ to be, what they gladly confessed before the world regardless of cost to them: he is Son of God, Saviour, Lord, Messiah of Israel, Judge, and Sovereign over heaven and earth. Mentor and friend? My favourite school teacher is that!

At the most recent meeting of General Council a former moderator declared, “Our church is dying; since it is going to die anyway, let’s use its remaining resources to drive our favourite agendas.” This is shocking. The church of Jesus Christ cannot be co-opted in the interests of socio-political agendas. The church is the body of Christ. To co-opt it (or try to) is to co-opt the head, Jesus Christ himself. As sole, sovereign head, our Lord will not be co-opted. Anyone who thinks that the body can be co-opted while the head remains complacent; anyone who thinks this is going to find herself sifted.

I don’t wish to suggest that all worshipping bodies throughout the church are shrinking. On the contrary, many are swelling. At the same time, the international bodies in the English-speaking world that have parented The United Church (such as Church of Scotland Presbyterianism and English Methodism) are dying too. Both the Church of Scotland and the English Methodist Church will disappear, virtually, soon into the next century.

When Maureen and I were in Oxford this summer I spoke with some British Methodists about their denomination’s morbidity. They laughed (blasphemously!) and chortled, “About the time we’re all washed up we’ll unite with the Anglicans.” I said nothing, but I couldn’t imagine a corpse marrying a corpse and bearing any kind of offspring.

I am haunted by our situation here in Streetsville. Our Sunday attendance is smaller now than it was fifteen years ago. On those Sundays when we receive new members, twenty or thirty people are added to the membership roll. This being the case, we should be having to hold three or four services every Sunday to accommodate the crowds. But no one had any difficulty finding a seat this morning.

I used to be haunted by the falling away of so many from each year’s confirmation class. I used to be haunted that we were “confirming” so many young people in a faith they didn’t possess. My disquiet here, however, has given way to a much greater disquiet: I am much more haunted now upon observing that when young people are confirmed, frequently their parents disappear. It seems that the parents attended worship for years only until their child could get “certified” in some sense, and then the parents disappeared, plainly possessed of no throbbing faith themselves. I am driven now to ask many questions about our congregation. For instance, what is the spiritual temperature here? Is it high enough to warm a cold heart to that heart’s flash-point? Fire we know has many properties; but surely the most characteristic property of fire is that fire sets on fire. Is the spiritual temperature here high enough to ignite someone?

I am haunted by myself, haunted by suspicions that niggle me concerning myself. On the one hand I am sure of — have never doubted — the truth and reality of Jesus Christ, my inclusion in him by faith and therefore my salvation from him, and my vocation to the ministry. While I am certain of all this I fear that the gospel-message is frequently obscured when it leaves my lips. I can’t help my philosophical turn of mind; I can’t help having to think critically. Nonetheless, by the time I have discussed life’s problems and perplexities; by the time I have anticipated objections and misunderstandings, does the gospel of Jesus Christ sound more complicated than the wiring diagram of a computer? In my efforts not to sound simplistic, has the simple truth of the gospel been clouded? Has that word, sharper than a two-edged sword, according to the book of Hebrews, been rendered more blunt and more flaccid than a frayed length of old rope? I fear that the weekly 2500-word sermon appears to be written on the head of a pin, when all the time the truth of God needs to be painted on a billboard.

II: — Our Lord himself frequently painted the word on a billboard. He never painted it more starkly than the day he declared, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” This one sentence from Mark’s testimony is as simple, as unadorned a declaration of the gospel as we’ll ever hear. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is upon you; repent — now!, and abandon yourself to God’s deliverance.” Jesus announces, “God has brought his patient yet anguished involvement with a wayward people to a climax; he has brought it all to a climax in me. The kingdom of God is here. It’s the new reality. Give yourself up to it, and never look back!”

(i) The English word “gospel” translates a Greek word that means “good news.” In the Hebrew bible (which Jesus knew rather well), “good news” always has to do with deliverance at God’s hand. The good news of Jesus, the good news of the kingdom, is God’s definitive deliverance. God’s ultimate deliverance is deliverance from sin, judgement, condemnation, death (so far as individuals are concerned); and deliverance from evil in all its manifestations, subtleties and repercussions (so far as the creation is concerned.)

God made you and me to be glad and grateful covenant-partners with him. Instead he finds us wayward, defiant, disobedient. Finally, however, there appears one human covenant-partner who renders the Father the glad and grateful obedience the Father is owed.

God is frustrated and saddened over and over as humankind succumbs to temptation as readily as a bear eats garbage. Finally, however, there is given to the world one human being upon whom temptation is concentrated and yet who does not yield.

God is shaken at the way evil scourges his creation, disfiguring people and warping nature. At a point in history chosen inscrutably by him he appoints his Son to be that agent by which the ironfast grip of evil on the entire creation is broken. In his Son God has established a beachhead where evil concentrates its assault yet doesn’t triumph, a beachhead from which the conquering one moves inland undoing evil’s disfigurements, exposing evil’s subtlety, besting evil’s persistence. Everything has changed now that someone greater than our cosmic foe has taken the field on our behalf.

Yet there remains one matter to consider. What is the fate of humankind in view of the fact that sin is endemic in humankind, sin is a contradiction of God’s holiness, and God finally won’t tolerate it? What is the fate of humankind in view of the fact that were God to wink at sin or ignore it or overlook it he would possess a character no different from Paul Barnardo’s? Of his incomprehensible mercy God has identified himself fully with the one whom he has given to us. God has so identified himself with the Nazarene that when that one bears in himself the Father’s just judgement on sin, the Father himself is bearing in himself his own judgement on sin.

It all adds up to something huge: in Jesus Christ a wholly new sphere has been forged for us. In him a new environment has been fashioned. Nothing less than a new world, a new creation, surrounds us. The kingdom of God has come in Jesus Christ. The kingdom of God occurs wherever God’s will is done perfectly. In Jesus Christ the Father’s will for his creation is done. Then in Jesus Christ new “living room” has been fashioned where sin doesn’t pollute and evil doesn’t disfigure and hopelessness doesn’t dispirit and defeat itself is defeated. No wonder our Lord announces good news. Deliverance is now the sphere, the environment in which life unfolds — or at least in which it may. All we need do is enter the new sphere, enter the new environment, that now surrounds us.

(ii) To enter it is to repent. To repent is to turn, to make an about-turn. To make an about-turn is to return. And in fact everywhere in the Hebrew bible to repent is to return. To turn into the kingdom of God is to return to the God who made us, who laments over our departure from him, and who longs for our return.

When our Lord cries, “Repent, return”, he has in mind three startling images cherished by the Hebrew prophets before him.

(a) The first image is that of an adulterous wife returning to her husband. Adultery is horrific at any time. For adultery is the betrayal of the most intense intimacy; adultery is the violation of a promise; adultery is personally degrading; and adultery is a public humiliation of the faithful partner.

When Jesus cries, “The kingdom of God is upon you: Repent!”, he is urging us to return to the God whose son or daughter we are meant to be. To return is to recover that intimacy with God which is nothing less than our greatest good and our fullest humanity. To return is to uphold the promise we have made to him on countless occasions throughout our lives. To return is to leave off our self-degradation (for make no mistake: however much our society ridicules a doctrine of sin as “Victorian” or “Puritan” or even “mediaeval”, sin remains invariably degrading.) To return is turn from publicly humiliating God to publicly praising him for his incomprehensible patience.

(b) The second image of returning that the prophets cherished is that of pagan idol-worshippers returning to the worship of the true and living God. The Hebrew word for “idols” is “the nothings.” Idols are literally nothing. At the same time, only a fool would pretend that “nothing” is inconsequential. A vacuum is nothing, yet a vacuum has immense power: it sucks down everything around it. A lie is nothing, for a lie is a statement without substance. Yet lies destroy people every day. Delusions are nothing, for a delusion is without foundation. Yet deluded people are at best utterly misled and at worst out-and-out insane. Most tellingly, perhaps, is the fact that we are inevitably conformed to what we worship. To worship any of the “nothings” is to become nothing ourselves.

Since stubborn refusal of the kingdom of God is self-annihilation, why don’t we repent, return, and become someone, that child of God created in his image and impelled to cry, “Abba, Father”, eternally? When our Lord pleads with us to repent he is pleading with us to renounce our pursuit of nothing (the lie, the delusion, the spiritual vacuum) only to find ourselves plunged into truth and reality, the kingdom of God.

(c) The third image of repentance, return, found in the prophets is the image of rebel subjects returning to their rightful ruler. The rebel subjects have thought they could rule themselves, only to find that their inept attempts at self-rule left them chaotic and fragmented. Their rebellion was born of ignorance of themselves, and their ignorance was born of ingratitude to their sovereign. Grateful now to that rightful ruler who alone can subdue disorder, and possessed now of the self-knowledge that without him they are ungovernable, they return.

To repent is to return to that king apart from whose rule disorder will engulf us. Then the only sensible thing to do is suspend foolish rebellion and fall at the feet of the king himself.

(iii) “The kingdom of God is upon you; repent, and believe in the good news.” Everywhere in the Hebrew bible “good news” has to do with one thing: deliverance. To believe in good news is to welcome the deliverance; more than welcome it, abandon ourselves to it. We western people who are imbued with so much Greek philosophy that we assume that to believe something is to add it to our mental furniture; to believe is to increase our reservoir of ideas. But to eastern people, Jews, to believe is always to trust. To believe in the good news is to trust — entrust ourselves to — the deliverance that God has wrought for us.

For either we trust the righteousness of Christ in which we are clothed as we “put on” him in faith, or we hold up before God the rags of our self-righteousness, ragged and dirty in equal measure. Either we trust the victory of Jesus Christ over all that aims at sundering us from him forever, or we persist in attempting our own victories in the face of cosmic forces that laugh to see us so stupid. Either we trust the amnesty that the judge presses upon us just because he has absorbed into himself his own judgement upon us, or we try to exonerate ourselves before him, even as our defilement leaves him gasping in his holiness.

To believe in the good news is to renounce all pretence of self-deliverance and all delusion concerning the need for deliverance; to believe in the good news is to embrace the deliverer himself, to give ourselves up to him.

From time-to-time I feel somewhat alone in my zeal for the gospel and my passion to see people captured by the gospel. Whenever I begin to feel alone I recall Elijah, who felt similarly lonely, only to have God tell him that there were 7000 faithful Israelites who had not bowed their knee to Baal. As I recall the story of Elijah I remember that there are dozens in this congregation who have already heard our Lord’s announcement of the kingdom, returned in every sense cherished by the Hebrew prophets, and abandoned themselves to him in the new world he has fashioned.

Dozens here have already done this. Some, however, have not. Won’t you join us? Won’t you join us today?

                                                                       Victor Shepherd    

September 1997

 

“Follow Me!” The Summons and Invitation to Discipleship

Mark 1:14-20       Ezekiel 13:1-3    Romans 12:1-2        Matthew 20:29-34

 

I:– I had to see it to believe it. It happened on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. The Shepherd family was walking down a country road when a flock of sheep appeared walking up the road. The sheep detoured into a field. In order to detour into the field all they had to do was turn into the field. The first sheep, however, the lead sheep, had leapt over a sizeable rock that it could just as easily have trotted alongside; whereupon every last sheep in the entire flock had leapt over the rock too. Leaping over the rock was a wholly unnecessary complication. Still, the sheep who followed seemed incapable of understanding this; they simply did what the animal in front of them was doing. It was a lesson for me in the psychology of animal conformity.

Everyone is aware that there is a psychology of human conformity. People are easily led. People follow without thinking. Or at least what passes for “thinking” is simply an unconscious rationalization of conformity. Or what passes for “thinking” is merely the re-shuffling of the same old half-dozen items of their mental furniture. The utter mindlessness of it all is deadening.

And then Jesus appears with words on his lips that he repeats over and over: “Follow me!” He repeats himself in a hundred different contexts. “Follow me!” What’s he doing, anyway? Is he expecting to find a sheep-mentality in us? Is he trying to foster a sheep-mentality in us? Does he want to exploit it, the way self-serving political mesmerists have exploited a sheep-mentality? Does Christian discipleship reduce us to being a “camp-follower” of Jesus, “camp-follower” being a colloquial expression for someone who couldn’t think his way out of a phone booth and who has a dependency-problem as well?

As a matter of fact when Jesus cries, “Follow me!”, he wants to see none of this. When he cries, “Follow me!”, he is urging us to resist mindless conformity; he is calling us to defy social expectation; he is pressing us to think — genuinely think — rather than re-shuffle meagre intellectual furniture and re-mumble the half-dozen cliches that pass for “thought”. Our Lord’s call to follow him is a call to throw off the sheep-mentality, throw off social dependency, throw off thoughtless conformity.

II: — Let’s look more closely at Christ’s “Follow me!”, his call to discipleship. His call is a summons, a command. He isn’t suggesting that we follow him; not wishing that we might; he’s ordering us! “Follow me!” It’s a command. Coming from the Incarnate one himself, it’s a command weighted with the authority of God. We are summoned to follow him. (Plainly, there’s an urgency to the matter.) At the same time we are summonsed to follow him. (Plainly, there’s judicial authority here.)

Yet our Lord’s “Follow me!” isn’t command only; it is also invitation. Were his “Follow me!” command only, he would appear cold and coercive; on the other hand, were it invitation only, he would appear sentimental and helpless. His summons has the warmth of an invitation; his invitation has the authority of a summons.

There is yet another aspect to Christ’s “Follow me!” So far from the mindlessness of sheep-like conformity, Jesus insists that we think. And not merely think (think, that is, with the “old” mind), but rather that we acquire a new mind, a different mind, a mind shaped by the truth of God; a mind oriented to the kingdom of God. Following Jesus always entails doing the one thing that sheep don’t appear to do: think.

Ponder for a minute the place scripture gives to thinking. Think about the place scripture gives to the mind. We are to love God with our mind (Mark 12:30); we are to have the mind that was in Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:5); we are to have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16); we are to shun the senseless mind, the darkened mind (Rom. 1:21); we are to avoid the hardened mind (2 Cor. 3:14), the veiled mind (2 Cor. 3:15), the corrupted mind (Titus 1:15), the double mind (James 4:8). Just as we are to get rid of the base mind (Rom.1:28), we are to acquire a renewed mind (Eph. 4:23). More than merely acquire a renewed mind, we are to find ourselves transformed — head to toe, through-and-through, every which way — we are to find our entire self transformed, beginning with the renewal of our mind (Rom. 12:2). Discipleship never means sheep-like stupidity, unthinking conformity. Discipleship always includes the most rigorous thinking, thinking infused by the truth of God and oriented to the kingdom of God.

Whenever our Lord cries, “Follow me!”, he is ordering us to abandon ourselves to him; at the same time he is inviting us to join him in an exhilarating venture. And in all of this he’s insisting that we think with that renewed mind which scorns “dark” thoughts and “base” thoughts and “senseless” thoughts.

III: — How important is it to follow Jesus? It’s very important; in fact there’s nothing more important. Over and over in the written gospels we come upon our Lord summoning people, inviting people, to follow him. They do. Matthew stood up, left behind whatever it was that was preoccupying him, and followed. So did James and John, Peter and Andrew. The text tells us that these fellows “left everything behind and followed him.” Left everything? It means they threw in their lot with him; they held back nothing of themselves. They didn’t test the water with their big toe; instead they dived in. They didn’t negotiate a “trial discipleship”. (Not that our Lord would have negotiated any such thing.) Unlike Lot’s wife, who looked back, half-wistfully, at what she had left behind, only to find herself petrified; unlike Lot’s wife, they don’t look back. Instead they hear and heed the master when he says, “Anyone who puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is someone not fit for the kingdom of God.”

If you and I are resolute in our following then we can only keep looking at Jesus. But because we are followers he is always ahead of us. Then to keep looking at him is always to be looking ahead. (To try to follow someone ahead of us while at the same time looking back behind us is simply to be what James calls “a double-minded person.”)

How important is it to obey the summons, to respond to the invitation? What could be more important in view of what ails us? What ails us is best seen in those who did follow Jesus in the days of his earthly ministry.

(i) Among his followers were tax-collectors. Tax-collectors were the bottom rung of Palestinian society. They were known as traitors, collaborators with the Roman occupiers, and greedy to boot. They were the most isolated people of their society. Those among them who followed Jesus found release from their acquisitiveness and relief from their inner anguish, plus company and camaraderie that they had never known before.

(ii) Among his followers were “sinners”. Isn’t everyone a sinner? Of course. But in first century Palestine “sinner” was the term used for people who weren’t religiously observant. They didn’t go to church on Sunday morning, they drank too much on Saturday night, they got pregnant when they shouldn’t have and got divorced when they felt like it (if they had even bothered to marry). And yet they found in Jesus the bone-deep truth and the undeniable solace that so much religion (let’s be honest) seems to obscure.

(iii) Among his followers were “crowds”. (“Multitudes” is the older word.) They were the people undistinguished in the vast sea of humanity. They weren’t notorious like the tax-collectors; they weren’t flagrant like the “sinners”; they were ordinary folk who suffered in the quiet way that all humankind suffers. Undistinguished in the mass, they were individually precious to the master. In following Jesus they knew something that no clever wordsmith could ever get them to deny: in the company of the master they found life brighter, happier, fruitful, promising.

(iv) Among his followers were two blind men. Blindness, in scripture, is both a distressing physical ailment and a metaphor for a much worse spiritual condition. A few people are physically blind — and this is bad enough; everyone is spiritually blind — and this is horrific. (The two blind men, in other words, represent all of us.) The two blind men hear of the approach of Jesus. They call out to him, “Son of David, have mercy on us.” “Son of David”: it means “Messiah”, the one in whom all of life’s wrongs are to be put right. Jesus stops before them and asks them what they want from him. “Give us our sight; just let us see.” He touches them. And immediately, Matthew tells us, immediately they follow him — out of gratitude.

All of us need to be made to see. How shall we enter the kingdom unless we first see it? How can we follow Jesus unless we first recognize him? Spiritual sight is ours at the master’s touch. Thereafter we follow him forever out of gratitude.

How important is it to follow? There is nothing more important than having what tax-collectors, “sinners”, crowds and blind men came to have from the master himself.

Are we not yet convinced? How important it is to obey the summons and rejoice in the invitation is obvious as soon as we look at what happens when we don’t follow — don’t follow Jesus, that is.

Peter tells us bluntly in his second letter. If we don’t follow Jesus, says Peter, then we “follow cleverly devised myths”. (2 Peter 1:16) “Cleverly devised myths” are the seductive “isms” that sweep up naive people, all the way from New Age pantheism to Old Age paganism to Every Age racism, ageism, classism, sexism, materialism.

In the second place, says Peter, if we don’t follow Jesus then we “follow our own licentiousness”. (2 Peter 2:2) The meaning of this is plain and there is no need to amplify it.

In the third place, Peter insists, if we don’t follow Jesus then we “follow the way of Balaam”. (2 Peter 2:15) Balaam, a figure from the older testament, was noted for his self-absorbing greed.

Not to follow Jesus is always to follow something better not followed at all. Then why not follow Jesus?

IV: — Those who did follow Jesus: what did they come to know? What did they come to have? What did they come to enjoy? In other words, what is the final outcome of discipleship?

(i) They came to know, have, enjoy an intimacy with the master himself that is finally indescribable. We must never undervalue this simple truth. We must never think that the final outcome of discipleship is doctrinal sophistication (important though this is) or a “world-view” that is supposedly better than someone else’s “world-view” or coping mechanisms for life that are better than anything the pharmacist sells. The outcome of our discipleship, the ultimate end of everything we do in church life, is intimacy with the living person of Jesus Christ.

I am moved every time I read Paul’s simple assertion, “I count everything loss (‘nothing’) because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Phil. 3:8) Paul doesn’t say that he valued everything about himself as nothing; he says that he valued everything about himself as nothing compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ.

Then what is there about the apostle that is otherwise so very valuable?

He is a Roman citizen. Few residents of Rome every got to be citizens of the great city. And non-residents? Fewer still. A non-resident Jew who is a citizen? This was so very rare that Paul belonged to a most exclusive elite. Moreover, in a day when a few people were allowed to purchase their citizenship, Paul reminded a Roman military officer who had purchased his citizenship that he, Paul, hadn’t purchased his: he had been born a citizen. Paul’s father or grandfather had rendered outstanding service to the Roman cause, and had been rewarded with a citizenship that was passed down from father to son. Paul belonged to a very privileged class.

He is also a “Hebrew of the Hebrews”. This means that Aramaic is his mother-tongue. To be sure, he speaks Greek fluently, like anyone born in Tarsus, but he speaks Aramaic as his mother-tongue. Jews born outside of greater Jerusalem tended to speak Greek as their mother tongue. If a Jew born outside of Jerusalem spoke Aramaic as mother-tongue it meant that he belonged to one of the old-money, aristocratic Jewish families. It was like being a Kennedy in Boston or a Molson in Montreal or a Massey in Toronto. Paul belongs to the topmost social class.

He is also a Pharisee; that is, he is faultless in his religious observances.

He never says that all of this is a trifle. (His Roman citizenship certainly wasn’t a trifle the day he called on it to spare himself a lynching!) He says it’s all a trifle compared to the surpassing worth of his intimacy with Jesus Christ.

To follow Jesus is to know, and have, and enjoy as much ourselves.

(ii) In the second place to follow is to be admitted to the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God being the present world, now capsized, turned right side up once again. To follow is to see that “kingdom of God” isn’t just another term for the world around us. Neither is at an aspect of the world, or an extension of the world. The kingdom of God is this world contradicted and corrected.

Think of power. The world looks upon power as the capacity to coerce. But in the kingdom of God, power is the capacity to fulfil God’s purpose — when God’s purpose is characteristically fulfilled by what the world regards as powerlessness (the cross, the foolishness of preaching, the social insignificance of the Christians in Corinth). Plainly, the kingdom of God is the contradiction and correction of the world.

Think of gainful employment. Why do we work? There are many reasons why we work: we need to sustain ourselves materially, non-work is psychologically stressful, work gives expression to education and training. But those with kingdom-understanding hear the apostle Paul when he says (Ephesians 4) that we are to work diligently and honestly in order to help those in need.

Think of vice. When the world mentions “vice” it has in mind the most lurid expressions of sexual irregularity. But subtle dishonesty and “profitable” shortcuts here and there? This is something of which people boast. Scripture, on the other hand groups the most lurid sexual irregularity and simple covetousness together, since in the kingdom of God they are alike, and in the same degree, manifestations of sin.

To follow Jesus is to be admitted to the kingdom of God, which kingdom is our present world contradicted and corrected.

(iii) To follow, lastly, is to gain knowledge of ourselves. Think of Peter. Peter is a fisherman. Jesus tells him he will soon be “fishing” for men and women. Of himself Peter cannot — and knows he cannot — “catch” other human beings for that kingdom which will never be shaken. Yet in time he finds himself doing what he never could do of himself.

He is told that when the heat is turned up he will melt down and deny his Lord over and over. He protests that he will never do this — only to find that he melts down worse than ever he thought he would, so treacherous is he under pressure. Yet when he recovers he’s not left knowing himself to be coward and failure and traitor. The event that acquaints him with the treachery he never thought he had in him is the same event that commissions him the leader of the young church in Jerusalem. Think of what he’s learned about himself now: he can become an enthusiastic disciple, insist naively that he won’t crumble, crumble shamefully, and none the less finally find himself exalted as the leader of Christ’s fellow-followers.

What is there yet for you and me to learn about ourselves? We are going to learn it only as we, like Peter, cry to Jesus, “We have left everything and followed you!”, only to hear Jesus say to us, “There is no follower who won’t get it all back a hundredfold, and in the age to come eternal life.” (Mark 10: 28-30)

Myself, I want only to follow, keep on following, keep on following ever more closely.

 

                                                                 (V. Shepherd May 2002)

 

Come Alongside Us!

Mark 1:40           2 Corinthians 5:20        2 Corinthians 7:6

 

When I was a child few things delighted me more than a kaleidoscope. I was fascinated endlessly by the bright colours, the rich patterns, the ever-changing arrangements as the kaleidoscope was rotated ever so slightly. To be sure, each pattern was repeated several times over, depending on how many mirrors the kaleidoscope had in it. Yet whenever it was rotated a new pattern, an unforeseeable pattern, always emerged.

I am no longer a child. Words have become my kaleidoscope, biblical words especially. Word-patterns delight me; more than delight me, they instruct me, enrich me, magnify my faith and my hope and my love and finally my gratitude to God.

One New Testament word that is found in a variety of patterns has helped and encouraged me for years, the word PARAKALEO. Its meaning is easy to grasp. KALEO means “to call”; PARA, “alongside”. PARAKALEO, “to call alongside”. The root meaning is always to call alongside, to call someone else alongside us. As the one word is used in different contexts its meaning takes on slightly different shades. It means to ask for help, to beseech, to beg, to plead, to urge, to exhort, to entreat; it even means to comfort.

Today we are going to look through the word-kaleidoscope, only to find ourselves helped immensely as we rotate it slightly and are given new riches in our Christian life.

 

I: — Let’s begin with the apostle Paul’s urgent plea in 2 Corinthians 5: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God!” “We beseech you.” The “we” are Paul and his fellow-apostles. He is pleading with his readers, “We have taken our stand with Jesus Christ; in his company we have found ourselves reconciled to God. Won’t you come and stand alongside us? We are calling you alongside us. Come! Stand with us! We beseech you. Be reconciled to God!”

Actually Paul’s urgent plea is his appeal at the end of his declaration of the heart of the gospel. The heart of the gospel is the provision God has made in Christ, specifically in the cross, for sinners who are living at this moment under condemnation. Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus reminded his hearers every day ultimate loss is possible; and not only possible, inevitable — apart from our seizing in faith him who is God’s provision for us. “We beseech you. We’re calling to you; come and stand alongside us as we stand with Jesus Christ; for then you too will be reconciled to God, and the just judge will henceforth be your eternal Father.”

The “standard-brand” churches in North America are declining. Declining? They are crashing! Crashing? They have already crashed and are now burning up.

Is this regrettable? We ought not to grieve at the disappearance of institutions that have used the name of Jesus Christ but have disdained him and his truth. For 100 years the United Methodist Church (U.S.A.) has had a theology so dilute, so anaemic, that it didn’t have enough gospel in it to save a humming-bird. The United Methodists also pioneered frivolity that was worse than frivolity. (For instance, a Methodist clergyman “married” two mynah birds, and was left undisciplined by the denomination.) Currently the denomination is a leader in “political correctness” and the myriad causes connected with political correctness — all of which contradict the gospel. The United Methodists have lost 35% of their members in the last few years and don’t know how to stop the haemorrhage.

The Presbyterians in the U.S.A. are going down like a team of sky-divers without parachutes. It was the American Presbyterians who introduced the “Sophia” blasphemy, the feminized paganism — out-and-out paganism — that speaks (among other things) of the sacramental significance of women’s body-fluids. (Lest we appear to be singling out the American Presbyterians we should note that our denomination sent over 50 delegates to the Sophia conference.)

Speaking of our own denomination, the year I commenced studying theology (1967) my own pastor preached an advent sermon on John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave…”. Here he cut off the text. Still, I assumed that the remainder of the text was implied. I was wrong. “For God so loved the world that he gave. And we (Rhodes Avenue congregation) should therefore give cash instead of food hampers to disadvantaged people at Christmas. Food hampers are demeaning; cash isn’t. Therefore cash should be given. After all, God gave, didn’t he?” I refrained from leaping out of my pew and asking out loud, “Does the text tell us that God gave cash?” But I did go home heartsick and ashamed.

Richard Niebuhr, an American thinker, commented 50 years ago concerning the anaemic pulpit pronouncements of his era, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

We have expected God to sustain a church just because the word “church” appears in the bulletin or on the signboard. Yet I trust we have not forgotten our Lord’s insistence that he will deny those who deny him. I trust we are not “lounging” on his promise, “On this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it”, for his promise presupposes the “rock” of Peter’s confession of Jesus Christ himself. Where the “rock” isn’t honoured, there is no promise.

I have long been haunted by my failure to declare the gospel as unambiguously and as forthrightly as the master himself insists it should be. In the days of his earthly ministry our Lord’s opponents faulted him and his followers for not observing all the ritualistic niceties around ceremonial hand-washing. “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?”, they asked Jesus venomously. As always, Jesus didn’t answer their question; instead he replied with his own question: “Why do you fellows transgress the command of God?” Then Jesus turned to his disciples and said, fully in the hearing of his opponents, “Those fellows are blind guides; leave them alone.”

Our Lord didn’t hesitate to state directly, starkly, even confrontationally, that there are individuals and groups and organizations who are so far from being spiritually helpful as to be no more than blind guides. Are we so bent on being inoffensive that we have lost our capacity to distinguish between gospel and gobbledegook? Would we rather appear to agree with an unbelieving world than appear to stand with Jesus?

A parishioner in Streetsville who cherishes me told me if the preaching here became any more stark it would sound shrill. Perhaps it would. But I am willing to take the risk.

Others have complained that the gospel (not my preaching, now, but the gospel itself) is narrow. I admit that it is narrow. After all, according to the apostles Jesus Christ alone is the incarnate one. He alone is the sovereign one, ruling over the entire creation. Through him alone and for him alone there has been made all that exists. The apostles are therefore entirely consistent with all of this when they cry, “…there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Narrow? The effectiveness of a knife depends on the narrowness of its cutting edge. Only the narrowest-edged scalpel can do life-saving surgery; no surgeon can operate with a crow-bar!

Do I sound shrill? narrow? The gospel is razor-sharp! Only such a gospel, says the book of Hebrews, penetrates profoundly and cuts curatively.

“We beseech you, we implore you, we plead with you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. We are calling you to come alongside us. For we, like Philip and Nathanael, have found the Messiah. Oddly, he’s from a one-horse town, Nazareth. But don’t let that put you off; he is God’s provision for a world lost apart from him. Come alongside us, stand with us and find out for yourselves.”

 

II: — As we turn the kaleidoscope ever so slightly a subtly different pattern appears. The root meaning is still “to call alongside”. In the new pattern, however, the word isn’t used to call neighbours alongside us to stand with Jesus; now the word is used to call Jesus himself alongside us, to call Jesus alongside us who are believers; to call Jesus closer alongside us who have already taken our stand with him and now know that we need him more urgently than ever. In the new pattern the word means to ask for help; any kind of help.

In the written gospels a Roman officer is found beseeching Jesus on behalf of his paralyzed servant. People bring a blind man to Jesus and beg him to grant him sight. A leper comes to Jesus beseeching him to cleanse him.

Of course help is sought for physical complaints: leprosy, paralysis, and so on. Nevertheless, everywhere in the written gospels physical distresses are also symbols of spiritual distresses. Deafness is a physical distress that our Lord relieves, to be sure; at the same time it is a symbol for that spiritual deafness which is an inability to hear and obey the word of God — a much greater distress. Blindness is terrible in itself; worse still is that spiritual blindness whereby we cannot even see the kingdom of God (says Jesus — John 3:3), much less enter it.

When people beseech Jesus, beg Jesus, call him alongside, regardless of what they call him alongside for initially, ultimately they are calling him alongside for spiritual relief and restoration. They are calling him alongside themselves inasmuch as they can no longer endure their own spiritual deformities and disfigurements, believers that they are.

How do we know what spiritual defects and deficits beset us? The longer we spend in the company of Jesus the more surely they are pointed out to us in any number of ways.

After a church meeting one day a man put his arm around my shoulder and kindly said, “Victor, you have many gifts — and gentleness isn’t one of them. It is a fruit of the Spirit, you know; it is a characteristic of Christ’s people. Think about it.” I didn’t need to be told any more.

The man who put his arm around me and told in the proper context for such telling wasn’t suggesting for minute that I turn wimpy or faint-hearted. He simply knew that unnecessary abrasiveness has nothing to do with quiet strength. The word that is most commonly translated “gentleness” or “meekness” in the New Testament is used in classical Greek of a wild horse that has been tamed but whose spirit has never been broken. A wild horse is of no use; a tame horse whose spirit has been broken is also of no use. A wild horse, however, now tamed, but still spirited: this is what the New Testament has in mind when it speaks of Jesus himself and his people as “gentle” or “meek”.

When the man of whom I have spoken acquainted me with a spiritual deformity that had gone unnoticed for too long, I knew I had to search my heart, go to my knees, and fall on my face before God in repentance. At the same time I knew that there are — there must be — so many other defects and deficits that shouldn’t be ignored.

Now don’t think all of this depresses me. On the contrary, it cheers me; after all, I’m being helped; I’m moving ahead in my discipleship. Continued repentance doesn’t spell chronic depression. Just the opposite: continued repentance spells constant improvement! It is in this spirit that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, 1517. It is in this spirit that Luther penned his first thesis: “When our Lord said `Repent’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”

Now to say that continued repentance spells constant improvement rather than chronic depression is certainly true. At the same time, I shouldn’t want to say that as the mirror is held up to us a tear or two is never in order. When the hymnwriter cries,

true lowliness of heart,
which takes the humbler part
and o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing

— when I hear this I know the hymnwriter is right. When Peter wept upon realizing how shabby his treatment of Jesus had been in the courtyard are we going to say that Peter ought not to have wept? that his response was exaggerated? that it was a sign of mental ill-health?

Frequently in sermons I mention my favourite 17th century Puritan writer, Thomas Watson. Watson, I find, is the most helpful spiritual diagnostician I have come upon. He is also master of the pithy, penetrating word. Concerning our ongoing repentance Watson writes, “Such as will not weep with Peter shall weep like Judas.” Myself, if I have a choice between weeping with Peter or weeping like Judas, it will always be with Peter. Peter, restored, became a leader whom people so venerated that they counted it an honour just to have his shadow fall on them. Judas, on the other hand, was said to have gone “where he belonged”.

When a friend, (or an enemy, for that matter) or our spouse, or any gospel- sensitive puts the finger on our lingering depravity (which lingers despite our having stood with Jesus) we can only call out for the Master to come closer alongside us, since like the blind man and the leper and the paralytic we need help.

 

III: — We rotate the kaleidoscope slightly once more and a slightly different pattern emerges again. The root meaning of the word is still “to call alongside”, but in the new context it means “to comfort”.

Scripture everywhere makes plain that the profoundest comfort comes from God. Paul speaks of him as “the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort”. (2 Corinthians 1:3) Yet even as Paul says that God is the God of all comfort he also says that he (Paul himself) is comforted by the presence of any number of Christians. Elsewhere in his correspondence Paul says it is God who comforts the downcast, while in the same sentence he writes that God comforted a downcast Paul through the visit of Titus. (2 Corinthians 7:6)

Hasn’t this been your experience a thousand times over? To be sure, occasionally when I have been downcast the person who proved to be the vehicle of God’s comfort “mysteriously” appeared at my door or at my office or on the telephone. More frequently, however, when downcast I have deliberately “called alongside” me another person whom I expected to be humanly helpful — only to have found this person an unknowing vehicle of the comfort of the One who is the God of all comfort.

When Paul found Titus to be a comfort it wasn’t merely that Paul was feeling a bit lonely one day and thought it would be pleasant to see a friendly face. On the contrary, when Paul found Titus a comfort Paul had been speaking of himself as “afflicted at every turn: fighting without and fear within”. Every day the apostle had to struggle. Every day he was immersed in conflict: conflict with political authorities who wanted to abuse him, or imprison him, or even execute him (which they did eventually); conflict with his own ethnic group that looked upon him as a traitor; conflict most painfully with fellow-Christians whose immaturity, pettiness, and failure to grasp all of the gospel and all of its implications sandpapered him. “Fighting without and fear within”: it sounds unrelievable! And yet relief! the comfort of a fellow-believer whose presence, manner, word, affection were everything! A fellow-believer who came alongside and — without ever intending to — became the vehicle of God’s own comfort.

I don’t wish to illustrate my own experience here, for to do so would embarrass several people who are here this morning. But I am unembarrassed to say that the apostle’s word rings true with me just because his experience with Titus and my experience with those I cannot name are identical.

I am no longer a child. I rarely pick up a kaleidoscope today. But I constantly pick up the book that testifies of Jesus Christ and testifies of the experience of so many of his followers. The words in the book are like a kaleidoscope to me: brilliantly coloured patterns that change slightly as settings shift.

PARAKALEO: it means to call someone alongside.

We call others alongside us to take their stand with Jesus. This is evangelism.

We call Jesus himself to come alongside us — closer alongside us — for we need help with our residual depravity. This is serious discipleship.

We call fellow-believers and our Father himself alongside us when we are beset with “fighting without and fear within”, only to find that fellow-believers are the vehicle of our Father who is himself the God of all comfort.

I have moved beyond childhood; but the child’s delight, the child’s amazement, the child’s thrill — this I never want to get beyond. For the word of God is as endlessly rich as you and I are endlessly needy.

                                                                  Victor A. Shepherd     

October 1995

 

Is It Waste Or Wonder?

Mark 4:1-9; 13-25

1] I have seen the Douglas Fir trees in the coastal region of British Columbia. The Douglas Firs are magnificent: their height, their circumference, their mass, their age (400 years old, in some cases.) To behold the Douglas Firs is to find oneself awed at their splendour, their resilience, their immensity.

As often as I see this arboreal magnificence it never occurs to me exclaim, “What a waste! Think of how few trees grew up compared to all the fir cones that fell to the forest floor.” Upon seeing the Douglas Firs you would never say, “What’s so very impressive? Ninety-nine per cent of the cones that fell upon the ground rotted away without remainder.” Anyone who spoke like this we’d regard as deficient on several fronts.

 

2] In the parable of the sower and the seed, a parable about a huge amount of seed sown and little seed that comes to anything, we have an incident from the earthly life and ministry of Jesus himself. This gospel incident occurred around 30 A.D. when Jesus was moving around Palestine. Mark wrote his gospel about 68 A.D., almost 40 years later. Plainly Mark thought the gospel incident to be something the Christians in Rome needed to hear in 68. Indeed they did. For by 68 emperor Nero was on the rampage. Whether sane or not, Nero was certainly savage. He persecuted Christians relentlessly, covering some in pitch and setting them on fire, feeding others to wild animals, and crucifying others still. The Christian community in Rome wasn’t large; every day it seemed to be getting smaller. Its leaders were saying to each other, “We’ve spent 40 years sowing the seed of the gospel. So little seems to have come of it, since the church remains numerically small.” Then church leaders asked themselves another question, a haunting question: “Since sowing the seed of the gospel engenders faith in Jesus Christ, and since faith in Christ entails public confession of Christ, and since public confession brings on savage persecution, is it right for us to go on sowing the seed of gospel? Should we be inviting people to their execution?”

Mark knew that the answer to their question was to be found in the earthly utterances of Jesus, which utterances had circulated orally for 40 years. Mark knew it was time to commit these earthly utterances of Jesus to writing so that Christians would always have them. And so Mark wrote his 16-chapter gospel, containing the parable of the sower (together with the explanation of the parable.) Mark knew that Christ’s word 40 years earlier would inform and sustain and direct his fellow-Christians in Rome now.

 

3] Actually the parable of the sower (as we’ve been taught to call it) is really a parable about soil. It’s a parable about different kinds of soil.

The first kind of soil is a footpath whose earth passers-by have trampled down rock-hard. The seed never even penetrates this kind of soil. The seed sits on the surface, but only for a minute before the birds eat it up. The birds? For those slow to understand (people like us) Jesus explains, “Satan immediately takes away the word that’s been sown on these hardened people.” So far as the gospel is concerned, these people are simply inert.

The second kind of soil is rocky ground. The situation of the people likened to rocky ground is more complex. In fact there are three phases to their response when they hear the gospel.

Phase 1 The seed of the gospel germinates in them. As it germinates and takes root new life appears and these people rejoice. The gospel brings peace and freedom. Their new-found peace and freedom exhilarate them. Joy!

Phase 2 Their endurance is but momentary. They thought they saw signs of stability and endurance in themselves, but the signs they thought they saw are deceptive.

Phase 3 Defeat overtakes them. They are defeated at the onset of hardship. To be sure, the seed of the gospel germinated in them; it even took root; life appeared; but it didn’t last. Hardship snuffed it out. Hardship exposed their shallow root system as so very shallow as not to be able to sustain them.

The third kind of soil is a brier patch. The seed of the gospel germinates in these people too, bringing them to faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Their faith is genuine. It develops and appears full of promise. While it appears full of promise, however, it never matures in that distractions, many different distractions, find it withering from neglect. What are the deadly distractions? Jesus mentions “the cares of the world, the delight in riches, and the desire for other things.”

We must be sure to understand that the cares of the world are just that: cares. They aren’t trifles; they aren’t trivia; they aren’t toys. They are legitimate cares: earning a living, raising children, caring for aged parents, finding accommodation, coping with illness. Our Lord never pretends these cares aren’t legitimate. Even so, he says and we should note, if they distract us they are spiritually lethal. The cares are legitimate; the distraction which they occasion isn’t. Then we mustn’t allow cares to distract us.

Ever since I was old enough to reflect on the Christian life and challenges to it, I’ve been inspired by people whose challenges didn’t find them distracted but who fended off the illegitimate distraction of cares that were legitimate in themselves. These people, inspiring me repeatedly for 50 years, stand out for me like beacons, lighthouses, even icons. One such person was my maternal grandfather. During the depression my grandfather worked in the factory of the Ford Motor Company in Windsor. Factory workers in those days were paid a pittance. My grandfather had to support a wife and four teenaged children. He was out of work for five months in 1930 and six months in 1931. Throughout this period his family walked to church every Sunday, and every Sunday my grandfather placed his offering in the offering plate. My mother tells me their neighbours in the working class neighbourhood where they lived thought my grandfather crazy because he went to church to praise God in the midst of the “Great Depression”, while fellow church-members thought him crazy because he contributed his offering when he had no work. Jesus says the cares of the world are genuine cares; the distraction that they can occasion, however, is without excuse.

