2^nd Corinthians 5:16-21

Psalm 133    Ephesians 2:11-16     John 10:7-17

 

I: — You don’t have to teach a child to be mean or spiteful. You don’t have to teach a child to be cruel or to find fiendish pleasure in being cruel. You don’t have to teach a child to torment someone who dresses unusually or speaks with a slightly different accent. Only the silliest romantics (never in short supply despite their naiveness) think that children are innocent, pure, untainted. In a fallen world of fallen human beings antagonistic behaviour comes naturally.

But we needn’t single out children. Adults are no better. To be sure, we adults try to disguise what children display openly. This only proves that we adults are cruel and cagey at the same time. Still, what bubbles up undisguised and unsuppressed in children effervesces just as relentlessly in adults.

All of this adds up to a truth that Christians never doubt; namely, in a fallen world hostility is found at all times and in all places, together with the estrangement that such hostility produces and perpetuates.

The fact of prejudice is surely irrefutable confirmation of all this. Prejudice doesn’t have to be taught. And by definition there’s no reason for our prejudice. By definition prejudice is an irrational fear of specific kinds of people or classes or nations or races or social groups. Prejudice, of course, is all the proof we need that humankind’s multi-fronted alienation is rooted in an irrationality that contradicts the rationality we all like to think we have in spades. From a purely rational standpoint all such alienation is groundless. To say it’s groundless rationally is simply to say it’s unreasonable, incomprehensible. Still, to say it’s groundless rationally isn’t to say it’s groundless absolutely. For in fact prejudice, alienation for which no adequate cause can be found, is grounded in our root condition as sinners.

Several weeks ago, in our investigation of crucial words in the Christian vocabulary, we probed the meaning of the word “sin.” We noted then that one of the consequences of sin is alienation or estrangement. We are alienated from God, alienated from our true self, alienated from each other.

I admit, however, that not all human alienation appears to be rooted in the incomprehensible mystery of sin. Some alienation appears to be rooted in that sin which is entirely understandable. Why am I alienated from my cousin? Because he envies my new home. Why are you alienated from your boss? Because he demoted you simply in order to promote his son. The truth is, people have treated us shabbily. They have lied to us, or betrayed us, or exploited us, or humiliated us. In this situation the gulf that has opened up between them and us, the alienation that won’t go away, has nothing to do with prejudice. It has everything to do with events that are as undeniable as they are unforgettable.

Where we (or others) are exploited or cheated or slandered we are angry, and rightfully angry. Jesus was angry repeatedly (every day of his public ministry, it would seem according to the gospels.) He was angry when he saw defenceless people exploited. He was angry when he saw sincere people mislead by religious leaders. He was angry when he saw vulnerable people “fleeced” financially. Not only was he angry in those situations, he expects us to be angry in similar situations. The person who is indifferent where our Lord is angry is a person whose indifference we had better not call “peace-loving.” To be indifferent when others are abused or exploited or plundered is to be humanly defective.

Still, today we are probing the gospel-blessing of reconciliation. Doesn’t anger, however right and righteous, merely intensify estrangement? Doesn’t anger, however, appropriate, merely inhibit reconciliation?

The apostle Paul, whose passion for reconciliation everywhere in life is at the forefront of his thought and work, can help us here. “Be angry,” he says, “but don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath.” (Eph. 4:26)   In other words, while it is sin not to be angry in the face of manifest exploitation or abuse, it is equally sin to allow our anger to fall into the settled mood of seething, festering bitterness.

A wise old Christian who had the gospel in his bloodstream said to me one day, “Victor, anger in a Christian is proper and fruitful only if it is accompanied by grief.” If I have harmed you in any way you may and should be angry with me. Yet only as you are also grieved by my insensitivity; that is, only as you see something pitiable in my callused spirit will your proper anger at me fall short of falling into festering bitterness. We may and we should be angry with the fellow who assaulted an elderly woman for the ten dollars in her purse. But if our anger isn’t merely to add to the cauldron of violence boiling already in the world (one item of which is this fellow’s assault) then we must also find pitiable the situation of that twenty-year old who is as twisted as he is and whose future is as bleak as his certainly is. If our anger, legitimate anger, towards that fellow isn’t accompanied by our grief, then our rage is as reprehensible as his cruelty.

The truth is, in a fallen world there is at all times a multi-faceted estrangement arising from what we all understand (premeditated, deliberate nastiness) and also from what no one can understand (the mystery of sin in our depraved estate.)

 

II: — Regardless of the kind of estrangement, however; regardless of the extent to which it can be understood, the gospel is inherently reconciling. Wherever the gospel is operative through the power of the Spirit reconciliation occurs. Because we love the one who is the reconciler, God, we want to be reconcilers in our own way. The last thing we want to do is render inoperative our attempts at reconciliation or discredit his. Then we have to learn how estrangement is overcome and antagonism defused. We have to learn how genuine peace is promoted rather than indifference touted. We learn this, or learn it afresh, only as we are soaked in God’s reconciliation of us and understand how it occurred. How did he do it? What did he do? How does it all work? Paul writes, “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him by the death of his Son.” (Romans 5:10)

[1] The first thing we have to notice here is that it is the offended party (God in this case) who initiates reconciliation. We had violated him. We had wounded him. Yet he reconciled us to himself. There is no harder point for people to grasp, I have found, than this. We always assume the opposite; we always assume that the responsibility for initiating reconciliation lies with the offender. After all, it’s the offender who caused the bloodletting. It’s the offender who turned bond into breach. “Then let the offender fix it!” we say. If my wife tears a strip off me and intimacy gives way to a gap between us the size of the Grand Canyon then surely it’s her responsibility to repair the breach, since she caused it in the first place. Meanwhile, I tell myself, I can only wait until she undoes the damage she caused. “So I’ll wait, however long I have to wait.” This logic is perfectly logical with the logic of the world; it is equally illogical according to the logic of the gospel. For according to the Gospel, God’s spell, the spell which God has cast on you and me, God himself sought our reconciliation with him when we were wholly to blame for the estrangement.

It takes a while for this reversal of the world’s logic to register with us. But once the logic of the gospel has sunk in we understand why it has to be the offended person who initiates reconciliation. The offender, the person who has caused the rupture in the first place, may not even be aware of what he’s done. (Remember, you and I were sinners long before we became aware that we were sinners; we had broken the heart of God long before we learned that we had done this.) What’s more, if the offender is aware of what he’s done he will consciously excuse or unconsciously rationalize the enmity he’s caused. Already he can recite ten “reasons” for his offensiveness. In addition, the offender will feel so “right” about it all that he would regard any attempt on his part to seek reconciliation as weakness. This is how the world, a fallen world, thinks. But this is not how Christians think in conformity to the reconciling activity of God.

[2] The second thing to be noticed is similar: the cost of reconciliation is borne by the offended party, not by the offender. “While we were enemies,” scripture informs us, “we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.” We offended God. Wrapped up in our self-extenuating rationalization, we were prepared to live with the consequent estrangement. But God couldn’t live with it. He, the one we had wounded; he couldn’t live with it. He sought to reconcile us to himself. At what price? The price was breathtaking: he gave up his Son – which is to say, he sacrificed himself. The cost, the pain of our reconciliation to him, God absorbs himself. Pained as he is by our violation of him; pained still more by the estrangement that arises from our violation, he pains himself inestimably more by bearing the cost of getting us home with him.

There is no such thing as reconciliation – anywhere in life – that costs nothing. Estrangement corrodes. Hostility is an acid that eats away at us even as it eats away at the person on the other side of the divide. Of itself the corrosion will only worsen until the relationship is pitted and pockmarked, then weakened, and finally crumbled. What it takes to overcome acid-fed corrosion and unsightliness and pulverization – reconciliation; this can’t be picked up in a bargain basement sale.

To say that our reconciliation to God cost him the death of his Son is to say that you and I shall never be able fully to grasp its price. Still, we can understand enough to see that reconciliation, anywhere in life, is going to cost someone a great deal. And in fact it is the offended person, already victimized, who now freely victimizes herself (isn’t this exactly how it feels?) in order to defuse the antagonism, end the standoff, and overcome estrangement.

The cost we bear, the pain we absorb, is real and pronounced even where it isn’t dramatic. Just because it isn’t dramatic it will seem insignificant to others. But it’s never insignificant even where it isn’t dramatic. I have in mind our aspiration to promote reconciliation, for instance, through our resolve not to focus on and intensify the pain we are in already through having been “shafted” (even if we can’t ignore such pain.) Or perhaps what’s required of us if reconciliation is to occur is this: we are going to resist the temptation to display or advertise the offence that wounded us in the first place. (Plainly as long as we are advertising the offence and our pain over it reconciliation is far from our heart.) Perhaps what’s required of us is this: having been stung once already we now have to risk being stung again.

“Just a minute,” someone interjects, “Anyone who sticks his neck out a second time is a fool.” I agree. He is a fool. Yet according to the gospel there are two kinds of fools: those who are merely fools because unwise, and those with much wisdom who for just that reason are “fools for Christ’s sake.” Frankly, anyone who risks herself, exposes herself, lives vulnerably for the sake of promoting reconciliation; any such person is always going to appear a fool. But the alternative to turning towards the offender in our own vulnerability is to turn towards the offender in our armour. Armour reconciles no one. What else is the cross except God’s vulnerability exposed to the world? And what else is the cross except God’s self-initiated, anguish-bearing deed of reconciliation for those who have offended him?