There are distractions in addition to the cares of the world, says Jesus. These other distractions are the delight in riches and the desire for other things. There’s nothing legitimate about them. They pander to and foster what’s basest in us: envy, greed, craving for social superiority. Of themselves, the delight in riches and the desire for other things are nothing but frivolousness and foolishness and frippery. These distractions are shallow, as shallow as cares are profound. Still, whether profound or shallow, distractions are distractions. They cause to wither that developing faith which to date has given every indication of flourishing. Distractions appear to be insignificant. But in matters of the Spirit, says Jesus, distractions are as deadly as Satan’s most frontal assault.

The fourth kind of soil is fertile soil, uncluttered, receptive. The seed that is sown here germinates, takes root, develops, matures; all with the result that astonishing fruitfulness appears. The yield is mind-boggling. Jesus speaks of the yield as 30 times greater than the quantity of seed sown, 60 times greater, even 100! We shouldn’t overpress the arithmetical analogy; our Lord means us to understand that the yield is so munificent as to be incalculable. Only 25% of the seed ever matures (without overpressing the arithmetic)? But the 25% that does mature yields a fruitfulness that no one can add up.

 

4] By 68 A.D. Christians in Rome were lamenting to each other, “So much sowing, and so few results.” Whereupon Mark brought forward and wrote up a word from the earthly ministry of Jesus 40 years earlier: “Keep on sowing; one day the yield will be and be seen to be astonishing.”

There’s more to be said. In the teaching that immediately follows the parable of the sower Jesus says, “No one who possesses a lamp puts it under a basket or hides it under abed. Anyone who possesses a lamp holds it up so that the light which has enlightened him may enlighten others in turn.” We who are disciples are never to deliberate with ourselves as to whether we should bother holding up the light or whether there’s any point to it. Our only task is to hold up the light that has enlightened us and leave the rest to God.

In the teaching that follows the teaching that follows the parable of the sower; that is, in the final teaching concerning the incident, Jesus says to the disciples, “Unless you relay the good news of the kingdom, you yourselves will lose what’s been given you. So be sure to pass it on. Your own vision and hearing grow only as you hold up the light and declare the truth. So just be sure that you keep on sowing seed.”

 

5] No one who looks at a new-born baby; no one sharing the joy of the parents in their long-awaited child; no such person says dejectedly, “Think of all the other spermatozoa wasted.” No one says this. No one standing among the Douglas Firs says, “Think of all the fir cones wasted.” Jesus says, “Yes, I’m aware that relatively little seed thrives and bears fruit; but the fruit that appears is of such magnitude and magnificence that to behold it is to think of nothing else.” Our Lord tells us that our only responsibility is to keep sowing the seed of the gospel, keep holding up the light that has possessed us, keep keeping on, never doubting that one day a yield will arise that will leave us adoring him who does all things well.

The young people whom we are about to confirm in the faith of the holy catholic church have been nurtured in Sunday School and home, as well as more recently, intensively in our confirmation class. (No one has ever accused me of lacking intensity.) With our Lord’s parable in mind we aren’t going to speculate about the degree of fruitfulness in them or lament the unfruitfulness of so many who have gone before them. We are going to anticipate, from some of them at least, yields of 30 times seed sown, or 60 times, even 100.

 

                                                          Victor Shepherd
May 1999

The Coming and Growth of the Kingdom

Mark 4:1-20; 26-32

Agriculture is a science. Today’s farmer doesn’t step out into a field and throw seed around willy-nilly. Instead he does germination tests on the seed he’s about to sow; he fertilizes the land with scientifically prepared materials; he cultivates the soil with highly technicized farm machinery; he treats the soil chemically to eliminate anything that might blight the crop.  Finally the farmer is ready to plant.

At the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry this was unknown. A farmer who wanted to plant simply picked up a handful of seed and threw it. The wind scattered it.  Some of the seed managed to fall on fertile soil, while some did not.

 

I: — The first parable we are examining today is that of the sower.  It’s about someone who simply scatters seed, keeps on scattering seed, never relents in scattering seed, and then awaits the harvest, knowing that there’s nothing else to be done.

To whom is this parable addressed?   It’s addressed to discouraged disciples. The disciples weren’t long following Jesus and embodying his mission before discouragement overtook them.  They noticed that religious leaders bitterly opposed the master.  His own family thought him deranged and deemed him a public embarrassment. The crowds, while often large, were also largely superficial and fickle.  The disciples began asking themselves, “Why are the results of our work so meagre? We have discerned the kingdom of God , present among us inasmuch as Christ the king is present with us, and it seems that most others couldn’t care less.  Or if they do care, they misunderstand the kingdom more often than not. And even if they don’t misunderstand it, they appear so easily deflected from it, so quick to give it up when difficulty comes upon them, so ready to acclaim Jesus today and accommodate his detractors tomorrow.  In light of all this, what are we supposed to do?  Perhaps we should expect less from our work, even give up on it.”

To discouraged disciples, then and now, Jesus replies, “A farmer scattered seed.  Not all of the seed ultimately yielded a harvest.  In fact most of the seed didn’t produce a harvest. But some of it did. Some of it always will. Therefore you fellows should keep on sowing. Sowing is the only responsibility you have.  It isn’t up to you to decide how effective your work is.  Simply know that your work is never pointless; some of the seed you sow will unfailingly yield a harvest.”

When my family lived in Edmonton (1938-1949) my father went to the Federal Penitentiary every Sunday afternoon for eleven years to conduct worship for convicts doing “hard time” and to preach at the service as well.         One day when I was about fifteen years old myself and had newly become aware of the “hard cases” who inhabit maximum security penitentiaries and I was beginning to wonder how some of these fellows would have looked upon my dad, I asked my father, “Did you ever see any results of the eleven years you spent in the prison?”   He looked at me as though I were benighted, as if I were ignorant of the way the gospel works and the faithfulness required of those who are wedded to its mission. He looked at me squarely and said quietly, “I never did it because I expected to see results. I did it because it was right.” In other words, my father believed the parable.  He believed that his sole responsibility was to sow.  (I must tell you, however, that one day when my parents were sitting together on an Edmonton streetcar a young man boarded the car, recognized my father, and leaned over to have a few words with him. My mother asked my dad who the young man was.  “One of the fellows I saw every Sunday afternoon”, said my dad; “he’s been released, and he wanted to tell me how grateful he is for the turnaround in his life.”)

I am asked constantly, “Shouldn’t the church be concerned with converting people?”   My reply always startles people who assume they know what I’m going to say. “No”, I answer; “the church should never be concerned with converting people.  Only the Holy Spirit (that is, God himself in his most intense, intimate presence and power) can turn people to himself.  Our responsibility is never to convert; our responsibility is to bear witness, to commend, to evangelize.  Witness is our responsibility; effectiveness is God’s responsibility.” At this point the person who asked the question is often startled, surprised that her gentle question drew such an emphatic response.  Even so, I’m not finished.  “Any church that tries to convert (“tries” since no church can, God alone being able to convert) invariably persecutes.  Sooner or later it will persecute.  What’s more, any church that tries to convert people to God announces to the world that it doesn’t believe in God, since it doesn’t trust God to do God’s own work, the work of the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus tells disciples of any era that their responsibility is to sow seed, and keep on sowing it.  What happens after that is beyond their control and therefore not their concern. They should ensure that they don’t fail to fulfil their commission, even as they trust God to fulfil his promise. They should ensure that they continue to do what they have been charged to do, and leave God to do what he has pledged himself to do.  Anything else is an expression of atheism.

From time-to-time I hear it said of a minister that he’s had an effective ministry and as a result he’s a success. The success of Rev. Snodgrass demonstrates his effectiveness.  I don’t understand this talk.  Is Rev. Snodgrass successful inasmuch as Sunday crowds are large?  A burlesque show would draw an even bigger crowd.  Does it mean that cash flow has increased?  A congregational lottery would boost the cash flow out of sight.

Perhaps someone wants to say that genuine “success” in anyone’s ministry is stronger discipleship among those to whom the minister ministers; not to mention self-disregarding love for each other, as well as greater sensitivity to God’s Spirit, and of course more resolute, cheerful obedience. Yes.  This, and this alone is genuine “success” – and this is known only to God. It’s impossible to measure all of this and write it up for the year-end congregational report. All of this is known to God alone, and he alone is to be credited for it.  Fruitfulness (what we label “success”) is his prerogative; faithful sowing is our task.

In the parable we are probing together Jesus makes it plain that most of the seed the farmer sows, whether it germinates and grows for a while or not, doesn’t last long enough to produce a harvest. But some of it does; some of it always does. Only 25% of the seed sown comes to harvest, yet the harvest that it yields is magnificent: 30-fold, 60-fold, even 100-fold.

To disciples discouraged by the apparently meagre results of their work Jesus says, “A farmer sowed a lot of seed. Not much of it produced anything that lasted. Most of it didn’t. But the seed that did produce produced abundantly, overwhelmingly.  You make sure that you keep sowing.”

II: — The second parable we are looking at today is brief.  We are told in a few lines that seed was planted and overnight it grew – how? – “the farmer knew not how.”   This parable is addressed to disciples who are prone to deny the mystery of the kingdom.

All of us live in a world where we rightly seek to “know how”. Seeking to know how is not only permitted in the natural realm; it’s mandated by God. What we call the “creation mandate” in Genesis; the command to till the soil and subdue the threatening elements of the universe – not only may we do this; we must, since God has mandated us to do it.

In order for explorers to explore the farthest reaches of the world they had to have navigational “know how”. In order to keep sailors alive at sea for long periods someone had to know something about vitamin deficiency. In order to perform pain-relieving surgery someone had to know how to stop bleeding and administer anaesthetics and minimize post-surgical infection. In order to give us large quantities of affordable food and clothing and drinkable water and pension plans and mortgage insurance, “know how” had to mushroom exponentially.

In all of this there’s no mystery. What isn’t known of the natural world at this moment is still knowable in principle, and will be known shortly.  The profoundest mystery, on the other hand, pertains to the kingdom of God . In other words, when we are dealing not with the natural world but with realms beyond nature, above nature, we shall never be able to penetrate the mystery of God’s unique operation in our midst, God’s unique operation in any individual’s heart.

I’m always amused when someone proffers a psycho-social explanation for the apostle Paul’s turnaround.  It’s suggested that since he tormented the early church, believing as he did that Christians were out to destroy the truth of Israel , he must have had a terribly guilty conscience about it all, and one day his overstressed conscience snapped and he could no longer deny the truth of the gospel. I’m amused because there’s no suggestion anywhere in scripture that Paul was conscience-stricken in the slightest.  In the days when he harassed the church he was as happy as a pig in mud. He thought he was supporting God’s cause. He was sure he was helping to rid the world of an error so erroneous it could only be called a scourge. Then one day it happened. What happened? The seed that someone had planted in Paul grew. How?   No one knows how. There’s mystery here that no one can penetrate; no one can explain; and therefore no one can explain away – that is, demystify.

Lest I be accused of tooting my own horn I shall speak only briefly of my summons to the ministry.  I mentioned once to a sophisticated man that I was fourteen when I knew that I had received a commission from the hand of the crucified (even though I didn’t speak of it this way when I was fourteen.) “Ridiculous”, this fellow snorted; “you couldn’t have known this when you were fourteen.” I said nothing. Throughout high school I wanted to be a lawyer; went to university with a law career in mind. In the course of preparing for legal studies I fell in love with philosophy; adjusted my plans so as to become a professor of philosophy – even as I continued to suffer from my disobedience.         One day I capitulated, admitted that the Hound of Heaven was bugging me to death, and have never looked back.         Yes, I’m aware of people who speak exactly like this and are currently living in psychiatric hospitals.  But I’m not deranged, and therefore such a ready-to-hand simplistic pseudo-explanation won’t do.  I’m aware that all kinds of naturalistic explanations can be advanced – pure speculation, worthless and unprovable – as to how I must have confused my father with God almighty and secretly wanted to please my mother even as childhood anxieties were unsatisfactorily resolved etc., etc., etc. It’s all nonsense. Then what’s the explanation?   There is none – apart from “the farmer knew not how.”   God’s secret penetration and secret preparation are irreducibly mysterious just because of the mystery that names itself GOD.

The mistake we must never make is to think that what’s mysterious – incapable of explanation – is by that fact unreal. Just the opposite is the case. What’s actual – the natural world that all the sciences and social sciences explore — isn’t mysterious, however much remains to be known, since it’s all explainable in principle.  What’s profoundly mysterious – the inexplicable intersection of God’s life with your life and mine and all that arises from this intersection – this is more than actual; this is ultimately real.  How does it all work? We know not how.

 

III: — The last parable, two of them in fact, are addressed to disciples possessing stunted imaginations. “Just imagine”, says Jesus; “From the tiniest beginnings (in ancient Palestine mustard seed was thought to be the smallest of all seeds) of your work and witness something so very large will come that no one will be able to assess its significance. Just imagine”, Jesus continues; “from a smidgen of yeast that is inserted into dough, the entire batch is leavened and swells hugely.  Now it’s all expanded in a way that is unforeseeable – unforeseeable, that is, until we see it.”

From the tiniest seed, the mustard seed, Jesus insists, there comes forth a shrub, a tree in whose branches perch the birds of the air.  “Birds of the air” is a rabbinic expression that means “all the Gentile nations of the world”.  Jesus is telling unimaginative disciples that from their small numbers (twelve, at first, one of whom proved unhelpful); from such a pathetically small number, from their supposedly simplistic message, from their apparently insignificant mission, there will come – what?  There will come that kingdom which gathers in people of every nation and language and outlook as Gentiles of every description will one day owe everything that is their glory to this handful of Jews who are beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t go back to their fishing.

We know that on the first Easter morning the disciples had decided to go back to their fishing. When the risen One appeared to them he said, “You want to fish?  Then fish. And tell me what you’ve caught.” John’s gospel reports that 153 fish were caught – vastly more than the disciples had ever seen in one net in their fishing days.  Then John adds a line we need to linger over: “And the net didn’t break.” In Israel of old it was said that there were 153 different Gentile peoples.  When eleven Jews fish, and their fishing is accompanied by the risen One’s efficacy, there is created a church that can no more be rent than the body of Christ can be shredded; a church that comprehends all the nations just because that kingdom to which the church points is the whole creation healed. “Can’t you see it?” says Jesus to disciples who lack imagination.   “Can’t you anticipate it more confidently than you can the sun’s rising tomorrow morning?”

Rev. Donald MacLeod, adjunct professor at Tyndale Seminary, and retired only months ago from the Presbyterian congregation in Trenton , Ontario ; upon retiring MacLeod and his wife travelled to China to see where his grandfather had gone in 1897.  His grandfather had been the first Christian in a town.  In 1900 grandfather MacLeod had built a house (it’s still standing, intact) for the wife he brought to it in 1901.  Three weeks ago, when Donald MacLeod went to this particular Chinese city of 60,000 people, he found 20,000 Christians there, worshipping in 38 different facilities (i.e., 500 Christians per church venue – and all of this in a country that has been anti-Christian communist for 60 years.) The Chinese people fell on him, showering him with gifts, eager to see the photographs of his grandfather he had brought with him.  The Chinese people poured out their gratitude for his grandfather; his grandfather, after all, had brought them that gospel which remains dearer to them than life.  All it takes is the tiniest bit of leaven – one man – to give rise to 20,000 Chinese Christians in the midst of totalitarian hostility.

As for yeast, what institution in our society hasn’t been leavened by the yeast of the kingdom? John Wesley was appalled when he visited prisons in Eighteenth Century England. One hundred men, women and children languished in one room the size of the sanctuary of a small church building. Men beat up men. Women were violated. Children were molested. Many adults were there only on account of debts they couldn’t pay.  By the time Wesley’s kingdom-yeast had worked its leavening, each convict had his own cell (modelled on a monk’s cell — penitentiaries were to help convicts become penitent), where each convict’s cell protected him or her from molestation at the hands of fellow inmates.

Think of hospitals and the care of the sick; the treatment of the mentally ill (it was a giant step forward when they were regarded as ill, not stupid; ill, not deliberately obstreperous); employment insurance, children’s aid; the criminal justice system, founded as it is on the Decalogue. What is there in our society that hasn’t been leavened by the yeast of the kingdom?

If we think that some of the yeast appears to be coming out of the dough, then we need to be reminded that it’s the responsibility of the Christian community to ensure that the yeast is always being re-inserted into the dough. We mustn’t throw up our hands and say, “But our yeast is so small and the dough is so big.” That, after all, is the precisely the point of the parable: the tiniest bit of yeast affects the entire batch of dough.   As we are resolute here, we shall recover our confidence too that from beginnings as small as mustard seed there arises something that no one can measure.

 

Concerning the coming and growth of the kingdom – a kingdom that is real and therefore that can never be shaken, the book of Hebrews reminds us — Jesus paints pictures that the world will never forget.

Disciples who are discouraged are assured that their sole responsibility is sowing, since God has promised that regardless of how little of it germinates and perdures, its harvest is nothing less than magnificent.

Disciples who are prone to deny the mystery of the kingdom are reminded that there is no human explanation for the unique work of God.

Disciples who lack imagination are reminded that from the smallest beginning something arises of cosmic significance, and from the unnoticeable operation of yeast something comes forth that no one can fail to notice.

 

Mark tells us that Jesus came into Galilee announcing, “The kingdom of God is at hand. Turn around.  Face it. And live from this day in the new creation that it is.”

 

                                                                                                     Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             April 2006

 

Touched Again

Mark 5:1-20            Lam. 3:22-24          Ps. 13:6

I: — “Seated, clothed, and in his right mind”. So reads Mark’s description of the healed man whom our Lord had touched. The entire story has been one of my favourites from childhood.

“Seated” — no longer agitated and frenzied.

“Clothed” — belonging to the community, according to ancient

Hebrew symbolism.

“In his right mind” — no longer driven and distracted. Simply sane.

The fellow’s situation could be summed up in one word: deliverance.

Only a few weeks ago Maureen and I were at a cottage on Georgian Bay. One Monday evening Maureen said to me, “I have something to tell you, but I am apprehensive about saying anything because I am afraid you will react by denying it or walking away or sulking — as your custom is.” I decided that holiday time might as well be truth time, and so I asked her to tell me what she had to say.

She told me, so gently as to be a caress, that I have been angry to the point of being consumed with rage. My frustration over developments within the denomination had mounted until the pressure of my frustration had generated enough heat to keep me enraged. In addition I had become embittered. Not to mention suspicious of people here, imagining slights where there were none and imputing ill-will to the people who had supported me most in my recent struggle. As I found myself disappointed and disillusioned over the past several years a low-grade infection had settled into me which had latterly become a high-grade infection. I had become an angry, bitter, suspicious and reproachful middleaged man. To be sure, I had preached on James 1:20 — “The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” — but I had also managed to forget whatever I said.

As Maureen held up the mirror before me I saw it all. For the first time in a long while I had no desire to deny, flee or sulk. I simply owned it all. And as I owned it, it came out of me like pus. As the poison within me drained away I thought once more of the gospel-incident: townspeople are shocked to see a frenzied, agitated fellow seated, clothed, and in his right mind. As I reflected on all that had transpired in only a few minutes I thought again of the text in the Lamentations of Jeremiah which I had read a hundred times: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. Great is God’s faithfulness.”

There were immediate consequences to my un-poisoning. One which affects you people most immediately is that you will never hear the sermon I had planned on preaching today. In the week before my holidays, when I had my shirt twisted in such a knot that it was ready to ignite, I had written a very strong sermon — or so I thought. As I read it over in the wake of my deliverance I realized that it had been written out of a bitter heart and an angry spirit. It will never be preached.

Still, I think it’s all right to tell you something of what was in it. For instance, I had picked up a copy of the UC Observer in a hospital waiting-room and had read an editorial concerning new directions in UC worship. What I read any thoughtful person would recognize as both illogical and blasphemous. In orbit myself now at one more perfidy I had inserted this item into the sermon in order to let you people know just how bad things are. But then I had asked myself, “Who is going to be edified by hearing this from me? And who will be edified by hearing it through my bitter rage?” No one, of course. The sermon will never be preached.

Perhaps you would have made allowances for me if you had heard it. “After all, he has been under stress.” But your generous forbearance would not really have helped me. During the last war the depth-charging of submarines was unsophisticated, very much a hit-and-miss affair. In fact a submarine’s chances of being sunk through a depth-charge attack were only 6%. In other words, a submarine was almost certain to survive a depth-charge attack. One attack. Several, in fact. Nonetheless, a submarine was usually sunk on the seventh attack. You see, after six depth-charge attacks the submarine captain was so unnerved that he lost his ability to think objectively, think constructively. The he was easy to sink. I don’t want to put too fine an edge on it; still, I wonder how many times I have been depth-charged in the last few years. Often enough, I think, that I was about to lose my ability to think objectively, think constructively. My wife came to my rescue. She embodied the steadfast love and faithfulness of God.

As I pondered all that she did for me on that Monday evening I thought again of Psalm 13:6, “I will sing to the Lord, for he has dealt bountifully with me.”

II: — Seated, clothed, and right-minded at last I have fresh enthusiasm for the Streetsville congregation and fresh vision for it. No doubt you have enthusiasm and vision too. Listen to a few aspects of mine for the next few minutes, and then tell me of yours over the next few weeks.

(i) One aspect of my renewed enthusiasm is adult education. Sunday morning at 9:00 o’clock sharp. (“Sharp on time”, as Stephen Leacock used to say.) 9:00 to 9:45, beginning on the 29th of September. An adult study of scripture is what I have in mind. In the past few years we have seen scripture twisted by the ideological left, and we have resisted this. At the same time, scripture-twisting at the hands of the ideological right is no better. A case in point. Concerning the NT stories of the feeding of the multitudes the ideological left says, “Nonsense. It’s all pre-scientific gobbledy-gook and should be set aside.” The ideological right says, “Not so fast. It’s one more miracle that Jesus did as proof of his divinity.” But Jesus was never concerned to prove his divinity, was he. Jesus wasn’t concerned to prove anything. When people asked for proofs concerning him or his truth or his kingdom, he refused. Instead he called disciples into his company, knowing that life in his company would generate conviction and assurance of him, his truth and his kingdom. For such disciples any “proof”, so-called, would then be as superfluous as it was inappropriate.

According to the inner logic of the NT itself the feeding stories magnify one glorious truth: Jesus Christ feeds and sustains his people in their particular wilderness. This is what we have to understand: Our Lord will feed and sustain you and me in whatever wilderness we find ourselves.

Another case in point. The ideological left sits loose to morality. Morality is thinly disguised social convention. As social convention it reflects social class rather than some truth or other etched in stone. The ideological right, on the other hand, equates immorality and sin. The immoral are the real sinners who especially need saving, while the moral, of course, are virtuous and godly. Not so according to scripture! Jesus didn’t die for the immoral, the apostle tells us; Jesus died for the ungodly. And the ungodly are the moral and the immoral in equal measure! Sinnership is common to all of humankind, whether moral or immoral. Our sinnership is the same spiritual distortion whether we behave in a manner which others congratulate or in a manner which others curse. Everyone, in equal degree, stands in need of God’s mercy and God’s patience and God’s invigoration; which is to say, everyone, in equal degree, stands in need of God himself.

From time to time people tell me that the bible is boring. Boring? With all the sex and violence in it? I want to recover biblical literacy as together we are grasped by the kingdom-reality it attests, which kingdom exposes ideologies of the right and the left at once.

Why Sunday morning at 9:00? Because Streetsvillians are too busy and too fatigued to come out one more evening in the week.

(ii) Another aspect of my enthusiasm: a deepening of our relationship with our Jewish friends at Solel. Some of us have maintained the contact through our work with the foodbank and the housing project, but on the whole our attention has been almost wholly directed to other matters recently. Even the briefest reading of the gospels makes it plain that to encounter Jesus is to encounter his Jewishness. The English text tells us that the menorrhagic woman reached out and touched the “fringe of his garment.” It wasn’t a fringe in the sense of a fashionable decoration; it was the tzith-tzith, the tassels of his prayer shawl. Jesus wore his prayer shawl as an undershirt every day. Jewish people today put on such a shawl when they go to the synagogue to worship; orthodox men and boys are wearing it as an undershirt at this minute. Because of the yiddishkeit of our Lord, engagement with Israel (the people) is not an option for Christians.

I am reminded of the church’s debt to the synagogue every time I read Romans 9 where Paul says, “They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants… the promises…; and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.” Be sure to note the apostle’s use of the present tense: to them belong. He doesn’t say, “To them there used to belong…”.

Then in Ephesians 2 Paul reminds Gentile Christians (you and me) that at one time we were “without Christ (the Messiah), excluded from the citizenship of Israel, strangers to the covenants based upon promise; without hope and without God in this world.” Then in an about-turn which takes the breath away from me, the benighted gentile Paul has in mind, he adds, “But now — but now you who were once far off have been included in the realm of the Messiah Jesus.” To seize our Lord in faith is to be admitted to everything that God promised Israel and fulfilled in his Son. Then surely I can disdain Israel — even merely ignore it — only to my spiritual impoverishment. At the very least, wouldn’t a close relationship to Israel help us cherish the older testament, which book, we must remember, was the only bible the earliest Christians had?

(iii) In the third place I am haunted by the fact that life (that is, bodily existence) comes far easier for most of us in Streetsville congregation than it comes for most people elsewhere. I tell my own offspring repeatedly that not one per cent of the world’s people enjoy the privileges that they, Mary and Catherine enjoy. For part of the last three summers our younger daughter has assisted at Camp Oochigeas. Oochigeas is a northern Ontario camp for children who have cancer. The camp directors are Doug and Cathy Hitchcock of this congregation. When Mary went off to camp for the first time I had a misgiving or two. After all, she was only fourteen, she was going to become attached to youngsters some of whom would not survive until next spring, and what would the effect of all of this be on Mary’s psyche, etc. Mary has come home invigorated; in the following months she has visited children her age who are hospitalized. We have had overnight in our home youngsters who are not likely to collect old age pensions. So far from being submerged by all of this Mary has thrived. What she has gained, what will be with her for life as a result of her work at Oochigeas, is inexpressible because invaluable.

In the summer of 1972 I supervised Keith Burton, the student-minister on Miscou Island, New Brunswick. (A good atlas will tell you where Miscou Island is.) Following ordination Keith went to England to work in a hospice for young men suffering from a muscular dystrophy, which disease saw most of then die at 16 or 17. (The oldest resident of the hospice was 25.) Keith wrote me from England: “Do you know what has happened to me through my work in the hospice? I have learned the meaning of the resurrection.”

One third of the women in Ontario’s jails are there inasmuch as they have been unable to pay fines. Is this the modern-day equivalent of yesteryear’s debtor’s prison? Might there be something here through which a women’s group (or a men’s group) could learn the meaning of the kingdom of God (an how it differs from the kingdoms of this world)?

Jesus Christ is victor over everything which afflicts humankind. My faith in his victory is strongest when I am knee-deep in suffering people whose suffering appears to contradict that victory. I say “appears”, because the triumph of him who has been raised from the dead is a triumph which can never be undone.

(iv) Sunday evening. I think there is a place for a Sunday evening event every month or two. There is little opportunity Sunday morning for discussion and dialogue. Why not make good this deficiency on occasional Sunday evenings?

A few weeks ago it dawned on me that the majority of the people who attend the Ottawa Summer School of Theology where I teach each July are laypersons. This summer I spoke to them for instance, about the doctrine of justification and its pertinence for real and neurotic guilt. Shouldn’t we hear of this in Streetsville and discuss it among ourselves?

In highschools, synagogues, universities and conference centres I have spoken on the often-tragic relation of the church to the synagogue (in other words, the history of Christian anti-semitism). Yet there has been no exposure to it here! Why don’t we invite our friends from Solel to join us on a Sunday evening and learn together?

For years I have been wedded to the city. I am a city-boy virtually devoid of rural blood. For long enough I have thought of Mississauga as a suburb of Toronto. But Mississauga is not a suburb of anything. Mississauga is a city in its own right. It’s population will soon be half a million. It has now all the problems which bedevil cities.

For years I have been intrigued by the biblical understanding of the city. The Tower of Babel (with its confusion and alienation) is an aspect of that city mentioned in Genesis 11. Not to speak of other cities: Babylon, Rome, Jerusalem. (Jerusalem is the holy city, supposedly, yet so unholy is it that it slays the prophets and crucifies the Messiah.) The book of Revelation speaks of the New Jerusalem, another city. Why don’t we explore together what it means to be a Christian, or a Christian community, in the midst of the city, when according to scripture the city is humankind’s proudest monument to its God-defiance? And while we are at it, why don’t we bring along a city-planner from city hall and hear what she has to say? In Paul’s day the Christians in Rome numbered no more than 75 in a city of one million. Yet this “little flock”, says Jesus, is salt and leaven. Salt and leaven, tiny in themselves, permeate and alter everything they touch; everything.

(v) Throughout all of this we must continue to cherish one another in this congregation; in cherishing one another’s humanity we may even have to learn afresh what it is to be human. I have in mind recent technological innovations which have put our humanity at risk. Computer technology has now given us Virtual Reality or Synthetic Space or Telepresence.

When you look at a computer screen or television screen you are aware that you are looking at a screen. Now imagine yourself equipped with large, electronically sophisticated goggles. As you look at someone on the screen you are not aware that you are looking at a screen. Instead you have the sensation of having the person on the screen in the room with you. You have the sensation of sight, hearing, touch, even smell. You can even reach out and “shake hands” with her (even though she herself is in Montreal). You will have the physical sensation of shaking hands, even though in reality nothing has been shaken. It’s called Virtual Reality or Synthetic Space or Telepresence. To have the sensation of touching someone when in fact no one is being touched means that our humanity has been simulated. Simulated with near-perfect simulation, thanks to computer technology, but only simulated. Then where is our real humanity? What is it to be human? What does the gospel have to do with real humanity? and the Christian fellowship?

(vi) Needless to say worship continues to be the single most important thing that we do in our life together here. Worship will continue to the setting where the living word of the living God is exalted and magnified. At the same time, the vehicle of worship is the liturgy. “Liturgy” is an English word formed from two Greek words, laos and ergon, “people” and “work”. In other words, liturgy is the work of the people, what the people do in the course of worship. There will be more for you people to do in worship as Jesus Christ is extolled, his people edified, and the reign of God discerned amidst the principalities and powers of this world.

It remains only for me to say that regardless of how you grade this sermon — A, B minus or Z — it is a much better sermon than the sermon you were going to hear. For the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God. Far more important that we confirm each other in that steadfast love of God which never comes to an end, just because his faithfulness to us is great indeed.

F I N I S

 Victor A. Shepherd

                                                                                                                                                 
8th September 1991

 

“What is your name?”

Mark 5:9

 

I: — “What’s your name?” Jesus asked a man on one occasion. Our Lord didn’t mean what the bureaucrat means when she’s filling out forms and asks us, “Name, address, telephone number?” If we said, “My name is Bill Smith,” it would tell her no more about us than if we had said, “My name is Sam Jones.” Names today tell us nothing at all about the person whom the name names. ” Victor Shepherd “: “Victor” is Latin for conqueror. I’m no conqueror; “Shepherd” is English for sheep-herder. I’m a city boy.

When Jesus came upon a deranged man, however, and asked, “What’s your name?”, he was asking the man to tell him something about himself, everything about himself, who he most profoundly was. You see, in the ancient world “name” meant four things: personal presence, character, power, and deserved reputation.

“What’s your name?” Jesus asks me today. He won’t be satisfied with “My name is Victor.” He already knows that. Instead he’s asking [1], “Victor, are you personally present? Are you really available to the people you meet? Are you really accessible? Or have you learned to “fake it”, smiling as if you were personally present when all the while your head and your heart are anywhere but with the people in front of you?” [2] He’s asking even more: “What’s your character? Are you honest or corrupt? patient or irascible? kind or vindictive? forgiving or vengeful?” [3] He’s also asking about power: “Are you influential or ineffective? Do you foster reconciliation or alienation? Do you spread joy or misery? In your company do people find faith easier to exercise or harder?”   [4] And then in the fourth place he’s asking me about the reputation I deserve just because I have acted in public as everyone knows I’ve acted.

 

II: — Centuries ago Jesus came upon a fellow who lived in the cemetery and mutilated himself, no one else being able to subdue him. “What’s your name?” our Lord asked him. “I don’t know!” the fellow replied, “How do you expect me to tell you my name when my name is ‘legion’, there being so many of us? What’s my name? Which one would you like to hear? What’s my character? Which of my many ‘selves’ are you talking about?” The man plainly doesn’t know who he is. He can’t tell you anything about an identity underneath his frenzy. A legion, we should note, was a Roman military unit consisting of 6000 men. The man feels he’s all of them at once.

How did he come to be many? He was overcome, overwhelmed by chaotic forces without that now were forces within.

In Mark’s gospel the story of the Gerasene demoniac follows the incident of Christ’s stilling the stormy sea for the sake of frightened disciples. In Hebrew cosmogony large bodies of water, turbulent, unpredictable, treacherous; these are everywhere a symbol of chaos.

In Genesis chapt.1 creation arises when God parts the primeval watery mass (the watery mass being the first step of creation, the raw material of creation), thus permitting land to appear, the fitting habitation for “6th Day” creatures: humankind and our second cousins, the animals. As long as God’s providential hand holds back the primeval chaos, animate existence, human existence, can thrive. If God, however, relaxes his intervention ever so slightly, chaos creeps back in. If God withdraws the hands that part the waters, chaos inundates the creation, rendering it de-creation — as happened in the story of the Flood, when God’s judgement appointed the world precisely to what the world had been telling God for generations that it wanted: his effectual absence.

“You’d rather be without me?” God had said, “Then never say I’m a spoilsport who won’t give people what they want. I always give people what they want. You want me inoperative? I’ll grant you that.” The result, of course, was that chaos surged over the creation until such time as God, in his wisdom and mercy, gave humankind a fresh beginning.

In the wake of our sin; in the wake of our pursuit of deities who aren’t the sole sovereign maker of heaven and earth; in our ardour for spirits who are less than holy; in our zeal for twists and turns that are anything but the turn, return, of repentance; in our seeking comfort and consolation everywhere but in the Comforter; in all of this we are effectually summoning chaos upon ourselves. Why, then, are we surprised when it comes upon us? Since chaos is that from which creation emerged, chaos is that to which creation most readily reverts. Chaos always laps at creation.

Scripture testifies to God’s patience and providence in moving back chaos, fending it off, just when it’s on the verge of overwhelming creation and undoing it. We see this everywhere in Israel ‘s history. Think of its entry into the promised land; its restoration from the exile; the provision of two figures who loom largest in both testaments: Moses and Jesus. In both men God’s hands hold off the chaos that threatens any society which exalts infanticide, whether in their era or in ours.

And now we have a man from the village of Gerasa who lives — like all of us — alongside a chaos that threatens individuals and communities and nations at all times, a chaos that from time-to-time invades us and molests us. At this point God’s intervention alone can fend it off and thereby give us room to be what God has always intended us to be: sons and daughters whose earthly, earthy life nature won’t menace but rather will support.

In his derangement the Gerasene fellow is a micro instance of that chaos exemplified in the stormy sea as macro instance. The man is simply overwhelmed at the evil he knows only too well to haunt the world even as the townspeople remain naïve, shallow and unperceptive.

Evil is legion, isn’t it. There are at least 6,000 manifestations of it, expressions of it, embodiments of it. Evil is multi-faceted: both blatant and subtle, both frontal and tangential, both brutal and seductive. Evil appears in the blackest colours but in the brightest too. Evil appears both as hideous and as benign. There is no end to the faces it wears and the disguises it assumes and the approaches wherewith it stalks us and steals upon us.

As often as I read the story of the deranged man who named himself after the image and likeness of a military unit I think, soberly, of countless men whose name has become legion through serving in military units. In times of war military personnel have always suffered, or died, or gone insane. For most of history, however, a soldier’s chances of dying were much greater than his chances of derangement. At the time of the US Civil War, however, all this changed, thanks to two major military inventions: the machine gun and the timed artillery fuse. The machine gun meant soldiers couldn’t flee; the timed artillery fuse, causing the shell to explode 100’ in the air instead of on contact with the ground, meant that soldiers couldn’t hide. They died in vastly greater proportions than they had ever perished before. Because they were much more likely now to die, they also went mad in record numbers. For the first time in the history of warfare a soldier’s chances of total psychiatric breakdown were three times as great as his chances of dying. In view of the fact that the US Civil War killed 650,000 very young men, there were two million 19- and 20-year olds who were total psychiatric casualties for the rest of their earthly life.

The same ratio of insanity to death has operated in every conflict since the US Civil War; in the Russo-Japanese war, the Great War, World War II, the Korean War, and more recently, Israel ‘s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. (This is a dimension of evil we ignore when we speak of war.)

No doubt you are wondering what all of this has to do with us who are in Knox Church tonight. We, after all, are not deranged. The Gerasene fellow can’t be like us because he manifestly is.

The truth is, Christ’s question, “What’s your name?”, now addressed to us, would find us having to give the same answer as he. “I don’t know who I am, which one I am, the reputation I am, just because there are so many of us.” We are many indeed. Plainly chaos laps at us; and if we truly are “many”, then chaos has more than merely lapped at us.

Then how did we come to be “many?”

Think of the daily pressure to be something to one person and something else to another person and something else again to a third person. Think of how it seems we have to ease our way through tight spots in life by bending the truth here and telling just a little lie there and misrepresenting ourselves somewhere else, all in the interests of getting us or those dear to us past the landmines and quicksands that will otherwise take us down. The truth is, of course, we are daily putting on one false face after another, always telling ourselves that underneath our exchangeable false faces there does remain our real face, our true face, our genuine identity. If no one else is aware of who we are at this point, at least we know who we are.

But it’s never this simple. As we shuffle the false faces, falsity overtakes us little by little. We tell ourselves we haven’t reduced ourselves to phoniness; we tell ourselves that when this sticky situation is past we can revert to our real face, our true self, our proper identity. But of course life is so very fraught with sticky situations — every day brings a host of them, doesn’t it? — that we simply become more and more adept at interchanging false faces until we no longer are aware that any one of them is false; no longer aware that we have become false; no longer aware that we are phoniness incarnate.

While I don’t have a drinking problem or a drug problem, I have to tell you that I am an addict. You see, I’m a sinner, and all sin is addictive. (If sin weren’t addictive we’d have long given it up, wouldn’t we?) Since I too am an addict, I’m sobered every time I read the literature displayed by those among us who know they’re addicts. One such item is the acrostic, “DENIAL”, with the word spelled vertically. DENIAL: “Don’t Even (k)Now I Am Lying.”

Our name can also become “legion” through moral compromise. When we are tempted to make moral shortcuts our conscience pricks us at first and we hesitate; pricked now, we have to rationalize the compromise to pacify our conscience; conscience pacified now, we have the inner tranquility, inner permission even, to go ahead with our treachery — just this once, of course, because of extraordinary circumstances — after which we shall revert to our integrity. It seems not to occur to us that integrity which can be set aside opportunistically is no integrity at all. Very quickly the compromise becomes second nature. A pastor now for 33 years, I have had people tell me the first time they committed fraud or adultery or something else they were in torment; the second time they had only a momentary twinge; the third time was as easy as falling off a wet log. When someone identifies them in terms of their sin and they protest, “That isn’t who or what I really am,” the obvious retort is, “Oh? Why isn’t it?”

Again, our name becomes “legion” through mindless conformity to social convention. Social convention seems to have nothing to do with chaos and the evil that chaos engenders. Social conventions, after all, are necessary. Social conventions facilitate the movement of people throughout the society the way traffic lights facilitate the movement of traffic through intersections. Our society agrees to stop at red lights. But of course there is no intrinsic connection between red light and stopping. In the same way we “collide” less frequently socially if we all agree to abide by social conventions even though there is no intrinsic connection between arbitrary convention and the behaviour associated with it. The peril in our doing so, of course, is that the social convention comes to tell us who we are.

People address me as “reverend.” It’s a social convention. “Reverend” means I’m revere-able, and I’m revere-able (supposedly) inasmuch as I’m extraordinarily holy. People also call me “Doctor”, Latin for “teacher.” I’m extraordinarily learned. You know, I like the sound of it: ” Reverend Dr .” It sets me apart, doesn’t it? It sets me apart from the common herd that is neither holy nor learned. ” Reverend Dr. “: it tells me who I am; it makes me who I am.

It makes me who I am, that is, until Jesus Christ looms before me and asks, “What’s your name?” And when I start to say, ” Reverend Dr. ” he butts in, “Do you think I’m fooled by arbitrary social conventions? Do you think the label that you relish disguises for a minute what oozes out of your every pore?”

The sad truth is most people take as their name whatever the silent majority represents. As the silent majority shifts from this to that, picks up this and drops that, believes this now when it used to believe that then; this is what most people are. What’s their name? Their name is the myriad, ill thought-out ideation that forms the mental furniture and the clogged cardiac system of the silent majority. Their name is legion.

Of course there are always those who think they’re smarter than most and can recognize all this. Therefore they are going to react to it: they are going to be whatever the silent majority isn’t. Alas, they don’t see that their “name” is still determined by the silent majority: reacting to the silent majority, they have become that noisy minority which the silent majority has made them in any case, unbeknownst to them. Their name too is “legion.”

 

III: — The man in our gospel incident was violent. No one could subdue him. After a while no one tried. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is; anyone whose identity is fragile; anyone who is forever scrambling to find an identity lest the one she doesn’t really have is taken away from her in any case; any such person will behave violently.

When I was younger I used to think that people who lashed out were uncommonly nasty. Having observed people for decades, however, I see that I was wrong. Those who lash out violently and cause havoc aren’t uncommonly nasty; they are commonly insecure. Their fragile, arbitrary, undefendable identity is threatened with extinction. They have to shore it up lest anyone “see through” them and discover that they are hollow inside.

When I was younger I was perplexed as to why people exploded if someone merely disagreed with them. And if they managed to stay cool when someone disagreed with them, they didn’t stay cool when someone refuted them. I was perplexed that what passed for a discussion on a topic became a battle in which someone, being led to see that the point he had advanced wasn’t actually sound, suddenly clung to the point regardless, enlarged it, raised his voice, reddened his face, and attempted to browbeat others into admitting he was right. The reason, of course, that it’s so difficult to admit we are wrong is that our identity is tied up with a position we’ve adopted (regardless of the issue), and to admit we are wrong is to forfeit an identity that is so fragile in any case that

it is readily pushed over and caused to fragment. Still, anyone threatened with loss of face and looming fragmentation will likely become violent. Anyone threatened with extinction is going to turn ugly. We shouldn’t be surprised.

 

IV: — In our gospel story Jesus heals the man whose name is “legion.” The townspeople find him “sitting there, clothed, and in his right mind”, the English text tells us. In the Greek text there are three pithy, parallel past participles: “seated, clothed, right-minded.” The three parallel past participles — “seated, clothed, right-minded” — underline the fact that something definitive has occurred to the man, something conclusive, something that is as undeniable as it is unmistakable.

SEATED   In Hebrew symbolism to be seated is to be in authority, to rule. Whenever a rabbi made an authoritative pronouncement he sat to speak. When Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount he sits to teach. Our Lord wants us to know that in the Sermon on the Mount he isn’t offering an opinion; he’s speaking authoritatively, sealing upon us the meaning of life in the kingdom of God .

Following his ascension the risen Jesus is said to be “seated at the right hand of the Father.” He is seated inasmuch as his resurrection has rendered him victor; his ascension has rendered him ruler; as victorious ruler he is sovereign over the cosmos.

The man whose name had been “legion” is now found seated. He is no longer the helpless victim of whatever forces howl down upon him. He is no longer a function of everyone he’s met and everything he’s seen. For the first time in his life he is sovereign of himself. He is now the subject of his own existence. As subject of his own existence he is a self; a self; one, unitary self. Now he is simply himself, his own self, the subject of his own life. Hereafter he speaks and acts with the authority of someone who knows who he is and what he’s about.

CLOTHED   In Hebrew symbolism to be clothed is to belong. When the prodigal son returns from the far country and comes home his father clothes him in a robe. The robe means that he belongs; he belongs to this household; he belongs in this home; he belongs with this family. He belongs.

In our Lord’s parable of the wedding garment the guests are streaming into the reception when one fellow tries to crash the party. He isn’t wearing a wedding garment. (In Israel of old, we must note, not merely the wedding party but the wedding guests too wore distinctive clothing.) The party-crasher is denied admission to the wedding reception. Lacking the proper clothing, he doesn’t belong, and everyone knows it.

When the apostle Paul speaks of the new life that Jesus Christ is for us, and speaks as well of the features of this life (readiness to forgive enemies, patience, kindness, humility, etc.), he makes his point by telling us that we are to “put on” Christ with his gifts. “Put on” is a metaphor taken from the realm of clothing. We are to clothe ourselves in Christ and his gifts. Our clothing ourselves in this way tells everyone that we belong to him.

The man whose name had been “legion” is now clothed. He belongs to Jesus Christ; he belongs to Christ’s people; he belongs to the wider community (whose ground and goal Christ is); he belongs to himself.

RIGHT-MINDED   In Hebrew thought to be possessed of a right mind, a sound mind, is to be sane, to be sure, but also, even more profoundly, to have one’s thinking formed and informed by the truth and reality of God.

Most people are sane now. Most people, however, aren’t “right-minded” in that they don’t think in conformity with the kingdom of God . If they are asked what is real, what is good, what they should trust, what they should pursue, what is central in life and what is peripheral; if they are asked these questions they can answer them all in a few words: “whatever promotes my plans for myself; whatever advances my self-interest; whatever makes my life easier and makes me self-satisfied.”

Most people are sane; most people, however, are not right-minded, not righteous-minded in terms of right-relationship with Jesus Christ and right pursuit in conformity with this relationship. The thinking of most people isn’t governed by any of this; it’s governed by rationalization, rationalization that aids and abets their selfism.

The man whose name had been “legion” is restored both to sanity and to a manner of thinking that is now governed by one grand preoccupation: the reality of God, the truth of God, the kingdom of God ; God’s plan and purpose for him here; his pursuit of this. What governs his thinking now isn’t thinly-disguised scheming connected with self-promotion; what governs his thinking now is a vision of the kingdom of God and a vocation to render this kingdom visible.

 

V: — What happened, ultimately, in the Gerasene village on that never-to-be-forgotten day? What happened isn’t what we expect. We expect a celebration. A man, after all, has been living in the cemetery, amidst the dead. His existence — violent, self-destructive, fearful — has been a living death. Now he is healed. Surely the event should be publicly hailed a triumph. Instead the townspeople recoil from the man. (Plainly he’s a greater threat healed then he ever was deranged.) They look askance at Jesus, the one at whose hands the man has been restored. They want him gone. They beg him to depart, the text tells us. They implore him. They plead with him. “Just leave us alone. We like the way things were before you showed up.”

Whatever else the townspeople might be they aren’t stupid. They have seen that the great healer is the great disturber, seen that healing is a disturbance. They have seen that wholeness is disruptive; peace engenders conflict; sanity is hard to live with. They had life figured out when the man they had long known (and could therefore write off) shrieked and howled, gashed himself and raved. Let him rave! Raving is harmless; sanity, however, isn’t. Inarticulate shouts and cries mean nothing; sober, lucid, penetrating speech now means everything. Every community has its misfits. And everyone knows where and how the misfits fit.

Yes. Misfits fit, because we tell them where they had better fit. Fit people, however, won’t be told. Therefore fit people, paradoxically, are forever misfits. The Gerasene village has been turned upside down. Before, no one had to take the ranting man seriously; now, those who don’t take him seriously are fools. Before, however economically unproductive he might have been (certainly he couldn’t have been gainfully employed), at least he was socially useful: he was Class-A Entertainment. Now he isn’t entertainment. His wholeness — self-perceived, owned, enjoyed — is a rebuke to those who pretend they aren’t as warped inwardly as he had been outwardly.

It’s plain that the man can’t be “put in his place” as he was always “put in his place” before Jesus appeared. It’s plain that he now sees with kingdom vision amidst townspeople who are kingdom blind. It’s obvious he can’t be domesticated just as Jesus of Nazareth, the one who has given him back his life, can’t be domesticated. Those who are socially ascendant are always nervous around those who can’t be tamed and won’t come to heel.

The townspeople had made their peace with the world as it is and also with themselves as they are. Once Jesus has appeared, however, such peace is seen to be a pact with evil. Since Jesus has identified what distorted the man manifestly, Jesus won’t stop short of identifying what distorts the villagers secretly — or not so secretly. Then the Master will have to leave. And if he’s rather slow to leave, they will beg him to step along lest he linger and torment them as he seemed, only a short while ago, to torment the villager they’d all dismissed as insignificant.

Nothing has changed. Throughout history, when the church has been most preoccupied with Jesus the world has been unable to tolerate it. When, on the other hand, the church has tried to out-world the world, forfeiting its birthright and making itself look ridiculous, the world has welcomed it. Prior to the collapse of the Berlin wall and the dismantling of the USSR , a Russian Orthodox Church that lent itself to the treacherous purposes of the state was a church the state could tolerate. Those congregations, however, that met Sunday by Sunday to exalt Jesus Christ; communist leaders from Lenin through Stalin to the most recent could never leave these congregations unmolested. They knew that whenever Christians remain preoccupied with Jesus, such Christians will always be a rebuke to the state, to the society, to the culture, as surely as the healed man of Mark 5, together with the one who had healed him, was more than civic authorities could endure. Isn’t this what we saw last August, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit, when CBC TV interviewers kept trying to have young people badmouth him or badmouth the church or badmouth whatever when all that the young people wanted to do was exalt Jesus?

 

The Gerasene fellow wants to join up with Jesus and the twelve. Jesus, however, has a different expression of discipleship for different individuals. And so he says to the man, “You go home to your family and your friends; you go back to the people who know you best, the people quickest to detect inauthenticity and the fastest to spot a profession of faith unmatched by performance; you go back to those who will most readily hold you to your newfound integration and integrity; you tell them what the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you.”

The man does just this, with the result, we are told, that many others “marvelled.” The Greek text is an iterative imperfect: kept on marvelling, continued to marvel, and continued to marvel just because the healed man continued to be anything but a flash in the pan.

 

VI: — The questions Jesus asked in the days of his earthly ministry are the questions he continues to ask, the questions he always asks.

And therefore when he says to any one of us today, “What’s your name?”, the answer he’s looking for isn’t “Sam” or “Samantha.” He asks the question only because he already knows the answer. He already knows that our name is, or has been, “legion”, since there are so many of us. And of course he asks the question only in order that he might speak to us, touch us, and thereafter display us as citizens of his kingdom, possessed of his truth, preoccupied with his plan and purpose for us. In short, he asks us the question only because he ultimately wants to render us seated, clothed, right-minded; and thereafter to witness in word and deed to all and sundry that he has done this for us, and done it all for us just because he has had mercy on us.

 

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd
July 2003   

(Knox Summer Fellowship, July 2003)

   

 

                                                                                                 

 

“Your Faith Has Made You Well”

Mark 5:34         Mark 10:52        Luke 17:19

 I don’t like intellectual snobs. For this reason I neither want to be an intellectual snob nor sound like one. If on Sunday morning I repeatedly direct the congregation to biblical languages and biblical meanings, it’s because I’m convinced a recovery of biblical meanings for biblical words is crucial for our life in Christ. I’m not showing off. I’m not discouraging people from reading the bible for themselves. I’m merely trying to provide whatever help I can so that a text thousands of years old will speak compellingly to modern folk like us.

Today we are going to examine several occasions of our Lord’s saying, “Your faith has made you well. Go in peace.” “Has made you well:” in Greek it’s the verb that elsewhere means “has saved you.” It’s important that we know this, for the people whom Jesus “made well” were certainly “made well” in the sense of “made better, healed.” Yet even as they were made well or healed of this or that ailment, they were also “saved” in a deeper sense.

In the same way we must ponder the word “peace.” When we modern Gentiles hear the word we immediately think of inner peace, peace of mind, the absence of anxiety. When our Lord’s Israelite hearers heard “peace,” however, they didn’t first think of peace of mind; they thought of the Hebrew “shalom,” the Hebrew word we usually translate “peace” but which in fact has a much larger meaning. In Hebrew “shalom” means “salvation,” and salvation, everywhere in scripture, is the creation restored and relationships in it healed. “Salvation” and “ kingdom of God ” are exact synonyms. To enter the kingdom of God and to know the salvation of God are the same.

When Jesus says “Go in peace,” then, he isn’t referring first of all to peace of mind. He’s referring first of all to something bigger, grander, richer. “Go in peace” means “step forward, step ahead in the shalom or salvation of God.” Shalom is the reality of restoration at God’s hand. Christ’s people have come to live in it. Now that we live in it we are to live from it.

A minute ago I said that peace, shalom, didn’t refer in the first place to peace within us. But certainly it does in the second place.   To live in the peace or shalom of God “out there” is to be possessed of peace “in here.”

“Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” It’s as though Jesus said “Through your trust in the king, through your clinging to me, you have come to live in the truth and reality of the kingdom. Now that you have come to live in it (‘your faith has “shalomed” you’), live from it. Move ahead in that truth you know to be unshakable.” As we move ahead in that kingdom, shalom, which cannot be shaken we find we are possessed of peace within us as well.

Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus engaged people beset with different problems and perplexities. Repeatedly he sent them on their way with good news ringing in their ears: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” Today we are going to look at three such instances.

 

I: — In the first instance a simple woman of immense need said to herself, “If I can just touch the hem of his garment” (as the old hymn says.) Actually she didn’t touch his hem, either the hem of his cloak or the cuffs of his trousers. She touched the tzith tzith, the tassels on his talith. All Jewish men wore their talith or prayer shawl as an undergarment (as orthodox Jews do today.) The four tassels (a daily reminder that the truth of God and the immensity of God extend to the four corners of the world) hung down beneath whatever Jesus was wearing that day on top of his prayer shawl. The woman who had haemorrhaged for twelve years (by now she was weak, poor and embarrassed) felt she had nothing to lose. If she could reach out to any aspect of our Lord, even to the fringes on his under-shawl, then the shalom of God, restoration, would be hers.

Was she superstitious? I think at one level she might have been. After all, grasping cloth fringes doesn’t do anything for anyone. At a deeper level, however, what she really wanted to do was make contact with Jesus. At bottom what counts in every era isn’t this or that minor superstition that’s often found mixed up with faith; what counts is that people want to make contact with Jesus Christ, albeit in the only way they know how. The woman in our story may have believed much or little about Jesus, both what is true and what isn’t true. But what she believed about him or didn’t wasn’t the point ultimately: she knew that if she could touch him, somehow, her entire life would be reordered.

When I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto I used to eat lunch with a graduate history student who had become startled, shaken even, at the disorder in the world and the disorder in her own life. She hadn’t had a Christian upbringing; she had no Christian memory. She had never been exposed to the gospel. Yet for some reason that only the mystery of God’s providence accounts for she thought that Jesus Christ might be the key to shalom without and peace within. She began attending church membership classes. There were many classes to attend. They discussed numerous theological subtleties, the place of angels, the role of Mary, the nature of the sacraments, and of course the superiority of denomination “A” over denomination “B.” One day at lunch she told me she had left the class. Frustrated, sad and more than slightly bitter she said, “All I ever wanted to do was make contact with him.”

However subtle we may become and should become in our understanding of Christianity let’s remember where the twelve disciples began. They began knowing little more than one all-determining truth: they simply knew that life with Jesus Christ was going to be better than life without him. In his company the disorder in the world gave way to the kingdom as the disorder in them gave way to peace. Apart from his company disorder, both outer and inner, would remain just that.

When discipleship became arduous and fair-weather followers abandoned Jesus he turned to the twelve and said, “Do you fellows want to quit too?” Speaking for all of them Peter replied, “Quit? Leaving you won’t help us. You alone wrap us in the shalom, the peace of God.”

When we are pressured in life, really pressured, I have found that theological hair-splitting isn’t very helpful. When we are being hammered whether we believe in Calvin’s extra-Calvinisticum or Luther’s communicatio idiomata doesn’t make any difference. When we are hammered and feel we are floundering we cry out with one cry only: “If I can just make contact….” It’s simpler than we think.

Still, what is simple in life isn’t thereby easy. It was simple for the woman to reach out to Jesus, but it wasn’t easy. She had to get through a crowd of men who didn’t understand, would never understand, her feminine problem with its attendant humiliation. No doubt some men dismissed her as silly; others as a nuisance. Certainly some would have made vulgar remarks about her, obscenities that didn’t even rise to the level of locker room humour. Still, she persisted, and while simple persistence is simple it isn’t easy.

It takes courage for people to persist today. It takes courage to reach out today while others snicker and ridicule. It takes courage amidst the pseudo-sophistication of those who equate faith with infantilism and scepticism with maturity.

Yet we persist in reaching out to Jesus because we have discerned the disorder “out there” and the concomitant disorder “in here.” As we do, we find our courage met instantly as our Lord does for us all that we expected and more. For we, in the company of countless others, hear him say “You haven’t touched me in vain. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

 

II: — Having made contact with our Lord, having made this crucial beginning, we crave more. Now that we are living in the shalom or salvation of God; now that we are living in the kingdom, the peace we have frees us to see what we’ve never seen before. When I say “frees us” I mean exactly that. After all, apart from the transformation that Christ works in us we don’t really want to see, however much we say we do. Psychological experiments have demonstrated irrefutably how prone people are to see what they want to see, even as they fail to see what they don’t want to see.

Then who wants to see? Only those whose living in the company of Jesus Christ frees them from fearing what they might see if they are made to see. For this reason Jesus asks Bartimaeus, a blind man, a question that only seems to be silly: “What do you want me to do for you?” Courageously, with that courage Christ’s company supplies, Bartimaeus replies, “I want to see; I really do.” He is made to see. And then our Lord adds, “Your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

The truth is, if we are going to “be well” then in addition to making contact with Jesus Christ we also need to be made to see. And if we are going to be made to see most profoundly, salvifically even, then only our Lord can do it. To be sure he rarely does it directly; that is, we aren’t made to see all by ourselves. Instead our Lord brings us to see through the instrumentality of someone we trust and love.

I have had the mirror held up to me on several occasions. It’s painful. It’s embarrassing. I’m not referring here to the situation where someone has waited weeks to get us “in his gun sights” and finally pulls the trigger. In other words I don’t have in mind the situation where someone out to get us abuses us verbally in public or   humiliates us. In this situation we may be so very devastated that we can’t defend ourselves; or we may be able to defend ourselves, in which case we should. I’m speaking, rather, where someone we trust, someone we know to have only our best interests at heart – a colleague, a friend, a spouse — gently confronts us with what we’ve never admitted about ourselves. It’s actually an indirect form of our Lord’s touching us so that we can finally see what heretofore we’ve never dared admit.
Within a year or two of my arrival in Mississauga (in other words I’d had time to attend several presbytery meetings) an older minister put his arm around me one night at the conclusion of the meeting and said warmly, non-accusingly, non-threateningly, “Victor, you have many gifts. Gentleness isn’t one of them. But gentleness happens to be a fruit of the Spirit. You aren’t helping yourself.” Did I resent him? On the contrary, I found in him the approach of the master himself as he said, “Your faith has made you well; go in peace.”

One day I was lamenting to Maureen the seeming coldness of a woman, wife of a friend, in our congregation in Mississauga . Maureen cut off my complaining as she said, without hint of nastiness, without hint of rejection, “I don’t find Mrs. X cold at all. It’s not that Mrs. X is cold; she simply won’t flirt with you.” I went to the floor with that one. Tell me: do I flirt? Perhaps you’d better not tell me until I’m certain that you love me.

We shouldn’t dismiss out of hand the person who gently tells us we appear to view many people with contempt since our speech is riddled with sarcasm. We need to be told if we are irked by people who are less than transparent when all the while our proclivity to exaggeration or deception or misrepresentation is common knowledge. We should hear and heed our children if they dare to tell us that what they do appears not be nearly as important to us as how they cause us, their parents, to appear.

The truth is there are very, very few secrets about any of us. Privacy isn’t the same as secrecy. Privacy is essential to mental health. Good. Let’s not give it up. But privacy and secrecy aren’t the same. What’s private and should be private isn’t necessarily secret and is rarely secret in any case. In other words, other people “read” us more quickly and more accurately than we think. Then we shouldn’t assume they’re wrong when they help us perceive that we do resent someone else’s good fortune; we are hostile toward those who merely disagree with us; we are indifferent to those who don’t flatter us.

In the company of Jesus Christ we want to see. What he enables us to see he also remedies. As he remedies our blindness he says, “Your faith has made you well, saved you; go in peace.”

 

III: — Being made well has to do with more than making contact with our Lord, more than even being made to see; it has to do as well with being rendered thankful. In other words gratitude is an aspect of our salvation.

Jesus healed ten lepers. Nine thoughtlessly went on their way. The tenth fellow returned, Luke tells us, “prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.” At this point Jesus said, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.”

Plainly, gratitude is a necessary ingredient in faith. Faith is genuine only if it includes thankfulness.

In the year 1563, when turbulence riddled Europe and life was riskier than we can imagine, two young men drew up what turned out to be the crown jewel of the shorter Reformation documents; namely, the Heidelberg Catechism. The Heidelberg Catechism aimed at nurturing and strengthening faith amidst threats to faith from all sides. The catechism has 129 questions and answers. They are divided into three sections: one, “The Misery of Humankind;” two, “The Redemption of Humankind;” three, “Thankfulness.” The third section discusses the whole of the Christian life: the Ten Commandments and the obedience we owe them, service to the neighbour, prayer, repentance, spiritual discipline. In other words the whole of the Christian life is gathered up in one word: thankfulness.

Our Reformed foreparents were correct: thankfulness does comprehend the whole of the Christian life. Thankfulness to Godgets us away from ourselves and neutralizes our whining about ourselves even as it neutralizes our envy of others. Only ceaseless gratitude to God will keep us shaping our lives after God’s commandments when so many people around us don’t understand why we should obey anyone. Gratitude to God is the lifeblood of our public worship, even as the same gratitude finds us humbled before God in private. Only thankfulness to God frees us to spend ourselves for others who cannot repay us and may not even notice us.

There’s even more to thankfulness; namely, what it fends off. When Paul speaks in Romans 1 of people with “darkened minds” and degenerate conduct, he succinctly states the reason for their darkened thinking and degenerate living: “They did not give thanks.” Ingratitude entails spiritual decline; spiritual decline entails degenerate living. When our Lord told the grateful leper, “Your faith has made you well, saved you,” it was no exaggeration. To be sure, the other nine lepers were lepers no longer, like the tenth. Unlike the nine, however, the tenth who returned to thank his healer was healed of far more than leprosy: his inner life and his outer life thereafter were one, and thereafter were righteous.

 

What’s the connection among the people we’ve looked at today? A desperate, courageous woman knew that if she could simply touch Jesus, make contact with him, her outer world would be altered and her inner turmoil rendered peace. A blind man knew that if he submitted to Christ’s touch he would see what he’d never seen before. A healed leper knew that he had to thank Jesus if all that the master longed to do for him was going to be his.

What’s the connection? You and I must want to make contact with Jesus Christ. Having made contact with him, and rejoicing in our new relationship with him, we must want him to make us see, lest we remain blind to spiritual defects in us that are no secret in any case. Having been made to see we must want to thank our Lord for his astounding mercy – only to hear him to say to us, “Your faith has made you well; now you go in the peace of God, shalom, as your life without and your life within is made forever different.”

 

Victor Shepherd

February 2005

Crucial words in the Christian Vocabulary: SIN

Mark 7:14 -23        Genesis 3:1-7     Romans 1:28-30     Ephesians 2:1-10

Some people enjoy restoring antique automobiles. Some people enjoy driving them. Most of us enjoy watching others drive the antique automobiles which they have restored. We smile when we see an antique car chugging along in the village parade. But none of us would want to contend with rush hour traffic or a highway trip in an antique car.

Yet this is what the church persists in doing, many people tell us, whenever the church speaks of sin. Surely the notion has been antiquated, we are told. Surely it belongs to the era of the Model “T” Ford. Let’s be honest: outside the community of faith the notion of sin, the word “sin”: these are out of fashion. How did it all come to be unfashionable?

   For one, thanks to some zealous but uninformed Christians sin came to be associated with innocent pastimes, like card playing or dancing or theatregoing. To speak of such matters as sin is ridiculous.

For another, sin became associated with lurid immorality, with a degradation (admittedly) that was also secretly coated with juicy, lurid lewdness. Since very few people are luridly immoral, and since no one will admit to finding it juicy, few people today understand sin as pertaining to them at all.

Finally, sin was rendered unfashionable by the self-confident secularism of our society. Years ago a European who thought autosuggestion to be the key to self-improvement urged people to say repeatedly, “Every day in ever way I am becoming better and better.” We smile at the naiveness, even the arrogance. Yet we smile too soon, for any society that worships the myth of progress (and the myth of progress is the mirage that North Americans chase) most certainly believes that it is getting better and better. We shall progress, we are told, only as we jettison such antiquated encumbrances as sin.

Nevertheless, the church, in her singing, preaching and praying continues to use the word. Profounder people among us won’t let it drop. Karl Menninger, internationally known psychiatrist and founder of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas , has written a thoughtful book, Whatever Became of Sin? Paul Tillich, philosopher and theologian, said in an interview for Time magazine, “For twenty-five years I have tried to find another word for ‘sin.’ There is no other word.”

 

[1] Since the community of faith isn’t going to drop the word, we should be sure we know what it means. Sin, at bottom, is as simple as it is dreadful: sin is simply telling God to “buzz off.” The telling may be explicit and conscious. More often, in fact nearly always, it is implicit and disguised because unconscious. It makes no difference. God is told to get lost. He claims us for himself. We say, “Leave me alone.” He insists that he wants only our blessing, and the obedience he wants from us will prove to be our blessing. We reply, “Everywhere else in life obedience is something we have to render a boss we can’t stand. Why should we think you are different?” He grounds his claim upon us in his love for us. We say, “I didn’t ask for your love. Furthermore, I resent your love; it’s an intrusion; I want my life to be mine.” The root Sin (and the fountain of all concrete sins) is a self-important, proud posture of defiance, of rejection, of disdain and disobedience. The posture pretends to be a sophisticated looking past God born of a sufficiency without God. Our sufficiency, however, is only a ridiculous figment of our imagination, and our innocent sophistication in fact culpable contempt.

We read children’s stories where someone highborn, aristocratic, sets out on a walk. He steps around peasants and paupers, disdaining them. From his position of aristocratic aloofness he never really sees them, never takes note of them, never engages them, so far beneath him he does he find them to be. As the children’s story unfolds one of the peasants or paupers was in fact a prince or a princess. The aristocrat’s proud aloofness, his groundless superiority, has caused him to forfeit something precious. Men and women strut like aristocrats disdaining the God who in his Son is lowly and humble, the God whose condescension to us for our blessing we regard as weakness in him. In our posture of proud aloofness we do not apprehend the God whose coming among us at Christmas and Calvary through peasant woman and cattle poop and criminal justice system is so very ordinary. When he does plant himself in front of us and presses both his love and his claim upon us we dismiss him: “Out of my way, ordinary fellow.” At bottom is our self-important posture of repudiation, rejection, dismissal – of him.

 

[2] What are the consequences of this posture? The first consequence, obviously, is estrangement from him. God isn’t indifferent to our postured superiority. He reacts. He thrusts us away from him. He won’t allow us to denounce him, defy him, and at the same time remain on casual terms with him. On account of his judicial reaction to our disobedience an abyss opens between God and us. The one who is eternally Father now looks upon alienated sons and daughters. The rightful ruler sends away rebellious subjects. Created to be God’s covenant-partners and co-workers, we relentlessly conspire against God and his truth. We sabotage God’s work. We deafen ourselves to God’s word. We trade on God’s kindness – or think we can.

The second consequence is estrangement from our fellows, those who were given us to be our brothers and sisters. When I was very young and warring with my two sisters my mother would say in exasperation and bewilderment, “Why can’t you just get along?” Why couldn’t we? Why can’t people throughout the world, in any era or culture, “just get along”? A Samaritan woman says to Jesus, “You are a Jew. I am a Samaritan. Samaritans and Jews: we get along like cobra and mongoose.” The first question in scripture is addressed to Adam and Eve, every man and every woman, after they have alienated themselves from God: “Where are you?” God says. The second question in scripture is addressed to Cain after he has murdered his alienated brother: “Where is your brother?” That’s a question God is forever asking all humankind all the time: “Where’s your brother? Where’s your sister?” An abyss has opened up between those given us to be brothers and sisters with the result that we are all hauntingly estranged from each other.

If the sociologists could eliminate the social conditions that are the occasion of human conflict (I said “occasion” not “cause”) would we then be living in a utopia? Tell me: if the Garden of Eden were reconstructed and repopulated would we all then be living in Lotus Land – or would we wreck the garden (again)? There can be no utopia just because improving our social environment may change the expression our sin takes but it won’t change us profoundly; it may change the manifestation of our sin but won’t eliminate sin itself. For the cause of humankind’s wrecking itself is that profoundest inner disorder rooted in our defiance and disobedience concerning God.

The third consequence of God’s judicial reaction to our root sin is alienation from ourselves. An abyss opens up, somehow, between me and myself. You see, God can always be refused. Still, our persistent refusing him doesn’t change the fact that he has made us for himself and therefore we are going to be most authentically human, most authentically our “self” only in him. To refuse him is always somehow to refuse ourselves. To be estranged from him is to be estranged from ourselves. To think we can get rid of him but continue to possess our “self” by means of our “self” – this is folly twice over. The self we’ve lost can’t be the means to possessing a self we are trying to find. It’s no wonder we are chronically discontent, dis-eased, ill-at-ease, self-alienated. It’s no wonder we keep asking “What’s wrong with me?” when in fact everyone is suffering from the same ailment for the same reason. It’s no wonder we keep trying to anaesthetize ourselves with adult toys and trinkets and playthings. Yet every so often the anaesthetic breaks down and we are startled to find “it’s still there” – the haunting, non-specific but undeniable apprehension that there’s something of the innermost “me” that I’m missing yet can’t quite find.

 

[3] Do you think this sermon is a “downer?” Have the last ten minutes been pessimistic and therefore depressing? Then what I’m going to say next should send you home rejoicing: “Today’s sermon is the most optimistic I have ever preached.” Why? Because the most optimistic thing to be said of any of us is that we are sinners.

If we don’t say that we are sinners then what expression are we going to use to describe, ultimately explain, the outer and inner wreckage we can’t deny? Are we going to say that humankind is sick? But “sick” has dubious connotations today, and they aren’t going to help us at all. Besides, if humankind as a whole is sick, then are there some among us who are considerably less sick than the rest and can therefore “cure” everyone else? The history of the world tells us that whenever a group in any society thinks it can “cure” everyone else it behaves with conscienceless savagery. On the other hand, if we say that there’s no privileged group in the society that can cure the rest of us, then there’s no physician adequate to our disease; there’s no physician with curative powers equal to the disease.

At this point someone will want to say that the problem lies with the word “sick” as a diagnostic tool. Instead of regarding humankind as sick we should regard ourselves as socially maladjusted.   To speak of ourselves as socially maladjusted, however, is to invite social engineering. The last ninety years, from the October revolution in Russia to the current situation in China and North Korea , from Germany of 1933 to Apartheid’s South Africa ; this period alone has told us as much as we want to know about social engineering. In any scheme of social engineering the “engineers,” the “answer” people, will insist upon the right to enforce their social solutions. They can only put us on the road to totalitarianism. The safest thing to say, because the truest thing to say, is also the most optimistic thing to say: we are sinners.

Let’s examine this assertion more closely. When we say that humankind is a sinner we aren’t using “is” in the same way as when we say a horse is four-legged. When we say that a horse is four-legged we mean that a horse is supposed to be four-legged, has to be four-legged. It was never meant to be anything else and is never going to be anything else. But when we say that we are sinners we are saying just the opposite: we are sinners but we aren’t supposed to be. We are sinners but we were never meant to be. We are sinners now but by God’s grace we shan’t be.

To say that we are sinners now is to say that we have falsified ourselves somehow, but by God’s grace we can recover our true identity. We can recover what we were made to be. Our capsized situation can be turned right side up. Most gloriously, it can all begin now.

Now you understand why it is optimistic to speak of humankind as sinner but pessimistic, hopeless and dangerous to speak of humankind as sick or socially maladjusted. Under God we can begin our journey toward the destination to which we’ve been appointed – which is nothing less than the overcoming of alienation everywhere in life: reconciliation with God, with our fellows, with our innermost, profoundest “self.”

Many times today we have used the word “alienation” to describe the threefold consequences of our root rejection of God. Think for a minute of what it is to be an alien. An alien is someone living precariously in a country to which he doesn’t belong, living precariously in a country of which he isn’t a citizen. Since he isn’t a citizen he lacks the rights and protection of citizen; he can be deported at any time. To be a citizen, on the other hand, is to belong, to have one’s life unfold in the security that one isn’t going to be deported. To be reconciled to God, and thereafter to fellows and self, is to know that we belong. It’s to know that life “fits.” The most optimistic diagnosis is that we are sinners, aliens, for only as the diagnosis is owned are we going to ask, “How do I become a citizen?”

How do we become citizens of the Kingdom of God ? The Apostles’ Creed gathers it all up in one pithy sentence: “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” To believe isn’t to add an item to our mental furniture, even an item of furniture called “the forgiveness of sins.” To believe, rather, is to entrust our entire future to the One who comes to us as Saviour and wants only that we trust him to save us.

Let’s return to the optimism of the diagnosis. Optimism, if it is to be genuine optimism and not mere wishful thinking, has to be grounded in realism. The realism of the human predicament is that we are sinners before God. The optimism of the human predicament is that we have been appointed to embrace our Lord who is also Saviour just because the forgiveness he pronounces he also effects. As we are forgiven and know ourselves forgiven, our reconciliation with God begins to effect reconciliation everywhere in life.

Think of the Samaritan woman in John 4. As a Samaritan she’s alienated from Jesus, a Jew: ethnic alienation, virulent today. As a woman she’s alienated from him because he’s a man: gender alienation, virulent today. As a five-time married woman who is currently shacked up (what’s the point of getting married a sixth time?) she’s alienated from Jesus because he’s sinless: moral alienation, virulent today. Because of her reputation she’s alienated from her townspeople (that’s why she’s at the well by herself at high noon when everyone else indoors seeking shelter from the heat): social alienation, virulent today. Jesus presses upon her the living water, the profoundest thirst-quenching water, that he himself is. In that moment, without ever having heard of the apostle Paul (who isn’t even an apostle yet), she understands what Paul means when he comes to say that forgiveness is nothing less than resurrection from the dead.

 

The church is entrusted with the message of forgiveness, just because the church, the Christian community, consists of those who have tasted forgiveness themselves. We know what it is to have been an alien and what it is now to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God . We know what it is to have many-faceted alienation give way – or at least begin to give way – to a many-faceted reconciliation. We see the folly and the ridiculousness of pipsqueak human beings who tell the creator of the cosmos to “get lost.” We see the folly and ridiculousness of it, but we don’t laugh at anybody who still lives there, because we once lived there ourselves. By God’s pardon, however, we have been brought from death to life, from darkness to light, from sinner to sinner forgiven. And we know that one day we are going to stand without spot or blemish before our great God and Saviour.

 

                                                                                                       Victor Shepherd                                                                                             

February 2004

 

How are we to understand Cross Bearing?

 

Mark 8:34-38     2nd Samuel 23:13-17     James 1:2-8

 

I: — A beach holiday looks good in the March break. Snow-shovelling is behind us, heating-bills are decreasing, and the cough-syrup stays in the bottle. When the travel company dangles the beach holiday in front of us nothing ever looked so good.

There is a kind of preaching which is just like this. People are jaded on account of life’s jolts. The preacher speaks of joy and peace and contentment; great surges of strength and wonderful infusions of enthusiasm. The preacher links it all to Jesus. When he dangles Jesus in front of jaded people, it’s all as attractive as the prospect of a beach holiday in the March break.

There is only one problem with the preacher’s presentation, but it’s a big problem: regardless of what he says, in fact he has left out Jesus. He thinks he has included him, since he ascribes all the “goodies” we get to him. But the huge error the preacher has made is this: he thinks we can have all that our Lord genuinely wants to give us without having our Lord himself. But we can’t. Jesus Christ does not give us joy, peace, contentment, strength and encouragement as though he were dispensing tonic from a medicine bottle. Our Lord can only give us himself. As he gives us himself, he does indeed give us “all things with him”, in the words of Paul. Popular preachers too often persist in overlooking something crucial: to be bound to Jesus Christ is to be bound to a cross. Warmly Jesus invites people to become disciples; realistically he also tells them that there is no discipleship, no intimacy with him apart from cross-bearing. To take up with him is to take up our cross.

I should never deny that fellowship with Jesus Christ is glorious indeed. He does bring us peace which the world cannot bring, peace which therefore passes the world’s understanding, peace which nothing and no one either gives or takes away. At the same time, fellowship with our Lord is double-sided: he insists that he brings not peace but a sword; specifically, that sword with which a hostile world wounds his disciples.

When the mother of James and John asks Jesus if her two sons can have extraordinary places of honour in the kingdom of God , Jesus, as his custom is, does not answer her question. Instead he asks his own question: “Can your two sons withstand getting kicked in the teeth on account of me?”

Jesus insists that cross-bearing is as essential a part of discipleship as obedience or prayer or worship. It’s not the case that we become disciples and then discover, much later, that every now and then there is a minor down-side to it all. Quite the contrary. Jesus calls us saying, “I promise you such blessing as to be available nowhere else, so wonderful that you may describe it but never explain it; I also promise you suffering that you have never imagined. Now do you still want me?”

Scripture never moves away from this conviction. In the Sermon On The Mount Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” Elsewhere, “you cannot be my disciple unless you take up your cross.” In Acts 5 the apostles finally leave the Sanhedrin (call it the church courts) “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for [Christ’s] name.” Paul writes so matter of factly, “Anyone who desires to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” James encourages his readers, “Count it all joy … when you meet various trials.”

One thing is plain: to shun cross-bearing, to shun that suffering which faithfulness to our Lord brings upon us, is to shun our Lord himself. Peter wept heart-brokenly in the wake of his denial. Peter had seen that the most intense suffering would shortly be visited upon his Lord. Quickly he disowned any connection with Jesus in order to spare himself similar suffering. In the same instant Peter knew he had divorced himself from the one for whom he had earlier said he would walk on broken glass.

When the National Alliance of Covenanting Congregations Within The United Church of Canada was formed the Rev. Gervis Black, senior minister from Metropolitan UC, London, toured the maritimes speaking on behalf of the Alliance (my former congregation Streetsville United Church, was a founding member.) At his first stop he found half-a-dozen congregations expressing much interest in the Alliance and eager to meet with him. The ministers of these congregations, however, were so frightened (of denominational authorities) that none of them would permit his church-building to be used for the meeting. The meeting had to be held in a school; in Halifax the meeting had to be held in a hotel. I understand why the ministers were frightened. I understand why Peter was frightened. Who wouldn’t have been frightened? Peter, however, wept. His weeping was his salvation.

 

II: — Christians live in the world. There is an aspect to our existence in the world to which Christians are surprisingly naive: the world is hostile to Jesus Christ and therefore hostile to the gospel. The world, however, is not hostile to religion. The world tolerates religion, even approves it. In fact, it is a mark of sophistication and broad-mindedness to find value in religion. As long as Christian discipleship, so-called, passes itself off as religion all is well. But as soon as Jesus Christ is seen to contradict the world’s self-understanding and self-projection, then Christ’s people are set upon. When Jesus sends out his missioners he says, “I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; you are going to get flogged in the churches.” (Why would the church flog apostles of Jesus? Because religion is acceptable in the church as it is in the world; whereas Jesus Christ, his truth and his people frequently are not.) “You will be hounded by all on account of me”, the master says chillingly. In John’s gospel Jesus prays for his people. Earnestly he says to his Father, “I have given them your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”

But why does the world (including a worldly church) hate our Lord and his people? Because the world sees Christians as disturbers of the peace. Jesus himself is a disturber of the peace. He and the world collide. Righteousness and sin cannot be reconciled. Truth exposes falsehood for what it is. Transparency shames duplicity. The kingdom of God and the work of the evil one are forever incompatible.

The irony of it all, of course, is that Jesus is the world’s friend as no one else is. And yet the world hates the only one who can save it. Christians stand with their Lord in solidarity with the world for the sake of the world; yet the world abuses them. In brief, to be a Christian is always to be saddled with affliction. There is no escape. Affliction at the hands of the world progresses through three phases. The first is defamation. Things are said about disciples, accusations are made, which are simply not true. The second phase is ostracism. You aren’t on the inner circle any longer (if you ever were); you aren’t on the “A” team; you’ve been waved to the back of the bus. The third phase is out-and-out abuse. Jesus illustrates this progression himself. First he was called a demon-possessed bastard. Then he was relegated to the fringes of the religious establishment. Finally he was “terminated”. What have you been called? I’ve been called much. Of course it hurts. But in fact it’s a badge of honour, a mark of our discipleship.

 

III: — People who ask about cross-bearing don’t usually have in mind what we’ve discussed so far. They usually have something else in mind. When people speak of bearing their cross they customarily mean not that extraordinary suffering brought upon us through our loyalty to him whom the world despises; they mean the ordinary suffering that comes to us simply because we are fragile creatures who live in an unpredictable environment. We fall sick, our teenager gets derailed, our aged parent is chronically confused, our brother-in-law is meaner than a junk-yard dog, we lose our job. We sigh with genuine weariness and wonder how we are going to “bear our cross.”

There are two things I want to say about this. In the first place, the suffering that comes upon us as part of the human lot the NT never speaks of as a cross to be borne.   If tomorrow I am found to have encephalitis or Lou Gehrig’s disease it will be dreadful, and not to be made light of. At the same time, it is not a “cross”, strictly speaking, since it is suffering brought on me simply through being human, not through being Christ’s disciple.

The second thing I want to say bears very careful attention. In the Roman Catholic tradition especially, it is acknowledged that the suffering we incur simply through being human, if borne cheerfully, without bitterness or rancour or resentment — this “ordinary” suffering becomes a sacrifice offered up to God and now has the significance of suffering incurred through being a disciple. You see, it comes naturally to us to resent suffering, chafe under it, be embittered by it and then poison ever so many others on account of it. Left to ourselves, this is how we fallen human beings react. It is by grace; in the words of Hebrews it is by “looking unto Jesus” that the suffering we neither brought on ourselves nor are able to get rid of doesn’t embitter us, disfigure us and poison others.

If, as our Roman Catholic friends insist, suffering borne in this way is indeed a sacrifice offered up to God, then it is legitimate for us to speak of it as a cross to be borne. After all, it is our discipleship which keeps us looking unto Jesus in the midst of our ineradicable suffering.

A year or two ago I was a speaker at a summer Conference in the course of which there was to be a healing service where the worship-leader laid hands upon people as he prayed for them. Two people at this event captured my attention: a 60-year old woman, a widow, together with her 35-year old son. She was a Registered Nurse and worked for the Peel Board of Education. She had had a small stroke. It had not impaired thought or speech, but it had inhibited movement in one arm and one leg. She hobbled. Her son, on the other hand, was very ill; he was severely schizophrenic. He lived with his mother inasmuch as he couldn’t live anywhere else. She was struggling to go to work every day despite her disabilities, even as she had to look out for and look after her psychotic son. In the afternoon before the evening’s healing service the son and I were sitting in front of the coffee machine chatting about anything at all. Suddenly he faced me in dead earnestness and said, “At the service tonight I am coming to you to have you lay hands on me. I want to be free from the voices; you know, the voices.” My heart sank. I staggered to my feet, bought us each an ice-cream cone, and took him for a walk. Ever since then I have pondered his unrelieved suffering, his mother’s difficulty, the struggle she has day by day — and the genuine cheerfulness in which she contends with it all. That’s what I ponder most: her transparent good nature and cheerfulness in the face of it all! It is by her looking unto Jesus that the suffering which isn’t a consequence of her discipleship has the significance, before God, of that suffering which is; for it is by looking unto Jesus that she has offered up to him what would otherwise embitter and disfigure her even as it poisoned others.