Few of us have been physically assaulted. But all of us have been psychologically assaulted.   We’ve all been trampled on, run over, put down, publicly humiliated, ridiculed quietly or ridiculed noisily. Pained as we are by it the gospel insists that it is we, the victim, who must initiate reconciliation.

After all, the word “gospel” is derived from the old English, “God’s spell.” A spell is something that a superior spiritual power puts on people so as to alter them. To say that we are the beneficiaries of the gospel is to say that God’s spell has altered us profoundly, altered us after his own heart. To have God’s spell put on us means that we are now impelled to do unto others as God himself has already done unto us. It was while we were enemies that we were reconciled to God by the shed blood of his Son.

 

III: — In this huge topic of hostility and reconciliation there’s a matter we have to be clear about. This matter Paul discusses in his letter to the church in Ephesus where he insists that in Jesus Christ “the dividing wall of hostility” has been crumbled. In the ancient world the highest wall (so high, in fact, that it could never be climbed over) was the wall separating Jew and Gentile. Because this “dividing wall of hostility” was utterly insurmountable it also represented any lesser wall that separated people from each other anywhere, for any reason (or no reason.) And precisely this wall, humanly insurmountable, God has broken down, says Paul, in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Now the wall doesn’t exist at all. And in place of the two hostile persons God has created one new person in Christ. And if this one wall has been crumbled, so have all the lesser walls that it represents. And who is aware of this? Christians are. Christians alone are, to be sure, but certainly we are. We know that in Christ God has fashioned one new person in place of two hostile persons.

What does it mean, then, if you and I claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ and then live as if the wall were still standing? What does it mean if we orient ourselves as if the dividing wall of hostility were fixed forever before us? Would it mean we were mistaken? Would it mean we were bigoted? What would any of us say if we came upon someone who insisted there was a huge wall squarely in the middle of Highway #27 and it was his job to make sure that the wall stayed put? We wouldn’t say he was mistaken or bigoted; we’d simply say he was insane. Listen: if you and I take the name of Christ upon our lips and then suggest in word or deed that there are dividing walls that are real and need to be shored up, we are spiritually insane.

I know, hostility and antagonism are the order of a fallen universe. And certainly we live in that universe. But finally, ultimately, we Christians live in Christ. We live in the one in whom the Fall has been overturned; we live in the one in whom all dividing walls have been crumbled.

To say the same thing differently: we have a foot in both worlds, but we don’t distribute our weight evenly over both feet. Even as we have a foot in both worlds we have shifted our weight onto that foot which is planted in the world of reconciliation. We don’t want to reflect the world’s antagonisms back to the world, thereby making everything worse. We want to reflect the reality of Christ’s reconciliation into darkened corners where darkened people continue to think that assorted walls of hostility are still standing. We want only to hold up reconciliation: God’s reconciliation with us and ours with our fellows – and all of this just because we know where reconciliation was first wrought and how it was wrought: namely, at a cross where the God we had offended and pained absorbed his pain in order to have us home again.

 

IV: — I know what someone is going to say before I sit down: our efforts at reconciliation don’t always work. There are situations where we’ve swallowed our “rights” and absorbed our pain and risked ourselves again and again only to have it all thrown back in our face. The relationship we hoped to recover has remained dead and now gives every appearance of remaining dead forever. Where are we now?

We must remember it’s never our task to be successful. It’s our task to be faithful. Our only responsibility is to be agents of reconciliation by living the truth of the reconciliation we already enjoy in Christ. The fruitfulness of our effort we must leave with God.

God has promised that regardless of the fruitfulness we don’t see, our lived witness will never be finally fruitless. Its fruitfulness may be hidden from us for now, but its ultimate fruitfulness isn’t in doubt. Assured of this we can even now claim for ourselves the joy of the psalmist when he writes, “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers (sisters too) dwell together in unity.” (Psalm 133:1)

 

                                                                                                               Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                  

  March 2004

Ephesians 2:15

Ecclesiastes 1:9    Revelation 21:5    Psalm 33:3

 

“There is nothing new under the sun”, said the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes.

“Nothing new?” said the writer of the book of Revelation; “Everything is new, for hasn’t God said, ‘Behold, I make all things new’?”

Then which is it: nothing new or everything new?

I: — Let’s begin with a brief word study. There are two Greek words for “new”: neos and kainos.
Neos means ‘new’ in the sense of chronologically recent.  If I have six identical wineglasses and I break one, I replace it with a new wineglass of the same kind.  The new one is the same as the odl ones.  It’s new only in the sense that I’ve owned it for ten minutes instead of ten years. It’s new in the sense of chronologically recent, even though it’s identical in all respects with the ‘old’ glasses.

Kainos, on the other hand, means “qualitatively different.”  For years the Volkswagen Company produced only the “Beetle.”   A new VW Beetle wasn’t a new development; it was simply a chronologically recent version of the same old car.  Then one day the VW Company brought out the Jetta and the Golf.  These were new developments.         The new VW car was now kainos-new rather than merely neos-new.

In scripture, wherever human newness is concerned kainos is used. We humans need ever so much that’s qualitatively new, ever so much that we can’t produce ourselves. The newness we need God alone can produce. For this reason scripture uses kainos, qualitatively new, only in connection with what God can produce.  God alone can fashion a new (kainos) human reality.

God alone can; God just as surely does.  The prophet Ezekiel speaks of God giving people a new heart; God removes the heart of stone (calcified, cold, inert) and gives us a heart of flesh (warm, throbbing, life-sustaining.)         Ezekiel tells us that God puts a new spirit within his people.  The apostle Paul, a spiritual descendant of Ezekiel, exclaims, “If any person is ‘in Christ’ – that person lives in a whole new world where everything’s new.”

God alone can fashion the humanly new.  He does. The newness he presses upon us is gift; sheer gift.

At the same time it’s a gift we must exercise.  Not only does Ezekiel tell us that God gives a new heart and new spirit; he also tells his people “Get yourselves a new heart and spirit.”  The newness that is God’s gift is also a newness we must exercise.

Too many people, upon hearing scripture’s characteristic speech about new heart, new spirit, new creation become dreamy-eyed mystics.  They passively wait for something they-know-not-what, some sort of intra-psychic vividness. They’ve heard someone else describe experience of some sort in living colour, and now they’re waiting for the phosphorescent flash.

We shouldn’t do this. Instead we should affirm, in faith, that the gift which God alone can bestow upon us he has bestowed; and then we should set about exercising this gift, doing the truth. We take God at his word, and then we act on the truth of that word.

 

II: — God tells us that he makes all things new.  Lacking time to probe everything he makes new we shall concentrate on one issue only: the two opposed persons whom he makes into the one new person. Listen to Paul: “For he [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility…that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” (Eph. 2:14-16. ESV)

When the apostle says that Jesus Christ has broken down the wall of hostility and has made one new person in place of the two, he’s speaking of Jew and Gentile. In the first century world there was no higher wall than the wall dividing Jew and Gentile. The Jew regarded the Gentile as godless and lawless.  The Gentile regarded the Jew as religiously obsessed, and obsessed with the pointless as well as the grotesque; after all, the food restrictions were pointless, said Gentiles, while circumcision was barbaric. Over the centuries mutual suspicion had hardened into mutual hostility.  The wall between them had had brick after brick added to it until it was insurmountably high. Not only could no one bring it down; no one seemed to want to.  And then – this takes the apostle’s breath away – and then in Jesus Christ, specifically in his cross, the wall had been crumbled.  This one Jew, the Son of God who was also the Son of man; this one Jew both mediated God to all humankind and mediated all humankind to God; this one fellow absorbed in himself the lethal hostility that boils and boils over whenever people who are different in any respect face each other. In absorbing in himself such lethal hostility he undercut the standoff; he collapsed the wall of hostility, thereby making one person in place of two.

Who knows this? Who knows that the wall is down? Who knows that Christ alone brought it down?  We do. Christ’s people do. To be sure, the two have been fused into one only “in Christ.”  By faith we live “in Christ.”         Therefore by faith we participate in “the one new person.”  Non-Christians don’t live “in Christ.”  Therefore they haven’t discerned that there’s only “the one new person.” Nevertheless, since the arms of the crucified embrace the whole world, the whole world has been appointed to this truth, even if there are some who haven’t yet perceived it, some who haven’t yet acknowledged it, and some, quite frankly, who simply don’t believe it and never will.  Still, no one’s disregard of truth undoes the nature of truth. For this reason Jesus Christ has conscripted his people on behalf of that truth which he has already established and which can never be undone.

 

III: — We can’t deny that the wall of hostility appears to be standing yet.  Think of racial hostility. For years I’ve heard Canadians say that because the history of Canada isn’t as racially torn as the history of the USA , therefore Canadians don’t have in their bloodstream the lethal racism that Americans seem to have.  The premise is correct; the conclusion is false.  Racism is a mark of the Fall, and everyone, everywhere, lives in the wake of the Fall.

William Stringfellow, the New York City lawyer and Anglican theologian I’ve spoken of many times here; Stringfellow maintained that racism in Canada was much more subtle, much more covert, much more polite than that in the USA, and for that reason harder to identify – yet no less virulent. Toronto , Stringfellow said, was much more racist than New York City .

It’s customary for sports teams to accommodate players two to a hotel room when the team is on the road.         For decades the Ottawa Roughrider football team always roomed black player with black and white player with white.         What happened when a black player and a white player were left over? The leftover players, white and black, were each given a separate hotel room at the team’s expense lest they have to share a room.  Black Ottawa football players who dated white women were taken aside and told they shouldn’t be doing such a thing.

Few Canadians appear to be aware that there were slaves in New France (now Canada ) during the seventeenth century. Slavery didn’t end here because of humanitarian enlightenment.  It ended because the climate here didn’t support a plantation economy. Slavery ended inasmuch as it didn’t pay white people to enslave black people.

During World War II Canadian citizens (citizens, be it noted) of Japanese origin were herded into concentration camps euphemistically called “internment camps.”  (Yes, I’m aware that a few years ago the Canadian government compensated these people, even as everyone knew that the distress into which they had been plunged couldn’t be assigned a dollar value at all, never mind the matter of payment rendered decades later.)  The treatment of Canadian citizens of Japanese origin was deemed necessary for reasons of national security.  Why, then, were German-Canadians not treated in the same manner?  Because German-Canadians were Caucasian.  The prime minister of Canada wrote in his diary, which document came to light years later, that Canada had to be protected from “the yellow peril.”  But the highest-ranking RCMP officers declared repeatedly that there was no peril.

Rabbi Lawrence Englander remains one of my dearest friends in Mississauga . Larry’s mother used to tell me of her teenage years in Brampton , when signs were posted reminding Jewish people that they were forbidden to enter public parks. More recently two people from Larry’s synagogue in Mississauga have come to me with heartbreaking stories about public vilification of Jewish people at the hands of Christian clergy in Mississauga, one event being a church funeral, another event being a pastor’s conversation with a thirteen year-old Jewish girl who had been sent to interview him on a grade eight school project. Solel Synagogue and Streestville United Church collaborated in masterminding two affordable housing projects, Jews and Christians alike thinking it important that financially disadvantaged people have adequate accommodation. (One project, by the way, was worth $19 million, the other $15 million.)         At the conclusion of the projects a celebratory party was held on a Saturday night in the synagogue. While we were all dancing up a storm in one part of the building, hoodlums sneaked into another part where the food we were to eat later was waiting for us. They trashed the tables laden with food. In the years I’ve lived in Mississauga , Solel Synagogue has been vandalized five times.

Ever since “9/11”, September 11^th 2001 , when the World Trade Towers were attacked in New York City , I have feared an outbreak of Islamophobia.  I have feared that every last Islamic person in North America would be looked upon as treacherous.  Some people tell me that there are dark, dark currents in Islam.  Some of the people who tell me this have lived in Islamic countries for many years. I have not. Plainly their identification of dark currents is something I can’t contradict.  Neither do I want to. I don’t doubt that there are horrifically dark currents in Islam.         But tell me: is Northern Ireland Islamic territory? Of course there are dark currents in Islam.  Are there no dark currents in church history?  Ask your Jewish neighbour. You won’t have to ask her twice. The truth is, until 1948, the founding of the state of Israel , Jewish people received far, far better treatment at the hands of Muslims than they received at the hands of Christians.  We should ponder all of this carefully.  After all, right now, both in the city of Toronto and in Canada as whole, there are more Muslims than there are Presbyterians.

When I was a pastor in New Brunswick there were enormous tensions between English-speaking and French-speaking people. High school students went to two different schools, depending on the language of instruction. For part of the bus trip to school, however, both Anglophone and Francophone students had to ride on the same bus.         The French-speaking students were threatened, with the result that guardians had to be on the bus in order to get the Francophone students to school intact. On one occasion I was speaking with an older woman in the congregation who wanted to sever and sell part of her ample lot. She had advertised the piece of land. On this particular evening a young woman, accompanied by her fiancé, approached her. They talked about the land, the purchase price, the date of transferring the deed, and so on. Somewhat suspicious now, the older woman said to the younger, “By the way, what’s your name?” “Poirier.”  “Poirier? The land isn’t for sale.”

 

III: — I want you to imagine someone standing in the middle of the street going through the motions of sawing, hammering, and mixing concrete.  As soon as you see him you tap him on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, but there’s nothing here.”  Imagine him replying, “Oh, but there is; there’s a wall here, and I deem it my responsibility to keep it in good repair.”  Whereupon he returns to the motions of sawing and hammering and mixing. What would you conclude about the fellow? You wouldn’t say, “I think he’s mistaken.”  You would say, “He’s psychotic; he’s no longer in touch with reality.”

Humanists who act from a humanitarian concern tell us that we ought to bring down the walls that divide hostile groups.  Humanists insist that not to bring down these walls is to perpetuate bigotry. Christians, however, don’t speak like this. We don’t talk about “bringing down” any wall.  We know that the wall is down now.  To live as if it weren’t down isn’t to display bigotry; it’s to display insanity.

For twenty or thirty years after the Allied defeat of the Japanese in World War II a Japanese man would stumble out of a cave on a Pacific Island where he’d been hiding for the last several decades.  He had been a Japanese soldier stationed on the island when American forces overran it. Having fled inland in order to spare himself, he had remained hidden on the assumption that American forces were still occupying the island.  On the day he was unearthed he learned that he had spent half of his life orienting himself to something that had long since disappeared.

People throughout the world do as much all the time.  They spend their entire lives orienting themselves to something that has long since disappeared. The wall is down. Christ has crumbled it.  Not to acknowledge this isn’t bigotry or blindness or ignorance; it’s psychosis, madness.  One new person has been fashioned in place of the two.         The wall is down.

 

IV: — One important matter yet to be discussed is the mood in which we announce and embody the truth about the crumbled wall.  In this regard scripture says much about the “new song.”  Neos-new would mean a recent repetition of the same old song; kainos-new means that God has given us a brand new song to sing, a song we could never invent for ourselves. Because we’ve been given a new song, the prophet Isaiah isn’t silly in urging his people, “Sing unto the Lord a new song.”  For the same reason the psalmist cries, “Sing unto the Lord a new song….Tell of his salvation, his shalom, what he has done, from day to day.” Four hundred years later another Hebrew prophet announces, “Behold, my servants shall sing for gladness of heart….For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.”

The point is regardless of what is happening in the world; regardless of what turbulence or distress there might be, the people of God have grounds for singing a new song and therefore must be found singing it.

It’s crucial that we be found singing the new song, for otherwise we’re going to be forever mumbling the old dirge.   If we aren’t found singing the new song, then when we come upon the person commonly described as “bigoted” or “intolerant” or “prejudiced”, our own spirit will acidify and our own heart will shrink and we shall become as bitter and as negative as the people we are currently faulting.  Only as we are found singing the new song can we continue to announce and attest the crumbled wall and not become petulant or cynical or sour when we are opposed by so many people who delight in telling us that the wall is still standing and standing for good reason.

 

“There is nothing new under the sun”.

“Behold I make all things new.”

“For he [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility…that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.”

“Sing to the Lord a new song.”          

 

Everything is new for those who are kingdom-sighted.

 

                                                                                         Victor Shepherd

February 2007

Ephesians 3:14-21

 

I have long thought that the least accurate way of finding out what a person believes is to ask him what he believes.         As soon as we ask someone what he believes, he’s suspicious – and rightly so. He wonders immediately why we are asking the question, where we are coming from, where we are going, what we plan to do with his reply.

We find out what a person really believes when we overhear her, when she doesn’t think that anyone’s listening, when she isn’t concerned to impress people.         We find out most accurately what someone believes, I’m certain, if we overhear her praying. This is the acid test: what we really believe about God (as opposed to what we say we believe), what we believe about the Gospel, about life – it’s all indicated about what we pray for; and not only what we pray for, but also how we pray for it.

Throughout Scripture we are privileged to overhear people praying: Moses, David, Isaiah, Jesus, Stephen, Peter, Paul. In the passage from the Ephesian letter that forms the text of today’s sermon, we can overhear Paul praying: not only what he prays for, but how he prays for it.

In Ephesians 3 Paul reminds his readers that concerning them (they are, after all, dear to him) he “bows the knee”. Contrary to what we modern types may think, to “bow the knee” doesn’t mean to get down on one’s knees to pray, perhaps like a child saying “Now I lay me down to sleep”. To “bow the knees”, rather, is a Hebrew expression meaning “to collapse”: to stumble, fall down, crumple. In modern English we say that someone’s knees buckled.  Jewish people don’t kneel to pray: they stand.  (If you go to a synagogue today you will find Jewish worshipers standing to pray.) In Luke 18 Jesus utters the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.   The parable begins this way: “Two men went to the temple to pray…one standing here, the other standing there….”  Jews stand to pray.