 

IV: — There is something more we must be sure to notice today. While in passage after passage the NT insists that cross-bearing is a necessary part of discipleship, in no passage does the NT speak of this in terms of protest or complaint. No complaining, no bewailing our appointment, no griping, no self-pity. Why not? Simply because Christians of apostolic discernment and experience know that Christ’s cross is that by which he conquers. They know that his resurrection means not that his cross has been left behind; his resurrection is precisely what continues to make his cross effective; they know that his resurrection is precisely what makes his ongoing suffering victorious in the world.

Few people understand that the risen Jesus suffers still. Many people assume that Jesus had a bad day, one Friday. Then he had a super day on Easter Sunday and things have gone swimmingly ever since. In other words, they assume that in his resurrection Jesus left his crucifiedness behind him forever. Not so! It is the risen Christ who says to Thomas, “Look at my gaping wounds.” Even as raised he is still wounded. It is the risen Christ who cried out to Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?”, when Paul (at that time Saul) was persecuting Christ’s people. The risen one suffers still. However, his resurrection means that his ongoing suffering is now the leading edge of God’s victory in the world.

The cross which you and I bear is the leading edge of God’s victory over whatever evil laps at us. Taken up into this victory ourselves, we know that the afflictions we bear will never best us. Indeed our affliction itself will be used of God to alleviate someone else’s affliction. Is it not Christ’s wounds which heal us? Is it not his death which brings us life? Is it not his suffering which comforts us? Then as cross-bearers with him it is our privilege to be used of him in similar manner on behalf of so many others. Remember, nowhere in the NT is cross-bearing, an inevitable aspect of discipleship, spoken of in terms of protest or complaint.

None of this is to suggest that cross-bearing is pleasant or will ever be. It is difficult; frequently it is dreadful. Our Lord knows this. That’s why he urges patience and cheerfulness upon his people. “In the world you will have tribulation”, he says, “but be of good cheer, the world is precisely what I have overcome.” Intense as suffering is, however, it is not the case that we are to hang on grimly until the day comes when we are finally relieved by him who has overcome the world. Right now, rather, Christ’s people are those who have “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come”. What we have already tasted convinces us that it is real; it quickens our longing for more; and it assures us that what we have already tasted and now long for, God will supply one day in fullest measure.

Paul says that the life of Christ’s people, our true life, real life, is at present hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, we shall appear with him in glory. Then may you and I ever be found cheerfully bearing whatever cross we must. For just as our Lord endured suffering and shame only to be vindicated before the entire creation, so shall we be vindicated as his people; for he will have brought us, cross and all, through that turbulent, treacherous world which he has overcome on behalf of every one of us.

 

                                                                                            Victor Shepherd

January 2005

 

 

 

The Rhythm of it All

 Mark 9:2-29

 

The human heart fills up with blood, expanding as it fills.  Then it contracts, sending blood throughout the body.         A second later it happens again.  Blood is gathered into the heart, blood is expelled from the heart, over and over. With some people, however, the heartbeat becomes irregular.  The rhythm is upset. These people have a lopsided pulse. Their condition is known as arrhythmia. Plainly their heart needs medical attention.

There’s a heartbeat of a different kind that regulates the Christian life. There’s a normal pulse that indicates a healthy balance between input and output.  And in the Christian life as well, arrhythmia points to an irregularity. Arrhythmia here should be checked out too.

The truth is, most of us tend to suffer somewhat from arrhythmia in the Christian life. Some of us are doers. We emphasise output. We are eager to fix the world, and invariably find ourselves unable to turn down any request for assistance. In fact, we don’t even have to wait for a request.  Any suggestion that we might pause and take stock we dismiss as indifference or laziness or heartlessness.

On the other hand, some of us are contemplatives.  We emphasise input. We meditate. We ponder.  We cultivate inwardness. We are more concerned with what is going on in the recesses of our hearts and heads than with what is happening in the wider world.  But both these conditions are arrhythmic; both indicate an irregularity in the Christian life.

As we reacquaint ourselves once more with the story of the Transfiguration we shall hear the regular, rhythmic heartbeat of discipleship. And hearing it in the old, old story, we shall find, by God’s grace, that our own heartbeat has been normalised; our own heartbeat is corrected by the master himself, just as he first corrected the heartbeat of the apostles before us.

 

I:         Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a mountain with him.  Right away our ears should perk up.  Having been exposed to scripture for decades we should know that mountains, in scripture, are the venue of revelation: Mount Sinai, Mount Carmel, Mount Zion , the Mount of Olives, the “hill” of Calvary ”, “The Sermon on the Mount.”         “Mountain” always points to God’s self-disclosure and the change within those who are beneficiaries of it.  As soon as we hear that Jesus has taken Peter, James and John with him up a mountain, we know that an epiphany is occurring whose truth and reality will stamp itself indelibly upon these men and upon all, like us, who receive their witness and therein find the same epiphany occurring again. While the three men are with Jesus on the mountain, Jesus shines before them with a luminosity they can neither explain nor forget.  He is highlighted in such a way as to leave them knowing that he is the effectual presence of God. They are startled yet also satisfied; taken aback yet also contented.         They know that once more, on this mountain, they are standing on holy ground not because of anything about the ground but rather because of him who has shone before them.

All of us have had similar experiences at the level of the merely creaturely, the merely human. There must be, there has to be, some situation where the human love that spouse or friend or child or parent has poured over you for years suddenly staggers you, overwhelms you in one way or another and leaves you “spaced”, as teenagers like to say.         You are startled that anyone should love you that much; startled even more that this person in particular, who knows you inside out, should love you that intensely and intentionally, that freely and forgivingly.  As startled as you are, however, you aren’t the slightest bit sceptical or suspicious. You simply glory in the glow of someone’s all-enveloping love for you.

There mustbe, there has to be, some situation where truth has broken in on you. It broke in on you like a wave breaking on the beach and running up the shore. Before it all receded, and your surprise with it, it soaked into you.         The fact that it was hidden within you; the fact that no one else was aware of what had happened; the fact that the truth that now seized your mind and heart you didn’t have words enough to articulate; none of this diminished in any way your conviction and the difference it made to you from that day.

There must be, there has to be, some situation in which Jesus Christ ceased to be a problem or a perplexity or the occasion of more questions than answers.  He loomed before you as bedrock reality on which you could stand and from which you could gain perspective on the mirages and deceptions that had beset you and kept you off-balance, confused and nervous.  As startled as you were, however, you weren’t frightened.  In fact this time your shock was also the end of your fear.

Usually we say little about such occasions.  We don’t want to appear a religious “spouter” or worse, a religious exhibitionist. We don’t want to appear as tasteless as those who blab marital intimacies at a cocktail party. Still, we know that something has established itself so deep within us that words will never do justice to it. Words will never do justice to it, to be sure, but some words, at least, come much closer than others to doing justice to it; such as the matchless words of Charles Wesley:

O disclose thy lovely face,

Quicken all my drooping powers;

Gasps my fainting soul for grace

As a thirsty land for showers:

Haste, my Lord, no more delay!

Come, my Saviour, come away!

When Wesley penned these lines he had in mind verse 13 from chapter 2 of the Song of Solomon:

Arise, my love, my fair one, come away.

The Song of Solomon is a love-poem of undisguised eroticism.  Wesley found the imagery there expressing his longing for his Lord together with that longing fulfilled.  No doubt he had read the Song of Solomon a dozen times per year for years beyond counting, and then one day words written for a different purpose became the vehicle of his heart’s greatest longing and its fulfilment as the lover of all men and women lit up before him.

One Sunday evening in Aberdeen, Scotland (at one time I was a postgraduate student in Aberdeen), I was in an upside-down mood: depressed, miserable, petulant, fed up and frustrated over a professor who had encouraged me for two years to go to Scotland to study under him. Ten days after I had arrived he had left without ever informing me of what he had known for months he was going to do. In my upside-down mood I knew I wouldn’t be any company for Maureen, and so I hopped on a bus and went to a small downtown church tucked away at the end of a narrow, winding street.  The president of the Methodist Conference of Great Britain and Ireland was to speak. I went expecting nothing. “O disclose thy lovely face, quicken all my drooping powers….”   It happened.  And I can’t remember one word of the sermon.

When I was a younger minister I thought that parishioners should be able to take home huge chunks of the sermon week by week.  After all, I had spent many hours working up this material; surely the least they could do was remember it.  Then one day a parishioner questioned me about the sermon I had preached three Sundays ago, and I realised I couldn’t recall the sermon. From that moment I ceased expecting worshippers to be a blotter.  From that moment instead I wanted not information blotted but fire struck. I wanted some aspect of worship, whether prayer or hymn or anthem (although the sermon would do too) to become the event of self-disclosure where Jesus Christ lights up and we are startled and moved yet also contented as truth and love and fathomless profundity steal over us, confirming both him and ourselves in him.

When mediaeval Roman Catholics were visited with such moments they spoke of them in the language of vivid visions.  Such language strikes many people as exaggerated, even grotesque.  When our Protestant foreparents were visited with such moments they spoke of them in the language of poetry (hymns), which language strikes many people as overblown, even saccharine.  But the vision and the poetry aren’t exaggerated at all for those, like Peter, James and John, before whom Jesus Christ has loomed illumined.  No language I speak to my wife or she to me strikes either of us as exaggerated. It would be exaggerated to someone who had never been in love and therefore had never lived in that world. Once we are in love and do live in that world, we know that the most intense love-language falls far short of the heart’s surge.  “O disclose thy lovely face….”   And when our Lord does precisely this?  There are only two responses: say nothing inasmuch as no word is adequate, or say something knowing that every word falls short.

II:         What next? Peter wants to freeze the moment, preserve it before it disappears.  Who doesn’t?  Nevertheless, to try to freeze such a moment is to kill it.  (Frozen fish, we must remember, may be preserved indefinitely but they certainly aren’t alive.) Much as we want to, we can’t seize the moment that has overtaken us, grasp it and try to hang on to it. If we grasp at it, we are grabbing the gift-wrapping when we should be glorying in the gift, for the gift is simply the giver himself.  To try to freeze the moment is to try to prolong the ecstasy when we should be looking to its author.

What’s more, we should always remember that God has something for us beyond ecstasy. When Peter tries to freeze the moment on the mountain, a cloud appears (clouds, in scripture, are a symbol of God’s presence), and out of the cloud a voice comes: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” “Listen”, for the Hebrew mind, always has the force of “obey.”  If we don’t obey we haven’t heard.

Only hours earlier Jesus had told the twelve he would have to suffer. “Can’t be” they had shot back. Undeterred, Jesus had insisted even more persistently that his vocation entailed suffering, and because his did, theirs did too.         He had told them they must deny themselves: self-renunciation was an aspect of discipleship. He had told them they must shoulder their cross; not his, to be sure, but theirs nonetheless, sacrifice being as essential to discipleship as paint to a painter. Their Lord had told them they must never, simply never, be ashamed of him and his truth and his way – not when they were mocked; not when they were slandered; not when they were hammered. Everything that Jesus had shared with them only hours earlier and which they had forgotten already, so intense was their moment of ecstasy; all of this was brought back as ecstasy gave way to sobering voice: “This is the Son I’ve appointed you to hear and heed. Listen to him.”

We can’t freeze the moment of God’s self-disclosure.  We shouldn’t even try. We must rather allow it to lead us to God’s claim on our obedience.

 

III:         Peter, James and John accompany Jesus back down the mountain.  They are returning to the turbulent, treacherous world whose trouble is unrelenting. Immediately they come upon a boy with epilepsy.  A distraught father has brought the boy to them.  The youngster can’t stop convulsing and foaming.  A crowd gathers, crowds always gathering at the gripping spectacle of human distress. In the midst of the boy’s neurological seizure and the crowd’s psychological seizure, a knot of religious hair-splitters is having an argument.

Everyone’s world convulses from time to time.  Families convulse, societies convulse, denominations convulse, and occasionally there’s a convulsion inside us so terrible that we foam. And amidst it all there are perverse people with shrivelled hearts who relish religious strife as they relish nothing else.

The disciples endeavour to do something for the boy and discover that they can’t. Once they have owned their helplessness Jesus comments, “This sort of thing can be driven out only by prayer.” We know he’s right. Of ourselves, what can you and I do for convulsions within and without?   Of ourselves, what can we do for others that doesn’t end up increasing their burden and perplexity and pain?  Only by prayer can all of this be dealt with.

Yet prayer doesn’t mean magical incantation.  It doesn’t mean a religious formula, the mere reciting of which brings sure-fire success. It doesn’t mean “abracadabra” repeated over and over with the name of Jesus tacked on the end to make it “work.”   It means, rather, a patient, disciplined waiting on God.  It means a self-exposure to God as persistent as our self-exposure to human need. It means a sensitivity to the heart of God commensurate with our sensitivity to the heart of our fellow-sufferer.  It means a glad and grateful, non-defensive willingness to be corrected by other Christians who are walking the Way with us.

IV:         As God takes us from mountaintop down to a valley of trouble we mustn’t shirk the crossbearing to which he has appointed us.  Yet our crossbearing must have about it no trace of resentment.

Our faithfulness to Jesus Christ amidst ceaseless turbulence certainly entails self-denial. Yet our self-denial must have about it no trace of sourness or self-righteousness.

In a world that is already riddled with deviousness and deception we must stand by and stand up for that truth which our Lord has planted amidst falsehood. Yet our boldness here must have about it no trace of aggression or arrogance.

To be sure, our activity on behalf of Jesus Christ and his people will always unfold amidst religious strife.  Yet we must exalt our Lord without magnifying fruitless controversy. And of course we must never become so taken up with argument, even edifying discussion, that we fail to see people who are in pain.

It’s only by prayer, says Jesus, that all these distortions and disfigurements can be driven out of us and render us fit instruments of the master’s word and touch. It is only as we betake ourselves to him, to his word, to our fellow-believers that we shall avoid the impotence that the twelve knew in the face of overwhelming human need.

 

When we come back down the mountain, what are we going to find?   We are going to hear the world’s bleating.         (Sheep without a shepherd, Jesus said the people were.)   We are going to hear the religiously argumentative who never quit in any case. But over all of this we are going to hear someone here, and another person there, who cry out to us, “I believe a little.   Won’t you and your congregation help me believe more?”

Those who cry out to us in this manner are those who’ve come to admit that life can’t be domesticated.  They used to think that life could be tamed, and now they see it can’t. They used to think that only neurotics and weaklings were fragile; now they see that fragility is the human lot. They used to think that any reflection on death was morbid; now they know that life is short and death is sure.

Sometimes these people begin with a request of us, sometimes with a bitter accusation, sometimes with a grope as they try to grasp anything that will stop their spinning and quell their nausea.  Often they begin with a perplexity which, on account of their pain, has moved from their head (perplexities in the head are harmless) to their heart (perplexities in the heart are distressing.)  At this point they look to us and say, “I do have some struggling faith; can’t you help it grow?”   This is what we find when we come down the mountain.
The pulse of the Christian life should be like the pulse in the body: rhythmic. It becomes arrhythmic as soon as we neglect any aspect of the Christian life, thereby rendering our discipleship lopsided.  In fact it’s not difficult to keep it rhythmic.  It’s just a matter of going up and down the mountain, up into moments of our Lord’s self-disclosure, glorious and satisfying at once, then back down with him into a world whose pain makes it writhe – doing this over and over until that day, says Charles Wesley, when our Lord’s ultimate self-disclosure obliterates all pain, and all God’s people are forever lost in wonder, love and praise.

 

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                           

February 2007

Help for our Half-Belief

Mark 9:14-29

1] The recent controversies in Canada’s largest Protestant denomination have generated sharp disagreements and more than a little anguish. For Christians such controversy is unavoidable. Peter tells us in his first letter that we should always be ready to articulate our gospel-convictions when those convictions are challenged. Time after time, on his missionary journeys, Paul went to the marketplace or a church-hall and argued for the truth and substance of Jesus Christ. This isn’t to say that he argued nastily, that he became bad-tempered or contemptuous or sarcastic. But it is to say that he was prepared to argue on behalf of the one who had seized him and now shone so brightly for him as never to be denied. In other words, he was ready to speak for, speak up for, the gospel of God whenever this gospel was maligned or distorted or simply misunderstood. As the gospel has been contradicted in our own denomination some of us have known what we had to do: we had to speak up, argue, dispute, and do all of this in a manner which adorned the gospel itself. As we have done this a crowd has gathered. Because of the controversy I have addressed crowds larger than any I had addressed before. In addition, news reporters and magazine writers have ensured that there was always a crowd to read if not to hear.

God has ordained that there be a place for this. DIALOGIZOMAI is a rich NT word; it means to dialogue, to discuss, to argue, to reason, to question, to contend. Yet while there is certainly a God-ordained place for this, it isn’t ultimate. Arguing and reasoning with respect to the gospel are never ends in themselves. Paul didn’t argue in the marketplace because he was argumentative or prickly; never because he relished arguing and enjoyed defeating someone in a verbal joust. He argued only for the sake of the gospel. We do as much today only in order to dispel misunderstandings of the gospel, to clear away any obscurities which might be impeding faith in our hearers. Ultimately our purpose in arguing on behalf of the gospel is to get beyond argumentation and have others embrace the gospel itself; that is, have them cling to Jesus Christ in the strength and desire which his grip on them lends them.

When we find the disciples of Jesus arguing with the scribes (according to Mark) we understand why they argue, why they have to. We understand too why a crowd gathered: crowds love controversies. Yet as soon as Jesus shows up the crowds forget the arguing and flock around him. They do so, Mark tells us, insofar as they are amazed at him; as soon as they see him they are startled at the authority he exudes. As soon as they see him they recognize that he can do for them what no one else can.

One of the crowd has brought his ill son to the disciples. This man assumes that where there are disciples of Jesus there is also the power of Jesus. He wants help for his disordered son. As soon as Jesus appears the parent recognizes that this man is the one he is really looking for.

People from “the crowd” come to our services. Recently several of them have come inasmuch as they have heard that there is argument, controversy here. At the same time some have come inasmuch as they have recently become parents and are sobered by their new responsibility; or they have lost someone dear to them and they have questions they cannot answer and a heartache they cannot assuage; they come after any one of life’s countless jarrings have left them wondering profoundly or wobbling drunkenly. In coming here; in coming into the midst of us who are disciples of Jesus, they assume they are drawing near to Jesus himself. They assume that from the midst of Christ’s people there will be given them what they need, or at least what they are looking for and what our Lord alone can supply.

Sometimes they come only to go, feeling that what they expected to find here isn’t here. Some, however, remain long enough that Our Lord himself appears to them . In that instant, like the crowd of old, they recognize that he is the one with authority. They are startled as they recognize what they cannot put words to, yet they know. Whether they have been attracted by the argumentativeness of this congregation or put off by it, they now know that the disputes were never ends in themselves but were always for the sake of the one who has loomed before them and whom they know to love them.

 

2] The anguished parent in our gospel story brings his son to Jesus. The boy goes rigid; he convulses; he foams. Plainly he is epileptic.

The ailments which were brought to Jesus in the days of his earthly ministry were certainly distressing ailments in themselves. At the same time they were signs of a deeper, more difficult spiritual problem besetting humankind. Think for a minute of the blind people who are brought to Jesus. Blindness is a dreadful affliction. To be deprived of sight is certainly to be victimized by evil. Since Jesus resists evil wherever he comes upon it, he restores sight to those who are blind.

But blindness is also symbolic of humankind’s spiritual condition, as the NT stories point out starkly. We are blind to the nature and purpose and truth of God. We are blind to the signs of God’s presence. We are blind to the truth about ourselves, blind to the nature of our own depravity and blind to our situation before God, the just judge.

At the same that Jesus restores sight to the physically blind, then, he expands the meaning of his action to include the spiritual blindness which afflicts us all. You must have noticed that in the account of our Lord’s meeting with Nicodemus Jesus says to him, “Truly, unless one is born anew (born of God) one cannot even see the kingdom of God, much less enter it.” In other words, only as the truth and power of God penetrate us do we become spiritually perceptive and discerning.

An epileptic boy is brought to Jesus. His epilepsy needs attention and is given attention. At the same time, the symptoms of the boy’s epilepsy point to the symptoms of humankind’s spiritual condition.

First, the boy is dumb; mute; can’t speak at all. Which is to say, humankind does not praise God. This is startling, since we are commanded to praise God. As a matter of fact the command to praise God is the most frequently repeated command in scripture. The characteristic of God is that God speaks. God speaks to us in expectation of eliciting speech from us. The absence of heartfelt and heartmeant exclamation to God is spiritual dumbness; as such it is a sign of our spiritual disorder, for it is first a consequence of our spiritual disorder. Only as there is a restorative work of God within us are we freed to praise God from our heart.

In the second place, the boy’s behaviour renders him unsightly and self-destructive. No one pretends that an epileptic seizure is pretty or pleasant to behold. A seizure never yet made anyone beautiful. Neither does our sin render us attractive. Our condition of sinnership, of course, is what underlies those unsightly outcroppings which we call sins. We don’t pretend for a minute that the outcroppings produced themselves. The outcroppings which disfigure us are outcroppings of a spiritual condition which is so deep in us as to be hidden to all except those with Spirit-quickened understanding. Still, it is the outcroppings which everyone sees, whether believer or unbeliever.

No list of sins could ever be complete, since our underlying sinnership effervesces inexhaustibly. Nevertheless, here and there in scripture we come upon partial lists. When Jesus speaks of our root condition of sinnership and refers to its outcroppings he speaks off the top of his head of “evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. He stops there only because he assumes he has made his point. In the same way Paul rattles off “covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, gossip, slander, hatred of God, insolence, abuse of parents, foolishness, faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness.” He stops there only because he has run out of breath. Any one of us could add another fifty.

The point is this. As we soberly look over the partial lists none of us would say that these outcroppings are other than unsightly. Blemishes, in fact. And in view of what God created us for they are hideous disfigurements. And these disfigurements, insists Jesus, are a consequence of the root human spiritual condition.

The boy’s behaviour also renders him self-destructive: his affliction has often thrown him into water and fire. Sin is humanly destructive. Sin slays, to be sure, and it issues ultimately in spiritual annihilation. This too is part of the human condition.

In the third place, when the boy’s father is asked for how long his son has been afflicted, the father blurts out, “From childhood; he’s been like this from childhood!”   I know for how long I have been afflicted with my sinnership, and I know for how long you have been afflicted with yours: from childhood. Several years ago someone asked me for a sermon on original sin. I preached it, and it is ready-to-hand in my little book, MAKING SENSE OF CHRISTIAN FAITH. I won’t repeat the sermon now. Suffice it to say that “from childhood” is no exaggeration.

Our Lord’s depiction of the human condition is accurate. Few people, however, believe him. They believe that education, the welfare state, improved recreational facilities, better health care will together transmute the human condition. It won’t. Only the touch of our Lord does this.

 

3] The father brings his boy to Jesus and says, “If you can do something, anything, have pity on us and do it.” “Do you believe that I can?”, asks Jesus, “or are you simply giving utterance to a bit of wistful thinking?” “I do believe that you can”, the man says, “but I can’t seem to believe enough! Do something about my unbelief!” Whereupon Jesus restores the boy to health. You and I are no different. We do believe that our Lord is saviour. We are not dabbling in wistful thinking. We do believe that he alone can deal with that sinnership which is the root spiritual condition of every last human being. Yet when we search our hearts, look out onto the world and note what awaits us there, look back into our hearts — why, it’s like Peter getting out of the boat with a modicum of confidence, only to look at the waves around him, and finding himself going under. In other words, every time we say, “I believe”, we are also driven to cry, “but I can’t seem to believe enough”.

To say this, however, is to admit that we cannot generate faith ourselves. We cannot come to be possessed of greater faith by fostering or facilitating something inside our psyches. There is no incantation or meditative technique or guru-gimmick or mystical magic by which we can generate faith out of our own resources. We come to be possessed of greater faith only by looking away from ourselves, away from our half-believing hearts, to the God who has promised to enlarge even mustard-seed faith. God alone can do this. Then we must keep on looking to him, for only as we look away from ourselves to him will we be fully assured that our Lord can restore us and will restore others.

 

The disciples have witnessed the restoration of the boy. They are taken aback at their own spiritual impotence. The boy’s father had brought the boy to them (as we mentioned several minutes ago) assuming that disciples of Jesus are themselves possessed of the very thing which their master exemplifies in himself and lends to his followers. Now the disciples are sobered. They cannot deny their own spiritual poverty. “Why do we appear ineffective in the face of humankind’s condition and need?”, they ask. Jesus replies tersely, “It’s a matter of prayer; always a matter of prayer.”

In saying it is a matter of prayer our Lord does not mean it is a matter of muttering a religious formula; not a matter of pious abbracadabbra. It is, however, a matter of petitioning God morning and night to magnify the faith he has given us. It is a matter of exercising the faith we have by concentrating more on the risen one who stands in our midst than on the turbulence which forever laps our lives. It is a matter of contending for the truth of the gospel (as we must) without crushing ourselves by thinking that the future of God’s kingdom hinges on the success of our argumentation. It is a matter of acknowledging that we share in Christ’s victory only as we participate in his sufferings. And prayer is always a matter of not fleeing or cluttering the wilderness-episodes of our lives but rather recognizing that we are led into wilderness-episodes in order that we, like Jesus before us, might hear our Father speaking to us with new clarity. All of this is gathered up as Jesus says to the disciples, “Spiritual authenticity is found in those who pray.”

 

 

It’s an old account of a disordered, disfigured fellow who has been afflicted from childhood. He typifies the root human condition. He typifies as well, however, that work of grace by which our Lord renders you and me all believing people creatures who redound to the praise of God’s mercy — even as the selfsame grace renders our insufficient belief sufficient; sufficient unto that day when faith will give way to sight and we shall behold our blessed Lord face-to-face, forever and ever.

 

                                                                                                    Victor A. Shepherd
November, 1991

. . . Whoever Does Not Receive the Kingdom of God as a Little Child Will Never Enter It

Mark 10:15

There may be some dyed-in-the-wool romantics who maintain that children are innocent, pure, always and everywhere nice like sugar and spice.  Such romantics, however, have never been parents or schoolteachers or police officers. Anyone who has lived with children or worked with children knows that children aren’t innocent. Children are cruel; they will gang up and pick on another youngster.  Children are devious; they will invent “explanations” without end to extenuate themselves when their wrongdoing is exposed.  Children are manipulative; they know how to set one parent against another, how to extort something they want from playmate or adult.

Jesus never pretended that children are innocent. He insisted that no one was spared the Fall. He wouldn’t have disagreed with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a book that details the savagery of socially privileged adolescents. (Lord of the Flies, the title of Golding’s book, also happens to be the English translation of the Aramaic word Beelzebul.  Didn’t our Lord speak of Beelzebul throughout his public ministry?)

Jesus isn’t a romantic.  He doesn’t pretend children are guileless or guiltless.  Nevertheless, the gospel story tells us that Jesus picked up a child, set the child in the midst of adults, and said, “Now look.  If you are ever going to enter the Kingdom of God you must receive the Kingdom like this child.”  Plainly our Lord is urging us to be childlike (but not, we should note, childish.) He says that unless we are childlike with respect to the Kingdom, we shall forfeit the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God , needless to say, is the Kingship of God. The Kingdom of God isn’t a territory such as the Kingdom of Great Britain or the Kingdom of Belgium . To live in the Kingdom of God is to live under the Kingship of God.  It’s to acknowledge that he who is our Father is also the Royal Ruler. Israel ’s greatest king was David, and David was a shepherd.  In other words, according to Jewish understanding the Shepherd of Israel has to be King or else his shepherding is ineffective; and the King of Israel has to be Shepherd or else his kingly rule promotes misery. The Shepherd who is King is the effective shepherd; and the King who is shepherd is a ruler who wants only to rescue and bless his people.

When we enter the Kingdom of God we enter upon, enter into, a relationship with that Shepherd King whose royal rule over us serves only to remedy whatever is wrong with us.  We enter this Kingdom, says Jesus, only as we become not childish (infantilism is never to be venerated) but childlike.

 

I: — What’s involved in being childlike? The child receives everything as gift, sheer gift.  In first century Palestine the child had no legal rights. There was no International Year of the Child reminding forgetful parents that every child has rights. The child had none. The child lived only by the good pleasure of its parents.  Anything the child received, then, it received as gift.

Have you ever noticed how many images in biblical thought concerning the Kingdom are pictures drawn from family life? The apostle Paul speaks of adoption, the sheer gift of a new parent who provides a new home whereby the wandering waif or orphan becomes full son or daughter, and is given all that the newfound parents have to give.         According to Luke Jesus speaks of a father who is so happy to see his defiant, disobedient son come home that he gives him shoes, ring, robe, party. All the gospel writers speak of the meals people share with Jesus.  Do they eat and drink with Jesus because at the end of the meal they’re going to purchase something from him?   The whole point of these eating episodes is that at the end of the meal these people are given what they never expected; they’re given what will find them forever different and forever grateful.  Scripture speaks consistently of Christ’s Kingdom ministry as a ministry characterized by gift.

Surely we all agree that genuine friendships are gift. The relationship between two persons that isn’t gift isn’t friendship; it’s a contract. Contracts are one instance of bartering wherein someone has something we want or need, and we have something she wants or needs.  The two persons interact for the sake of mutual convenience.  When mutual capacity to supply the other’s need disappears, so does the barter-relationship. It doesn’t pretend to be friendship because it never was gift.

I’ve never liked the expression “make friends.” I don’t think friends are made. That person who can comfort us when we are shredded and bandage us when we are haemorrhaging; who can see the anguish in our heart when we’ve managed to keep it off our face; who knows what profoundly delights us when others have no idea; this person isn’t made. This person is given to us.

To be childlike is to recognize that we who have no rights at all before God; we are yet those to whom he gives good gifts, all of which are summed up in the gift – of himself – as he seizes us and holds us fast and cherishes us and wants only that we should find in our intimacy with him and our obedience to him a satisfaction so satisfying that we’d never think of looking anywhere else.

And yet, tragically, there are those who don’t appreciate the gift as gift.  They think it’s their responsibility to earn it or merit it or achieve it. They confuse gift with contract.

“So what” someone says.  “Is a minor theological mistake all that important?  Does anything harmful arise from confusing gift with contract and remaining before God?” The truth is, the error isn’t minor, and something harmful does arise.  What exactly? There arises either anxiety or pride or self-loathing.

The anxious are those who will live and die uncertain of their standing before God, since they have always suspected that they’ve never “measured up.”   Their God, whether they are conscious of it or not, has always been the Grand Examiner. “Religion”, loosely called, has always been for these people an occasion of anxiety. But in view of the anxiety that laps at everyone’s life, does anyone need the additional burden of religious anxiety? Could the gospel ever be good news if it multiplied disquiet?  The anxious are always left wondering if their “good” is good enough.

The proud, on the other hand, are those who are not only convinced that standing with God is something they can merit; they’re also convinced that they’ve merited it.  Their rectitude, their dutifulness, their diligence – it’s all been sufficient. Their superiority, evident at least to them if to no one else, guarantees them whatever they might need on Judgement Day.  Jesus, however, deprecates this attitude and speaks against it repeatedly. In the parable of the Tax-Collector and the Pharisee the latter fellow, the Pharisee, reminds God, “You have to be aware that I’m not like this religious incompetent beside me. Religiously, morally too, he wouldn’t know his right hand from his left.”         The God of the proud is always the God who is supposed to recognize and reward self-important superiority.

The self-loathing, in the third place, are those who regard themselves as religious failures.  Preoccupied with achieving, they differ from the proud in that they know they haven’t measured up; and they differ from the anxious in that they are beyond wondering if they’re going to measure up.  They know they don’t measure up and they’ve given up.

The anxious, the proud, the self-loathing; while they appear to be remarkably different since their misunderstanding of God is so different, in fact are “birds of a feather” just because at bottom their misunderstanding of God is the same: they’ve confused the giver who gives gifts with a negotiator who finesses contracts.

The eager child at the birthday party standing in front of the table piled high with gifts for her; this child isn’t thinking of anxious self-examination or proud superiority or self-rejecting self-loathing.

Theological errors are never harmless.  Theological errors of such a magnitude hold people off that blessing wherewith God longs to bless them; namely, that gift of himself which is nothing less than his arm around our shoulder and his smile looking us in the face and his Fatherly word of pardon and peace – and all of this giving rise to our heart overflowing in gratitude and gladness as we want only to obey him and love him forever.

How important is it be childlike?

How important is it to know the difference between gift and contract? “Whoever does not receive the Kingdom like a child shall not enter it.”

 

II: — There’s another respect in which we must all become childlike: a child is always eager to grow up. All children crave becoming adults. Why else would the three year-old girl scrape her mother’s high-heeled shoes across the floor, teetering precariously with every step, asking her mother at the same time when she will be allowed lipstick and pierced ears? When the child is four he can’t wait until he’s five and can begin school.  When she’s four she can’t wait until she’s old enough to go to Brownies. When he’s 15 he’s dreaming of the day he’s 16 and can drive.

Peter Pan, the fellow who never grows up, is pathological.

Everywhere in scripture the leaders of God’s people are concerned with the threat that immaturity poses to God’s people. The prophets lament that so many in Israel prefer the childish to the childlike.  Childish as some are, their understanding of God is infantile; they can’t distinguish between their redeemer and a magician; they can readily be deflected onto the wrong road by any smooth talker whose enticements the immature can never recognize and resist; they are petulant and whiney before God as any three year-old is soon petulant or whiney.

The leaders in the young church have to contend on the same front. Peter urges his people, “Keep on growing in grace and knowledge.”  Paul pleads with the Corinthian congregation, “In thinking be mature.” Luke finds it important to tell us that even Jesus increased in wisdom as he increased in stature.

The day before I was ordained I had to attend a rehearsal for next day’s service of ordination.  Following the rehearsal two middle-aged ministers took me aside (I was 26) and told me that learning had very, very little to do with ministering. Most church people, they told me with the confidence born of 30 years’ experience, had the understanding of a twelve year old.

I was suspicious when I heard it then and I’m angry when I hear it now. In the first place, it simply isn’t true: the people of Schomberg Presbyterian Church do not have the Christian understanding of twelve year olds.  In the second place, to think so and worse, to say so, is to regard the congregation with contempt.  In the third place, a minister who thinks a congregation’s understanding is fixed at a twelve year old level will soon have a congregation sophisticated in all matters except faith.  The congregation’s stunted growth in matters of faith will be self-fulfilling prophecy as the minister’s contempt guarantees the spiritual impoverishment of his people.

Jesus deplores childishness in his followers. He insists on childlikeness. Immaturity characterizes the childish. Eagerness to grow up characterizes the childlike.

 

III: — Then what are the signs, or at least some of the signs, of our growing up?

[1] One sign is our coming to understand the truth that God has promised to bear us through our suffering. He hasn’t promised a way around it. For many reasons – not least because of widely-disseminated broadcasting – many people absorb what the childish will seize readily.  When Maureen and I were in Washington last November, I turned on the hotel room TV while Maureen prettied herself before we went to church. Mr. Joel Osteen was preaching. He is preacher to the largest live congregation in the USA . (Fifteen thousand people throng his building every Sunday. This figure doesn’t include the TV viewership.)   Osteen was preaching on “Guardian Angels”.  When he was a youngster he and his family had guardian angels.  He and his four brothers played high school football – and not one of them was ever injured.

Many things can be said about this.  At the level of the trite, it’s plain that I lack a guardian angel, since I’ve been injured many times and hospitalized three times. At the level of the profound, what does Osteen think he has said about his Lord?   Jesus survived several years as a carpenter, but survived only months when he began his public ministry.  The Sunday morning I watched the Osteen telecast I noticed the cameras moving over the live audience.         Everywhere in the building people were nodding in assent.   They all agreed with the speaker: to have a guardian angel is to be spared injury and mishap and misfortune throughout life.  How many were going to find their “faith”, as it were, shaken when life’s turbulence left them thinking God’s promises were hollow?

Faith isn’t an invisible shield that fends off disappointment, grief, betrayal, or pain.  Faith binds us to our Lord who knew that even for him there was no “way around” even as there was certainly a “way through”.

God has promised never to fail us or forsake us. He bears us through our distress as he holds us fast to the Son whom he has borne through. The way through pertains to faith. The supposed way around pertains to magic.  The childlike person who is growing up knows the difference.

[2] Another sign that we are growing up: Jesus tells us we are to be innocent as doves, yet wise as serpents. Serpent-wisdom is our understanding of the fallen world we inhabit: how it operates, how it beguiles, what treachery it traffics in, where it can threaten the unwary Christian. There are Christians whose zeal is not to be doubted, whose intentions are the best, and yet whose naiveness resembles that of the child who can’t discern the danger that the candy-offering stranger brings with him.  It isn’t enough to be innocent as doves; we also have to be wise as serpents. Maturity is crucial here.

[3] It’s a sign of maturity that we are eager to balance what I call the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the Christian life, and eager to ensure that they intersect. The vertical dimension of our Christian life pertains to worship, prayer, meditation, study. The horizontal pertains to our concern for our neighbours, specifically our suffering neighbours. If the vertical is isolated and thought to be the totality of the Christian life, it becomes an insular pietism, a self-indulgent inner “trip” unrelated to life. If, on the other hand, the horizontal is isolated it becomes a pagan “do-goodism” that soon finds itself resourceless, discouraged – and, worst of all, embittered. Maturity means we can perceive why both vertical and horizontal are necessary and how they intersect.

What other signs of increasing maturity are there? We could mention dozens. No doubt you have several in mind that I have never thought of.  What matters is that we are always maturing in our understanding, trust, love, and obedience.

 

We began today by noting that children are certainly not innocent.  Therefore we are never to emulate their depravity.  Children are also childish. Childishness isn’t going to help any adult. Adults will be helped, however, as we pursue being childlike.

The childlike receive God’s good gifts as just that: gifts. The childlike want nothing to do with an achievement mentality or a reward mentality or a meritocracy of any sort.  They never lose their amazement and wonder that the gifts they are given have their name on the gifts.

The childlike are always eager to grow up.  They are zealous for greater wisdom, obedience and love.  The know that God has loved them since the foundation of the world. After all, did not our earthly parents love us even before we were born?

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd       

January 2007

Concerning the Cross: Are We Perverse or Profound?

Mark 10:45

 

Not so long ago the New York Times newspaper published an article concerning a man and his peculiar hobby. The man lives in New Jersey , and his hobby is collecting items connected with state prisons and executions. “Here is the horsewhip with which unruly prisoners used to be flogged,” he announces dramatically. “And here are the manacles by which violent convicts were cuffed to the floor. And here is the noose that circled the neck of fourteen men and two women as they dropped to their death.” Government authorities in New Jersey wish the fellow would find another hobby. They look upon him as perverse. He’s an embarrassment. But the fellow refuses to find another hobby. He relishes bringing sightseers to the climax of his display: an electric chair where dozens of convicts were executed.

Are we Christians any less perverse? Every Lent we speak of the suffering of Jesus: the cruelty of his abandonment as the worst of his friends betrayed him and the best of his friends deserted him.   Every Lent we recall the injustice meted out to him, the blows he received at the hands of judicial authorities, the cold contempt of soldiers, the whipping, the crown of thorns. And of course the climax of our annual rehearsing all this is the instrument of execution itself: the cross.

We are repelled by the man in New Jersey who polishes up his electric chair and then invites people to see it even as they pay him to lecture them about it. But don’t we polish up our cross (the church custodian does this)? Don’t we invite people to contemplate it even as we pay someone (the minister) to speak to them about it? Then what’s different about us? Is the church’s preoccupation with the cross as ghoulish as the fellow whose life revolves around his execution devices?

Everyone in this room finds any instrument of execution repugnant. We aren’t the first to feel this way, for in the ancient world everyone found the instrument of execution repugnant. The cross was repugnant to Romans, Greeks and Jews alike, albeit for different reasons.

The Romans viewed the cross with loathing. No Roman citizen could be crucified – for any reason. Then who could? Only subject peoples could be crucified, and in Roman eyes subject peoples were scarcely human in any case. Subject peoples who happened to be terrorists or military deserters or rapists: they could be crucified. Terrorists, deserters, rapists: the scum of the earth, Romans thought: loathsome.

The Greeks viewed the cross with loathing as well. The Greeks sought wisdom in philosophy. Philosophy dealt with notions that have universal validity: truth, goodness, freedom. Then Christians came along and insisted that truth and goodness and freedom were found not in universal ideas but in a particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, who wasn’t even a philosopher. Greeks regarded all of this as ridiculous to the point of repugnant.

Jewish people viewed the cross with loathing as well. After all, they deemed Jesus to be a Messianic pretender. Since Jesus had been a victim of cruelty when the real Messiah was to eradicate cruelty, Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah. What’s more, any Jewish person who knew the sacred scriptures, especially the book of Deuteronomy, knew that anyone impaled on a stake was under God’s curse. The book of Deuteronomy said so in black and white.

The ancient world, whether Roman, Greek or Jewish, regarded the cross as every bit as repugnant as we regard electric chair or noose repugnant. Then why do we Christians feature the cross in every place of worship and announce it in every service of worship? Are we any different from the man in New Jersey ?

 

Yes, we are different. Unlike him we don’t regard the cross – unquestionably a means of execution – as entertainment. And like the apostles before us, we don’t trade on the physical horrors of the cross (even as they were no more horrible for Jesus than for the two men who died on either side of him.) More profoundly, like the apostles before us we glory in the cross because we know that here something was done for us we could never do for ourselves; here something was done for us that has the profoundest consequences for our life now and our life to come. In speaking of the cross week in and week out we aren’t perversely prattling on about something ghoulish. We are praising God for our salvation. Strictly speaking, in recalling the cross we aren’t recalling any execution, as if it made no difference who was executed. In recalling the cross we are seizing afresh the crucified one himself; in recalling the cross we are embracing as ardently as we can the one who died there for us, now lives among us, yet lives among us forever bearing the wounds of the cross. For while we can embrace our Lord Jesus today only because he’s been raised, he’s been raised with the signs of his crucifixion upon him still.

Gathering it all up we can say that Jesus Christ stands among us as the one whose cross-shaped wounds continue to call us to him. What can we say about him and his cross?