Then why does Paul (a Jew) “bow the knee”? We should recall our Lord Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of his crucifixion wherein he would bear in himself the Father’s just judgement on the sin of the whole world.         We are told that Jesus “knelt” to pray.  He didn’t calmly kneel down beside that flat-topped rock we see in so many church pictures. The Greek text uses a verb tense that indicates our Lord’s knees buckled; he collapsed, got to his feet again and took a few steps, staggered once more and collapsed as his knees “bowed” and buckled beneath him repeatedly – all the while with perspiration running down his face, Luke tells us, as though blood were pouring out of a forehead gash.  “Bow the knee” is an expression Jewish people used of that pray-er who was preoccupied, intense, passionately concerned, in the grip of something crucially important and therefore unmindful of all else.

Paul is this concerned about the congregation in Ephesus . He’s pleading for them.  He isn’t tossing off a pretty prayer before he hops into bed and falls asleep. He’s urgent, instant, constant, about something.

 

What is it? What’s he so very passionate about? He wants the Christians in Ephesus to be strengthened in their “inner being”, their “inner man” (woman). He wants them to be fortified against the attacks, the difficulties, the disappointments and dangers that life hurls at them. He wants them to be fortified against the propaganda of a world that sneers at truth and sets clever falsehood in its place.  He doesn’t tell them to strengthen themselves.         Regardless of how strong they might be in themselves (or might not be), he insists they need an infusion of strength from outside themselves, specifically from the Lord whose people they claim to be.  He prays ardently that Jesus Christ, the true man, new man, will reside in them and preside in them so very thoroughly that his presence within them will be their strength, and they will know it.

 

[1] The apostle is so very concerned about the strengthening of the inner person, in the first place, because he knows that life has to be faced, ultimately, by the individual and her Lord. On the one hand, no one wants to minimize the comfort we receive from those who gather around us and support us when upheavals come upon us.  Few things are worse than being abandoned just when we need others as we have never needed them before.  On the other hand, however much our friends may sustain us (and they do), all of us are aware that there is a dimension to us, an innermost crevace, to which no one else has access.  There remains an innermost recess in all of us that not even the best friend or the most loving spouse can penetrate.

It’s for this reason, I’m convinced, that so many people feel awkward at funeral parlours.  They know that their concern at the time of the bereaved person’s loss, and their support in the months afterward, however genuine and generous, finally gets so far and no farther.  They know that their care and concern, genuinely helpful, can’t ultimately access the innermost recesses of the person most recently afflicted.

If they can’t access that person’s innermost heart, then who can? One alone can; namely, the one who said, “Abide in me and I shall keep on abiding in you.” He alone can “abide” in us. The evening the widow goes to bed by herself, for the first time in decades, her family is startled at their inability to reach someone who seems so very close to them yet is ultimately out of reach.  The most effective thing any of us will be able to do at that time is pray, even pray with bowed knee, that Jesus Christ will strengthen her “inner being” as he dwells even deeper in her – to use Paul’s language.

All of life is like this, not merely bereavement situations. Parents whose children are about to leave adolescence for adulthood are aware that soon these young adults will strike out on their own.Parents will be powerless. Weren’t they powerless (or largely powerless) when their offspring were adolescents? Yes.  But the move out of the adolescent world into the adult world amplifies the realization that while our love for someone never stops short of that person, our access to that person does.  Then we can only pray for the strengthening of the inner being, the inner man or woman.

All of us need such strengthening.  Life is ceaseless stress. We are released from our employment. We fall ill. We are rebuffed.  We disappoint ourselves. Every day brings a surprise, something that we haven’t been able to anticipate and therefore that we haven’t been able to prepare ourselves for. It comes upon us without warning and moves on quickly.  We are left with the after-effects, as unable to understand it all as we are unable to shed the after-effects.         There are many things we can do next, but most aren’t helpful.  We should always remember that we are spiritually most vulnerable when we are emotionally most wounded.  It’s little wonder that the apostle prays ardently for the strengthening of the inner being of those dear to him in Ephesus .

 

[2] Yet the apostle has more in mind. He contrasts the inner man, the true man, the new man, with the old man, the old woman. The new man is who we are in view of Christ’s coming to us and taking us into his own life.  The Gospel-promises insist that all who keep company with Jesus Christ are given a new nature, a new name, a new future.         The new man or woman is the creature God intended from the start, unmarred by sin and corruption and self contradiction.  The new man or woman is the creature in whom God’s image shines forth, the image no longer marred or obscured or defaced. This is who we are as men and women “in Christ”.

But this isn’t all that we are, for the old man, the old woman, the creature defaced by sin and difficult to live with; this is still with us. To be sure, the old being doesn’t determine our ultimate identity: Christ does this. Still, the old being clings; it lingers.  And it is loathsome.

In the Roman Empire of antiquity, Roman authorities displayed limitless imagination and cruelty in punishing law-breakers. One of the most hideous punishments was that of strapping a corpse to the back of a law-breaker. The criminal had to carry it around for a day or two or three as a judge decided. The corpse was heavy. It was awkward.         It inhibited movement. It always interfered with what the person was supposed to be doing.  Worst of all, it was revolting: it stank, it leaked.  It was hugely repulsive to the person who had to carry it, repulsive as well to those who witnessed it.

In the 7^th chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome , Paul glories in the new life that arises in God’s people as they live in the company of Jesus Christ.  Then with shocking abruptness he deplores the life of the old man, the old woman, the creature of sin that all believers have repudiated – he deplores this as he cries, “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”  On the one had he knows and glories in and is ceaselessly grateful for the gift of new life at Christ’s hand.  On the other hand he’s only too aware that the old man slain at the cross and therefore dead; this corpse is strapped to his back, and it isn’t pretty.

Luther, with his customary earthiness, says that you and I are new creatures in Christ to be sure, but the old man/woman won’t die quietly. The corpse still twitches, says Luther.

We know what he means.  While we are indeed new beings in Christ, the old being appears stuck to us. It’s heavy; it’s awkward; it interferes with the Kingdom-work we’re commissioned to do. And it is repugnant.  How repugnant? If I used the language right now that Luther used, you’d throw me out.  If ever we think Luther exaggerates, however, we need only ask those who work with us or live with us.  To be sure, they may love us; just as surely they are burdened with us precisely where we are most loathsome.

Temptation never ceases to pound on our door. Sometimes we open the door a crack “just to get a better look at it”, only to find that we can’t get the door shut again. Eventually we are startled, then staggered, and finally sick at heart to realize that we could hate someone so intensely that seeing him undergo adversity would make our day. Until we did it we never thought we could wait, patiently, for three months, to level someone in a public meeting – and the more people there were to witness it, the merrier we felt.

Have you ever noticed that we don’t envy what strangers have; we don’t envy what the super-rich have?  We envy what our very best friends or family members have.  We begin making tangential comments, snide remarks, passive-aggressive remarks whose poison tips we both relish and deny at the same time. Before long another relationship has gone down, and we still manage to blame the party we have slain.
You must have noticed how much better most of us can cope with emergencies, major upheavals of all sorts than we can cope with minor irritations and frustrations wherein we appear childish, petulant, spiteful, rude.  While there are relatively few major upheavals in life, however, there are countless minor vexations, cumulative vexations, and therefore the people whose lives cross ours most frequently find the body of death on our backs distressing to them and repugnant as well.

Yet we mustn’t stop here, for in Romans 7, as soon as Paul cries out “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” he exclaims “Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ”.  There is deliverance.  Not instantaneous, not without a measure of pain on our part as lingering depravity is burned out of us, not without the occasional lapse whenever we become complacent; still, he who is our inner man and who is ever strengthening us; he is at work within us to free us from that burden we know to be oppressive and loathsome.

When Paul prays for the strengthening of the inner man he’s praying the Lord will magnify, expand, his redemptive work in us so that we whom he has declared new may become new in fact. In his letter to the Christians in Philippi , Paul reminds the people there that the one who has begun a good work in them will unfailingly go on to complete it.

In a word, the apostle is praying that the Ephesian Christians will find themselves increasingly conformed to Jesus Christ as the body of death drops away from them.

 

[3] The apostle has one more thing in mind: he contrasts the inner man, the new man, not only with the old man; he also contrasts the inner man with the outer man.  The inner person is who we are, who we are in ourselves because first of who we are in Christ. The outer person is what we are deemed to be by the 101 grids or diagnostic tools or measuring rods by which we are measured.  We are all measured by our monetary net worth, by our level of formal education, by our political affiliations, by our social sophistication (so-called), by our physical beauty (or ugliness), by the labels that adorn the clothes we wear, by the smoothness with which we can handle ourselves at cocktail parties and assorted social events, by the whiteness of our teeth and the non-whiteness of our hair, even by and our sense of humour. (People with a cutting, sarcastic sense of humour, I have found, are deemed to more clever, more “with it”, in greater demand, than those with a gentle, non-victimising, sense of humour.) We may be deemed to be “cool”. (“Cool” has a specific meaning in our informal understanding.)  We may also be deemed to be “hot”.  And because of the informal meanings of “cool” and “hot”, we can be cool and hot at the same time.

It’s as if so many points, one to five, are awarded in each category, the accumulation of points determining our place on the social scale.  By means of the social scale we are regarded as “losers” or perchance “winners” or, more likely, something in between.  Our place on the grid determines whether we are to be flattered or forgotten. Yet Christians know that our place on the social scale is a matter of utter arbitrariness. If the grid by which we are assessed is changed, our place on the scale changes.  Furthermore, the social grid deployed today wasn’t used yesterday, and another grid will replace it next decade.

Then who are we?  Who was the apostle Paul? He tells us that when he went to Corinth he was laughed at because of his speech impediment and his scrawny physique. He replied to the Corinthians, “I am what I am by the grace of God.” (1^st Cor. 15:10)  And what was that? To the Christians in Colosse he wrote, “Our real life is hid with Christ in God.” In other words, who we are is determined by Christ’s possession of us.  This is known only to God; it is known to us insofar as God reflects it back to us. But make no mistake: it’s real.  It’s real beyond the unreality of the “outer person”.

Paul prays for the strengthening of the inner person because he knows that if we become preoccupied with the outer person, we shall deny our fellowship with Christ; we’ll forfeit our integrity; we’ll conform ourselves to social expectation and sell ourselves.

Are we afraid of looking like losers?  Tell me: did our Lord look like a winner when he was executed with criminals at the city garbage dump?  In the company of Jesus Christ there are neither winners nor losers, neither weak nor strong, neither successes nor failures, neither the flatterable nor the forgettable. There are simply children of God whom Jesus their elder brother cherishes. His grip on them makes them who they are, determines a truth about them that no social arbitrariness can undo. In view of the fact that it can’t be undone before God, we shouldn’t act as if we can undo it before ourselves or before the world.  As our inner person is strengthened, the truth and reality of who we are in Christ sinks deeper into us and increasingly characterizes our thinking, our doing, our aspirations.

 

“Bow the knees.” It doesn’t mean to kneel down. It means that some pray-er is pleading for fellow-Christians with an intensity, an urgency, a persistence that we find startling.

Specifically, Paul is pleading for the strengthening of the inner being of the Christians in Ephesus . He’s aware of the downward pull of the old man/woman; he knows the preoccupation with the outer man/woman.

But he knows too, as he concludes his prayer, of “the power at work within us that is able to do far more abundantly than we ask or think”. Then by God’s grace may you and I ever want for ourselves what the apostle wants for us, and may we want it with an intensity, an urgency and a persistence no less than his.

 

                                                                                                     Victor Shepherd                                                                                                    

September 2005                                      

 

Ephesians 3:20-21

 

“Now to him who by the power at work within us…to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations.”

Whenever I have conducted confirmation classes for younger people I have noticed how engaged they are as we discuss God, his Son Christ Jesus our Lord, the nature of faith, the necessity of obedience, the rigours of discipleship. In fact I have noticed how engaged they are concerning almost any topic until we bring up the topic of the church. For them, at least, the church seems to have little credibility.

Many adults appear to be on the same wavelength. After all, they would never hesitate to announce a little league hockey practice at the same hour as Sunday School, thereby declaring church unimportant, even though they continue to expect the services of the church to be available when granny needs to be buried or their daughter needs to be married.

Then again those of us who have been ministers of the church for decades are always surprised to hear from folk who have been “turned on” to the gospel through coffee-house groups or campus organizations and who now wish to candidate for the ordained ministry, even though they have had no exposure to the church and have no familiarity with its worship or its governance or its traditions. Plainly they view the church has having little to do with their new-found faith.

All of this forces us to ask, “What is the church? What is it supposed to be?” By way of answering this question we are going to listen to three major streams or traditions of the church as a whole. The three are classical Protestantism (Presbyterianism is huge here), Roman Catholicism, and the charismatic or Pentecostal movements.

 

I: — Let’s begin with our own tradition, classical Protestantism. The emphasis here is plain: the church consists of those who gather to hear the Word of God preached and to respond to the Word preached through praise and prayer. The architecture of church buildings suggests this. In most of the church buildings of classical Protestantism the pulpit stands square in the centre of the platform. The pulpit, often not only central but even elevated, occupies the chief place. It can’t be overlooked. People assemble Sunday by Sunday in order to be taught. And when a pastoral relations committee is calling a new minister, the first question it wants answered is, “Can he preach?”

But we must never think that preaching is entertainment; it’s not of the order of an after-dinner speech or a politician’s pep rally. Preaching always presupposes that what people are taught through an exposition of the gospel they need as they need nothing else and they can acquire it nowhere else. In other words, the presupposition of preaching is that the gospel has a precise content. This precise content is rooted ultimately in the heart of God who is possessed of a precise nature and has come to us in a singular Son and whose truth summons us to respond in a particular trust and love and obedience.

In classical Protestantism, then, people gather at worship first of all to be informed of a truth and reality they can’t learn anywhere else. No immersion in newspapers, magazines, movies; no time spent at golf, bird watching or water skiing: none of this is going to acquaint us with that gospel which has to be taught, and which should be taught, say classical Protestants, through ministers whose vocation the church has recognized and whose education and training the church has supervised. Calvin was fond of saying that the voice of God sounded in the voice of the preacher. He never meant that the voice of God and the voice of God’s servant are identical. Yet he insisted (i) God speaks; (ii) God is going to be heard to speak only as the herald of the gospel is heard to speak.

From time to time people tell me that they don’t have to assemble on Sunday mornings in order to be instructed in the Word and will and way and work of God. Neither do they have to be instructed in the response that God both invites and summons them to make. They insist they “feel closer to God” in nature than anywhere else (church included), and therefore on Sunday morning they go to hear the birds sing or watch the sunrise or look at the Grand Canyon . But gather to hear the Word of God declared? Superfluous, they say.

In the spirit of the tradition of classical Protestantism I reply (as gently as I can), “Feel close to God? We can genuinely feel close to God only as we are close to God. And since as sinners we are God-flee-ers we can be close to God only where God has drawn close to us. And where has he drawn close to us? Not in nature and not on the golf course: God has drawn exquisitely close to us in his Son; specifically, in the cross of his Son. When we are profoundly moved at nature’s beauties we are not being moved by God; we are being moved by God’s creation, the things that he has made, but we are not thereby in touch with the person of God himself. We are in touch with the person of God himself only as we are touched by that Son whose crucified arms embrace us and plead with us to embrace him in return.

If people tell me that in nature they have a sense of God’s power, I remind them that God acts most effectively and acts most characteristically (i.e., lovingly, redemptively), precisely where, from a human perspective, he is powerless: in a cross. All of this strikes people as something they’ve never heard before. In fact they haven’t heard it before. They need to be told.

Plainly we can’t inform ourselves of the gospel. The gospel – what all humankind needs as it needs nothing else – is not a human invention. It’s a divine cure. And concerning God’s cure we have to be informed.

You must have noticed that when Jesus began his public ministry, Mark tells us, he “…came preaching.” Then he commissioned twelve others to preach in his name; then seventy; then many more. There’s much to be said for classical Protestantism’s angle of vision concerning the church: the church consists of those who gather to hear the Word of God preached and to be schooled in the response they are to make.

 

II: — Let’s turn now to the angle of vision found in Roman Catholicism (and in Anglo-Catholicism, as well as the Eastern Orthodox Church.) These Christians emphasize the church as the body of Christ. Unquestionably this emphasis too is rooted in scripture. Altogether there are 188 images of the church in the New Testament. Three of the major images are “bride”, “building” (temple) and “body.” Of the three major images, however, “body” is the chief image. We are the body of Christ. Christ himself is head of his own body.

As soon as we acknowledge the church to be the body of Christ we have to acknowledge several crucial truths we might otherwise overlook.

[1] Individually you and I have a relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord only as we are related to his body, the church, the congregation. We can’t be related to the head of the body without being related to the body itself. No one can cherish Jesus Christ while disdaining his people. No one can glory in the head of the body while dismissing the body.

[2] Individually you and I have an identity as Christians only as we are identified with the body, the church, the congregation. If we are asked, “Are you a Christian?” our initial response, whether uttered audibly or not, is, “Yes, I’m a Christian; I cling to Jesus Christ in faith.” The response is fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough. “Yes, I cling to Jesus Christ in faith and I cling to his people in love.” When the Christians in Corinth were ripping apart their fellowship through their bickering, party-spirit, and out-and-out wickedness, Paul asked them sharply, “Do you despise the church?” That stopped them in their tracks. They knew what he was going to say next: “If you despise the body then you despise the head of the body, Jesus Christ, and you aren’t Christians at all.”

[3] Individually you and I are going to be useful in the service of Jesus Christ only as we are members of his body. Rather crudely Paul asks us to think of a normal human body, and then to imagine a leg detached from that body “over there,” an arm somewhere else, an eyeball somewhere else again – you know, the sort of ghastly spectacle we might see at the site of an airplane crash. “Now,” says the apostle, “of what use is a detached leg?” Plainly, no use at all. Not only is a detached leg useless, can it even be said to be a leg? If a leg is defined as that which supports and propels a torso, then a detached “leg” isn’t really a leg at all. The purpose of an eyeball is to see. A detached eyeball can’t see, since it’s detached from nerve and brain. Then is it an eye at all? Once any body member becomes detached it’s no more than a piece of putrefying flesh: unsightly, malodorous, and above all, useless.

In everyday life the function of our body is to do what our head tells it to do. What the head wills the body to do is transmitted through our nervous system, since nerves connect mind and muscle. Jesus Christ has a body on earth (his muscles, as it were) in order that his will for humankind will be done. Christ’s purposes for his human (and non-human) creation will be accomplished only as there is a body, somewhere, that receives, recognizes the directives from the head and implements them.