 

I: — The first thing we must say is that in his cross he has identified himself with sinners. To be sure, prior to the cross, throughout his earthly ministry, he identified with sinners.

Sinners, by definition, are those who aren’t “at home” with God. Jesus knew what it is not to be “at home.” He was born in a stable since there was no room for him in the inn. He didn’t belong. Subsequently he said he had nowhere to lay his head. A wanderer. Homeless. Misunderstood by family. Abandoned by friends. Isolated. He tasted the full taste of what it is not be “at home” anywhere.

It’s a favourite theme with novelists.   It’s a major motif in existentialist philosophy. Humankind is rootless, alienated, wandering, homeless; lost in the cosmos.

The problem with the analysis which novelists and philosophers supply is that it isn’t nearly profound enough. They don’t get to the bottom of problem. They don’t understand the real problem is that we feel we’re not at home just because we aren’t at home; we aren’t at home with God. And the reason we aren’t at home with God is that we’ve been driven from intimacy with God on account of our sin. God’s judgement upon our sin has driven us from him. We don’t feel “at home” in the cosmos? What do we expect? We’re never going to feel “at home” in life when God’s judgement upon us has rendered us homeless as surely as Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden they called “home.”

When the cross loomed in front of Jesus he said, “I have a baptism to be baptized with.” But hadn’t he already been baptized? Yes, he had. He went to the Jordan where his cousin John was baptizing startled people who were newly horrified at their sinnership and were confessing it and repenting it. When John saw Jesus he said, “What are you doing here? You’ve nothing to confess.” “Baptize me just the same,” said Jesus, “for I am confessing on behalf of all men and women everywhere; I’m confessing on behalf of those who have just begun (but only begun) to see how twisted their heart is and on behalf as well of those who have yet to see it. I’m repenting on behalf of those who think their repentance is as deep as their sin (it isn’t) and also on behalf of those who are still spiritually asleep. I’m identifying myself with sinners; that is, with every last human being who has ever lived or ever will.”

Having identified himself with us in his baptism; having identified himself with us in his being nowhere “at home” throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus Christ now identifies himself with us to the uttermost in his Father’s judgement upon us sinners. Unquestionably sinners are under the judgement of God. God’s judgement means condemnation. When Jesus cries “Why have you forsaken me?” he is identifying himself with us in his Father’s judgement on sinners. “Why have you forsaken me?” This is the cry of a man who feels the anguish of not being “at home” with his Father and knows precisely why, even as men and women everywhere feel themselves to be not “at home” but don’t know why.

But of course to look at the cross, to apprehend the cross, is to know why. To apprehend the cross is finally to have our sinnership made plain to us.   To understand the cross is finally to understand just why we’ve never felt “at home”; namely, we haven’t been “at home” – with God – and none of this we knew until Jesus our Lord identified himself with us in his ministry, in his baptism, and pre-eminently in the “baptism” of the cross. Our situation before God has finally been disclosed to us.

 

II: — Sobered as we are at the disclosure of our situation before God, we nevertheless rejoice in the disclosure and thank God for it. For the revelation of our predicament is simultaneously the revelation of God’s provision for us. Certainly the cross acquaints us with the bad news about ourselves. But the cross acquaints us with the bad news only in acquainting us with the good news. For the good news is good just because the cross highlights our sin for us only in the course of bearing it and bearing it away. The cross acquaints us with the disease only in the course of providing us the cure.   The cross informs us of our condemnation only in the course of telling us that someone else has borne that condemnation for us.

A minute ago I spoke of the man in New Jersey who won’t stop talking about his execution museum pieces. We think he’s unbalanced, since his prison artefacts announce only death. We Christians too won’t stop talking about the cross – but for an entirely different reason.   We keep talking about the cross (admittedly an instrument of execution) just because the cross announces life.   And knowing now that the cross announces life, we now understand how it is Jesus insisted from the first day of his earthly ministry to his last that the cross was the purpose of his coming. “The Son of Man,” Jesus said of himself, “came to give his life a ransom for many.” “And I, if I be lifted up (i.e., crucified) will draw all manner of men and women to me.” “This hour is my glory. Father, glorify yourself in me.” Unquestionably Jesus regards the cross as the purpose of his coming and the glue that integrates everything he does in his life leading up to the cross.

I fear there are many people today who think that Jesus came for some other purpose, any other purpose. I keep running into people, for instance, who think that Jesus came among us primarily to be a teacher, came among us to inform us wherever we might happen to lack information. The truth is, when it comes to his teaching, Jesus said very little that others didn’t say before him. There is very, very little in the teaching of Jesus that is unique to him. He is, after all, a son of Israel ; most of his teaching is simply a carrying-forward of what he learned from the spiritually learned people around him. For instance Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” But the rabbis in Israel had already said, “Where two or three are gathered around the Torah, around the Word of God, there the presence of God shines forth gloriously.” What our Lord is saying is so close to what he learned at school that we can’t acclaim him a startlingly novel teacher. But of course the Son of God who is also the Son of Man tells us himself that he came not to be a teacher primarily; he came to give himself a ransom for us. He came to be that provision which sinners need. He came to be that provision whereby the cure for our sin discloses the fact and nature of our sin. He came to be that remedy for our defilement by which we’d understand ourselves defiled. He came to be that salvation in the light of which we’d know we need saving.   For it’s only the saved, isn’t it, who now know they must have needed saving.

 

Several times today I’ve quoted the text where Jesus says he came to give himself a ransom. The word “ransom” is always used in scripture to speak of release or deliverance. There were two kinds of people who were customarily ransomed: slaves and prisoners of war (in other words, those who are in bondage and those who are in the power of the enemy.) Jesus uses the analogy for one reason: it fits. Our sinnership binds us as firmly as if we were slaves or prisoners of an alien power. In point of fact there’s no “as if” about it: our sinnership is something from which we can’t deliver ourselves.

Still, there is deliverance as we receive, cherish and praise God for the provision he has made for us. If anyone says, “What’s all this talk about provision? Doesn’t God love us? Hasn’t he always loved us? What ‘provision’ has to be made?” – anyone who says this doesn’t understand the difference between love and mercy. To be sure God has always loved us, since he is love. Still, even while he loves us he can’t deny his judgement upon us. Since he can’t deny his judgement upon us, when his love and our sin meet – which is to say, when his love and his judgement meet – his love takes the form of mercy. Mercy is love absorbing the judgement we merit.

Then there is deliverance as we refuse to trifle with God’s mercy but instead welcome his provision whereby his loved poured over us, his judgment insisted on the truth about us, and his mercy brought it all together and provided our release from condemnation. There is deliverance as we embrace the One who is, in himself, all of this for us.

 

    From time to time people tell me that the Christian faith is complicated. I hope they don’t think I make it appear complicated. In fact the Christian faith is simple. It’s gathered up most pithily in a statement Paul announced to the church in Corinth when the church there was on the point of misrepresenting the gospel. The statement: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, was made sin for us in order that we might be made the righteousness of God.” (2nd Corinthians. 5:20) In other words, Jesus Christ is God’s provision for us amidst our sin, and the provision that he is tells us the truth about ourselves. Is the truth about us the truth that we are sinners? The truth about us is that we are forgiven sinners. Remember, only the cure discloses the disease. Only the provision discloses the predicament. Only the remedy for the problem acquaints us with the problem. The truth of the cross is that we are forgiven sinners, thanks to the one who identified himself with us in all respects, thanks to him in whose company we can be “at home” with God and know it.

 

In truth aren’t at all like the odd-ball fellow in New Jersey . In fact strictly speaking we aren’t preoccupied with the cross; we are preoccupied with him whose cross it is; we are preoccupied with our Lord Jesus Christ, who comes to us in grace and wants only to bind us to him in faith.

He came to give himself a ransom. He came to clothe himself in our sin in order then to clothe us in his righteousness. Therefore we are glad to exclaim with the hymn writer, “In the cross of Christ I glory.”

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                    

Good Friday 2004

 

The Crucial Encounter: Bartimaeus

Mark 10:46 – 52

Several years ago William Nolan, an American surgeon, wrote a bestseller, The Making of a Surgeon. The book describes in detail the financial cost of a medical education, the sacrifice one has to make in order to acquire surgical expertise, the disruptions in family life as emergencies have to be dealt with, the low pay of the intern and the resident. Part of the purpose of the book is to justify to the public the staggering incomes that American surgeons enjoy, and to improve the public image of MDs.

Mark the apostle has written a bestseller too. His book could be called The Making of a Disciple. Mark probes the matter of discipleship more thoroughly than any other gospel writer. Unlike Dr Nolan, however, Mark doesn’t write to justify the huge incomes of disciples. (Disciples, he knows, are promised anything but riches.) Neither does he write to improve the public image of disciples. (It’s impossible to improve the public image of those who follow a bedraggled Jew soon to be executed between two terrorists at a city garbage dump.)

Then why has Mark written his book? For two reasons. In the first place he wishes to encourage those who are disciples now. He wants to remind them of how they became disciples in order to given them fresh heart in view of the savagery that emperor Nero has recently visited upon them. In the second place he’s confident that God will use his book, The Making of a Disciple, to enlist yet more disciples of Jesus Christ.

Mark wrote his gospel for Christians in Rome in the year 65. There were five “house churches,” five small congregations, in a city of one million. Think of it: one hundred Christians approximately in a city of one million. Obviously discipleship wasn’t very popular. In fact, dreadful persecution had descended on these five house churches. Mark wrote his gospel to encourage these people and to enlist others who weren’t disciples yet but who would become such as God himself owned and used Mark’s brief book.

Then how does one become a disciple? What characterizes those who’ve enlisted? In other words, what distinguishes disciples from onlookers? Today we haven’t time to examine the entire book, but we will examine one small section of the book that encapsulates the process whereby disciples are made. The small section has to do with Bartimaeus.

 

I: — Bartimaeus was blind. Since there was no CNIB in the first century world, no social assistance, blindness always entailed poverty. Bartimaeus was blind and poor: symbolically, he lacked both illumination and resources. Yet he had heard that the man from Nazareth , Jesus, was in the neighbourhood. He called out, hoping that this man could relieve him of his darkness and his resourcelessness. The first moment in the making of a disciple, then, is the transparent admission that however much we may know about however many matters, and however much expertise we may claim in however many fields, when it comes to the profoundest issue of life we haven’t a clue: we’re blind, poor.

Be sure to notice one thing: Bartimaeus doesn’t have the profoundest understanding of Jesus. He doesn’t call out “Son of God” or “Saviour” or “Lord.” Any of these terms would mean that he has recognized the deity of the Incarnate One. He can only affirm that Jesus is related to Israel ’s greatest king, David. Now “son of David” means “Messiah.” Then was Bartimaeus possessed of unusual prescience? I think not. I think it more likely that in his desperation he called out to the reputed wonder-worker, hoping Jesus might be God’s agent in remedying the world’s wrongs and vindicating the victimized and even granting sight to the blind. While he thinks Jesus might be God’s end-time agent, he hasn’t yet apprehended that this Messiah is also ‘Emmanuel,’ God-with-us, the Incarnate One. For this reason he makes no theologically definitive confession of faith. He simply calls out, “Help me; help me.”

We should note, then, that discipleship doesn’t begin after we’ve achieved theological sophistication. Discipleship begins when we recognize the murkiness and impoverishment of our lives. We simply ask for help. Discipleship begins before we can hang the correct theological labels on Jesus, sometimes a long time before. Like Bartimaeus, of course, we must persist with our plea – “help me” – even in the face of an unsympathetic crowd that tells us to be quiet. As fledgling disciples we must want what we are looking for so badly that we are going to persist despite others’ scorn or belittlement or apathy. We can’t be deflected by those who maintain that Jesus has been dead for 2000 years, or by those who maintain that faith is merely a crutch for the immature and the inept, or by those who maintain that discipleship is a throwback to killjoy Victorianism. Bartimaeus heard it all, yet called out the more persistently.

Discipleship is in truth much simpler than people imagine. It’s simpler because our slightest admission of our own need and Christ’s availability will render us disciples-in-the-making. At the same time it’s more challenging than people imagine because we have to persist despite detractors.

Do you ever ponder the large number of people who join congregations and then slowly drift away, never to be seen again? Do you ever wonder about ministers who persuaded three levels of the church courts that they were called of God to the work of the ministry, and are now selling life insurance or teaching school or earning a living as parole officers? As much as we need to perceive our spiritual blindness and our spiritual poverty, we have to persist.

Bartimaeus persisted in calling out to Jesus, and persisted just because he knew that unless Jesus helped him he would always be blind and resourceless. His persistence, born of his unsatisfied craving, was enough to stop Jesus in his tracks and have Jesus say “Call that fellow.”

 

II: — The second moment in the making of a disciple is the exhortation to take heart. Someone in the crowd who hears his repeated plea and sympathizes with Bartimaeus says to him, “Take heart, Jesus is calling you.” But this is no fluffy suggestion to cheer up. While there’s only one reason why we can realistically take heart, the one reason happens to be the profoundest reason and sufficient reason: Jesus Christ is in the neighbourhood. Since Bartimaeus is blind, he can’t see just how close Jesus is. The truth is, Jesus is as close to him right now as Jesus can ever be.

Everywhere in scripture this exhortation “Take heart,” tharseite, “Be of good cheer,” “Courage!” is found in the imperative. It isn’t a suggestion or even a recommendation of our Lord as he utters it; neither is it wishful thinking on the part of hearers as they hear it. We are commanded to take heart, we must be of good cheer, and this only because the master has heard our sincerest plea, has turned to us and isn’t going to overlook us or pretend he didn’t hear us. We may and must take heart just because our Lord is at this moment pouring out upon us what we need most. He meets us precisely at the point of our pain or distress or confusion or fright. And we do take heart, for as he speaks, his word to us becomes his deed within us. “Take heart:” it means that he, our Lord, has lent us his heart.

Think of the situations in the written gospels where these words were spoken and welcomed. A man whose guilt has paralysed him is told to take heart, for his sins are now forgiven and his paralysis undone. A desperate woman who wants only to touch the fringe of Jesus’ prayer shawl, wants merely to make contact with him, is told to take heart, for through her simple faith she is now healed. Disciples who are frustrated as they try to row into a gale and who feel they are about to founder are told to take heart, for the one who quells chaos everywhere in life is now with them.

Jesus doesn’t come waltzing onto the scene with a camera-ready smile and ooze, “Cheer up folks, it’s the happy hour.” Rather just as we began to cry, “Son of David, have mercy on me,” because he had come into our “space,” so now that he has come even nearer to us (for has he not turned to us and called us, albeit through those already disciples?) his even greater closeness has rendered effective and believable the word that makes and sustains disciples, “Take heart.”

 

III: — And then there’s the third moment in the making of a disciple: Bartimaeus followed Jesus. More precisely Mark tells us that Bartimaeus “followed Jesus on the way.” There is simply no substitute for following.

Like any skilful literary craftsman Mark uses several metaphors to speak of discipleship. But Mark’s favourite metaphor for discipleship is the Way or Road or Journey or Venture. Over and over Mark refers to Jesus walking on the road. The disciples are with their Lord on the road. As they keep company with him he teaches them. It is while they are walking the Way that their understanding of the truth of God, slender at first, is filled out and fortified. It’s on the Way, while the journey is in process, that disciples learn not merely the meaning of discipleship but more importantly how to live it. It’s on the Road that they learn what it is to make mistakes, stumble, get up again, press on after him who walks far enough ahead of them to be their leader but not so far ahead as to be out of sight. It’s on the way that they learn what it is to have their profession of loyalty to him collide with a world that ridicules such loyalty and mocks disciples who uphold it and snickers at all they hold dear and denies the truth that has seized them.

We should see immediately that what counts above all else concerning discipleship isn’t how much we understand; it’s what we do with even the little that we understand. Myself, I have long thought that many people think of discipleship in Christ’s company as something like going to school. The school curriculum has to be learned; discipleship has to be learned. The problem here, of course, is that while school learning is largely abstract – we have to learn historical concepts and scientific theories and mathematical manipulations; while school learning is largely abstract, discipleship is entirely concrete. When Jesus came upon some people who claimed to be his followers yet preferred the abstract to the concrete he rounded on them and said, “Why do you call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord’ and yet you don’t do what I command you?” If we want to learn what it is to be a follower of Jesus Christ we mustn’t think it’s like going to school. Instead we must understand it’s like being an apprentice. The apprentice auto mechanic or electrician or plumber doesn’t read 30 books and announce “I think I’ve got it!” Instead he learns from a journeyman auto mechanic or electrician or plumber. He learns on the job, learns while doing, learns by observing, learns through making mistakes that the journeyman can correct. To learn like an apprentice isn’t to read great wacks of information; it’s to absorb, almost unconsciously, a little today and little more tomorrow and still more another day until the apprentice eventually comes to know as much as the journeyman although he can’t exactly tell you how or when he came to know.

Disciples live in the company of Jesus Christ. He is both the Way we are to follow and our companion on the Way; both simultaneously. Discipleship isn’t armchair acquisition of theories about the Christian life; discipleship is a matter of doing it in the company of our Journeyman who has done it all before us. It’s far more important that we live the little that we understand than it is to understand much and fail to live it.

Once Jesus had made Bartimaeus to see he didn’t say, “You’d better start studying for the exam.” Once Jesus had made Bartimaeus to see he summoned Bartimaeus to follow him. Bartimaeus was to follow up his deliverance from blindness with following after Jesus forever. There is no substitute for following.

While there is certainly no substitute, there are many evasions. There are many ways of avoiding the Way, of sidestepping the road, of declining the journey.

[1] One evasion is doing nothing while throwing around religious clichés, stock expressions, code words. If someone peppers his conversation with “saved,” “blood,” “the Almighty,” and so on, it’s often assumed he must be a long-time venturer on the Road, while if someone doesn’t use this vocabulary or can’t, it’s assumed she hasn’t even set out.

Both assumptions are false. Too often being able to toss out the Christian code words is a cover-up for evading the road. The test of discipleship isn’t what we say but what we do. That’s why the apostle Paul writes, “If you are children of the light, then walk in the light.”

[2] Another evasion is substituting the rites and rituals of the church for faith and obedience. For instance, we baptize infants as the sign that God in his mercy has made provision for this particular child in anticipation of the day when she owns, owns for herself, owns for herself in throbbing faith, the provision of grace and mercy that God has fashioned. But if we think that the sacrament of baptism is a substitute for the faith and obedience it anticipates then we are dabbling in voodoo. In the service of baptism the parents declare publicly that they themselves are at this moment walking the road they want their child to come to walk with them. If, however, the parents think that baptizing the child renders unnecessary both the child’s subsequent discipleship and their current discipleship then they are self-deluded twice over.

[3] Another evasion is an armchair preoccupation with a hypercritical orthodoxy. Too often the sign of discipleship is whether a person can assent to this or that creed, whether someone can finesse the doctrine of the Virgin Birth or the Trinity.   Now I happen to think that the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Trinity are crucial to Christian understanding. I’m the last person to make light of theological adequacy. I’ll never be found promoting doctrinal superficiality.

But this isn’t where we begin. Jesus called many people to follow him; Zacchaeus, for instance. But Jesus never said, “Come down out of that tree; we’re going to bury the hatchet and eat together – if you first tell me you believe there’s something peculiar about my mother.”

When Jesus called disciples to follow him and thereafter urged them to follow even closer, he knew and they knew that they understood very little. In fact they likely understood only one matter: life in his company was going to be better than life not in his company. To be sure, their understanding grew. Mark’s understanding swelled until he could write a gospel narrative. Peter’s understanding swelled until he could write matchless letters. But they didn’t begin there. They began with a simple following that was riddled with incorrect assumptions, silly rationalizations, glaring mistakes, and sometimes a zeal which outstripped wisdom by far. All that mattered was that they were now on the road, undertaking the journey as apprentices learning from the journeyman himself.

If someone tells me he’s certain about very little of what the church says, even of what the church says about Jesus, and yet he feels that Jesus has light to shed and truth to impart and strength to lend; if such a person tells me all he can do for now is try to do the little he genuinely believes – that person is a disciple.

If we have received only enough light for one step, let’s be sure to take that one step. Does it ever occur to us that we can take only one step at a time in any case? Does it ever occur to us that if Jesus Christ is light enough for one step today, and we take it, then the selfsame light will be light enough for another step tomorrow? There is no substitute for following.

“The Making of a Disciple.” It begins when, like Bartimaeus, our need of illumination and resources for living bring us to cry to Jesus, “Have mercy on me.” It proceeds as we hear our Lord telling us to take heart, since help is around the corner. It matures as we follow him on the Way, every day receiving greater confirmation that he is the Way, but only because he’s also Truth, and for this reason will prove to be our Life.

 

Victor Shepherd

June 2004

 

What God Has Joined Together

Mark 12:28-34    Ephesians 3:7-10, 20, 21   James 1:22-25

 

“What God has joined together, let no one put asunder”, the marriage service reads. Our Lord’s pronouncement here reflects God’s intention concerning marriage: two become one, indissolubly one, inextricably one. In a Christian understanding of marriage two people are joined together so that their lives are fused; their lives interpenetrate. It’s not the case that marriage joins two people the way two blocks of wood are glued together, side-by-side. Two blocks of wood that are glued together can be unglued with the application of glue-dissolving solvent. Once separated again, the two blocks are intact, exactly as they were before they were glued, simply because gluing them together never changed them in the first place. It’s entirely different with a tree graft. When one kind of fruit tree is grafted to another kind of fruit tree, the two trees thereafter grow into each other. They grow together so as to become a single organism. Any attempt now at separating one tree from the other doesn’t leave both trees intact; any attempt at separating one tree from the other doesn’t leave even one tree intact. Any attempt at separating them destroys both. What God has joined together, no one should put asunder — or even try.

In the Christian life there is much that God has joined together. And in the Christian life to separate what God has joined together entails destruction. Then as is the case with marriage, we must strive to keep it together. Exactly what has God joined?

 

I: — God has joined MIND AND HEART. The mind apprehends truth, the truth of God, the truth about ourselves. The heart is where we live, what we experience, meeting someone in an encounter so profound and so intimate as to leave us altered ever after. Mind and heart, truth and life, “knowledge about” and “acquaintance with”, understanding and experience, information and intimacy — all of these are to be grafted into each other and interpenetrate each other.

If they are separated, destruction results. Mind separated from heart leaves the truth of God cold and sterile. Mind separated from heart turns the gospel into an abstract philosophy that just happens to use an old-fashioned vocabulary. Mind separated from heart turns the gospel (Jesus Christ himself in his power to make us his) into an idea, a notion that may elicit after-dinner discussion but will never forge throbbing faith in anyone.

We can come at the matter from another angle. To speak of the mind is to speak of reason. To speak of the heart is to speak of faith. Reason and faith should always be joined. If they are separated, destruction results. When reason is separated from faith (that is, separated from its anchor in God), then reason is little more than rationalization. When reason is separated from faith, reason is little more than a mental cleverness that always justifies whatever we want justified in us or our group or our nation. When reason is separated from faith, reason is little more than a debating tool that can defeat others in a verbal joust and leave them humiliated and frustrated and vengeful — even as such reason cannot effect any genuine human good or forge any human bond.

Faith, we know, anchors our entire being in God. And therefore when faith is joined to reason, reason profits from our anchorage in God. When faith is joined to reason, reason is delivered from its proclivity to rationalization; when faith is joined to reason, reason serves the nobler purpose of edifying and helping. In other words, when faith and reason are joined, faith frees reason for reason’s integrity and reason’s role as a servant of the human good.

On the other hand, when faith is separated from reason, then faith is corrupted as surely as reason is corrupted when reason is separated from faith. When faith is separated from reason, God is no longer loved with the mind. When faith is separated from reason, then the human heart runs after superstition. When faith is separated from reason, all concern for truth is abandoned as people splash around in sentimentality like 5-year olds in a wading pool. When faith is separated from reason, the ability to think is no longer cherished, truth is no longer pursued, superstition is prized, and confusion reigns everywhere, in private life and public life equally.

Without reason, faith degenerates into sentimentality and superstition. Without faith, we saw a minute ago, reason degenerates into rationalization and a tool for humiliation. Reason and faith must always be joined together.

 

There is yet another way of approaching mind and heart, reason and faith. Think about the doctrines that Christians uphold. Doctrine, of course, is a reasoned statement of Christian truth. As a reasoned statement doctrine is abstract by definition. Faith, on the other hand, is where we live, what we know in our experience. As heart-experience faith is concrete by definition. Abstract truth and concrete experience, mind and heart, should always be joined.

Think about the foundational Christian doctrine, the doctrine of the Incarnation. Incarnation is the truth that the eternally transcendent God has identified himself with the Jew from Nazareth so that what the Nazarene says, God says; what the Nazarene does, God does; what the Nazarene undergoes, God undergoes.

God undergoes? The eternally transcendent one undergoes? Yes! All of this means that there is nothing befalling us in life that God himself hasn’t experienced as man. Does God know my pain? In what sense does he know it? Does God know pain in the sense that a neurologist like Oliver Sacks knows about Parkinson’s disease and can write learned books about it even though Oliver Sacks has never had Parkinson’s disease himself? Or does God know pain in the sense that he has been in pain himself, been in a divine pain that we humans know nothing about inasmuch as we aren’t divine? (God does know a uniquely divine pain; of this I am sure.) Or — more profoundly still — does the eternally transcendent God know human pain just because he has been human himself and therefore has himself lived, lived out, lived through our pain and sorrow and temptation?

The doctrine of the incarnation upholds the lattermost: the truth of the incarnation is that God himself has identified himself with our humanity in Jesus of Nazareth. This is the truth of the mind. What does it all mean for the heart? It means that when I look to God I am looking to someone who has tasted everything life throws in my face. It means that I can trust him and cast myself upon him without reservation or hesitation. Even though God is holy and not a sinner, it means that even the severest penalties for our sin, even the worst consequences of our sin, God has endured himself and absorbed into himself in his Son’s dereliction — and therefore not even our sin or any aspect of it need separate us irretrievably from him. Therefore I shall never cower from him in terror but will always count on him for forgiveness.

It’s obvious that doctrine has everything to do with life, mind with heart, information with intimacy, reason with faith. What God has joined together we must never put asunder.

 

II: — In the second place God has joined PIETY AND PRACTICE. The psalmist writes, “I have hid God’s word in my heart, that I might not sin against him.” James writes, “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, lest you deceive yourselves.” These two truths are complementary and must always be kept joined together.

“I have hid God’s word in my heart.” This sounds like a privatized piety that shuts out the big bad world so that the person who hides God’s word in her heart may remain unstained. It sounds so very exclusive as to be little more than narrow self-interest, albeit religious self-interest. On the other hand “I must be a doer of God’s word” sounds so very inclusive as to suggest that the doer is naive about the treachery of the human heart, naive even about the world’s resistance. It sounds so very inclusive as to be shallow and simplistic. Actually, both are needed, and needed together, if both are to retain their integrity.   Hiding God’s word only in one’s heart is a religious indulgence. Doing God’s word only is presumptuous, and presumptuous just because we have assumed we can do God’s word without first hiding his word in our heart.

John Calvin used the word “piety” more than any Christian thinker I know. Calvin, to be sure, had something precise in mind whenever he used the word: Calvin defined piety as “love for God and reverence for God induced by a knowledge of God’s benefits to us.” We must love God and reverence God. At the same time, Calvin tells us, that word of God now rooted in us must also yield “tangible fruit” from us. Piety and practice must always be joined.

Cardinal Cushing of Boston used to say, “We must pray as if it all depended on God and work as if it all depended on us.” Cushing has it almost right. I say “almost” because I’m unhappy with “as if.” We don’t pray as if it all depended on God; our praying means it all does depend on God. We don’t work as if it all depended on us; our working means it all does depend on us. Piety and practice must be fused.

Whenever I read Mark’s gospel two features of Jesus’s life leap out at me. One feature is the amount of time Jesus spent praying, even spent praying by himself. Again and again we are told that Jesus went away by himself to a lonely place or a solitary place or a secluded place, and there he prayed. The second feature of Mark’s depiction of a day in the life of Jesus that leaps out at me is the little word EUTHUS: “immediately.” Jesus ministers to an epileptic boy whose convulsions leave him flailing and frothing. “Immediately” Jesus hikes to the next town where he finds hostile people with venom in their hearts whom he rebukes and reduces to silence as only he can. Then “immediately” he gets into a boat (storm and all) and straightens out his disciples who have managed to misunderstand him wholly — again. Then “immediately” he comes upon a sick child whose parents are distraught and a psychotic man whose violence has left him isolated. We get indigestion reading about one day in the life of Jesus. At the same time, we know that Jesus arose a long while before dawn, when it was still dark, went off by himself, and prayed.

In the same vein we read of the apostle Paul and his ceaseless comings and goings (ceaseless, that is, until he was imprisoned). Three missionary journeys in and out of Jerusalem throughout his part of the Mediterranean weren’t enough for him; he wanted above all to get into Spain and announce the gospel where it had never been heard before. Did he do the word? Yes; just think of his efforts on behalf of the starving Christians in Jerusalem during the famine. Did hide the word in his heart? Yes; just think of his being caught up in the Spirit only to hear what may not be uttered and see what may not be described.

It is only as we hide the word in our heart that we can keep on doing the word in the face of setback and disappointment and opposition and inappreciation and even ridicule. The Corinthian congregation had glaring needs and Paul worked very hard among those people. Did they appreciate all that he did for them? On the contrary they laughed at him; they told him he was a poor speaker with a comic physique. What then did Paul do in the face of this outrageous contempt? He did the word all the more zealously among them even as he refused to cool his ardour for them or his affection for them; and he was able to keep on doing the word just because he kept on hiding the word.

Piety and practice must be joined together. Once separated, piety alone becomes a religious indulgence, a privatized “trip” for religious self-stimulators; once separated, practice alone becomes a compulsive “do-goodism” that soon leaves the do-gooder herself sour and sarcastic. What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.

 

III: — In the third place God has joined CHURCH AND INDIVIDUAL. Church and individual can be discussed (although not discussed fruitfully) in terms of “chicken and egg”. Which comes first: the church or the individual? Some say the church, since the church has preserved the substance of Christian truth for centuries and the church is the custodian of the gospel and the church is that which God has preserved despite assaults from without it and sabotage from within it. Others would say that the individual comes first, since individuals make up the church and the church is always one generation only from extinction. But such a discussion bears no fruit at all. Instead we must resolutely keep together what God has joined together.

C.S. Lewis used to say that when Christians look at the church as a whole they see divisiveness everywhere, and not merely divisiveness but even a history of nasty divisiveness. On the other hand, said Lewis, when atheists look at the church (especially atheists who lack assurance of the truth of atheism) they see a unity, a oneness in truth that has perdured for millennia, a solidity that threatens the atheist and the agnostic. When Christians view the church from the inside they see the disagreement between Roman Catholic worship with its liturgical movement and music, and Quaker worship where everyone sits in silence for a much of the service (if not most) and where the only liturgical act is a handshake between two elders signifying the conclusion of the service. But when non-Christians view the church from the outside, says Lewis, they see enormous commonality: a doctrine of the Incarnation, whose particular historicity embarrasses atheists with a philosophical turn of mind; a conviction concerning original sin that contradicts any and all assumptions about the perfectibility of humankind and progress in the world; an insistence on sacrifice (both Christ’s and the Christian’s) that flies in the face of the notion that happiness is the meaning of life. To an outsider, says Lewis, the church is solid, coherent, stable, durable. It will outlast any assault upon it; its greatest thinkers are the equal of (if not superior to) the thinkers its detractors put forward. And it is this church that guards the truth and hands it on from generation to generation. Any individual who thinks she can do without the church is a fool, for she thinks her wisdom is greater than that of any of her foreparents; she thinks she can do without the communion of saints, that body of believers who will carry her when she is weary or wayward; she thinks she can do without the “great cloud of witnesses”, those Christians who have finished the race ahead of her and urge her never to quit. Any individual who sunders herself from the church commits spiritual suicide.

At the same time, the church must never forget that the church consists of believers, and only individuals can ever believe. The church consists of disciples, and only individuals can ever become disciples.     I am moved whenever I notice again how much of our Lord’s earthly ministry was private. Yes, he certainly addressed multitudes. He addressed them; but he called individuals. He came upon Matthew and said, “I have something else for you to do; come with me.” It didn’t matter that crowds were pressing and multitudes were confused and many were needy; at that moment all that mattered was, “Matthew, come; yes you; come right now.” One day there was a “Bread and Honey Festival” parade through Streetsville; Jesus stopped at the foot of one tree out of thousands and said, “Zacchaeus, birds perch in trees; I have something better than bird-life for you; come with me.” In front of several critical men Jesus allowed a grateful woman to wipe his feet with her hair. A psychiatrist-friend of mine tells me that a woman wiping a man’s feet with her tresses is a highly erotic act. Yet amidst the suspicion and contempt of hostile men Jesus let her do it. And to her alone — alone — he said, “Your sins are forgiven.” And then of course there are our Lord’s numerous conversations, protracted conversations, with individuals: Nicodemus, the woman at the well, plus so many others.

Martin Luther said, “Just as we must each do our own dying, so we must each do our own believing.” Of course we must do our own believing. From page one on of the older testament it’s evident that while God loves the entire creation and while God deals with a people collectively, God speaks only to individuals. Any church which forgets this truth is a church that is nothing more than a social club or a bureaucracy.

It is no wonder, then that the apostle Paul insists, “Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.”

 

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd                               

June 1997

You asked for a sermon on How to Approach the Twenty-Five Year Old About Coming Back to Church

Mark 12:28-34

 It can always be argued that the 25 year-old should come (or come back) to church for precisely the same reason that any person of any age should come (back). In this respect the 25 year-old is no different from the 85 year-old. God is to be worshipped; God is to be worshipped in the company of his people; God is to be worshipped as a public witness to his public activity. Why does the 25 year-old think she’s different from the 85 year-old?

At the same time I appreciate the sermon-request as it came to me, since a 25 year-old is different from the 85 year-old. The concerns and questions and opportunities and expectations are very different for each age-group.

For years I wondered why wars have always been fought by 18 to 20 year- olds. And then one day, as I was reflecting on car insurance rates for 18 to 20 year-olds, I had my answer. People of this age are heedless of danger. They feel themselves to be invulnerable. They’re reckless. They have a sense of adventure that eclipses any awareness of risk.

By the time someone is 25, much has changed. Several years have been spent acquiring an education or gaining work-experience or both. Recklessness has been tempered with wisdom. The sense of adventure remains, but now it is moderated by sobriety and a realistic perception of life. (By the time I was 26 years old, for instance, I was ordained and the spiritual advisor to people three times my age; by age 26 my cousin was three years past graduation from medical school.) How, then, are we to approach the 25 year-old concerning the church, its message and its mission?

I: — I’d start with the issue of truth, truth in the sense of reality. The 25 year-old is old enough to ask herself, “What is, ultimately? What is reality? And therefore what is worth pursuing?” To ask this question is also to ask, “What is merely seeming? What is deceptive? What is it that promises more than it can ever deliver?”

In response to the crucial question, “What is, with what (or whom) do we have to do ultimately?”, the materialist insists that reality is material, or at least rooted in the material. One form of materialism tested over and over in our century is Marxism. Now we mustn’t dismiss it too quickly. We must never forget that iniquitous class-distinction has been more pronounced in Britain than anywhere in continental Europe. Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital out of his immersion in the horrible social consequences of industrialization in Britain. If we had been immersed in those social horrors, could we have prevented ourselves from joining anything that promised social amelioration? Can you imagine the spectacle of five year-old children raging not on account of a temper tantrum but on account of the “DTs”? (A child with the DTs was a common sight in 19th century England.)

At a meeting of Maritime Conference in 1971 a retired coal miner from Cape Breton addressed us young United Church clergy. With tears in his eyes he told us of the horrors of coal-mining in Nova Scotia when he was a young man. The men worked seven days per week for a pittance, amidst dangers that no mine-owner or government body attempted to minimize. He told us the men were desperate and looked everywhere for help in changing their conditions. They looked to the church, and were given no help; they looked to the communist party, and were promised everything.

There are several problems with the materialist philosophy of Marxism, chief of which is, it simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t deliver what it promises; in fact, it delivers the starkest contradiction of what it promises. Marxism promises freedom but finally enslaves. It promises foodstuffs for the masses but fails to provide so much as a loaf of bread. It promises the classless society but requires brutal secret police to maintain social rigidities. It promises the tranquillity supposed to emerge in the absence of ruthless capitalistic competition but issues in the savagery of black market competition. In our century no experiment has failed as notoriously. Need we say more to our 25 year-old friend?

Marxism is only one kind of materialism. There are others. Another one (or at least an aspect of another one) is epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism maintains that mind is reducible to brain; it maintains that what we call thinking is nothing more than the “steam” thrown up by lightning-fast movement of brain cells (i.e., of matter.)

To be sure, no one denies the connexion between mind and brain. No one denies that brain is necessary for mind. No one denies that physical alterations to brain produce altered ideation. (Ponder the effects of alcohol or head-injury.) Yet to admit all of this is not to admit that mind is reducible to brain, reducible without remainder. For if mind is reducible to brain, then what we call thinking simply isn’t. If thinking isn’t, then what we call imagination, creativity, genuine newness; all of this isn’t. What we call “ideas” is no more than the exhaust fumes of an underlying biological state. If mind is reducible to brain, not only does thinking disappear; so does responsibility, so does reasoning. (And the sermon should stop here, for a sermon is an attempt at persuading people, by means of reason, that they are responsible creatures accountable to the God who made them to love him with their mind, their genuine mind.) Is our 25 year old going to accept the form of materialism known as epiphenomenalism?

What are the alternatives to materialism? Humanism is one alternative, humanists affirming that ultimate reality is the profoundly human, the uniquely human. Humanism venerates cultural riches transcending the merely material as culture fashions us and informs us. Culture renders us most profoundly human.

Humanism was recovered in the Renaissance as the learning of ancient Greece and Rome was recovered and added to by the Renaissance thinkers themselves. It thrived throughout the Renaissance (15th through 17th centuries). Then the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers dealt it some hard blows. The 19th century discoveries of Darwin, Freud and Marx (yes, there is a measure of truth in Marx) dealt it still harder blows. And historical developments in the 20th century have all but killed it. When, soon into the 20th century, the most sophisticated nations slew each other, day after day, piling up scores of thousands of corpses each day (I speak now of World War I); when the nation most advanced in medicine, science, philosophy, theology and music perpetrated a hideousness so hideous that the world is always wanting to deny it (I speak now of you know what); when the nuclear age dawned and the two mightiest nations looked at each other with fingers poised on the buttons that would vapourize millions instantly, leave many more millions to die slowly of radiation sickness, and render the earth uninhabitable — when both nations pursued their policy of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (“MAD”); when all of this unfolded in the 20th century, humanism withered.

We have come at last to the alternative to materialism and humanism; namely, the notion that Spirit is reality. Spirit isn’t vague or fantastic; Spirit isn’t ethereal or ephemeral; Spirit is without parallel for its density, solidity, opacity, weightiness. Spirit is reality. When we think of “spirit” we should spell it with both an upper case “S” and a lower case “s”, for “Spirit” refers to God, and “spirit” refers to our God-forged capacity for God and our human uniqueness of being uniquely related to him. At the end of the day the context in which all of life unfolds and the truth that drives world-occurrence is S(s)pirit. Because Spirit is ultimate reality, to ignore Spirit is to discount spirit; and to do this is to will one’s life to unfold in unreality. To persist in unreality is to court falsity, and to court falsity is to end in illusion. Then why not declare forthrightly that Spirit is reality, Spirit is substance, Spirit is the environment that surrounds us at all times and in all places? Spirit is the environment apart from which we shouldn’t be human. Flee it? Escape it? Can you imagine a fish that, by dint of very hard swimming, could finally escape water? Every time such a fish exerted itself to swim beyond water it merely reconfirmed water. No wonder the psalmist remarks, “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Ps. 139:7) Once we’ve recognized that Spirit is substance, Spirit is reality, we find everything in life reconfirming the truth.

Where is Spirit recognized as ultimate reality? In the church. Where is Spirit-incarnate cherished and honoured and obey? In the church. Why should the 25 year-old come back to church? We’ve already dealt with this question.

II: — The 25 year old is likely soon to be a parent. Parental responsibility is awesome responsibility. While scripture insists that God has set parents in authority over children, it also insists that there is one ground, and one ground only, for the authority that parents have over their children: parents are to model for their children the relationship that God has with his people.

Two conclusions can quickly be drawn. (i) Apart from their mandate to model with their children God’s relationship with his people, parents have no legitimate authority over children. (ii) Not to nurture a child in the things of God is a terrible dereliction on the part of parents. This morning we are going to think about the latter, the responsibility parents have to provide spiritual nurture for their children.

I used to be amused (I’m now merely dumbfounded) at parents who say they aren’t going to provide any Christian edification for their child, preferring to leave the child’s mind uncluttered (they mean unprejudiced) so that the child can make up her own mind when she’s older. While such parents assume they are the acme of wisdom, in fact their stupidity would be instantly evident anywhere else in life. What should we think of the parent who said, “I’m not going to send my child to school when he’s five years old; I want him to make up his own mind; then he’ll be able to decide for himself whether he wants to bother with this intellectual stuff”? Such a parent thinks she’s keeping open the greatest number of options for her child, when in fact she’s closing options for her child. Her child won’t read, will likely never learn to read, will be scarcely employable if employable at all, will be socially isolated and psychologically traumatized. What are we to think of the parent who says, “When winter arrives I’m not going to insist my child wear an overcoat when he plays outside; he can decide for himself whether the encumbrance of winter clothing is finally ‘worth it’. We don’t want to encumber him unnecessarily.” Thinking she’s expanding the child’s options, she’s foreclosing them. Soon the child will have pneumonia and won’t be playing anywhere. What are we to think of the parent who says, “I’m not going to have my child vaccinated. I don’t want to impose on him something he might find unpleasant. I’ll let him make up his own mind when he’s older.” Make up his mind when he’s older? He won’t be around to make up his mind. He will have succumbed to diphtheria or something like it.