“But surely,” someone objects, “surely where you are talking about Christ’s body you don’t mean the local congregation; you don’t mean St. Matthew’s by the Variety Store. Why, in that congregation there are all kinds of problems and more than a few power plays and God only knows what else.” (It has been said – truly – that the church is like Noah’s Ark : if it weren’t for the storm outside no one could stand the stink inside.) “Surely that congregation isn’t the body of Christ.” Yes it is. Our Lord’s body may be scarred, marred, pock-marked, even deformed, crippled in some respect. Nevertheless, it’s the only body he has.

In everyday life no one can exist without a body. Jesus Christ, Lord of his own body to be sure, nevertheless chooses to be present to our world and present in our world through his body. We are members of that body. If we forsake it we forsake him. If we snootily remove ourselves from it then we fatally remove ourselves from him.

There’s one thing more we can learn from the angle of vision that the church is the body of Christ: the body will last as long as the head lasts. Sometimes it is suggested that the church is at risk. To be sure, any one congregation or denomination may be at risk, but Christ’s body is no more at risk than Christ himself is, and he is never at risk. He has been raised victor over death. He has been enthroned at the right hand of the Father. The powers of destruction cannot prevail against him; cannot prevail against him, head and body alike.

The body of Christ existed long before we were added to it; it will thrive long after we are no longer around. Therefore the community of Christ’s people will never disappear. The church is weak? God will strengthen it. Confused? God will enlighten it. Corrupt? God will purify it. “I shall build my church,” says Jesus, “and the powers of destruction shall not prevail against it.”

 

III: — Let’s look at the church from the third angle of vision, the emphasis of the charismatic or Pentecostal movements. The emphasis here is on the Holy Spirit: the church is the community of the Spirit. These movements remind us that a body can appear splendid, and yet be a corpse. The Spirit – life, breath, vitality – the Spirit is the difference between a body and a corpse.

To emphasize the Holy Spirit (the Holy Spirit is the immediacy, intimacy and vividness of God) is to emphasize our experience of God. The book of Hebrews, for instance, speaks of those who have “tasted the goodness of God and the powers of the age to come;” tasted, not merely read about it, not merely discussed it. What’s the difference between tasting salt (and knowing that what you’ve tasted is salt) and reading a book on the chemical properties of sodium chloride? Paul reminds the church in Thessalonica that the gospel came to them “not in words only, but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full conviction.” Of course the gospel had come to them in words. (Classical Protestants had made sure of that.) Yet the gospel had come to them as well “in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full conviction.” Can’t we sense the crescendo, the surge, of all that our charismatic fellow-Christians insist on? The Christians in Thessalonica heard the gospel announced, and then were convicted and convinced of its truth and its significance for them.

In his first epistle the apostle John says much about believers abiding in Christ and Christ abiding in them. Is it mere talk, or is there a reality behind the talk that lends the talk authenticity? John answers our question when he adds, “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit.” The Spirit is God himself in his immediacy and intimacy and intensity burning his way upon men and women so that they know—not wish or think or hope – know that their relationship with their Lord is just that.

When the Christians in Galatia were in danger of exchanging the gospel of God’s free grace and his gift of faith for a moralistic legalism that would render people self-righteous legalists Paul wanted to correct them as fast as he could. He asked them, “Did you receive the Spirit by hearing (the gospel) with faith or by moralistic legalism?” (Galatians 3:2) The point is this. When he asks them “Did you receive the Spirit?” he was referring to their identifiable experience of God. They could no more deny their present experience of God than the person with a raging headache can deny her headache. If I have a headache right now you may say to me, “Did you get your headache from reading in poor light or from having the ’flu?” Regardless of my answer the one thing that isn’t in doubt is my headache. I know I have a headache.

“Did you receive the Spirit through hearing with faith or by moralistic legalism?” The apostle knows they aren’t going to deny their present experience of the Spirit. He knows too that they are going to recall how they came to taste the Spirit: they had responded to the gospel in obedient faith.

In the older testament the Hebrew word for spirit is ruach. In the newer testament the Greek word for spirit is pneuma. Both ruach and pneuma mean breath, wind, spirit. Breath is essential to life. To be without breath is to be without life. Wind indicates power; it drives boats and windmills; it dries clothes; it moves clouds. Wind always does something. And Spirit? Spirit is simply the God who infinitely transcends us now coming among us, even coming within us with such immediacy, intimacy and intensity that we no more doubt him than we doubt our headache – better, than we no more doubt our contented heart.

The charismatic churches have much to share with us.

 

What is the church? Classical Protestants say it’s the gathering of those who assemble to hear the gospel preached and to be schooled in the response of faith and obedience.

Roman Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, Eastern Orthodox insist that the church is the body of Christ, his hands and feet and muscle in the world, obeying Christ the head and aspiring to do his work.

Charismatic Christians say the church consists of those who have been touched by the Spirit.

The truth is, all three emphases are correct. And we need all three. For if one emphasis only is upheld, distortion, lopsidedness and out-and-out error occur.

If we want to see the church whole and see as well its marvellous diversity, then we must view the church from three complementary angles of vision. As we do this we shall find our understanding deepening, even as we find our love for the church swelling – but never out-swelling our love for him who ever remains ruler and head of the church, Christ Jesus our Lord.

                                                                                                        Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

 April 2004

 

Ephesians 4:11-16      Jeremiah 23:13-17     Matthew 7:15-20

 

I: — I have a friend who is a physician at Toronto ’s Sunnybrook Hospital . He is also professor of medicine at the University of Toronto . Several years ago a fourth-year medical student was suspected of knowing very little medicine. University officials were embarrassed. How had this fellow managed to get to fourth year and seem so ignorant?  Who had marked his examinations and passed him during his first three years? Why had he been passed when he should have been failed?  Fourth-year medical students rarely fail, since less able students are weeded out much earlier in the programme.  My friend was called in. He asked the student two or three elementary questions concerning anatomy.  The student could not reply.  Whereupon my physician-friend told university officials to plough this fellow so deep that he would never surface in a medical classroom or clinic anywhere.

The one thing my friend did not do was say, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. No doubt there are good qualities in the fellow somewhere.  Let’s avoid hurting his feelings; after all, it’s terrible to be rejected. If the student is rejected he may never recover emotionally, and we wouldn’t want that on our hands!” Instead, “Expel this fellow right now before he has a chance to damage someone irrecoverably.”

When I was in Grade XIII chemistry the day came when we were to make hydrogen gas in the classroom.         I’m told that high school students are not permitted to make hydrogen gas now because of the risk of explosion the process entails. That’s why my chemistry teacher (1961) carefully instructed us in the properties of hydrogen gas and the precise steps we were to follow lest someone’s face be riddled with glass shards.  Then the teacher proceeded to monitor each student’s experiment. Suppose the teacher had said and done nothing and an explosion had occurred.         Wouldn’t parents have been right in pronouncing him negligent, even criminally negligent?

 

Prophet and apostle (whose written testimony scripture is) are so very concerned about false teaching ,  just because they know that a teacher or preacher or Sunday School instructor or UCW devotions leader fitted out with false doctrine is dangerous; dangerous to others of course, but also dangerous to herself.  And the congregation? Any congregation that lacks a Christian mind; any congregation indifferent to false teaching, false doctrine is as negligent as the perpetrator himself.

 

II: — And yet in congregations everywhere in Christendom we find people impatient with doctrine, impatience with an insistence on sound teaching, impatient, in short, with acquiring a Christian mind.  Someone is always saying, “Who needs it?  It’s only cerebralism for those who like head games.  Besides, doctrine is frequently an occasion of dispute.  Let’s get rid of it all and just go with Jesus, a doctrine-less Jesus.”

To speak like this, however, is not to know what one is saying.  For starters, who is this simple Jesus we are to go with?  Why go with him rather than with Winston Churchill?  Because Winston Churchill isn’t the Son of God.  “Son of God” did someone say?  But to speak of Jesus as the Son of God lands us squarely in the doctrine of the incarnation. All right, then, forget the incarnation; we shall speak only of Jesus Christ. But “Christ” isn’t our Lord’s surname (in the way that “Shepherd” is mine.)  “Christ”, CHRESTOS, is Greek for the Hebrew MASHIACH, meaning Messiah. The Messiah is God’s agent in righting creation gone wrong.  Two doctrines leap out at us: the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the fall. (Remember, a Messiah is needed only for a world gone wrong.)

Our objector, now grown impatient, retorts, “Forget Messiah; just give us the simple saviour of our Sunday School days.  Saviour? Saviour from what? Two doctrines leap out again: sin and salvation. “Can’t we just believe without all this mental clutter?”  Believe what? Besides, how does such belief differ from gullibility or superstition or mere opinion? Obviously “belief” presupposes a doctrine of faith.  There is no doctrine-less Jesus.

 

III: —    Doctrine, you see, is the articulation of truth.  Where doctrine is dismissed someone is saying there is no such thing as truth. But Christians cannot say this. Where doctrine is unknown truth cannot be known and cannot be commended.  But Christians are eager to know the truth and commend the truth since we are born of the truth. Where teaching is out-and-out false people are put on a road that ends in swamp or desert, never on a road that ends in the kingdom of God .

The older testament is everywhere concerned with false prophets and the damage they do. The newer testament is everywhere concerned with false teachers and the damage they do. There are five New Testament books which are especially concerned with the place of sound teaching (the acquiring of a Christian mind), the place of truth within the Christian community.  The five brief books are Paul’s two letters to Timothy (a young preacher), his letter to Titus, plus Peter’s second letter and Jude’s only letter. These five epistles especially emphasize the necessity of sound teaching and the danger of false teaching.

Ponder for a minute Paul’s line in his first letter to Timothy where he speaks of “…God our saviour, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”; or in J.B. Phillips’ paraphrase, “The purpose of God our saviour is that all men should be saved and come to know the truth”.  Plainly it is Paul’s conviction that we need to be saved – not helped, not boosted, not fixed up – saved (i.e., spared spiritual futility now and from eternal loss ultimately); it is his conviction that God longs to save us all without exception; it is his conviction too that God does so only as we come to know the truth, that truth which God himself is and that truth concerning ourselves which God discloses to us. Knowledge of God’s truth is essential to our possession of God’s salvation.  On the other hand it is just as plain that dissemination of false doctrine, false teaching which renders people ignorant of the truth; this imperils their salvation.

If we have a raging infection our physician prescribes an antibiotic (penicillin or something like it).  We take the medicine because we believe it is the cure for our infection. If penicillin were prescribed and we had already been told that it was not the cure for our infection, we should only disdain the medicine and have our infection worsen until we were sick unto death.

People rejoiced to hear the Christmas announcement just because they believed that what God had prescribed for them was the cure they needed. The good news of Christmas was that to them, to them even as they were helpless and hopeless in their predicament before God, there had been given a saviour.  Not any saviour; the effectual saviour, none other than Jesus of Nazareth and him only. John insists that Jesus Christ has been given us as “the remedy for the defilement of our sins”. Whenever false teachers with their false doctrine obscure this truth, deny this truth, diminish this truth, or cast aspersion upon it; whenever this truth is “fudged” in any way men and women are imperilled before God, since they will remain without the only saviour any of us can ever have.

Do not think I am exaggerating when I compare God’s truth to antibiotic medicine without which the infected person sickens unto death. When Paul speaks of “sound doctrine” in his letters to Timothy and Titus the one word he uses over and over for “sound” is HUGIAINOUSA; HUGIAINOUSA is an everyday medical term which means health-giving.  In other words, sound doctrine, sound teaching, is health-giving just as surely as false teaching is death-dealing.  In his first letter to Timothy Paul reminds the young man of what appears when a Christian mind is absent; i.e., when sound doctrine is absent and false teaching proliferates: “murderers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars and perjurers”.  Are these people contrasted with virtuous persons?  No. They are contrasted with “sound doctrine”, health-giving teaching.  At the end of his first letter to Timothy Paul speaks of “the teaching which accords with godliness”.  Not only does he insist that the young preacher “be able to give instruction in sound doctrine”, he tells Timothy why: “for by so doing you will be able to save both yourself and your hearers”.

When I used to interview candidates for the ministry in the courts of the church I let other committee-members probe the students’ social skills and marital history and career plans and psychological profile. Instead I always concentrated on the students’ grasp of God’s truth; I wanted to see the Christian furniture of their mind.  When I was told eventually that this was none of my business (can you believe it?) I resigned from the committee, for then I could no longer protect congregations who would be endangered a year or two later when these candidates were ordained.  The danger, after all, is not slight.  Jesus speaks of those who address a congregation all the while appearing to be warm, affectionate sheep when in fact they are ravenous wolves. They aren’t ravenous wolves because they are nasty or cruel; they turn out to be ravenous wolves — lethal, deadly — just because they are mindless with respect to the gospel (even if, perchance, sincere), just because they have substituted false teaching for God’s truth.

Little wonder, then, that Paul writes the congregation in Ephesus and urges the people in it – all the people in it – to grow up, to get beyond a child’s understanding. As long as a congregation has only a child’s understanding, says the apostle, it will always be “tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine”. “Tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine”: false teaching blows Christians off course, at the very least.  It likely leaves them upset (spiritually and emotionally seasick) and may even find them drowning.

For this reason the apostle Jude fulminates against false teachers in his one-chapter book. In the most scorching language Jude tells us that false teachers are “waterless clouds”: they promise life-giving rain but they never produce a drop for spiritually parched people.  They are “barren fruit-trees”: they yield nothing that is of any help to anyone. They are like “wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame”: not only are they as destructive as a typhoon, their own lives are shameful. Finally, says Jude, they are like “wandering stars”; today we should say “shooting stars” which fall out of the sky and fizzle out into the darkness. Jude’s language, scorching as it is, is no more severe than our Lord’s when he says that false teachers appear to be cuddly sheep when in fact they are lethal wolves.

 

IV: — We haven’t time to explore all the false teaching mentioned in the New Testament. We have time only to comment on representative false teaching.

(i)         John identifies as false any teaching which denies the incarnation. To deny the incarnation is to deny the atonement; this is to deny that we have been given a saviour. It’s to leave people floundering, ignorant and unrepentant, in their sinnership before God.

(ii)         Peter identifies as false teaching which denies that obedience to God is required of all Christians, with the result that licentiousness appears and the name of Jesus is disgraced.

(iii)         Paul identifies as false that teaching which pretends that people have to earn or merit or deserve their standing with God as pardoned sinners. Sound doctrine, on the other hand, insists that we are justified by grace through faith on account of Christ; we are set right with God, rightly related to him, as we trust in faith his provision of mercy, fashioned for us and vouchsafed to us in his Son.

(iv)         James identifies as false the teaching that we can be hearers of the Word of God without being doers of the selfsame Word.  To be an authentic hearer, says James, is always to be a doer, especially a doer on behalf of what James calls “the widow and the orphan”; that is, those people who are marginalized, vulnerable or defenceless.

(v)         Jude has more to say about false teachers in his tiny letter than any other NT writer. “Recognize them and avoid them”, he tells us.  How are we to recognize them?  If they contradict the gospel they give themselves away.         In addition, says Jude, they use fancy language; they are intellectual snobs; they are slick manipulators; and they claim to have the Holy Spirit extraordinarily when all the while they behave shamefully. Recognize them and avoid them.

 

V: — There is one crucial point you must give me time to make this morning: while correct teaching, sound doctrine, truth is necessary, it is not enough. Necessary, always necessary, but of itself never sufficient.  You see, it is possible to grasp the truth of God with one’s mind and yet have one’s heart far from God.

The Hebrew prophets always knew this.  The Hebrew prophets didn’t suspect that their people were ignorant of Torah. They knew that their people had been schooled in Torah since infancy and therefore were apprized of God’s nature and God’s purpose and God’s way.  Nevertheless, cried the prophets, what the people have in their heads they do not yet have in their hearts.  The God they say they believe in they do not obey.  The one whose love rescued them from Egypt and sustained them in the wilderness; this one who loves them they do not love in turn. The God they know so much about they are personally acquainted with so very slightly. The Hebrew prophets plead with their people to encounter intimately the person of the God whose truth has already informed their minds.

When I was moving step-by-step through my doctoral programme I had to sit a series of oral examinations on a variety of topics.  One of my examiners was Professor Jakob Jocz, a third-generation Lithuanian Hebrew-Christian. When my examination with him was over Jocz leaned forward in his chair, fixed his eyes on me and said in his pronounced, Eastern European accent, “Shepherd, you have done well in this examination.  But I want you to remember something.  As important as the truth is that we have probed today, it is by no means everything: what really counts is the shape of a person’s life”. I have never forgotten this.

I like to think that I have made considerable progress in acquiring a Christian mind. But this fact does not mean for one minute that I am more intimately acquainted with the living God than is the old saint who has prayed and wrestled, suffered and obeyed, pleaded and praised every day for decades and who can now echo the psalmist from the bottom of her heart: “I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me”. (Psalm 13:6)

Whenever I think about my grasp of sound doctrine I recall the word of the apostle James. James, together with all prophets and apostles, knows that sound doctrine is utterly essential to the calling and equipping and strengthening of God’s people. Then should every Christian aspire to be a teacher, an expositor of sound doctrine?         Of course not.

Still, there are six clergy-leaders in the congregation of St Bride’s who are appointed to teach.  We six are prayed for every Sunday.  Good. We need all the help we can get. At the same time, we should be aware, according to James, that those who teach are going to be judged with greater strictness.

Since we clergy-teachers are going to be judged with greater strictness, why don’t you do us the favour of judging us now, thereby sparing us something worse later? “What counts is the shape of a person’s life.”  Don’t leave us in any ghastly illusion concerning ourselves one day longer. For I know that the psalmist is correct when he insists that the upright, and only the upright, are going to behold the face of God. (Psalm 11:7)

 

                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                      
                                 
 October 2, 2010

 

St Bride’s Anglican Church, Mississauga

 

Jeremiah 23:13-17

Matthew 7:15

1 Timothy 1:3; 2:4; 1:10 ; 4:16 ;

Titus 1:9

Ephesians 4:13

Jude 12-13

James 2:19

Psalm 13:6; 11:7

 

 

Ephesians 4:24      Romans 13:14      Colossians 3:5-14

 

Nakedness renders very few people more handsome.  Most people look worse in the bathtub than they do anywhere else.  By the time we are 35 years old gravy and gravity have taken their toll. We look better clothed.