The folly of such parenting is evident in such matters as schooling and clothing and hygiene. It should be obvious with respect to matters of Christian nurture. It is obvious as soon as we know Spirit to be substance. The folly is self-evident.

There’s more to be said. If parents say, “We’re going to allow our child to make up his own mind on …”; the parents who say this in fact aren’t allowed to do it. The state won’t permit parents to exercise their folly. The state insists that children be schooled. The state insists that children not be neglected. If the parents are found guilty in this respect, the parents will be charged with a criminal offense. The state insists that schoolchildren be vaccinated. If the parents prefer not to have their children vaccinated, their children will be removed from the classroom. Why? Lest their children infect other children.

Do you think it’s possible for children to infect other children with something besides microbes? Do you think it’s possible for young people to infect young people? If so, what’s to be done? Where do we turn?

When parents say, “We want to keep an open mind; we want our child to make up his own mind”; when parents say this in everyday matters, the state intervenes and overrides the parents’ folly. Should the state intervene and override parental folly in matters of spiritual nurture? I’m not going to debate this point today. But the fact that the state intervenes where it does and doesn’t intervene where it doesn’t indicates much about the society’s failure to understand the nature of reality.

The 25 year-old is soon to be a parent. Children have to be nurtured. Enough said.

III: — Another consideration for our 25 year-old. I want to speak briefly of a German poet, Heinrich Heine. Because Heine was a poet his friends assumed if ever he needed comforting profoundly, he would find all the comfort he needed, indeed all the comfort possible, in the realm of cultural excellence. When tragedy overtook Heine his friends sent him off to the arts. He listened to the German musical genius. He probed literature. Standing in front of the famous statue of Venus, that beautiful sculpture whose arms have unfortunately been broken off, he cried, “It’s beautiful; but it has no arms!” No cultural excellence could finally touch his grief.

How different is the conviction (a conviction born of experience) of the unnamed writer of Deuteronomy: “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” (Deut. 33:27) We mustn’t think that because the everlasting arms are ever underneath us life is therefore ever rosy. The everlasting arms are always underneath just because life isn’t always rosy. Neither should we think that “everlasting arms” means that God has reached down and remotely given us a hand, only a hand, while all the while remaining above our frailty and fragility. His arms are around us, rather, just because he shares our frailty and fragility. It is a Hebrew prophet who asks, “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”, only to go on to speak of “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief…surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” (Isaiah 53:1,4)

When we are 18 years old it’s hard to imagine life ever turning down; when we are 18 we think that the world is governed by reason and is ultimately fair. By the time we are 25 we know that fairness isn’t found in life: unfairness proliferates everywhere. By age 25 we know that many things control the world: prejudice, hatred, fanaticism, hunger for power, ambition, folly — and reason? Reason is the last determinant, the slenderest determinant, of how the world unfolds.

Then what are we to do? Where are we to look? What can we expect to find? If the “what” is capricious and borderline chaotic, then whom can we expect to find? Isaiah looked up and heard, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.” (Isaiah 41:10)

IV: — My last comment to the 25 year-old is a challenge: “Do you want to help what our Jewish friends call, Tikkun Olam, the mending of the world? Or do you merely want to profit from the inequities that riddle it now?”

I have informed this congregation many times that the congregation sees only part of my work; it sees chiefly that part which pertains to the people who come to worship. The other part is known to virtually no one else. This part of my work occurs among people who don’t have the good fortune and grand opportunities that we take for granted. Naturally enough, we tend to make ourselves the measure of the universe. Therefore we assume, unthinkingly, that we in this congregation represent life in Canada. In fact we don’t. We think we’re a cross-section of the Canadian people, or at least a cross-section of Mississauga’s people. Cross-section? We’re the skim off the top; we represent the top 1/10th of 1% in terms of income and education and opportunity. There are strugglers all around us who don’t have our good fortune and privilege. There are legions whose sheer bad luck or upbringing or genetic coding has excluded them from so much of what we lucky people take for granted. We in Streetsville are so very privileged we’ve lost sight of those who aren’t. Compare the average Canadian family-income with that of this congregation; compare the average formal education with that here; compare the average retirement package with that here. Compare the average social opportunity and employment opportunity and recreational opportunity and intellectual opportunity with those here. If we are hard-hearted and spiritually inert we might recite that wretched hymn, “The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.” To be sure, we can always resolve to continue to benefit from our extraordinary privilege, determined not to think of anyone else lest our tummy become upset. On the other hand, we can soberly, truthfully, conscientiously admit that much will one day be required of those who have been entrusted with much. We can pursue Tikkun Olam, the mending of the world.

Our Lord came upon a woman who had been bent over for 18 years. He didn’t say to her, “Why are you bent over? Is it your fault?” Neither did he say, “Eighteen years already? What are two or three more? Besides, you don’t have much longer to live.” Instead he became angry, but not angry at her; angry at someone else. Our Lord hissed, “Satan has done this.” And then he freed her.

And so my challenge to the 25 year-old is, “Are you big enough for this? Are you willing to be made big enough? Or do you want to take your self-indulgent ease within the cocoon of unusual luck and privilege, all the while thinking your exclusive cocoon to be the product of extraordinary virtue?”

I’d like to talk with some 25 year-olds.

 

                                                                   Victor Shepherd       

February 1998

 

On Loving God

 

Mark 12:29      Psalm 42:4; 84:2     1 John 4:8       1 Corinthians 2:9

 

I have never had a stroke, as far as I know. (To be sure, I have been concussed four times and fractured my skull once, and therefore I must have sustained some neurological damage. Still, I have not had a stroke.) One aftermath of some strokes is that the stroke-sufferer cannot say what she wants to say, cannot articulate what she longs to communicate. Those attending the stroke-sufferer can only guess and guess and guess again.

Sometimes I feel that I too am not articulating what I long to communicate, and therefore people are left guessing again and again.

One guess is that I am trying to improve the moral tone of the community. To be sure, I should be happy if the moral tone of the community were improved. I am scarcely a booster of immorality or amorality. Nevertheless, at the end of the day I am not a moralist, concerned with having the community conform to a code. I am a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Another guess is that I am concerned to have religious observances better attended. To be sure, I should like to see them better attended; it bothers me that church-rolls carry so many people who are never or rarely seen at worship. At the same time, Jesus himself reminds us that the way is straight, the gate is narrow, and the few who enter upon it and persist in it are few indeed.

Another guess (guessed chiefly by those without church-connection) is that I am in the business of providing an affordable counselling service. To be sure, I am glad to offer whatever help I can to any suffering human being. Still, I’m not a psychologist.

Then what am I trying to do here? At the risk of speaking again like the stroke-sufferer who cannot articulate what she wants to communicate, I shall make another attempt: I AM TRYING TO FACILITATE AND FOSTER LOVE FOR GOD. I am trying to move us — all of us — to love God. You see, I have never lost sight of the “great commandment” reinforced by Jesus himself. When asked, “Which commandment is first of all?” he replied, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.” These two are never to be separated. At the same time, the first cannot be reduced to the second or collapsed into the second. It is not the case that by loving the neighbour we also love God. God insists on being loved for himself; being loved as God. The first command ever remains the first: we are to love God.

Actually, we are not exactly commanded to “love God”; we are commanded to “love the Lord our God”. The difference is crucial. “The Lord”, Yahweh, is the proper name of God everywhere in the Hebrew bible. The Hebrew name YHWH is spelled with no vowels. A word with no vowels cannot be pronounced; and a word which cannot be pronounced cannot be translated; neither can there be a substitute for it. Yahweh, “the Lord”, cannot be translated into Zeus (the deity of the ancient Greeks), or into Gitchi Manitou (the deity of Amerindians), or into Supreme Being (the deity of modernity). Neither can it be translated into any of the gods which people worship all the time: the American way of life, Canadian nationalism, or even something as crude as undisguised mammon. Neither can Yahweh, “the Lord”, be translated into the highest cultural achievement (however rich) or the profoundest environmentalism (however necessary). The name of God is spelled without vowels: it cannot be pronounced or translated. It admits of no rivals or approximations or substitutions. We are not to love God-in-General; we are not to love any vague deity. We are to love “the Lord” our God. He alone is creator; he fashioned a people to be a light to the nations; he spoke with Moses and seared upon him what the world will never be without; he arrested and infused prophets; and he, ultimately, became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Yahweh alone is God and he cannot be co-opted by anyone or anything. Him we are to love.

 

I: — But why? Why should we love God? Because we are grateful. Surely our gratitude to him compels our love for him. He has made us and ever sustains us. This is reason enough. Yet this is not where the Hebrew mind begins. The Hebrew mind begins not with creation but with redemption: God has saved us. The Hebrew heart is always moved most profoundly in reflecting upon our rescue at God’s hand.

Think of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are not an abstract moral code; neither do they enjoin conformity to a code. The Ten Commandments describe the shape, the pattern, the direction and the freedom of the life of that man or woman who knows that God has rescued her and is thereforeverlastingly grateful to God. The preface to the Ten Commandments is crucial: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt , out of the house of bondage”. Deliverance. This is what leaves us breathless. If we have stood, adoring, before the cross then we know we’ve been rescued from ultimate loss. Then of course our gratitude will render us eager to have our lives take on the shape, pattern, direction which our rescuer wills for us. We shall love God ardently inasmuch as our gratitude to him dissolves all hesitation or reservation.

 

(ii) Yet we love God for another reason: God’s love for us creates in us and elicits from us our answering love for him. I love my children (who are now adults.) I am overjoyed to find them loving me. I like to think that I could continue to love them even if they never loved me, even if they answered my love with arctic iciness. But how difficult it would be, because what a heartbreak. I want my love for them to create in them and elicit from them a love for me; their love for me would then magnify my love for them, and my magnified love for them would in turn swell their love for me as the spiral of love became more intense and more wonderful.

A minute ago I said I should like to think that I would continue loving my children even if they never returned my love, but I am not sure that I could; at least not sure that I could for ever. But God can, and God does. God’s love remains undiminished even though there are countless hearts which remain cold and stony. What such people have not yet grasped is this: they were made for love. They were made to love God. They would be most authentically human, most richly human, most nobly human, if only they surrendered their indifference or defiance. For then they would find that God’s great love had begun to create in them and elicit from them a love for God through which they became most truly themselves.

Obviously I am speaking here of human self-fulfilment. We have to be careful in speaking of self-fulfilment, since what passes for self-fulfilment in our era is, at bottom, selfish-fulfilment. When people complain that they are not fulfilled they usually mean that they can’t get what they want. Seminars which provide techniques for “self-fulfilment” give people the tools whereby they can finally get what they want. What’s more, since I am a fallen creature and therefore sin-riddled, fulfilment of my sinful self could only result in a monstrosity better left unimagined. (Secularites who prattle glibly about self-fulfilment never seem to grasp this point; never seem to understand that fulfilment of the depraved self results in intensified depravity.) At a much profounder level, however, to love God is the true fulfilment of my self, since to love God is to know the remedy for my sinful self.

The psalmist is correct when he writes, “My soul thirsts for God… my heart and flesh cry out for the living God”. To have our thirst and our outcry met is surely to be fulfilled, most profoundly fulfilled. It should not surprise us, then, that we are most profoundly ourselves when we most self-forgetfully love God. After all, we were made “in the image and likeness” of God, and God, John says so very pithily, God is love. We have been made by love for love.

The answer to the question, “Why ought we to love God?” the answer to this question has been rather long. But the length of the answer is nothing compared to the depth of the reality: we are to love God inasmuch as the God who is love has created us and has rescued us. In addition, he has fashioned us in such a way that we can become what we are created to be only by giving ourselves up to him and loving him with an ardour which reflects the ardour of his love for us. Paradoxically, it is as we love the God who is not an extension of ourselves that we most profoundly become ourselves.

 

II: — The next question can be answered more briefly. The next question is, “How ought we to love?” The answer is stated in our text: with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Fancy preachers (or fanciful preachers) finesse the four words, “heart”, “soul”, “mind”, “strength” and develop a four-point sermon. The truth is, there aren’t four points here. There is only one. “Heart”, “soul”, “mind”, “strength” are virtual synonyms in Hebrew! Each word means the same as the others. When Jesus insists we are to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength he is increasing the intensity until we understand that we are to love God totally, with everything in us. We are to love God without hesitation, without reservation, without qualification, without calculation. Our love for God is to be whole-soulled, admitting no rivals.

To say that we are to love God with all that we have and are is not to say that we are to love nothing else and no one else. There is much else that we are to love: our neighbour, to say the least. We are to love children, parents (scripture insists that neglect of parents is heinous), spouse. We are to love much else, yet love nothing else pre-eminently. Our love for God must come first.

Since the commonest metaphor for faith, in scripture, is marriage, it is fitting that we discuss our love for God in terms of marriage. Everyone knows (or should know) that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage. Regardless of our society’s preoccupation with inclusivity, exclusivity remains of the essence of marriage. The relationship we have with our spouse we are to have with no other man or woman. My wife occupies a place in my heart and life which no one else can occupy. But this is not to say that others have no place in my heart and life. They do! It is just that the place which others occupy (and even occupy at my wife’s urging); the place which others occupy cannot encroach upon the place which she occupies.

The older marriage vows contained the line, “…and forsaking all others”. These words did not mean that the newly-married couple forsook absolutely everyone else, dismissing friends, relatives, needy human beings, henceforth to live in a shrivelled, miserable universe of two. “Forsaking all others” meant that they forsook having the kind of relationship with others which they now had with each other. Exclusivity is of the essence of marriage. Where this truth is doubted or denied, the marriage is destroyed.

If you understand this then you understand what prophet and apostle mean when they tell us that God is jealous. To say that God is jealous is not to say that God is insecure or suspicious, like the insecure and suspicious husband who rages if he sees his wife talking to another man at a social function. To say that God is jealous is simply to acknowledge that exclusivity is of the essence of our love for God.

Our Israelite foreparents in faith, always earthy in their expression of spiritual truth, used to say, ” Israel has gone a-whoring after false gods!” They meant that the Israelite people had given to other things the whole-soulled love which they owed God alone. In doing this they had violated their covenant-promise to God, had become unfaithful; and like anyone who “goes a-whoring” they had debased themselves.

If we become most profoundly ourselves through loving God, then we debase and denature ourselves through deflecting our first love from God to something else, anything else. For God is a jealous God, we are told again and again. God is not insecure or suspicious; he does insist, however, that he be acknowledged as God. If we refuse to acknowledge the exclusivity of our relationship with him, we destroy the relationship.

 

III: — With what result do we love God? What is the outcome of our love for God? One result we have already discussed at length: insofar as we answer with love the love that has made us and redeemed us we become most truly ourselves.

Another result is that we love our fellow-believers who, like us, aspire to love God without hesitation or reservation. In his first epistle John writes, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God; and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” To be sure, we are to love the neighbour (the neighbour being, according to the parable of the Good Samaritan, any suffering human being). Nevertheless, we are especially to love fellow-believers, fellow-lovers of God.

In the year 1663 one of England ‘s finest puritan writers, Thomas Watson, wrote a little book called A Divine Cordial. It was meant to be a tonic for Christians who had become dispirited through savage persecution in Britain . In his brief book Watson lays down fourteen “tests of love to God”. One such test of love to God is love for fellow-Christians. A fellow-Christian, Watson says, “is like a fair face with a scar”. Then he adds, “You who cannot love another because of his infirmities, how would you have God love you?” I am emphasizing the matter of our loving fellow-Christians because I know that discouragement abounds in the Christian life, difficulties abound in church life, dispiritedness alights on us like the ‘flu, isolation blows its chill breath upon us, and before we know what has happened someone else has dropped away from the congregation. One test of our love to God, says Watson, is that we love those who love God.

Another result of our love to God is that we rejoice to see God’s name glorified and God’s truth exalted. One afternoon a parishioner came to see me and told me that she would do anything to help me in my work, anything she could do to free me for my work because, she said, what issues from this pulpit honours God. I trust it does. Of this much I am certain: through the work which she does, through the service which she renders, that woman herself honours God every bit as much. Myself, I rejoice to see and hear God glorified, the gospel commended, his truth enhanced, his love owned, his mercy confessed, his faithfulness welcomed, and his people cherished.

Another result of our love for God is that we, his people, are humbled. One day I overheard a conversation between a friend of mine and another woman. The second woman mentioned that she had been asked to do something, to render some service in the congregation, and then added that she regarded it beneath her. “I’m not that small”, she said in conclusion. My friend quietly replied, “What you really mean is, you aren’t that big; you aren’t big enough.” God’s love, poured upon us, never demeans us, never shrivels us. God’s love dignifies us and renders us big. So big, in fact, that no service to him and his people will ever be found too small. Our love for God humbles us without humiliating us. No service is beneath us. After all, we are only loving him whose love for us washed dirty feet and endured the contempt of the cross.

The final result of our love for God is this: our love for God will be consummated by what God has prepared for all who love him. Paul insists that what God has prepared for all who love him cannot be described, cannot even be imagined, so glorious is it. Our love for God will be crowned so gloriously as to leave us speechless yet forever adoring. Nonetheless, that love of his which he has already shed abroad in our heart is surely a clue to it. Then for the full splendour of what he has prepared for us we can wait confidently now, just because we have already tasted and enjoyed that love which has quickened ours.

 

Then we shall continue to love him. We know why we are to love him. We know how we are to love him. Do we know how much? Let Bernard of Clairvaux, a medieval thinker and hymnwriter, have the last word today: “The measure of our love to God is to love him without measure.”

 

                                                                                                          Victor Shepherd                                                                                                      

September 2004

 

Four Questions

Mark 12:41-44

I really like Jim Houston, the handsome man who chairs our finance committee. He’s very able — and there’s no substitute for competence. He’s also personable — and I much prefer the company of the personable to the company of the prickly. He’s funny — in fact his sense of humour is the best I’ve ever come across.

Because I like Jim so very much and enjoy being around him I felt bad when I told him not to lay his “trip” on me at the last executive meeting. The executive of the Official Board had been talking about today, Stewardship Sunday. Jim had said to me, “Victor, I won’t be writing your sermon for that day, but no doubt you’ll have a scorcher!” I had replied with a weariness that went all the way to my bone-marrow, “Jim, I don’t have another Stewardship Sunday sermon in me. In the 17 years that I’ve been here I’ve preached a dozen stewardship sermons. Plainly they haven’t worked — or why should I be asked for yet another? Besides (by now brother Jim didn’t know what he had uncorked in me); besides even if I wanted to preach a stewardship sermon on 29th October, I couldn’t: I simply don’t have another one in me.”

Poor Jim (I really felt bad laying my “heavy” on him) — for the first time in my acquaintance he didn’t have anything funny to say. He mumbled something to the effect that regardless of what I had or didn’t have in me he’d be ready with his “Rock’em, sock’em” depiction of “The Year’s Biggest Hits” — the hits being not bonecrushing bodychecks but the “hits” we’ve taken in getting the building put in order, the leaky roof repaired, and so on.

I know I disappointed Jim. I know he wanted me to bring forward a tear-jerker. But everyone’s heard my tear-jerkers.

Speaking of tears. What would you think if you came upon a 35-year old woman sitting at the kitchen table, weeping, while she tried to glue together the broken pieces of the lens from her eyeglasses? Can you imagine anyone so benighted as to try to glue together a broken lens? In the first place the glue available at that time didn’t glue glass; in the second place, even if the pieces could be glued there would still be cracks where they had broken; in the third place there would be glue-smears all over the patched-up lens and you wouldn’t be able to see through it in any case.

Then why did my mother sit at the kitchen table trying to glue together her broken lens while we three children looked on? Because the family didn’t have enough money to replace the lens. Why was she weeping? Because (she told me years later) she felt that the family’s financial position was hopeless.

Still, it was at this time that my father — you know the story about my dear old dad, how a broken-down stranger (intoxicated to boot) approached him as we Shepherds were on our way into church one Sunday, how my dad gave the man all the money he had with him.

Two weeks ago I told Jim Houston I didn’t have any more such stories in me; no fresh stories. But that was all right. Not even fresh stories would be effective. After all, my old stories were fresh the first time, weren’t they? — and even when they were fresh they were singularly ineffective. There is no point in my telling such stories when they don’t work!

I’m going to do something different today. Since I don’t have any drum-beating, tear-jerking, conscience-tormenting stories to put before you, I’m going to tell you simply why Christians give money, and give it sacrificially.

I: — Believers give money to the church for four reasons. The first should be obvious. The church has been entrusted with the gospel. There is no more important event amidst all the events of world-occurrence than a ringing declaration of the gospel. There is nothing more important — there can be nothing more important — than a non-fuzzy, non-fumbling announcement of Jesus Christ.

Doesn’t your heart resonate with the apostle Paul when he says so very simply yet so very movingly to the congregation in Philippi, “For me to live is Christ”? “Life means `Christ’ for me”, is what he has in mind. The One who had overtaken Paul when Paul had been looking in the wrong direction and moving down the wrong path; this One ever after loomed so big in the apostle’s mind and heart that he couldn’t contain himself and could only let his ever so rich experience pour out of him. What is the money we give compared to that?

Let’s not fool ourselves. The church has been entrusted with the gospel of Christ not because our Lord is an “add-on” for suburbanite yuppies who already “have it all” and now want a little decoration on top of the “all”. Neither is our Lord the fixer-upper of those who have made it most of the way themselves and who now need a little boost to achieve whatever it is they regard as worth achieving. Our Lord is first and last Saviour from a peril so perilous it is finally indescribable.

Indescribable? Of course it is. For what other reason would our Lord paint incompatible pictures in trying to speak of it? The most fiery fire, he says repeatedly, along with the darkest outer darkness. But fire isn’t dark! In painting incompatible pictures (the brightest fire and darkest darkness) our Lord is telling us that ultimate loss, before God, is something we cannot adequately comprehend, even as it is something we ought resolutely to avoid.

The gospel is life just because it is the effectual self-declaration and self-bestowal of Him who is resurrection and life. You must have noticed that every funeral service repeats the words of Jesus, “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” Our Lord means exactly what he says. To live in the Son is to be reconciled to the Father; to be reconciled to the Father is to be bound to him in a bond whose truth, intimacy, intensity must finally remain a wordless wonder. And to live here is to be fixed so firmly in the heart of God that our coming physical death and biological dissolution are but a momentary irritant and inconvenience.

Humankind needs saving and Jesus Christ is its sole saviour. Let us not pretend anything else or settle for anything less. Humankind needs saving from the judgement of God and from the consequences of its own sin. Let us not waste our time saying that we need “saving” (as it were) from such matters as meaninglessness. I have never yet found someone whose life was meaningless. I have met many for whom life’s meaning wasn’t worthy of any human being (e.g., lining up to drool over the big lottery-draw, or looking at 7 NFL football games on a weekend; even the derelict who wants only to panhandle enough quarters to buy a bottle of the cheapest wine — the meaning of his life is just that!). It’s not that people find life meaningless; it’s rather that their lives are cluttered with myriad inferior meanings and they need truth, which truth is given with the Saviour who wants only to give us himself.

Prior to his seizure at the hand of the Risen One the apostle Paul didn’t find his life meaningless; nevertheless, after his seizure at the hand of the Risen One he counted all the meanings that had preoccupied him to this point as garbage compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. (Phil. 3:8)

The church has been entrusted with the gospel. We who are Christ’s followers must announce him. When we announce him, however, more than a mere announcement happens; when we announce him he himself emerges from our witness and acts in our midst. Did not our Lord say to his earliest followers, “Whoever hears you hears me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, rejects him who sent me”? (Luke 10:16)

Why do Christians make financial sacrifices on behalf of the church? — because we have found that Jesus Christ is life for us, and we never want it said that we withheld such life from anyone else.

II: — There is another reason, a related reason, for our financial sacrifice. We want the gospel’s “indirect lighting” of our society to continue. When indirect lighting is used in a building the light-fixture isn’t seen but the illumination is evident. For centuries the illumination of so much of our society was the result of the indirect lighting of the gospel. Think of the laws that govern us; think of our criminal justice system; think of education; think of health care. And then imagine (if you can) the shape of a society where indirect Christian influence has been removed.

We must never think that the indirect lighting that has been in place for centuries will take centuries to disappear. On the contrary, it can disappear overnight. During the last 80 years of Czarist rule in Russia prior to the Revolution of 1917 there were 20 state-executions (no doubt for heinous crimes). During the first month of Revolutionary rule under Lenin there were over 1000 executions.

I have to smile when I hear church-detractors complain that the church of yesteryear gave rise to “moral legalism”. People who speak like this, I have found, are so very shallow that they couldn’t define legalism if they were asked to. More to the point, would our society be better off if instead of moral legalism (so-called) we had immoral lawlessness?

The influence of the Ten Commandments has been inestimable throughout the western world. The people today who snicker at them as “Victorian”: wait until their employer withholds earnings to which they are entitled, or wait until their employer won’t give them another day off work since Christmas falls on a Sunday. They will be the first to complain that they have been stolen from. Stolen from? Who said stealing is wrong? A minute ago the complainers were snickering at Victorians who spoke of right and wrong!

The people who snicker at the Ten Commandments as Victorian are too shallow to see that if only 1% of the population (just 1%!) behaves criminally then social existence is impossible. At many times throughout history social existence has been impossible — at least for a short while until a totalitarian arm-breaker appeared whom people were glad to see, since totalitarian arm-breakers at least allow a society to exist.

Needless to say, the indirect lighting of the gospel that illumines the wider society; this indirect lighting continues only as long as there is direct lighting of the gospel elsewhere; specifically, only as long as the gospel shines directly in the church. Indirect gospel-lighting of the wider society will remain only as long as direct gospel-lighting floods the church.

We must keep the gospel shining directly in the church, in the first place, just because the gospel quickened us and we want others to be quickened as well; in the second place we must keep the gospel shining directly in the church so that the indirect lighting of the gospel will continue to illumine our society. Where society isn’t rendered livable by indirect illumination it is rendered livable by a state-brutality other societies have found preferable only to mob-brutality.

III: — There is yet another reason for our financial sacrifice. Our giving money away is the confirmation that the power of money is a broken power in our lives.

According to Jesus there are only two powers in the cosmos: God and mammon. (Since you have heard me say many times that the only two powers in the cosmos are God and the power of death, death being the ruling power in a fallen world, it is plain that the power of money is most intimately related to the power of death. But more of this on another occasion.) Jesus says, without argumentation, “God or mammon: these are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. God or mammon. Which one do you worship? Which one do you serve? Which one is going to triumph finally in you?” All of us know what the right answer is. There isn’t a person in this room ready to jump up and say, “I wish to ally myself with the power of mammon!” We all know what the right answer is. Still, there is only one way to demonstrate the answer we have given in the secret places of our heart; there is only one way to show where we have truly lined up; there is only one way to show that the power of money in our lives is a broken power. We must give it away. The only freedom we have with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.

Economists tells us that money is a medium of exchange. It’s easier for the farmer to pay money for an automobile than it is for him to take six million apples to the Ford dealer and hope that the dealer wants six million apples as much as the farmer wants a new car. Money is a medium of exchange that avoids the inconvenience of the barter-system, say the economists.

The economists are correct; but they are also exceedingly shallow unless they say a great deal more. After all, everyone knows that money is eversomuch more than merely a medium of exchange. Don’t we all say that money talks? If money “talks” then money is a power. Don’t we whisper to each other that money secures votes? Everybody knows that money makes or breaks people; money intimidates, money coerces, money enforces silence. (Not only does money talk; money keeps people from talking. In other words, money is a power so powerful that it can do anything.) All we need do to observe the power of money is to note how people thought when they lacked money, and how they think now that they have money; how they voted when they lacked money, how they vote now that they have it; what they expected from government when they lacked it, what they expect when they have it; how highly they thought of public schooling when they lacked it, how highly they think of private schooling now that they have it.) Money is a power so powerful, says Jesus, that it rivals the power of God himself. We confirm that the power of mammon is a broken power in our lives as and only as we give it away. The only freedom we have with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.

IV: — The last consideration for our financial sacrifice has to do with need.

(i) Admittedly, our church-building has been “needy”. We had two choices when we were told that it wouldn’t be long before the city-authorities put the yellow tape around the building and allowed no one to enter. Our two choices were to repair the building or to walk away from it. At the congregational meeting where this was discussed we voted 100% to repair the building.

We didn’t repair the building because we are museum “freaks” who are especially fond of antiquarian architecture. We repaired the building for one reason only: to facilitate the praise of God arising from those for whom life means Christ.

(ii) Another area of need is the material distress, physical distress of so many around us, together with emotional distress arising from material disadvantage.

“But isn’t it the responsibility of government to meet such needs?”, someone wants to ask. I’m not going to debate whether it is or isn’t the responsibility of government. I shall simply say that governments everywhere are getting out of the business of providing the assistance so many need. With what result? With the result that the church’s historic diaconal ministry will come back into its own.

Throughout the church’s 2000-year history the ministry of the diaconate has been distinguished from the ministry of the word. The ministry of the word was preaching, teaching, counselling, while the ministry of the diaconate was the providing of material help for those in especial need. In the past two decades The United Church of Canada has altered the meaning of “diaconal”; no longer does it refer to the providing of concrete assistance. Instead it refers to a professional church-worker half-way between lay and ordained. Those who are described as “diaconal”, in our denomination, are deemed “more” than lay but “less” than ordained. But this is a distortion of the historic meaning of the term. For 2000 years “diaconal” has meant “providing assistance to the materially needy.” In Calvin’s Geneva, for instance (in the year 1550, approximately), deacons had two major responsibilities: care of the sick and care of the poor.

During the middle ages an order of nuns took it upon themselves to provide proper Christian burial for those who had been executed by the state and to provide material assistance for their survivors (i.e., for widows and now-fatherless children).

I am convinced that as governments reduce government spending precisely where the church historically shone and where we have recently expected governments to shine; as governments reduce spending here the church will be called to recover its historic diaconal ministry. One result of the church’s recovering its historic diaconal ministry will be that the church will have handed to it, on a silver platter no less, the opportunity of recovering that credibility which the church complains at present of having lost.

(iii) The final need I shall mention today concerns outreach. Think of our congregation’s mission project in India. We are going to be supporting development-projects in two small Indian villages. We must never think that our money buys mere tokenism in India. What our money produces in terms of development there will benefit the village-people enormously.

Several years ago one of my friends, now on the medical staff of Sunnybrook Hospital, spent three years doing surgery in Africa. He tells me he thinks his surgery did some good in Africa; in fact his surgery did as much good in Africa as surgery does in Canada. It benefits one person at a time, one person at a time in the midst of millions. He told me that if we really want to do vastly more good than surgery can do we should send over a well-driller. “If you want to improve living conditions hugely”, he told me, “teach the people to do two things: drill a well and dig a latrine. A well and a latrine will do more than any amount of surgery.”

We have enormous opportunity to improve the material wellbeing of our friends in Indian villages. Let it never be said that they suffered unnecessarily on account of our stinginess.

Two weeks ago I told Jim Houston that I didn’t have another stewardship sermon in me. I didn’t. I still don’t. Therefore in place of a stewardship sermon I am going to ask us all to ponder four questions:

[1] How intimately do we know Jesus Christ, and what does he mean to us?

[2] What will our society look like if the indirect lighting of the gospel disappears and with it the illumination that remains essential?

[3] Have we ever confirmed, by giving money away gladly and readily, that money is a broken power in our lives?

[4] Are we going to allow our stinginess to cause others to suffer unnecessarily?

There is no sermon today, merely four questions.

                                                                    Victor A. Shepherd
October 1995               

Extravagance?

Mark 14:3-11        Deuteronomy 15:7-11

Shortly after ordination I was transferred to Maritime Conference of The United Church. I had been in my New Brunswick congregation only a few weeks when Dr. Robert McClure, missionary surgeon and, at that time, moderator of the denomination, visited the area. The regional clergy met with him over supper in a steakhouse.  I ordered my steak rare. When it came to me it appeared not to have been cooked at all. My steak was hemorrhaging. In that gruff abrasiveness for which McClure was known everywhere he barked at me, “Shepherd, do you want a tourniquet for that thing?”

A few months earlier I had seen a different side to the man, and a different manner of expression. McClure was speaking to a group of students at the University of Toronto about his work in the Gaza Strip. He was telling us that we North American “fat cat” students knew nothing about much that matters in life; specifically, we knew nothing about gratitude. He told us that on one occasion in the Gaza Strip he had stopped at a peasant hovel to pay a post-surgical call on a woman on whom he had operated.  (He told us he had done a “rear axle job” on her.  Since I lack medical sophistication I can only guess what this might be.) The woman and her husband were dirt-poor. Their livestock supply consisted of one Angora rabbit and two chickens.  The woman combed the long hair out of the Angora rabbit, spun it and sold it. She and her husband ate or sold the eggs from the chickens.  Following her post-surgical examination the woman insisted McClure remain for lunch. He told her he had to see another patient a mile or two down the road, but would be back for lunch in an hour.  When he returned he peeked into the cooking pot to see what he was going to have for lunch: one rabbit and two chickens.  The woman had given up her entire livestock supply, her own food supply, her livelihood, her income.  She had poured out herself upon him, reserving nothing.  As he related the incident to us students, McClure –gruff, blunt, abrasive – wept like a child, and could only blubber and blurt, “You students know nothing of gratitude, nothing.”

There is another incident of gratitude that will never be forgotten, says our Lord. A woman broke a bottle of expensive perfume and poured it over his head and over his feet even as she wiped his feet with her hair.  Make no mistake: it was expensive. Three hundred denarii was a year’s income for a labourer in Palestine . Why did she do it?         We’ll come to that. What rejoinder did her deed elicit? With either disappointment or dismay or even disgust Judas retorted, “What a stupid waste! Why not sell the perfume and give the proceeds to the poor?”   Jesus replied, “Let her alone.  The poor you’ll always have with you.  She’s done something beautiful.”

 

I: — We would misunderstand this gospel story abysmally if we thought for a minute that Jesus was cavalierly dismissing the horror of poverty and the plight of the poor themselves. We are people of shrivelled, stony hearts if we read this story as legitimating any society’s disregard of the poor.  Only the most insensitive people are unaware of wasted money that would do eversomuch for the wretched of the earth.

We must remember that the poor of first century Palestine weren’t those who had a little less than their neighbour, those whose automobile was older than most people’s, those whose home had only one toilet. They weren’t those who had fallen into downward social mobility only to be caught in the social safety net that we have in Canada , which net prevents any of us from falling anywhere near as far as we otherwise might. In first century Palestine the poor were really poor. The houseguests who witnessed the perfume-pouring, including Judas; they had a point; they weren’t without sensitivity or understanding. They were piercingly aware of the poverty they couldn’t fail to see and the staggering value of the perfume wasted on the head and feet of one man.

These people were Israelites.  They knew the Hebrew bible. They knew that the first responsibility of Israel ’s king, back in the days before the Roman conquest when Israel still had a king, was to safeguard the poor.  (This point we should linger over.  The first responsibility of political authority is to safeguard the poor.) So exquisitely sensitive was Israel to the horror of poverty that it had many different Hebrew words for “poor.” One Hebrew word for “poor” referred to those who were physically frail, sick, handicapped, lame, wasted. Another Hebrew word for “poor” referred to those who were forever dependent.  To be uncommonly dependent on others, for any reason at all, is to be poor, if only because such people are always at the whim and mood of those they depend on. A third Hebrew word for “poor” referred to the oppressed.  The oppressed were the powerless, the helpless who were exploited relentlessly and ground down ruthlessly.  Israel was so exquisitely sensitive to the plight of the poor for one reason: God is exquisitely sensitive to the plight of the poor.  The psalmist reminds his people, “God does not forget the cry of the afflicted.”

Jesus was a faithful son of Israel – and more: Jesus is that Son of God with whom the Father is well pleased. Then our Lord’s concern for the poor reflected perfectly his Father’s concern and gathered up the concerns of his kinsfolk.

We Canadians live in a country that continues to display concern, some concern at least, for the poor. I have never doubted why or how we came to display such concern: our nation has been informed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. In those countries that lack a Christian history and a Christian memory the attitude to the poor is very different.  While I was appalled at the wretchedness I saw in India , given India ’s widespread poverty, I was startled to learn how many rich there are in that country and how rich they are.  Never think that India is populated by poor people only. Never forget that every year since 1870, including the years of the worst famines, India has been a net exporter of food. But India has little Christian history and therefore little Christian memory.  For this reason the attitude to the poor there is different.  I have no doubt too that as secularism erodes the Christian background in Canada and dilutes the Christian infusion, Canada ’s attitude to the poor will change, and change for the worse.         Is there any governmental leader in Canada at this moment who knows that his or her chief responsibility, by God’s ordination, is to safeguard the poor?

In Israel the poor could take grain from a field or grapes from a vine, and take these at any time if they were without food.   (This wasn’t deemed theft on account of the manifest emergency.) Every third year 10% of the harvest was given to the poor, no questions asked. Every year a border had to be left standing in every grain field following the harvest, the border of grain being for the poor alone.  The poor were allowed to borrow money interest-free.         Job says he won’t be able to face God if he hasn’t assisted the poor. Amos says God will punish Israel for its failures with respect to the poor.  The apostle James is livid when the wealthier members of a congregation receive preferential treatment.  Since all of this is gathered up in our Lord himself, the people who rebuke him over the woman’s extravagance can’t be faulted.  They are sensitive to the plight of the poor; they expect him to be; he is. Then why doesn’t Jesus fend off this weepy woman and have her do something useful with the money she wants to give up?   Whatever our Lord meant when he said, “The poor you have with you always”, he didn’t mean that the poor can therefore be overlooked. Tragically, what our Lord didn’t mean is precisely what too many people have thought he meant.  It was the social consequences of our Lord’s words abused that drove Karl Marx to speak with no little justification of religion as the opiate of the people, the drug that tranquillizes the wretched of the earth in the face of their misery.

The poor matter. They matter to God. They should matter to us. Every Israelite knew this. Jesus knew it too. Judas knew that he knew, as did the other onlookers.  Therefore their protest, upon seeing money thrown away on anyone in a display that lasted only a minute, is entirely understandable.

 

II: — Then why does Jesus permit the woman to waste her money and jeopardize the poor?   Before we answer that question we must ask and answer another question. When McClure, the missionary surgeon, looked into the cooking pot and saw the rabbit and two chickens, why didn’t he say to the woman, “Why have you deprived yourself of your livelihood? Don’t know you know you’ve rendered yourself penniless?   What do you think you’re going to do now?”         Why didn’t McClure shake his head in amazement and say to us university students, “Those impoverished people in the Gaza Strip; they are their own worst enemies. We’ll never be able to do anything for those who evidently can’t help themselves.” McClure said no such thing because he knew the meaning of her act: her act didn’t mean she was unaware of her material predicament.

Jesus said no such thing because he knew the meaning of the woman’s act: her act didn’t mean she was unaware of the plight of the poor. Our Lord knew that what the woman was pouring upon him wasn’t perfume, ultimately, however costly; it was love she was pouring upon him. It was gratitude taking the form of love. It was a spectrum of gratitude and love that could be seen as pure gratitude or pure love or any gradation of the two if it even makes sense to distinguish love and gratitude in this woman’s heart.  Her pouring out the perfume wasn’t the most adequate expression she could find of her love for the one who meant everything to her; it was the only expression that occurred to her in that instant. Of course it was a waste in one sense; in another sense, no waste at all, since it was categorically different from all considerations of waste and usefulness and thrift and expedience.  It can be considered waste as long as a price tag (300 denarii) is attached to the perfume; it can’t be considered waste as long as no price can be affixed to love. Does anyone want to suggest that she should have mailed our Lord a letter for only 52 cents, or even e-mailed him for nothing?

Jesus didn’t object to her doing what she did once.  Had she attempted to do it repeatedly, I’m sure he would have stayed her. But to stay her when every impulse within her moved her to disregard social convention and public niceties and yammering tongues and cruel gossip; how could our Lord have halted such an expression of love and gratitude without crushing her? Had he stayed her she could only have concluded, to her endless embarrassment, that she had been as gullible as a child, when in truth she had found herself forever different thanks to the ministry of this man.

In first century Palestine a woman didn’t speak to a man in public, or a man to her, lest they be thought to be involved in an impropriety.  Neither did they touch each other.  A friend of mine, a psychiatrist whose psychiatric expertise is matched by his Christian ardour; my psychiatrist friend, in discussing this incident with me one day, remarked that the woman’s act was extremely sensual: wiping a man’s feet with her hair, kissing his feet, trying to dry them with her hair – this is erotic.  Her hair must have been long, so long that she would let it down and then let herself down; no, not let herself down, simply collapse at his feet oblivious to everything and everyone, aware only of him upon whom she was now pouring out everything. Then was there an erotic element in her deed? There was. And so what. Our Lord was no fool. He wasn’t unaware of the erotic trace element in the woman’s self-giving. But while he was no fool, neither was he a sledgehammer about to crush her.

One hundred years ago James Denney, a fine Scottish theologian, remarked, “You show me someone who hasn’t purchased a gift he couldn’t afford for someone he loves and I’ll show you someone who isn’t fit for the kingdom.” Of course none of us could afford such a gift every week and therefore we wouldn’t purchase such a gift every week.         The Scottish fellow’s story has point, we should note, only if we can’t afford such a gift at all, not even once, and yet purchase it anyway in our poured-out gratitude for someone who is dearer to us than life.  If we have done such a thing, we won’t bother replying to those who say that such a deed is the height of irrationality and foolishness and improvidence and should therefore be eschewed everlastingly.  We won’t bother replying just because there is no word that can express inexpressible gratitude and love and devotion.

Not so long ago Maureen’s best friend from her New Brunswick days telephoned us on a Saturday night.  She wanted us to pray for her on the spot, that is, over the phone. She was very ill, sick unto death. Her husband, she told us, wasn’t in the house but rather was stumbling around outside, beside himself at his wife’s condition and his dread of losing her, so much does he love her.  She telephoned me subsequently with the same request.  Again her husband couldn’t bear to overhear the conversation.  When Maureen and I lived in her village we often commented on this couple’s straightened financial circumstances.  They had little money and had come from families with little money, she being one of 17 children and he being one of 14.  The first Christmas we were in Tabusintac she purchased a Christmas gift for her husband; it was the most outlandishly expensive cologne for men. Now he was a lumberjack. Thereafter he was the sweetest-smelling lumberjack in the New Brunswick woods. But she hadn’t bought the carriage-trade cologne to make him smell sweet; she had bought it because it had been the only vehicle she could think of for expressing her love for her husband.

Let’s come back to the woman in the gospel story.  Different accounts of the story in different gospels tell us that she poured the perfume on the head of Jesus or on the feet of Jesus.  In different gospels Jesus is recorded as making different comments, entirely understandable in view of what it is about the incident that most impresses different gospel writers.  When the woman poured the perfume out on the head of Jesus she was anointing him. Kings and priests were anointed in ancient Israel . When the woman anointed Jesus, then, she was recognizing him to be the one to whom she owed obeisance and allegiance and lifelong faithfulness, for he was now her effectual sovereign. When she anointed him she was also recognizing him to be priest, not a priest like those who offered up sacrifices in the temple, but rather the priest who offers up himself, priest and sacrifice in one, and therefore her effectual redeemer. In fact she honoured him as rightful ruler of her life only because she had first known her sin pardoned at his priestly hand.  It was her experience of forgiveness and freedom that constrained her to bind herself to him forever. “You show me someone who hasn’t spent a fortune he didn’t have for someone he loves, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t fit for the kingdom”, said the old Scot. Was the woman in our story fit, fit for the kingdom?   We shouldn’t be asking about her.  We should be asking about ourselves.  What are we going to say when the same question is posed concerning us?

As a matter of fact our Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, puts the question to us that he put to Peter on Easter morning in the wake of Peter’s denial. He asked, “Peter, do you love me…?” In fact he asked the question three times in the wake of Peter’s three denials. On the one hand, by asking the question three times over he was saying to Peter, “Don’t answer glibly; take your time and think about it; don’t ‘pop off’ with something ill-considered and hasty.         Ponder the question and weigh your answer.”   On the other hand, by asking the simple question without mentioning the repeated denials he was sparing Peter the downward spiral into self-loathing and self-rejection and ever-worsening guilt.  The question was sharp enough not to let Peter off, yet gentle enough not to let Peter go. “Do you love me?” Our Lord puts the same question to us in exactly the same spirit for exactly the same reason. Peter said, “Lord, you know that I love you.”   Months earlier a woman whose tears bespoke more than could ever be said anointed Jesus in public, witnessing to the watching world that she gloried in his priestly pardon and gladly submitted to his kingly claim.

 

A woman’s poured-out perfume, poured-out tears, poured-out heart told our Lord how much she loved him.  It should have told the onlookers too.  It didn’t, however, but not because they were concerned – rightly concerned – for the poor.  Our Lord was unfailingly concerned for the poor, as no doubt the Israelite woman herself was. Her deed couldn’t tell onlookers how much she loved him, however, in that they lacked such love themselves, and lacking such love themselves were unable to recognize it in someone else.

Then how much do I love him?  How much more should I love him?  And you?

 

                                                                                                     Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                         

February 2008

(preached February 10 2008, Markham Presbyterian Church, Ontario)

How Do We Know He’s Alive?

Mark 16: 1-8

I: — “Did he really rise from the dead?” the skeptic asks. “Prove it. Prove that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the Dead. If you can prove it, then the Christian message might be true after all.”

Let me tell you right now: there is no proof. Jesus consistently refused to traffic in proofs. At the outset of our Lord’s public ministry the tempter took him up to the top of the CN Tower. “Jump off, and land without spraining your ankle; then the whole world will know that you are the Son of God.” “No”, Jesus had replied, “If I do that, people will only look upon me as a sideshow freak, they may find me entertaining or even puzzling, but they will never follow me and magnify my work in the world.” A few months later some bystanders were uncertain as to whether they should throw in their lot with Jesus or wait and see. “Give us a sign”, they told him, “an unmistakable sign that you are the one we should follow.” “No sign”, said Jesus; “Signs are for armchair debaters who lack commitment; signs foster arguments among armchair dabblers; I want foxhole followers. If you join me you will know who I am and rejoice in it; if you don’t join me, a sign won’t get you to change your mind. A sign will only set you to squabbling among yourselves as to what the sign means.” You see, for those who have met the risen Lord signs are superfluous; for those who have yet to meet him, no sign is ever sign enough.

From time to time people ask me if the resurrection of Jesus can be proved. It can’t. What’s more, Jesus himself has never wanted it proved. He has always wanted followers, not detectives.

 

II: —   Then what can be proved? What is confirmed historically? History confirms two facts.

(i) Jesus of Nazareth landed himself in immense trouble with religious leaders. He was labelled a false prophet. Since “everyone” knew that the days of the prophets were past, anyone who sounded like a prophet had to be false. Therefore he was a false prophet.

He was a blasphemer too. He appeared to speak and act with the authority of God. When he was pressed to deny that he did so, he refused to deny anything. Anyone who claims to speak and act with the authority of God is a blasphemer.

He was a seducer of the common people. The ne’er-do-wells, the amoral, the irreligious — he drew them all to himself instead of sending them back to the pseudo-wisdom of the self-important and superior.

Not surprisingly, he was disposed of at the city garbage dump where the Roman executioner kept a scaffold ready-to-hand.

This is fact one. Thirty year-old upstart lands himself in trouble with religious officials who then ask civil authorities to execute him.

 

(ii) Fact two. His former followers, who had misunderstood him over and over and who had finally forsaken him and written off their time with him as embarrassing naiveness; his former followers began announcing zealously that he was alive. They were convinced he was alive, they said, simply because they had met him. Therefore they would no more think of trying to prove he was alive than you would try to prove me alive when you meet me at the door of the church after the service. No longer regarding him as deluded and themselves as naive, they worshipped him as Lord – he hadn’t been blasphemous after all when claimed to be the Son of God – and they insisted that with him a new age had dawned, the dawn of the “Age-to Come.”

History confirms that he died. History confirms that his former followers declared him to be alive, and declared him to be exalted as Lord of the entire creation.

“But wasn’t the tomb empty?” someone asks. If you were an ordinary citizen of Jerusalem and you heard reports of an empty grave in the city cemetery, you would merely conclude that someone, whether friend or foe, had removed the body for whatever reason. An empty tomb never proves that someone is alive; an empty tomb “proves” no more than that a tomb is empty; an empty tomb never proves that dead wandering teacher is now living ruler of the cosmos.

To be sure, early-day Christians insisted that the tomb was empty. Nevertheless, no early-day Christian believed upon Jesus risen because of an empty tomb. Early-day Christians believed upon Jesus risen because the living Lord Jesus himself had seized them and convinced them that he was alive and was in fact the very one they had seen crucified. This is the only reason anyone believed in the resurrection of Jesus then; it’s the only reason anyone believes in the resurrection now.

The apostle Paul didn’t make a trip to the Jerusalem cemetery, see an empty tomb, and finally draw the right conclusion. Quite the contrary. Paul was preoccupied with his cruel business of persecution when the risen One himself stepped in front of him and floored him. Peter was fishing. Mary Magdalene was grieving. Fearful disciples were fearing. All of these people were busy with the things which preoccupy us. And it was while those people were about everyday matters — working, weeping, fishing, fearing — that they were stolen upon, overtaken; they were impelled to acknowledge that Jesus had been brought to life and installed as sole, sovereign Lord. It still happens exactly like this.

 

III: — Let us be clear about something crucial. Romantics may tell us that Mozart “lives on” in his music and Shakespeare “lives on” in his plays and Martin Luther King Jr. “lives on” in the cause of justice for Afro-American people. But romantic talk is entirely inappropriate for Jesus. Jesus does not “live on” in his disciples. Jesus lives himself. Period. And because he lives himself, he directs and sustains and empowers his own cause throughout the world.

No early-day Christian remembered Jesus. Do you understand the force of this? No early-day Christian recalled Jesus. We remember or recall only those who have departed. We recognize those who are alive in our midst. Christians have always recognized Jesus. We meet him and adore him, hear him and cherish him, embrace him and obey him. We do. So did our ancestors before us. What did it mean for them?

 

(i) Our ancestors in faith revelled in their conviction that death had been conquered; not cancelled, but conquered. The difference is crucial. On my first pastoral appointment I sat with a woman who was most distressed at her 65 year old sister’s terminal illness. “If only Emma could be cured”, she kept saying, “if only a miracle would occur”. Gently, as gently as I could, I pointed out that if Emma’s terminal illness were reversed now, she would still have to die later. In other words, if she didn’t die at 65 she would still have to die at 69 or 72 or 81. If for some reason she came back to health at 65, then death had been cancelled at least for the moment; i.e., postponed.

But to say that death has been conquered is to say that death has been stripped of its power. On the day when the Lord was raised from the dead and death was stripped of its power, his people — you and I — became gloriously free. The writer of Hebrew insists that Jesus Christ has “destroyed the power of death and has delivered – freed – all who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.” (Hebrews 2:15) Sigmund Freud maintained that no human being could honestly face the prospect of dying, and therefore all human beings were unconsciously controlled by fear of death. But Christians aren’t determined and governed by their fear of death; Christians are determined and governed by the risen one who has freed us from that bondage in which the fear of death imprisons people and manipulates them.

Because the Christian is freed from the power of death and therein from the bondage arising from the fear of death, the Christian is free to give her life away. The Christian is free to risk himself on behalf of the one who risked everything for the people he loved. And since the world-at-large unconsciously tries to protect itself against death by piling up things and fortunes and reputations and rewards, the Christian is gloriously freed from preoccupation with things and fortunes and reputations and rewards. Because death is now stripped of all power to dislodge us from our security in Christ, we are freed from having to pursue the false securities, abysmal insecurities, of money and fame and mastery. We are free to give ourselves away.

 

(ii) The resurrection meant something more to our ancestors in faith. It meant that God guarantees the effectiveness, the triumph, of all cross-bearing. When Jesus died on Black Friday, his followers had concluded that his cross meant one thing: his suffering was utterly disastrous and completely useless. But when God raised him from the dead, they knew something else: God had vindicated Christ’s suffering and now advertised it as victorious. The resurrection of Jesus – and only his resurrection – turned Black Friday into Good Friday, “God’s Friday.” Resurrection means that our Lord’s cross-bearing has triumphed: atonement has been made for the sins of the world. If his cross-bearing has triumphed, ours always will too; ours will always be effective.

Our Lord guarantees the effectiveness, the triumph of whatever cross we take up for him and for his work and for his people. Resurrection doesn’t mean that cross-bearing can now be stepped around; it doesn’t mean that what we used to call “cross-bearing” is now no more than a minor nuisance. Resurrection means something entirely different: the crosses we take up anywhere in life, everywhere in life, will always yield fruit of some kind. The crosses we shoulder are gathered up in that one cross which includes them all. And they will all be rendered fruitful by the power of that resurrection which made our Lord’s fruitful.

For this reason my mother spent years patiently assisting young girls who had been sent to an institution when their parents no longer wanted them or couldn’t look after them. The girls, aged 8 to 16, were ill-behaved, devious, frequently mean-spirited, and of course psychologically stressed. On one occasion they harmed my mother physically. I suspect that more than a few grew up to be psychopaths. Yet my mother always knew that what she endured from those girls for the few years of their lives she was in touch with them would bear some fruit which she could leave with God.

For this reason my late father went to the Fort Saskatchewan Penitentiary every single Sunday afternoon for as long as he lived in Edmonton (eleven years) to provide music and a sermon for a service of worship. He knew that the convicts often seemed indifferent and uncomprehending and even resentful. Yet he never felt that his time was wasted. One day when I was about twelve years old I asked my father (innocently, I thought) if he’d ever seen any results for his eleven years’ work among convicts. Immediately he turned to me and said, a bit sharply, “I didn’t do what I did in expectation of seeing results; I did it because it was right.” Still, in the providence of God he was permitted to see the fruit of his work on one occasion at least. One day my father was sitting on an Edmonton streetcar with my mother when a man approached him, whispered briefly to him and shook his hand. The man had come to repentance and faith through the prison ministry, and now exulted in the fact that he could live, one a day at a time, without falling back into criminality.

The sacrifices we make right now for the sake of the kingdom; likely only we are aware of them, and it would be both poor taste and unbiblical blabbing to speak too much about them. And of course there are days when we resent the pressure of the wood and wish we could ditch this cross plus so many others. Of course there are such days; after all, Jesus wasn’t grinning on Calvary . Nonetheless, on Easter Sunday we are given fresh heart because our conviction is renewed: that resurrection which vindicated our Lord’s suffering and rendered it victorious guarantees as much for us.

 

(iii) Lastly, our ancestors in faith knew that because Christ had been raised from the dead and now lived and ruled in their midst, he would always use them, honour their discipleship, empower their testimony, regardless of how badly they had failed him in the past or might fail him in the future. The Bible is an agonizingly honest book. It portrays God’s people with all their defects. There’s no cosmetic cover-up to make God’s people look good. Peter denies. David murders. Moses rages. James and John think they are going to get positions of privilege in the kingdom. With shocking insensitivity born of selfishness the disciples squabble among themselves over who is going to look best precisely when Jesus is at his worst.

It’s no wonder that on several occasions Jesus sighs with exasperation and addresses the disciples, “O you midgets of midget faith!” Yet because Jesus Christ is alive and honours the mission his people take up in his name, it is we, people of midget faith, fumbling faith, stumbling, bumbling, falling down faith; we are the ones he will ever use.

Regardless of everything we find amazing in life what’s most amazing, unquestionably, is the humility, patience and helpfulness of our Lord who continues to deem us indispensable and honour our work as only he can. We are people of little faith; yet little-faith-people are the only people he has. Then we his followers are the very people whose service he will magnify in a manner as wonderful as it is unforeseeable. I don’t need any proof of all this.

I am as confident about it as were my foreparents in faith, and for precisely the same reason. He who was raised from the dead overtook them not once but many times. As often as he did he reconfirmed himself as living, as lordly, as loving.

He has done as much to me. As much, I trust, as he has done to you.

 

                                                                                                       Victor Shepherd

Easter 2004

 

Luke: Physician and Apostle

Luke 1:1-4

I: — Luke never saw a crowd; he never saw a mob or a group or an audience. Luke never saw a faceless man or woman. He saw only an individual, an individual with a specific affliction or problem or perplexity. Luke saw only a suffering individual whom Jesus Christ graced and whom Luke himself thereafter loved. Luke’s gospel is easily the warmest of the four. He describes people with such realism and yet also with such empathy that our hearts go out to them, even though they lived in so very different a time and place.

Luke was a physician. He used a medical vocabulary instinctively. In the incident where the boy is said to be “thrown down” (English text) by his affliction, the Greek word Luke uses was the current medical term for convulsions. In the incident where the distraught father cries to Jesus, “Look upon my son!”, the word Luke uses for “look upon” is the current medical term used of a physician seeing a patient. Like most physicians Luke was understandably defensive of the medical profession. When the menorrhagic woman approaches Jesus, Matthew and Mark tell us she had exhausted all her savings on physicians but was no better. Dr. Luke tells us the same story, but chooses to omit the part about costly medical treatment that has proved ineffective.

As a travel companion of Paul, Luke got to meet the leaders of the young church: Peter, Barnabas, Stephen , Lydia . But Paul was his special friend, his bosom friend, and to his friend Luke remained undeflectably loyal. How loyal? When Paul was imprisoned in Rome and his execution was imminent, Paul wrote young Timothy, “Luke alone is with me.” He couldn’t have been more loyal. If Luke stood by Paul, a man on death row, then did Luke meet the same violent end as Paul? We don’t know. We shall have to wait until the beloved physician tells us himself — if we’ll even bother to ask such questions on the Great Day.

Luke was a Gentile, the only Gentile writer in the New Testament. There’s nothing in his gospel that a Gentile can’t grasp. He habitually gives Hebrew words in their Greek equivalent so that a Gentile can understand. “Simon the Cananaean” becomes “Simon the Zealot.” Calvary isn’t called by its Hebrew name, ” Golgotha “, but by its Greek name, “Kranion.” (” Golgotha ” and “Kranion” both mean “the place of a skull.”) Luke never uses the Jewish term “Rabbi” of Jesus, but always a Greek term meaning “Master.” In tracing the descent of Jesus he follows it back not to Abraham, the foreparent of Jews (as Matthew does), but to Adam, the foreparent of all humans.

Luke’s writings are the single largest contribution to the New Testament. His written gospel is the longest book in the NT; when we add his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, we have over one-quarter of the NT. Luke wrote excellent Greek; in fact his Greek is the best in all of scripture.

Luke was well-educated and widely travelled. He is the only gospel-writer to speak of the Sea of Galilee as a “lake”; for Luke had been to the Mediterranean, and he knew that compared to the Mediterranean, Galilee was only a lake!

Plainly it was Luke’s intention to describe in his written gospel God’s activity in the ministry of Jesus, and to describe in the Acts God’s activity in the church. Luke never intended to write about himself. Nevertheless what he wrote about his Lord accidentally tells us much about Luke himself. In learning what it was about Jesus that intrigued Luke, we learn eversomuch about the apostle himself.

II(i) — Think of children, for instance. Luke says more about children than any other gospel writer. He knew how anguished parents are when a child, especially an only child, is gravely ill. Three times he mentions distraught parents who cry, “She’s my only child, and she’s dying!”, or “He’s my only child, and he convulses and foams at the mouth!” When Matthew and Mark speak of the children who are brought to Jesus, they use a Greek word that means a youngster of any age. Luke uses a different word, one that means infant. In Greek, Luke’s word also means unborn child or fetus. It’s the word Luke uses for the infants who are brought to Jesus for blessing and for the unborn John the Baptist who stirred in the womb of Elizabeth when Mary told Elizabeth she was pregnant too. Luke loved children, and “children”, for him, included the not-yet-born. Luke, Gentile though he was, knew that God had said to Jeremiah centuries earlier, “I knew you even before I formed you in the womb; I consecrated you a prophet even before you were born.”

Several times I have been asked to conduct living-room services for a couple that has miscarried. In every case the couple wants — and receives from me — recognition of the fact that what they have just lost isn’t of the same order as resected tonsils or gall bladder or appendix.

Luke’s witness needs to be heard, for I think there is less room than ever for children in our society. Whereas Israel regarded childlessness as the greatest misfortune that could befall anyone (worse even than leprosy or blindness), many couples today elect never to have children. They tell us they don’t need children to be “complete” themselves. (Did anyone ever say they did?) They tell us too that children interfere with career plans, travel plans, research plans, financial plans, cultural plans. I think that a society that has little room for children finally has little room for life. The Hebrew greeting, “le chaim, to life”, is finally impossible unless we are also saying, “to children”. No society can finally be life-affirming and child-denying at the same time.

(ii) Luke noted not only our Lord’s love of children; he noted as well our Lord’s love of misfits, outcasts, submerged citizens, losers, call them what you will. Like his master Luke too loved the non-winners in the race to the top, the losers in the games so many of us play so well.

This is why Luke relates the Master’s parable of the two men who go to the temple to pray. One man glories in his virtue. He doesn’t merely appear virtuous; he is virtuous. When he thanks God that he’s “not like other men” he’s telling the truth: he isn’t like other men. He’s devout, he tithes, he keeps his sex-life squeaky clean. The publican, on the other hand, possesses no such virtue in which to glory. He can only say, “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.” And this fellow, says Jesus, goes home “justified”, set right with God.

]Any congregation sees only part of the minister’s work, the part that pertains to preaching, teaching, pastoring, administering. The other part of the minister’s work no one sees (except perhaps the secretary). This part is the minister’s work with “losers”. They come to the minister for help. They are out of money and they want a few dollars for this or that. They are chronically mentally ill, and with the insight of the mentally ill and the unguardedness of the mentally ill, they don’t understand why they are in trouble every time they say “The emperor has no clothes” when it’s perfectly plain that the emperor has no clothes and all the sane people around them know it too – even as sane people won’t say it.

The women who come to the minister for a few dollars want money for two items, 90% of the time: paper diapers and drugs for yeast infections. For a long time I have known that the people who have drug plans are those with jobs good enough that they don’t need drug plans, while the people without drug plans are those with jobs poor enough that they do need drug plans. (I trust no one here today is going to begrudge these poor women money for paper diapers, even though most women here washed cloth diapers for years.)

And then there’s the family whose son or husband has hanged himself and the family needs a funeral that “won’t last very long.” Anguished families from the other side of the tracks have one question only concerning the funeral: “Will it last long?”

These people sidle up to me as unobtrusively as they can. Either they have no inclination to join us at worship on Sunday morning, or else they don’t feel comfortable here. They likely think (quite mistakenly) that we don’t hurt as they do, that life is rosy for us all the time, that we aren’t caught in the same suffering. For years now I have been haunted by their non-appearance on Sunday mornings.

I’m haunted because Luke keeps telling us that a woman whose life was a moral mess-up found in Jesus what she had found nowhere else. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was intrigued enough by Jesus to come as close as he could while remaining unnoticed. And then there was the dying convict who gasped to his gallows-mate whom he was seeing for the first time, “Won’t you remember me when you come into your kingdom?” — and received a word that let him die relieved. I’ve asked myself a thousand times why these people aren’t found here.

And then one day I realized that Jesus didn’t meet them in the synagogue. He met the woman in a man’s home. He met Zacchaeus at a shopping centre. He met the dying convict at the local garbage dump. He didn’t meet any of them in the synagogue.

Not so long ago I had to drive home from the hospital a woman and her two young children. Her third child had just been admitted on account of stomach trouble. Three children, no husband. A fellow who was fond of her (inappropriately fond) got into an argument with another fellow (also inappropriately fond) over her; the first fellow stabbed the second fellow to death on a Sunday night. Bob Rumball, the minister of the deaf congregation in Toronto , buried him. The next day the manager of an IGA store phoned me: the woman, needing food for her children, had written a rubber cheque. I’m not pretending the woman is virtuous; she isn’t. While she has no doubt been victimized by much in her life, I’m not pretending that she isn’t also self-victimized; she is. I’m not pretending that she possesses the homemaking skills needed to raise her family; she doesn’t. Her children’s material future is as bleak as hers. She is a loser. When Luke came upon stories like hers in the oral traditions about Jesus, he fastened on them. Luke says that these people, not often found in the synagogue, welcomed Jesus as warmly as he welcomed them.

(iii) Also important to Luke, because important first to his Lord, were women. Luke mentions thirteen women mentioned nowhere else in the gospels. All of the gospel writers recognized that Jesus elevated women and gave them a status and honour they had received nowhere else. Oddly enough, Mark momentarily slipped back into the old way of thinking. Mark tells us that Jesus had four brothers, and Mark names them. Then Mark adds that Jesus also had sisters — without stating how many or what their names were! But Luke tells us that the first European convert to the Christian faith was a woman, Lydia by name. Luke tells us that it was wealthy women who financed the band of disciples when those men had renounced gainful employment. Luke knew much of the degradation of women, and he was determined to overturn it.

Several years ago, when the Anglican and United Churches were discussing church union, some Anglicans objected strenuously to women clergy. “Why”, they said, “if a woman presides at Holy Communion and says, `This is my body’, she will fan something in male worshippers better left unfanned.” Odd, isn’t it, that the same critics of church union never objected that when I, a male, preside at Holy Communion I send women wild with surges of libido.

For years most Christian denominations have forbidden women to speak in public worship. But Luke tells us that when the Spirit of God moved the four daughters of Phillip, those women stood up and spoke.

We must remember that only a few years ago women were not allowed to vote. In 1929 the government of Canada maintained that documents using the word “person” didn’t pertain to women, since women were non-persons. It was only two decades ago that Flora MacDonald, a Member of Parliament, found herself excluded from a state function in Europe : the organizers had assumed that no woman would be representing a nation. (What did they think of Margaret Thatcher? that she was a freak of some sort?) Today, right now, in four-fifths of Christendom, women are denied access to ordination — despite the fact that women were the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection, and being such an eyewitness was a condition of being an apostle, no less. (How is it that women qualify as apostles but not as ministers?) Luke faithfully reflected his Lord’s elevation of women.

II: — We shouldn’t think that this is all there is to Dr. Luke. There’s a great deal more to him. There are three emphases in Luke’s mind and heart that receive more attention than anywhere else in the NT. The three emphases are joy, the Holy Spirit, and prayer. All three are related; all three flow into and out of each other. In Luke’s writings Jesus prays more, and Christians pray more, than in any other NT writings. Luke also says more about the Spirit, God’s intimate, effectual work in and among Christian people. And Luke’s writings throb with joy.

Luke knows that as we are brought to faith in Jesus Christ we are lifted up out of ourselves, up to the One who rejoices himself. There is joy in heaven, says Luke, when someone finally unclutters her life and welcomes the bread of life. “Joy before the angels of God”, he adds, when someone who is meandering blindly is made to see and steps out on the Way. There is merriment, dancing, a party when the wayward and the foolish “wisen up” and come home.

In describing the growth of the young church in Acts Luke speaks again and again of the Spirit, God’s unique effectiveness in vivifying the witness of the disciples, in supplying encouragement to believers in the face of resistance, and in causing love to triumph within the congregation amidst disagreement and suspicion. When missioners announce the good news of the gospel and some who have never heard it before take their stand with the apostles, Luke writes, “There was much joy in that city.” When persecution flays the missioners themselves Luke tells us that these men and women were “filled with the Holy Spirit and with joy.” Luke knows that people turned in on themselves never find the happiness they seek; he knows just as certainly that as people are moved to look away from themselves to that kingdom and its Lord now filling the horizon of their lives, their discontent gives way to joy. Luke begins his gospel with the note of joy: Zechariah and Elizabeth are told they will find joy in their old-age fertility as their son, John the Baptist, is born to herald the Messiah. Luke ends his gospel on a note of joy with the resurrection story of Jesus, as witnesses to it “returned to Jerusalem with great joy.”

In telling the Christian story as he has, and specifically in speaking of Jesus as he has, Luke has told us much about himself. Plainly Luke has enormous confidence in the Spirit or effectiveness of God; plainly Luke’s own heart pulsates; plainly all of this is nourished by the time Luke himself spends on his knees — as was the case with his Lord before him.

As for Luke’s attention to children, women, the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, the disadvantaged, the suffering — Luke’s attention here reflects the sensitive observation of the physician who sees the wounded of the world every day.

And as for Luke’s provision of a written gospel that is Gentile-friendly, we can only thank God for this one Gentile who knew that the Jew from Nazareth had other sheep of another fold, and knew that you and I, Gentiles that we are, are just these sheep.

 

Victor Shepherd

June 2005

 

Manifesto Of The Real Revolution

Luke 1: 39-56

 

It’s easy to sympathize with revolutionary movements, since revolutions are spawned by shocking injustices and unendurable oppression. It’s easy to see a new day dawning in revolutionary movements, a new day for those who have endured the long night of exploitation and frustration.

Because it’s so easy to sympathize with revolutionary movements we are all the more jarred — if not left feeling hopeless — when at last we admit that the movement which promised human liberation has delivered no such thing. No one knew this better than Robespierre, an architect of the French Revolution with its threefold promise of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. Robespierre was executed at the hands of the social transmutation he had engineered. Little wonder he commented, minutes before his death, “Revolutions consume their daughters”.

As we watch Latin American countries lurch from fascism to communism, from the political far-right to the political far-left, we see it happening all over again. The African nations that threw off colonialism because it was cruel have installed a political monster whose human rights violations make colonialism appear almost benign. In pre-Revolutionary Russia Czarist rule was deemed insupportable; yet in the early period of Leninist rule the state executed one thousand people per month. A revolution that had promised to feed people still couldn’t supply each citizen with a loaf of bread 70 years later. Promising people freedom it demoralized them with a secret police; promising human fulfilment it couldn’t even grant mere recognition of human beings.

Revolutions founder over one thing: human nature. And in a fallen world, “human nature” means “human depravity”. The problem with revolutionary movements is this: they are incapable of being genuinely revolutionary! They merely “revolve”; that is, turn up, recycle, the same fallen human nature. Revolutionary movements cannot get to the heart of the matter simply because they are powerless to deal with the human heart. Political leaders may speak of a “New World Order”; Christians, however, know that the only new world order is the kingdom of God. “New” orders (so-called) are merely a case of deja vu. The only real revolution is the kingdom of God, fashioned and ruled by the king himself. It alone supplies the new heart, new mind, new spirit of which the prophets spoke, for which everyone longs, and which Jesus Christ alone bestows.

I: — According to Mary, mother of our Lord and spokesperson of his revolution, real revolution begins with the scattering of the proud in the imagination of their hearts. “Heart” is biblical shorthand for the innermost core of a person, the “nerve centre”, the “control panel”. “Heart” has to do with thinking, willing, feeling and discerning. In addition, “heart” means identity, who we really are underneath all cloaks, disguises and social conventions. The “imagination of our heart” is our fashioning a deity of our own making, a god after our own image and likeness, which deity we follow zealously. Through the prophet Isaiah God says, “I have held out my hands to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations.” Isaiah knows that first we disdain the Holy One of Israel and his claim upon us; then we fabricate whatever deity will legitimate and satisfy our craving, whether we crave wealth or recognition or ascendancy or anything else.

While Mary is customarily depicted as demure and dainty, naive to the nth degree, the picture she paints of human nature is anything but naive: it is stark. She tells us of proud people who are victimized by the imagination of their heart — all of us; we are at this moment stumbling down paths “which are not good”, certainly not godly. All of us are like the fool of whom the psalmist speaks, the fool who “said in his heart, ‘There is no God'”. He’s a fool not because he doesn’t believe God exists; he’s a fool just because he believes God exists and yet maintains that there are no consequences to dismissing the Holy One of Israel while preferring and pursuing the imagination of the heart, no consequences to exchanging the deity we fancy for the God who claims our faithfulness. Blinded by and in love with the gods of our own making we are all alike fools whose folly is going to prove fatal.

Yet Mary remains spokesperson for a revolution which is to be announced as good news, the uniquely good news of Christmas: God has scattered the proud! Our first response to learning that God scatters us vigorously may not be that we have just heard good news! To be told that we have been scattered, at God’s hand, suggests that God has hammered us so hard as to fragment us, and then dismissively swept away the fragmented remains. To be sure, we have been judged; we have been found wanting. Yet this is not to say that God sweeps us away in his judgement. The Greek verb “to scatter” (DIASKORPIZO) also means “to winnow”. To winnow grain is to toss a shovelful so that the wind carries away chaff but leaves behind the kernel, prized and soon to be put to use. In other words, God scatters us, the proud, inasmuch as he longs to save us and intends to use us. In getting rid of chaff he lays bare that heart which he can then renew in accord with his nature and kingdom, and then use ever after.

“Scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts” is essential if a revolution is to be real and not merely a recycling of human depravity. Mary insists that in the invasion of his Son God has scattered us all and will continue to do so, yet not out of petulance or irritability or frustration or disgust. God scatters us — winnows us — inasmuch as he plans to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and use us in ways we cannot anticipate.

II: — Mary maintains that God has done something more; God has “put down the mighty from their thrones”. But has he? Has God levelled those who strut? Has he crumbled those who tyrannize? In one sense it appears that God has done no such thing. Caesar Augustus was not deposed the day Jesus was born. No mighty ruler has been unseated just because the gospel was upheld. We need think only of Stalin’s cynical comment when told that the pope opposed Stalin’s mass murders. “The pope?”, snickered Stalin, “How many troops does the pope have?” Stalin strutted just because he knew that he, and no one else, ruled the former USSR.

And yet at a much deeper level the advent of Jesus Christ does mean that God has put down the mighty from their thrones. Herod wasn’t paranoid when he raged that the Bethlehem child was a threat to his throne. After all, in the coming of Jesus Christ into our midst the world’s only rightful ruler has appeared. Herod intuited correctly that the Christmas Gift would win to himself the loyalty of men and women who would never transfer that loyalty back to Herod. All political manipulators and ideologues and social engineers and “educational” programmers; in short, all who want to reshape society, even remake humankind, must know sooner or later that just because the world’s rightful ruler has appeared and is now enthroned their authority has been exposed as mere posturing and their promises as mere wind. Discerning Christians testify that those who think they can coerce or control have in fact been dethroned. They have been dethroned in that no ruler or tyrant can tell Christians who they are (Christ alone does this); no ruler or tyrant can make Christians who they are (Christ alone does this) — which is to say, no ruler or tyrant can ever make Christians what they don’t want to be. Corrie Ten Boom was as simple a Christian as one could find. (She was a fifty-year old unmarried daughter of a Dutch watchmaker who kept house for her father and sister). Yet Corrie Ten Boom defied Hitler by harbouring Jewish refugees in German-occupied Holland. She knew the terrible risk involved; she knew what the penalty would be. Whereupon she persisted all the more resolutely in her defiance. The moment she refused to admit any legitimacy to Hitler’s rule; the moment she refused to conform to it — in that moment Hitler was dethroned. Plainly the most coercive man in Europe was powerless in the face of a fifty-year old, unarmed woman. Yes, he could imprison her (and he did); but he could never tell her who she was; he could never make her who she was; and he could never make her what she didn’t want to be. Any Christian who refuses to conform anywhere to the blustering and bullying of “the mighty” just because that Christian acknowledges the rulership of Christ alone; any such Christian testifies that God continues to dethrone.

The revolution of which Mary speaks is unquestionably real. Still, the question can always be asked, “Real as it is, how far does it go? Whom does it finally affect?” It’s easy to say that it manifestly affects all the bullies we don’t like in any case and whom we are glad enough to see dethroned. But Mary’s revolution is unique, qualitatively different from all social dislodgings and historical upheavals, only if that innermost tyrant, that self-important egotist who manipulates me, is dethroned as well. I know how easy it is to look disdainfully at the person who is so obviously ruled by chemical substance or psychological habituation or shameless self-promotion when all the while I secretly scramble to hide the things that control me and brazenly try to excuse them when I can no longer hide them. I know how easy it is to speak of a new heart and mind when my reactions, in unguarded moments, suggest a heart still ruled by passions and instincts which serve my lingering sin, my self-indulgence, self-advantage, and self-promotion.

Then I can only cry out to God that I do want the revolution of which Mary speaks to reach me and revolutionize me. And so far from gloating over the fact that God has put down the swaggerers whom I am glad to see put down, I must plead with him to dethrone in me whatever has usurped the rule of Jesus Christ. For only then will the genuine “new world order” be under way.

III: — It is a singular mark of God’s kindness that the work of God’s left hand assists the work of his right; to say the same thing differently, a mark of God’s kindness that his right hand is stronger than his left, that mercy triumphs over judgement, that whatever wound he inflicts is only surgical repair for the sake of restoration to health. Having “put down”, God now “exalts”; he exalts “those of low degree”, the humble.

The humble, it must be noted, are not those who belittle themselves miserably and otherwise display abysmally weak self-image. (Crippling self-image isn’t humility; it’s illness.) Neither is “humility”, so-called, a religious technique whereby we can get ourselves “exalted”. And of course humility could never be the end-result of struggling to make ourselves humble, since the effort of making ourselves humble merely reinforces pride. Humility is self-forgetfulness, the self-forgetfulness that steals over us when we lose ourselves in something or someone who is bigger, richer, deeper.

In the revolution of which Mary speaks it is these humble people, self-forgetful people, whom God exalts. To be exalted, ultimately, is to be lifted up a child of God. When John speaks of the incarnation, its purpose and its result, he writes, “To all who received him [Jesus Christ], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” In other words, to “forget” ourselves into Christ is to become sons and daughters of God. To the believers in Thessalonica Paul writes, “You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We don’t belong to the night or to the darkness.” What it is to be exalted — lifted up, held up — as a child of God who no longer belongs to the night or to the darkness Paul makes clear in his letter to the congregation in Philippi; those people are “children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life.”

There is nothing more revolutionary than the person who shines in the midst of a perverse world. No one, believer or unbeliever, has ever doubted that the world can repopulate itself (that is, no one has ever doubted that a crooked and perverse generation can produce crooked and perverse offspring). Humanists insist that the world doesn’t have to repopulate itself (that is, left to itself the world can produce better and better citizens — this belief is clung to even though the wars of last century alone have slew one hundred million.) Christians, however, know that the world has to repopulate itself, can do nothing except repopulate itself, for the only person who is profoundly different, before God, is the person whom God’s grace has rendered self-forgetful and then rendered God’s own child. This person shines like a Westinghouse light bulb in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. This person is a beacon of hope, because this person is living testimony that at God’s hand there is something genuinely different.

IV: — Mary gathers up everything about her revolutionary manifesto in her pithy summation: “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”

Who are the rich whom God has sent away empty? Bashing the rich is fashionable nowadays. And of course those who like to bash the rich are quick to tell us who the rich are. The rich are those who have fifty dollars more than the bashers have; the rich are those who have a slightly better pension or a slightly larger home than the bashers have. Such an attitude bespeaks only envy and resentment. The truth is, those whose “riches” are a spiritual threat aren’t those who have money but rather those who are preoccupied with money — whether they have it or not.

The mediaeval Christians who spoke of the “Seven Deadly Sins” were correct in naming gluttony one of them. They were also correct in insisting that gluttony is not a matter of eating too much; gluttony is being preoccupied with food, even if one’s preoccupation with food is a preoccupation with avoiding food! (In other words the person obsessed with slenderness is as much food-preoccupied — and therefore gluttonous — as the person who can think only of what he is going to eat next.) It is no different with respect to money. Those who don’t have it can be as absorbed by it as those who are awash in it.

In those revolutions which remain forever ineffective those who have money disdain and dismiss those who lack it, while those who lack it hate and envy those who have it. While appearing to be poles apart, those who have it and those who lack it in fact are identical, since both alike are engrossed with it. Only the real revolution gets us beyond this, for only the real revolution makes our preoccupations shrivel as the holy God looms before us in his awesome, all-consuming immensity. As this One looms before us the chaff we have been gorging is simply forgotten, and we become aware of a hunger we never knew.

Our Lord Jesus has promised that all who hunger for God and his righteousness are going to be filled. All who crave the ultimate satisfaction of a relationship with God which can’t be snatched away by a paperback putdown or evaporated by the fires of harassment; all who finally hunger for this as they hunger for nothing else will be given that bread of life which profoundly satisfies yet never satiates. For this bread leaves us seeking none other yet always seeking more of him who is himself way and truth and life.

The rich who are sent empty away; they need not remain away. For as soon as they recognize their preoccupations as unworthy of someone who is created to be a child of God they too will hunger, will look to him who alone satisfies, and will be yet another fulfilment of Mary’s Christmas cry.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd    

December 2001

 

Of Eden and Advent

Luke 1:46-55
Genesis 3

I: Why is there unrelenting tension between men and women? Women feel set upon by men, victimized, violated even. In the wake of the feminist protest men feel misunderstood, maligned, even conspired against.

Why is the struggle for survival just that, a struggle? We wouldn’t mind working hard if we knew that fruitfulness followed our work as surely as night follows day. But whether we are farmers or physicians, office-workers or educators, something is always going wrong; we are never clear of frustration; we are forever having to scramble and scrabble.

Why is it that mere difference between groups of people becomes the occasion of lethal hostility? As slight a difference as the difference between brown skin and white skin and black skin shouldn’t precipitate mayhem and murder. But it does!

Why are we profoundly discontented ourselves? We thought that the new house would make us happy — and it did, for three weeks or so. The new car lifted our spirits — until our neighbour drove up with a costlier car.

Why is it that humankind never advances? To be sure, we make progress in the realm of science; that is, we progress insofar as we harness nature. But humankind itself makes no progress at all. Our foreparents sinned and suffered and slew; we sin and suffer and slay. History, we have learned, is the history of warfare. Having learned this, however, we still are powerless to do anything about it.

Why is it that everyone blames everyone else for what’s wrong? The socialist blames the stony-hearted capitalist with his exploitative greed. The capitalist blames the masses with their pleasure-loving shortsightedness and their irresponsible undependability. Everyone points the finger and says, “It’s your fault!”

Our foreparents contended with bubonic plague; then with smallpox; then with tuberculosis. Now we contend with aids and its social aftermath. Is humankind on a treadmill?

Here is my last question, a different question. Why is the gospel “good news”? Wherein is it good news? If it’s genuinely good, it has to be more than news, because the last thing we need is more words. If it is genuinely good, then it has to be a new reality.

II: — Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Today we begin looking ahead to the birth of him whom St.John describes as “the remedy for the defilement of our sins.” In order to understand our defilement — its nature, its scope, its inescapability — we must go back to the old, old story of the Fall.

Adam and Eve — “humankind” and “mother of the living” is what their names mean respectively. This story is a parable of every man and every woman.

In this profound saga God has placed Adam and Eve in a garden; Eden, it is called, the Hebrew word for “delight”. Life is blessed here. Everything they need to nourish themselves is ready-to-hand. God’s provision attests his goodness, kindness, helpfulness. There is one thing, however, which they are to avoid. They must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now “good and evil” is a Hebrew expression meaning, “everything you can think of; the sum total of human possibilities.” Imagine yourself doing anything at all; I mean anything. The sum total of these “anythings at all” is what the Hebrew mind means by “good and evil”.n Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for one reason: God loves them, God blesses them, God protects them. Among these “anythings at all” which we imagine ourselves doing; among these are a great many which do not bless: they curse us. Among these are many which do not enrich us; they impoverish us. Many do not protect us; they expose us to influences and powers which are ultimately fatal.

A physician-friend of mine dropped over to see me one evening. He asked me if I knew what the single largest threat to public health was in the world today. I didn’t. He told me: promiscuity. Then we talked about “crack”. The first wave of crack-babies has entered school. Already it is incontrovertible that these children have attention spans so short that they are not going to learn anything; they bristle with the ugliest hostility, and they are unable to form any conscience at all. Does anyone still doubt that there are some “anythings at all” which really are ruinous? The two I have mentioned are dramatic and glaring. There are other “anythings at all” which are far more subtle; discernment is needed to recognize them. Yet discern we should, since in eden, Eden, God wants only to protect us and bless us.

In our ancient story (as relevant, of course as today’s newspaper which confirms it one hundred times over) temptation is personified by a talking snake. (Don’t laugh; even fairy tales are always profound.) Temptation personified says softly, “Now about this tree whose fruit you are not to eat; did God really say you were not to eat it? Did he really say that?” In other words, temptation casts doubt on the command of God. And since God loves us, to cast doubt on the command of God is to cast aspersion on the love of God and the goodness of God. At this point all of us are whispering to ourselves, “God didn’t say it; or if he did, he had no business saying it; he must be a spoilsport; he is certainly arbitrary.” First we doubt the goodness of God’s command; then we deny that violating it will turn blessing into curse.

In our old story the woman replies to the serpent, “God says that we aren’t to eat of this tree; furthermore, he said we aren’t even to touch it.” She is lying! She exaggerates. As soon as she exaggerates she lies! God never said they weren’t to touch it. She is making this up herself. First, doubt of the goodness of the command of God; second, denial that violating it (violating God himself) turns blessing into curse; third, inventing a law of life for ourselves. We make ourselves lawgivers; we decide by what code we should live. The living voice of the living God isn’t heard at all now, because we are telling ourselves what we think renders life blessed.

The serpent has all of us on the slippery slopes now. The serpent says, “I’m aware that God said you would die; that is, be estranged from God himself, with horrible consequences — I’m aware that God said you would die if you extended your lives into those “anythings at all” which he says are ruinous. But what does he know? You won’t die! Just the opposite! You will be exalted. Your consciousness will be altered. Your mood will be elevated. Life will be beautiful. You will be freed up as never before. Your self-awareness will be expanded until you feel you are the centre of the universe. Your self-confidence will be inflated until you feel there is nothing you can’t succeed at. You will have a perspective on life that you have never had before — the same perspective as that of God himself.”

Adam and Eve eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “Yada”, the Hebrew verb to know, doesn’t have the force of “to acquire information”. We modern folk assume that to know something is to have information about that thing. To know automobiles is to have information about horsepower and wheel bases. But for our Hebrew foreparents to know always has the force of personal acquaintance with a reality. To know sorrow is to be personally acquainted with grief. To know pain is to be in pain. To know God is to be personally acquainted with God himself. Not to know God is to thrust off God himself; to repudiate him and spurn his goodness and his protection and his blessing. Not to know God, therefore, is to know ‘good and evil’. It is to have personal acquaintance, intimate acquaintance with that reality which impoverishes life, curses it, and ultimately destroys it.

AND THIS IS WHERE WE ALL LIVE! We are — every one of us — profoundly alienated from God, hauntingly alienated, fatally alienated.

III: — And then the question which God puts to Adam, to everyone: “Where are you?” Well, where are you? Where am I? Speaking for all of us Adam says to God, “I’m hiding from you.” How silly! As if anyone could hide from God! Adam is now as ridiculous as the four year old playing hide ‘n’ seek who thinks that because she regards herself hidden away no one else can see her or find her.

To be a fallen human being (which all of us are) is to flee God, flee into hiding, ridiculously thinking that we can hide from God. Our situation fails to be humorous simply because it is tragic. After all, life is not a game. We have said to God, “We don’t want you.” And God has said to us, “You don’t have to have me. But then neither do you have to have my goodness, my protection, my blessing. To do without me — your preference! — is to be stuck with the consequences of doing without me.”

There is something we must understand clearly. To thrust away the only righteous ruler of the earth is to be stuck with manifold unrighteousness and its spinoffs. To cast aspersion on the goodness of God is to wade around in wickedness. To disdain God’s protection is to be defenceless against exploitative evil. To assume that God’s wisdom can be improved upon is to be poisoned with the unwisdom of folly. In a word, to forfeit blessing is to be stuck with curse. AND THIS IS WHERE WE ALL LIVE!

“But can’t we go back to Eden?”, someone asks with more than a hint of desperation. Many attempts are made. All utopias are an attempt at recovering Eden. All such attempts are going to fail. Marxism was such an attempt. Its failure is writ large. Every pronouncement that men and women are only the product of their environment reflects another attempt. Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” — that primitive peoples were somehow intrinsically virtuous and were corrupted only by civilization — another attempt. Anyone who disagrees with Jeremiah — “The heart of many is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt” — anyone who thinks that Jeremiah exaggerates assumes that Eden can be recovered. In our ancient story an angel with a flaming sword bars the way to the tree of life in the garden. We can’t go back and seize the tree of life ourselves and undo the deadly curse we have brought down on ourselves. We cannot resurrect ourselves. We cannot restore ourselves. The flaming sword which turns every which way in the hand of the angel fends off any and all who are so naive and foolish as to think that they or their scheme can undo the Fall and its consequences. Eden cannot be recovered. Looking back is pointless just because going back is impossible.

IV: — Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent is the season of longing, of waiting, of expectancy. What are we longing for? We long for Eden. Not everyone uses this vocabulary. Most people long for they know not what. In truth, nonetheless, they long for Eden. What are they waiting for? They are waiting for someone who can undo Eden’s curse. Why the expectancy? Because deep down they want to be delivered from the dis-ease which keeps gnawing at them. They are mature enough to realize that the grab-bag of grown-up trinkets and toys does nothing to the halt the dis-ease which haunts them. But since there is no return to Eden the entire world must be doomed to unending frustration.

Not so! Advent reminds us that we are not to look back, but ahead. In Advent we stand on tiptoe anticipating the very blessing which we cannot give ourselves. In Advent we await Christmas as eagerly as the youngster awaits opening the first gift. THE gift of Christmas for us all, of course, is that new addition to the human family which is more than an addition; the gift is he himself who is both humanity renewed and lord of the renewed humanity.

Advent recalls another woman speaking. Not Eve rationalizing her capitulation to temptation; this time it’s Mary exulting in her service to the world. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour… henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” Generations to come will call her blessed, for in her child what we have lost and cannot recover ourselves God has given us just because in his mercy he will suffer anything himself to save us from our self-inflicted misery.

Adam and Eve succumbed to the blandishments of the tempter. But the Christmas child, grown up, will resist the tempter in the wilderness, resist throughout his ministry, resist again in another garden (Gethsemane, this time), resist finally on the cross when mockers tell him he might as well unhook himself since he is not doing any good in any case.

In the garden of Eden we were barred from storming the tree of life in an effort to save ourselves. We are not allowed to arrogate to ourselves what rightly belongs to God alone. Yet by God’s mercy there is another tree. Concerning this tree no angel with flaming sword bars us access. Instead access is guaranteed us and the invitation is sounded continuously: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” What hangs from this tree we are urged to taste and so to see for ourselves that God is good indeed.

The apostles discerned that in Jesus Christ we were given not only that saviour whom we need individually. With him we are introduced to a new world. In other words, our Lord brings a renewed creation with him. All who cling to him in faith find their renewed life unfolding in a new world, a new environment.

For this reason Paul says that in Christ there is neither male nor female. He doesn’t mean that gender-distinction is eliminated in a unisex muddle. He means that gender-distinction is preserved and enriched just because gender-hostility is overcome. In Christ there is neither Jew nor gentile. He doesn’t mean that the distinction is eliminated. (Paul was always aware that the gentile world never lets Jews forget that they are Jews; he was also aware that God requires Jews not to forget that they are Jews. He insists that in Christ (and in Christ alone is what he means) the deepest-grained hostility anywhere in the world — the hostility between Jew and non-Jew — is overcome. And if this hostility is overcome in Christ, any hostility is as well. What other instances of renewed life in a renewed world can you share with the rest of us?

A few minutes ago we saw that to do without God, to want to do without God, is to do without God’s blessing and therefore live under curse. But in the One who is God incarnate there is blessing only. How could there be anything else? And therefore in his company that disease which can neither be named nor denied is eclipsed by gratitude for him whose name we now know, whose name, Yehoshuah, means “God saves”, and whom we have no wish to deny.

In Christ our dust-to dust exile is overarched by the promise of resurrection: our destiny is not death, decomposition of body and dissolution of personhood. Our destiny is eternal life at God’s own hand.

The last question I left with you in introduction of the sermon was, “Why is the gospel good news?” It’s good news not in the sense that it is up-to-the-minute information (like Barbara Frum’s broadcast.) It is good news just because it announces a new reality so winsome as to breathe its own invitation.

In Advent we don’t look back in nostalgia and regret; we look ahead in eagerness and confidence. For there is given to us the one whom all humankind craves, whom Christians know to be Jesus the Christ, and who caused Mary’s heart to sing, even as he will make our hearts sing for ever and ever.

F I N I S

                                                                                                       Victor Shepherd

                         

Of Itzakh, Isaac, and “The Wonders Of His (Christ’s) Love”

Luke 2:1-14
Col. 1:15-20

Many people who are musically sophisticated regard Itzakh Perlman as the world’s finest violinist. Yet his violin-playing isn’t the most noticeable feature about him. Anyone who has seen him winces when he walks, if it can be called “walking.” Perlman had polio as a child and ever since has barely been able to shuffle along, ever so slowly, each step laboured and clumsy, swinging his caliper crutches in a monumental struggle just to get onto the concert-hall platform, while an assistant carries his precious violin for him. Perlman is the only violin virtuoso who has to sit to play.

Not so long ago in Lincoln Centre, New York City, Perlman was only a few bars into a violin concerto with the N.Y. Philharmonic Orchestra when a string broke on his violin. He waved his bow to the conductor to stop. Perlman removed the broken string from his instrument and signalled the conductor to begin again. Then Perlman played the entire concerto on the three remaining strings of his violin. Thunderous applause greeted him at concerto’s end. When it had finally died away Perlman said to the hushed audience, “Sometimes in life we have to do our best with what’s left.” Then he handed his defective violin to his assistant, retrieved his caliper crutches, and shuffled haltingly off the platform, once more doing his best with what was left.

Many people who appear — and are — extraordinarily gifted nevertheless have had to do their best with what was left. One such person was Isaac Watts, known throughout Christendom as “the father of the English hymn.” He wrote hundreds of hymns, many of which will never be forgotten. What few people know is that Watts was deranged frequently, and deranged for extended periods of his life. There were protracted periods when he wrote nothing, did nothing (apart from survive in the care of a kind family that protected him) as he waited until sanity returned. There were periods in his life when it would have been just as accurate to speak of episodic sanity as of episodic derangement. What did Watts write when sanity caught up to him and his suffering abated? “Come, let us join our cheerful songs with angels ’round the throne; ten thousand thousand are their tongues but all their joys are one.” Or again, “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun doth his successive journeys run.” As ill as he was for so much of his troubled life, Watts could still write from his heart, “My God, how endless is thy love!” Perhaps he is best known for “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come.” Certainly we’ve all sung his splendid Christmas carol, “Joy to the World!” It’s plain that Watts’s literary output was a matter of doing his best with what was left, what was left of his sanity. He always did his best.

God does his best, too, with what’s left. Yet there’s a difference here. When God does his best with what’s left of a fallen world, does his best with a disfigured creation, does his best with an evil-riddled cosmos; when God does his best with this he doesn’t merely extract bravely whatever good remains in it. Rather, he restores it. When God does his best with what’s left of a warped world, he recreates that world.

Isaac Watts knew this so very well. He articulated it for us in his Christmas carol, “Joy to the World.”

 

I: — “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground”, cries Watts. Plainly it’s a reference to Genesis 3, the old, old story of the world’s fall. What has happened? God has never been indifferent to humankind’s root defiance of him and root disobedience to him and root ingratitude; he’s never been indifferent to the primordial posture we assume before him, a posture wherein our “know-it-all” smirk casts aspersions on his goodness, on the goodness of his promise to us and his claim upon us. His claim upon us is rooted in his promise to us; his promise to us is rooted in his own heart. Heart and promise and claim are one in wanting only to bless us. We, however, assume he’s an arbitrary spoilsport out to make us miserable. We doubt him, defy him, disdain him, disobey him.

Contrary to what the person-in-the-street thinks, God always gives us what we want. No longer pressing himself upon us, he takes a step back from us. (This is what we want: a little more distance between him and us.) As he takes a step back from us, the crown of creation, he thereby takes a step back from every aspect of the creation beneath its crown. A vacuum opens up between him and the creation. Into the vacuum there pours all manner of evil. Now the creation is marred and disfigured and warped. “Thorns and thistles” infest the ground, as the old, old story in Genesis tells us. In a primitive agricultural society, thorns and thistles infesting the ground bespeak frustration; so much frustration, in fact, that only ceaseless labour and ingenuity stave off utter futility. (Everyone with even a backyard vegetable garden knows that only ceaseless labour and ingenuity stave off the frustration of having the vegetable-enterprise end in utter futility.)

As for “sins and sorrows”, they are as endemic in a fallen world as thorns and thistles. Jesus says, without argument or proof, “Whoever sins is a slave to sin.” Foregoing argument or proof, he assumes that anyone who disagrees with him is incorrigibly stupid. “Whoever sins is a slave to sin.” Since we all sin, we are all in bondage. Sorrows? “Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows”, says the psalmist. The Hebrew verb can as readily mean “run after” as “choose.” “Those who run after another deity multiply their sorrows.” The fall of humankind means that we do run after other gods; and just as surely do we multiply our sorrows.

Yet Watts can write his carol, “Joy to the World!”, because he knows that the coming of Jesus Christ means that the curse upon the world is overturned; it’s reversed. The coming of Jesus Christ means that the blessings of Christ are as far-reaching (and known to be as far-reaching) as the curse has been. While our Lord’s pronouncement is unarguable, “Whoever sins is a slave to sin”, equally unarguable is his declaration, “If the Son makes you free, you are free indeed.” While those who run after other gods unquestionably multiply their sorrows, those who join our Lord on that Way which he is, join him in running the race of life, always looking unto him who has pioneered the way for us — these people unquestionably multiply their joys. As for frustration, frustration so intense as to border on futility; in so far as we do the work that he has given us to do, kingdom-work, our work will never prove futile and we ourselves shall never go unrewarded.

“No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.”

 

II: — Watts has even more to say about the joy that has come to the world in the coming of Jesus Christ. “He rules the earth with truth and grace.” The same Lord who restores the world now rules it, and rules it with truth and grace.

Christ’s rulership is remarkable. After all, the rulers we are acquainted with do rule, to be sure, but they don’t rule with truth. They rule with something other than truth. They rule with disinformation. (Think of the Gulf of Tonkin incident with the American warship. The U.S. government arranged this bit of disinformation in order to bring the U.S.A. into the Viet Nam war.) Or they rule with duplicity. (Think of Toronto Councillor Howard Moscoe. When asked, two weeks ago, why charity casinos would be installed in North York after the citizens of North York had voted in a referendum against charity casinos, Moscoe unashamedly replied, “The referendum meant nothing.”) Or they rule with propaganda. (Think of the federal government’s promise a few years ago never to implement wage and price controls. Within ninety days of being re-elected it introduced the controls!) Or they rule with sheer, simple, self-interest and self-enrichment. (Illustrations here are superfluous.) Rulers rule, to be sure, but they don’t rule with truth.

Neither do they rule with grace. Our Lord, however, does. He rules with grace. Grace, throughout scripture, is God’s faithfulness to his own promise ever to be our God. Grace is his undeflectible resolve never to quit on us in anger or abandon us in disgust or dismiss us in impatience. Grace is God’s unalterable determination to remain true to himself in his promise to us regardless of our unfaithfulness in our promise to him. Since grace collides with our sin, then when grace meets our sin grace takes the form of mercy. And since mercy, so far from being mere benign sentiment, is effectual in the face of our sin, mercy issues in salvation, shalom, peace. For this reason the threefold “grace, mercy and peace” is found over and over in scripture. (Once again, in its collision with sin grace takes the form of mercy, and mercy triumphs so as to effect our peace with God, our salvation.)

Unlike the rulers we read about every day, our Lord “rules with truth and grace.”

 

III: — Several minutes ago I spoke of our need to “do our best with what’s left.” Perlman and Watts have done so. But in doing their best with what was left, were they merely doing what they could to prevent a disaster from sinking all the way down to total disaster, unrelieved disaster? At the end of the day are you and I realistically doing no more than this? In doing our best with what’s left, are we merely doing what we can to prevent a calamity from sinking all the way down to complete calamity?

No! In view of the fact that when God does his best with what’s left (a wounded, warped creation) he restores that creation wholly; in view of this our doing our best with what’s left is much more than merely salvaging a catastrophe: it’s an anticipation of the day when God’s perfect restoration is going to revealed; it’s a preview of the day when God’s restoration is going to be rendered as undeniable as it is unmistakable. Watts did what he did not because there was nothing else to do besides fall into total despair; Watts did what he did, rather, because he foresaw the day when he, like the deranged man in the gospel-stories, will be found seated, clothed and in his right mind. Perlman did what he did in anticipation of the day when he, like so many whom Jesus touched, will be found no longer lame but now leaping and cavorting, unhindered and uninhibited in every aspect of life. When you and I “do our best with what’s left” we aren’t merely trying to put a happy face on a monumental misfortune; we are anticipating the day, says Watts himself, when our Lord “makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.”

 

IV: — All of this being the case, what are we to do at this moment? Watts knew what we are to do: “Let every heart prepare him room.” We are to receive, or receive afresh, him whose blessings flow far as the curse is found. We are to receive, or receive afresh, the one who rules with truth and grace now and who is going to make the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.

We are to receive our Lord. We are going to do so as in faith we receive bread and wine, the vehicle of his self-giving to us now, as surely as body and blood were the vehicle of his self-giving for us then.

“Let every heart prepare him room.”

                                                                       Victor Shepherd     

December 1997

 

Good News, Great Joy, A Saviour who is Christ the Lord

Luke 2:10-11

The world is always looking both for good news and for great joy.  The world also knows that there won’t be great joy unless there’s first good news. Everyone wants good news. Everyone is aware that newscasts are 90% bad news.       “All we ever hear on TV or radio is bad news” people complain.  “Why can’t we hear good news for a change?”

The answer isn’t hard to find.  We live in a fallen world. The “prince” of this world, says Jesus (not king, to be sure, but certainly prince) is characteristically a liar and a killer.  Omnipresent evil means that lethal falsification riddles everything. Sophistic savagery is always ready-to-hand. It’s no wonder that newscasts announce troubles of every sort in every place.  Nevertheless, we long to hear good news.

But we don’t want “good news” that’s make-believe. We want good news that’s good because true. There can be such good news only if in the midst of evil and evil-quickened conflict there is the profounder reality of God’s definitive incursion into human affairs. There can be good news only if he who is prince of this world is bested by the one who is king.

Christmas is this good news. Christmas isn’t wishful thinking or sentimental froth or saccharine make-believe.       Christmas is that good news which is true, real, profound; good news good enough to engender great joy – and all of this just because there has been born to us a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.

 

“Christ” the Lord? What does “Christ” mean? The child whose coming among us we celebrate in Advent isn’t named Jesus Christ in the way that I am Victor Shepherd. “Christ” isn’t his family name. It’s a description. It means “anointed”. Our Lord is the anointed one, anointed by his Father for our blessing.

Throughout Israel ’s history three figures were anointed: priests, prophets, kings.  When we are told that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, we know that he gathers up in himself what priests and prophets and kings embodied, as well as that to which they pointed as they too looked for the coming one.

Since we have good news and great joy only because of the anointed one, Christ, we must probe what it means to say that in him priests and prophets and kings find their fulfilment.

 

I: — Let’s begin with the priests.  Priests ministered in the temple, where sacrifices were offered daily. The sacrifices were the core of worship inasmuch as sincere worshippers knew themselves to be sinners. They knew that defiled sinners had no right to approach the holy God.  They knew that defiled sinners couldn’t survive approaching the holy God. The temple sacrifices were the God-appointed means whereby people who could claim nothing and merited nothing except God’s judgement could nonetheless find a Father who cherished them and a Forgiver who pardoned them – and all of this without in any way compromising his holiness or denying their unrighteousness. The sacrifices in the temple gave people access to God precisely where they knew their sin otherwise barred them from him.

Today, of course, we are fastidious people.  We are careful to use deodorant, perfume, shaving lotion, cologne, air-wick. Today we should find the temple scene repulsive. Think of the sounds that animals make when they know their end is upon them; the smells they make. Think of the priest gathering a basinful of blood and throwing it over the steps surrounding the altar.

Alas, I fear we are too fastidious. We are shallow in our self-understanding: either we don’t think ourselves to be sinners at all or we think our sinnership to be trivial.  We are cavalier in our approach to God: of course he’s going to forgive us, since that’s the business he’s in – said Voltaire on our behalf.

Ancient people knew better.  They knew that sin is lethal. (Exactly what sin kills you and I could list for the next six months.)  They knew that sin breaks God’s heart, provokes God’s anger, and arouses God’s disgust. And because it does all this, the forgiving of sin is never cheap. Forgiveness is always and everywhere costly.

Costly for whom?   The animal brought to the temple was the best the worshipper owned.  It cost a great deal to give up.  And because it was a male animal, invaluable for purposes of breeding and therefore lucrative for the owner as well, when that animal was offered up to God the worshipper knew she had renounced her ticket to superiority of all kinds and was casting herself and her entire future on God.

What’s more, as the priest sacrificed the animal in the temple the worshipper placed her hand on it as a sign of her personal identification with the life offered up on her behalf.  Sobered now at what her reconciliation to God cost, she surrendered herself anew to him in gratitude and adoration.

The day came when the woolly lamb in the temple was no longer the sacrifice. The day came when the curly-haired baby in the manger grew up and offered himself as the Lamb of God.  Plainly he is the sacrifice by which a rebellious world is reconciled to God.  Yet because he has offered himself, he is also the priest who offers up the sacrifice. As priest he’s the anointed one.
Because he’s the anointed one offering himself for our sakes, you and I all humankind have access to God.  We have an access to God we don’t deserve yet which God has fashioned for us in his mercy, thanks to his Son.  While our sin breaks God’s heart and provokes his anger and arouses his disgust, the sacrifice our “great high priest” offers up for us gathers up God’s heartbreak and anger and disgust and defuses it all, thereby allowing any and all who want to go home to go home.

“Oh, Shepherd”, someone objects; “Why do you get into something this heavy at Christmas?   Why don’t you say something light at Christmas and save the ‘heavy’ for another day?” As a matter of fact there are several reasons why the Advent sermons should be substantial.

[1] There are usually people in church at this season who won’t hear the gospel announced for months, and they should hear something besides froth.

[2] We always administer Holy Communion in Advent.  The service of Holy Communion graphically depicts our Lord’s sacrifice. Surely no one is going to tell me that the truth of the cross may be seen in the Lord’s Supper at Christmas but it mustn’t be heard in the sermon at Christmas.

[3] We sing carols at Christmas, and the best hymn on our Lord’s sacrifice happens to be a Christmas carol, “Hark!       The Herald Angels Sing”. Listen to the words:

Hark!   The herald angels sing ‘Glory to the newborn king’.

Peace on earth, and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled.

Or listen to another stanza:

Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more should die;

Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth.

The baby in the manger was born precisely in order that he might become the offering on the cross. He is the lamb of God, given us by the Father for the reconciliation of any and all who place their hand on the anointed one himself.       Jesus our Lord is sacrifice and priest together.

 

II: — Not only were priests presiding at sacrifices anointed; prophets were too.  Prophets were those who spoke for God and thereby acquainted their hearers with God. Prophets teach; as they teach about God, God himself takes over their teaching, as it were; God himself surges over hearers so that hearers are overtaken, then overwhelmed, and finally constrained to confess that God-in-person has addressed them.

The prophets were aware of much that modernity has forgotten. For one, the prophets knew that no amount of gazing inside ourselves will ever inform us of the truth of God or acquaint us with the person of God. They knew that every last human being is a bundle of contradictions.  Looking inside ourselves, therefore, will only inform us of a bundle of contradictions. Two, the prophets were aware that no amount of gazing outside ourselves will ever inform us of the truth of God or acquaint us with the person of God.  Looking outside ourselves informs us of what’s “out there”: suffering, grief, propaganda, treachery, waste, and war.

To be sure, the prophets never denied that self-contradicted people living in a convoluted world could nevertheless do much that is marvellous; they would readily have admitted that we can do, and do superbly well, philosophy, engineering, science, music, poetry, mathematics. The prophets denied, however, that we can inform ourselves of the truth of God or acquaint ourselves with the person of God.  For this to occur something else is needed; specifically, what’s needed is someone who has faced God, has heard him, and now turns to face us to speak for God.

One thing above all else makes the Hebrew prophets “tick”: they have heard God speak. Having heard God speak, they find themselves constrained to speak on his behalf. All the Hebrew prophets are aware that they have been admitted to the Besoth Yahweh, the council of God. They’ve been admitted to the throne-room of the heavenly court.  They aren’t presumptuous, engaging God in casual chit-chat.  In fact once admitted to the throne-room, they don’t speak to God at all. They describe it all as overhearing; they overhear God talking to himself, as it were. They listen in, reverently, attentively, while God thinks out loud.  Suddenly God takes notice of the prophets and speaks to them directly. At this moment the truth of God is stamped upon the prophet; the judgement of God is seared upon the prophet; the mercy of God and faithfulness of God and patience of God are imprinted upon the prophet indelibly.

At this point the prophet turns around from facing God in the throne-room and faces the people in the community.  “The Word of God is fire in my mouth”, Jeremiah cries to his people; “I have to let this word out or my mouth will ignite.”  Amos says laconically, “God has spoken.  Who can but prophesy?”

And so the prophet speaks.  He has stood in the council of God.  For this reason he can speak authentically of God. As the prophet speaks on God’s behalf, God himself empowers the prophet’s word and renders the prophet’s word a vehicle of God’s self-giving and self-communication. At this point hearers become aware that they aren’t hearing one man’s religious opinion; they aren’t even merely hearing someone speaking on behalf of God. At this point they are hearing God himself.

Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one.  He stands in the tradition of the prophets.  He speaks for God. Yet as the Incarnate one he speaks for God in a way that no Hebrew prophet could; he speaks conclusively for God just because he is God, Emman-u-el, God-with-us.

A prophet to be sure, yet more than a prophet, Jesus Christ speaks for God as God. Then he is the one we must hear and heed and cling to if we are to know the truth of God and remain fused to the person of God for ever and ever.

III: — Kings were anointed too.  Kings were anointed to rule. People today don’t like the sound of “rule”.  It sounds coercive, tyrannical, dictatorial, heavy-handed.  It sounds as if the king has colossal clout while subjects can only cower. Nobody wants to live under such an arrangement.

In Israel things were different. In Israel the first responsibility of the king wasn’t to boss (let alone tyrannize); the first responsibility of the king was to protect the most vulnerable of the people of God. Vulnerable people might be vulnerable on account of monetary poverty or social oppression or raging disease or military attack from outside the community; they might also be vulnerable on account of treachery from inside the community. Regardless of the source or nature or occasion of the vulnerability, the king’s first responsibility was always to protect those most at risk.

Some kings in Israel met their major responsibility.  Most didn’t. Little-by-little it appeared that the only king who would honour this mandate consistently would be the king who was also shepherd, a shepherd-king.  David was the shepherd-king in Israel ’s history. David defended the marginalized and vindicated the exploited and protected those at risk for any reason; in addition, in the course of doing all of this David brought glory to his people. At least David did this more consistently than anyone else.  But even David proved treacherous.

Little-by-little Israel came to see that God’s people were going to be protected, vindicated, and exalted conclusively only if a shepherd-king appeared who acted with the power of God himself. Then what was needed most was a shepherd-king – human, to be sure – who was also God Incarnate. And this is precisely what we were given at Christmas.

We are the people of God.  We need to be safeguarded. Since the world is a battleground of all sorts of conflicts, all of which are at bottom manifestations of the primal conflict, spiritual conflict, we are always at risk of becoming a casualty.

In military engagements casualties include the wounded, the missing and the slain. In the assorted struggles in which we find ourselves and must find ourselves we are going to be wounded from time-to-time.  But missing? How could any of God’s people be missing, unlocatable, when God-Incarnate is their shepherd-king? And slain?       Wounded as we are from time-to-time, God’s own people can never be wounded fatally. He who is our king, anointed such from eternity, is also resurrection and life.  Before God we can’t be slain and we can’t go missing.

We make far too little of this truth, for undeniably events overtake us where we feel we’ve gone missing, and gone missing just because no one seems to miss us. And events overtake us where we feel ourselves slain, unable to rise, unable to go on. But in fact we aren’t slain and we can go on. Our shepherd-king is resurrection and life.

When I was a young man and diligently reading the psalms because I’d been told I should read them, I used to grow weary of reading about the psalmist’s enemies.  In every third psalm we heard again the trouble his enemies were causing him and how treacherously they had bushwhacked him and how close they had come to vanquishing him. I began to think the psalmist paranoid.  But I see now that he wasn’t paranoid.  He was simply aware that nobody has life domesticated; nobody has life tamed; nobody has life under control, despite the fact that we’re all control-freaks. We can find ourselves clobbered on any day, from any quarter, for any reason (or no reason.) Life remains fragile.

Not so long ago I was asked to deliver a guest-lecture at the University of Toronto on John Calvin, progenitor of all English-speaking evangelicals.  When I had concluded, the questions came quickly.  The ultra-feminists in the audience tried to paint Calvin as anti-woman. I fended that off.  The Marxists tried to paint him as uncritical capitalist.  I fended that off. On and on it went.  Plainly the special interest groups were looking for some way to dismiss him.  Finally someone asked, “What is the lens through which Calvin views life?   Since all of us have a psycho-social determinant, what’s his?”

“Calvin was a refugee”, I replied; “and like all refugees Calvin knew that life is precarious, earthly rulers can’t be trusted, betrayal is always at hand; above all, Calvin knew that like refugees we are haunted by an outer and inner homelessness that will be overcome only in the eschaton.” The room fell silent. I understood why.  Everyone in the room identified with what I had just said about Calvin the refugee.

Because we are finite and fragile, we are physically vulnerable.  Because we are wounded, we are emotionally frayed.  Because we are sinners, we are spiritually “in a far country” and need to get home.

Who will get us home?   Who will safeguard us on our way home?   Who will ensure that our innermost core, our identity, remains intact? Only he who is shepherd-king, and effectual shepherd-king just because he is God-with-us, Emmanu-el, shepherd-king-Incarnate.

 

“Be not afraid”, we are told; “there is good news of a great joy, for to you there is born a Saviour who is Christ, the anointed one, effectual priest and prophet and king.” This one is Lord now, and ever will be.

 

                                                                                                         Victor Shepherd

                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Advent 2005

 

Son of God, Son of Mary, Son of David

Luke 2:19

Do you remember when you were a child and you couldn’t wait until Christmas? My sisters and I counted the days. By Christmas Eve we were beside ourselves.  On Christmas morning when our parents finally gave us permission to get up, we children were down the stairs like the Kentucky Derby field leaving the starting gate.

There is a man, an old man now, whose anticipation of Christmas is as fresh as a child’s. What excites this old man isn’t the store-bought present wrapped in shiny paper; it’s the manger-born child wrapped in diapers.  The old man’s name is Martin Luther.   His Christmas exuberance is child-like.  No one in the church catholic glories in Christmas in quite the way that Luther does.

There is good reason for this.  Luther was no armchair spectator.  He was immersed in life. Life had whirled him up into ceaseless turbulence and conflict.  He was also immersed in Jesus Christ.  And Christ was that luminosity which loomed before him and seized him and leant him righteousness and resilience; a righteousness and resilience that allowed him to resist the deadly forces which otherwise spewed destruction wherever one looked.  When Luther spoke of temptation he didn’t mean titillating notions that lingered in one’s head like a catchy tune; he meant something so visceral, so gut-wrenching that even the strongest person shook. When Luther spoke of love, he didn’t mean benign sentiment; he meant the most passionate, self-forgetful self-giving. When Luther spoke of evil, he knew first-hand a horror as grotesque as it was terrible. Many people who are daintier than they should be are put off by Luther’s earthy language. They find it shocking. Do you know what he found shocking? – people who are so naive, so superficial, so clueless that they fail to understand that the world swarms and seethes and heaves. Luther knew that the world is the venue of a cosmic conflict which surges round and about, claiming victims here and there, while from time-to-time the front of this cosmic conflict passes right through your heart and mine.  When it does, only the earthiest language is adequate.

Everyone knows what Luther said at the famous confrontation in the city of Worms , 1521. “Here I stand.  I can do no other. I cannot and will not recant. God help me.” But few people are aware that he said this not in a spirit of petulant intransigence or puffed-up arrogance. He said this in anguish – anguish for many reasons, not the least of which was this: from that moment until the day he died, twenty-five years later, there was a price on his head. Even fewer people know what his opponent, Emperor Charles V, vowed in the face of Luther’s stand: “I have decided to mobilize everything against Luther: my kingdom, my dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my soul.”   In other words, the opposition Luther would face for the rest of his life was total, relentless, and lethal.  And we find his vocabulary exaggerated and his delight in the Christmas gift childish? We should know what he knew: the world is a turbulent and treacherous place for any Christian in any era.

Creatures of modernity like you and me think we live in an ideational world. If we pass a motion at a meeting, we assume that a problem has been dealt with.  If the House of Commons passes new legislation, we assume that injustice has been rectified. We assume that to discuss a social problem dispels the problem.  We mull over different philosophies and compare them with “Christianity.” Luther didn’t speak of “Christianity;” he was possessed by the Christmas babe himself. He didn’t finesse theories of evil; he was confronted with powers of darkness so intense and so penetrating that either he looked to the One who is indeed victor or he unravelled.

I understand why Luther delighted in Christmas, why he looked forward to December 25th with a child’s tremulous longing.  Then what is it about the manger-gift that sustained the Wittenberger then and sustains us now?

 

I: — First, he who adorns the manger is the Son of God.  “Son of” in biblical parlance means “of the same nature as”. To behold the child who is Son of God is to behold the nature of God; or at least as much as can be beheld.  Luther didn’t dispute the truth that God is magnificent, mighty, (almighty, in fact); God is resplendent, glorious, incomparably so. Luther never disputed this. He also said that we never see it. The God whose majesty is indescribable is hidden from us. But Christmas celebrates not God hidden but God revealed.  And God revealed appears in the world as we are in the world: weak, vulnerable, suffering, bleeding.

The Nicene Creed says that “for us and our salvation the Son of God came down from heaven…”   Came down? Yes.  A condescension. Came down. Self-abasement.  Humility? Certainly.  Yet more than humility: humiliation.         There’s a difference.

It is wonderful that God humbled himself for our sakes; wonderful that he didn’t confine himself to his splendour but accommodated himself to us his creatures. Yet immeasurably more wonderful is it that for our sakes he knew not merely humility, but even humiliation. We read in the gospels that the detractors of Jesus hissed that our Lord was illegitimate. “Why should we heed — or even hear — a bastard like you?” they taunted contemptuously. When he died, the same people quoted the book of Deuteronomy: “Cursed is he who hangs on a tree.” “That proves it!” the head-waggers chattered knowingly, “We were right to shun him. He was cursed by God all along. What insight we had from the start!” Humiliation?   Crucifixion was a Roman penalty reserved for those deemed scum: military deserters, terrorists and rapists.  Jesus is lumped in withthatcrowd.

Then there’s the cry of dereliction, “Why have you forsaken me?” It’s the most anguish-ridden cry that Jesus ever uttered.  Yet since the Father and the Son are of the same nature, the cry of the Son’s dereliction is simultaneously the cry of the Father himself. It’s the cry of someone who has voluntarily undergone enormous wounding for the sake of those he holds dear. The cry of dereliction is really the cry of God himself over the pain of his torn heart, suffered for the sake of us whom he plainly loves more than he loves himself.

Not the hidden God (splendid, magnificent, majestic) but the revealed God (suffering, humbled, humiliated, slain;) only the revealed God can help us, said Luther. For only the revealed God has identified fully, identified himself wholly with the grief and guilt, turbulence and turpitude, conflict and slander and suffering that surround my life and yours.  Only this God is of any help to us.

Luther used to say that the most comforting words in all of scripture are the six words – what do you think the six most comforting words are? – of the preface to the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord your God.” If we really understood these six words, he said, we should be invincible.  And who is the Lord our God?   The God of manger and cross who will go to any length to seize, save and secure those whom he has named his own.

 

II: — Yet there is more to the manger-gift. Not only is he Son of God, he is also son of Mary.  Jesus isn’t apparently human or seemingly human but actually human, fully human. “Tempted at all points as we are”, is the way the NT speaks of him.   The one Greek word, PEIRAZEIN, means tempted, tested and tried all at once.  Tempted, tested and tried like us but with this difference: he was never deflected in his human obedience, trust and love for his Father. He didn’t capitulate in the face of either the tempter’s threats or the tempter’s seductions.

Let’s talk about temptation for a minute.  We modern types always assume that temptation is primarily temptation to do something wrong, temptation to commit a misdemeanour, temptation to contradict a code. But in scripture temptation is primarily temptation to deny the goodness of God. First we deny the goodness of God; next we deny the goodness of God’s claim upon our obedience (his claim upon our obedience, is of course our blessing;) finally we spurn the claim and disobey him – as we violate him and thereby violate ourselves. It’s not that we have done something wrong; rather, we have cast aspersion on the goodness of God and the goodness of his claim; the bottom line is that we have violated our relationship with God even as we have violated our very own person.         It’s no wonder the Anglican Prayer Book reminds us, “And there is no health in us.”

He who is the son of Mary has been given to us as the one human being who doesn’t succumb to temptation; the one human being whose obedience to his Father is uncompromised, whose trust in his Father is undeflected, whose love for his Father is unrivalled by any other attachment. Then by faith I must cling to the Son of Mary, because my obedience is compromised a dozen times per day; my trust is fitful, and my love for God is forever being distracted by lesser attachments. The human response to God that I should make and even want to make has been corrupted, since I am a creature of the Fall.

Then of myself I can never render God the obedience and trust and love which befit the child of God. Nevertheless, there is provision for me: I can identify myself with the one whose human relationship to his Father is everything that mine isn’t.  In faith I can cling gratefully to the son of Mary.

In the last few years family-therapists have come to appreciate the damage sustained by adults who came from what are called “shame-bound families.” We’re speaking now of the adult whose childhood unfolded in a family where the all-consuming preoccupation was the deep, dark family-secret that had to be kept secret. If the secret were told, public shame would spill over the family.  Therefore any number of lies, evasions, and smokescreens were invented to cover up whoever it was in the family, whatever it was in the family, that threatened the family’s artificial reputation.   The adult child of the shame-bound family now finds herself guilt-ridden, fearful, inhibited.

To belong to the family of God is to be relieved of being shame-bound. In the Son of God God has identified himself with me completely; all that is or might be shameful about me God has taken on and absorbed himself. In the Son of Mary, on the other hand, I have identified myself with the man Jesus.  Whatever is genuinely shameful about me is taken up into the righteous humanness of Jesus himself. In his humanness he is the one with whom the Father is well-pleased.  In faith, then, I cling to him, and in him my shame is bleached and blotted out.

 

III: —  Lastly, the manger-gift is also the son of David.  When people hailed Jesus as the son of David they were recognizing him as the Messiah. David had been Israel ’s greatest king, despite his undeniable feet of clay.  David had valiantly tried to redress the injustices that pock-marked the nation. David was a harbinger, a precursor of the day when the just judge of the earth would no longer be defied and a topsy-turvy world would finally be righted.

Make no mistake. The world is topsy-turvy. A man who fails to hit a baseball seven times out of ten  is guaranteed ten million dollars per year for the next five years.  Meanwhile homemakers are selling daffodils on street corners because cancer patients needing treatment have been told that there’s a six-month waiting list for the equipment.  The public education budget increases every year – and so does the incidence of illiteracy. Please note: concerning illiteracy Canada has surpassed both the United States and Italy . Canada is now, per capita, the most illiterate nation of the west – and all of this despite unprecedented billions spent on public education.

Anyone who struggles, like King David of old, to redress the injustices of the world learns quickly how frustrating, absurd and heartbreaking the struggle can be. A friend of mine who administers a facility for battered women was invited to duplicate the facility in another municipality, simply because of that municipality’s need. (In other words, wife-beating shows no signs of going out of style.)   The institution she represents was offered free land by a developer.  She spoke to municipal civil servants as well as to elected representatives.  They promised to support her.  When a public discussion was called concerning the project, however, both municipal staff and elected representatives sniffed the political wind-direction and turned on her.  They didn’t merely withdraw the support they had promised; they faked surprise, as though they were hearing her for the first time, and then they denounced her, as though what she proposed (a facility for battered women) were antisocial and irresponsible and even patently ridiculous. (You see, a facility for battered women attracts creepy males as surely as a garbage dump attracts rats – so she was told.)   I saw my friend two days after the event.  She was still punch-drunk. She was shocked at the betrayal, the savagery, the greasy opportunism of it all. Luther wasn’t shocked at this. He was shocked at ignorant, fastidious people found his language shocking when he tried to address it.

The whole world cries out for the son of David, however inarticulately or unknowingly, just because the world cannot correct itself. As a matter of fact, the world is not getting better and better, however slowly.  Then is hopelessness the only sensible attitude to have?   Not for a minute. The manger-gift is the son of David, the Messiah promised of old, the royal ruler who will right the capsized world on that Day when he fashions a world in which righteousness dwells.

Then you and I must never capitulate to hopelessness.  Neither do we disillusion ourselves with naiveness.         Instead we faithfully, patiently, do whatever we can in anticipation of that Day when justice is done. And if what we do in anticipating this Day plunges us into even greater conflict for now, then our friend Luther will smile at us and say, “I could have told you that; I always knew that the appearance of Jesus Christ provokes conflict.”   And at such a time we shall have to find our comfort and cheer in that manger-gift, the child of Bethlehem , who made Luther’s eyes light up like a child’s on Christmas morning.

He who has been given to us is the Son of God, the son of Mary, and the son of David.

As the Son of God he is God humbling himself, even humiliating himself in seeking to save us.

As the son of Mary he renders the Father the proper human response that we should make but can’t, and therefore we must cling to him in faith.

As the son of David he is the long-promised Messiah who guarantees us a righted world in which righteousness will one day be seen to dwell.

 

                                                                         The Reverend Dr Victor Shepherd            

Advent II    7th December 2008             
Church of St Bride, Anglican, Mississauga