Then what shall we wear? Anything at all? Shabby clothes?  Soiled clothes? “Far-out” clothing as unserviceable as it is ostentatious?  Surely we want to wear clothing that enhances us.  And if we can find clothing that is “just right” for us, we may even say that our clothing “makes” us.

The apostle Paul was fond of the metaphor of clothing.  In his letters to congregations in Rome , Ephesus and Colosse he speaks metaphorically of clothing which should be thrown out, as well as of clothing which should be worn all the time.  The apostle knows something we do well to remember: nakedness (metaphorically speaking) is not possible.  It is impossible to be unclothed spiritually.  He never urges his readers to put on something in order to cover up their spiritual nakedness. Instead he urges them to take off that clothing which always clothes, naturally clothes, fallen human beings, and then to put on that clothing which adorns Christians, and adorns them just because they have first put on the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

 

I: — First, the clothing that has to be rejected.  Everyone knows that some clothing is not merely old or frayed or threadbare. Some clothing is much worse than this: it is vermin-ridden.  Vermin-ridden clothing is not to be washed or patched or simply set aside in case it comes back into fashion.  It has to be destroyed.

For this reason Paul begins his wardrobe recommendations with the startling phrase, “Put to death….”  “Put to death what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity…” and so on. Degenerate sexual behaviour is inappropriate to Christian discipleship and must be eliminated.

What the apostle had to say in this regard shocked the ancient world. In ancient Greece a man had a wife for human companionship; he had as many mistresses as he wanted for libidinal convenience; and he had a pubescent boy for ultimate sexual gratification. As the gospel surged into the ancient world Christian congregations stood out as islands of sexual purity in a sea of corruption.

Do we still stand out today?  Not so long ago the Toronto newspapers published articles on the promiscuity of NHL hockey players.  Players were not named for the most part (although one Maple Leaf identified himself unashamedly as one who had been tested for AIDS).  A player with the Montreal Canadiens, a fellow who makes no Christian profession at all, remarked, “I always thought it was supposed to be one man and one woman for life.”         Does it take a hockey player to remind the present-day church of what it is supposed to uphold? In the ancient world the church stood out as startlingly different; the society surrounding the church had never seen anything like it.

I am asked over and over what I think about “trial marriage”.  Invariably I say that “trial marriage” is a logical impossibility; it is as logically impossible as a trial parachute jump.  As long as you are standing in the doorway of the airplane, you haven’t jumped at all. Once you have jumped, however, it isn’t a trial; it’s the real thing.  A trial parachute jump is logically impossible.  So is a trial marriage.  If a commitment intending indissolubility hasn’t been made it isn’t marriage at all. If a commitment intending indissolubility has been made it isn’t a trial.  We can be sure of one thing: the person who foolishly thinks there can be “trial marriage” will also think there can be “trial adultery”. Paul, reflecting the conviction of all Christians of the apostolic era, insists that some clothing can’t be helped by spot remover.  It has to be destroyed. “Put to death what is earthly in you”, is his manner of speaking.

 

There are additional items of clothing which should be destroyed.  “Passion, evil desire, covetousness”, with covetousness underlined, since covetousness amounts to idolatry, he tells us.  The Greek word for covetousness is PLEONEXIA.  PLEON — more; EXIA, to have.  Covetousness is the passionate desire to have more — have more of anything. It is evil in that the passionate desire to have more corrupts us and victimizes others.

To crave greater prestige, greater notoriety, greater visibility is to embrace compromise after compromise until we have thoroughly falsified ourselves, a phoney of the phoneys.  To crave more goods is to fall into dishonesty.         To crave more power, greater domination, is to become first exploitative then cruel.

Paul sums up the passionate desire to have more — covetousness — as idolatry. Martin Luther used to say, “Our god is that to which we give ourselves, that from which we seek our ultimate satisfaction.”  What we pursue, what we actually pursue regardless of what we are too polite to say we pursue, what our heart is secretly set on when all the socially acceptable disguises are penetrated; this is our god.  Because we expect to be rewarded by this deity (and will be rewarded, Jesus guarantees with his repeated, “They have their reward…”) we secretly, yet surely, give ourselves to it.  Such idolatry, insists the apostle, we ought swiftly to put to death.

 

He isn’t finished yet. Also to be killed are “anger” and “wrath”.  ORGE, anger, is smouldering resentment, calculated resentment, long-relished resentment that nurses a grudge and plots ways to even the score. THUMOS, wrath, on the other hand, is a blow-up, the childish explosion that is no less sinful for being childish. The petulant adult with infantile tantrums, as well as the adult whose long-relished resentment is kept smouldering; both these people are pitiable. They think they are well-dressed when in fact their shabby clothes are loathsome because verminous.

 

Lastly, the apostle speaks of “slander”, “abusive talk”, and “lying”. Slander is the ruination of someone else’s reputation.  Abusive talk is any language that assaults and is meant to hammer people. Lying is deliberate misrepresentation. The slanderer is as lethal as a rattlesnake.  The abusive talker is as brutal as a sledgehammer.         These people plainly damage others.  The liar, on the other hand, while certainly deceiving others, principally damages himself. You see, the liar who lies even in the smallest matters has rendered himself untrustworthy. Once he is known to be untrustworthy no one will say anything of any importance to him; no one will confide in him. All he will hear for as long as he is known as a liar is what’s trivial. Of course the liar can be forgiven (and should be); but the liar can never be trusted. Far more than he victimizes others he victimizes himself.

 

The apostle never minces words.  There is clothing we must not merely shed; we must get rid of it.  “Put to death”, he tells us, the impurity which defiles, the craving which corrupts, and the talk which either damages others or renders oneself untrustworthy.

 

II: — At the beginning of the sermon I said that nakedness (metaphorically) isn’t possible. We jettison the clothing which we must only because we have first put on, already put on, the new clothing which becomes all of us.  In his letter to the Christians in Rome Paul says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”  We do put him on — in faith — so that he becomes ours and we become his. To the Christians in Ephesus Paul writes, “Put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”  To the Christians in Colosse he says, “Put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”

It is plain that Christians are those who, in faith, have put on Jesus Christ himself. As we put on him we put on that renewed human nature which he is and which he fits onto us; as all of this happens the image of God, in which we were created but which has become scratched and marred and defaced — this image of God is re-engraved and now stands out starkly.

If this is really what has happened (and what more could happen?), what is the result of our having put on Christ?

 

(i)         The first result is startling; the first result is so public, so notorious, so blatant that it can be observed even by those who make no profession of faith at all. The first result is that the barriers throughout the world which divide, isolate and alienate human beings from each other are crumbled.  “Here there cannot be Greek or Jew”, says Paul, “…nor barbarian, Scythian, slave or free person; but Christ is all and in all.”

The barriers in the ancient world were as ugly as they are today.  The Greeks regarded themselves as intellectually superior to everyone else. They were the cultured of the cultured. The Greek language was considered both the most expressive and the most mellifluous (beautiful sounding) of any language.  Why, compared to the sound of Greek all other languages had a harsh, unmusical, brutish sound: “bar-bar”.  Greek people therefore regarded everyone else in the world as a barbarian.

We modern people look upon the study of languages as a mark of the educated person. No one brags of being unilingual.  But the ancient Greeks boasted of knowing one language only.  They despised the study of non-Greek languages.  They argued that since every language is inferior to their own, and since everyone who speaks an inferior language is inferior to the Greek people, why waste time studying the inferior languages of inferior people?   Max Mueller, an internationally acclaimed linguist of the late nineteenth century; Mueller insisted that a desire to learn other languages arose only through the indirect illumination of the gospel, arose only when the people who spoke these languages were no longer seen as barbarians but as brothers/sisters.

The Scythians mentioned in our text today are named inasmuch as they were regarded as the lowest form of human life.  “More barbarian than the barbarians” is how the Greeks spoke of them. Scythians were held to be barely human, scarcely human.

Utterly unhuman were slaves.  In the ancient world the slave wasn’t considered to be a human being in any sense. Slaves had no rights. They could be beaten, maimed or killed with impunity — and why not, since killing a slave, through overwork, for instance, was no more significant than breaking a garden-rake through overuse.  No less a philosopher than Aristotle had said that a slave was a highly efficient tool that had one disadvantage not found in other tools: the slave had to be fed.

And yet in the early days of the church the spiritual leader of the congregation was frequently a slave.         Freemen and women, people whose social class towered above that of a slave; freemen and women recognized the godliness of the slave who was leading their congregation. They recognized the spiritual authenticity and authority of someone whom the society at large didn’t even regard as human, and deferred to it.  Only in a Christian congregation could this phenomenon be seen.  It happened nowhere else. It was the single most public consequence of putting on Christ.

One consequence of putting on our Lord, of putting on our new nature in righteousness and holiness, is that the congregation is a living demonstration of the collapse of those barriers which divide, isolate and alienate people from each other.

 

(ii)         A second consequence: in putting on Christ, in putting on that new nature which is being renewed after the image and likeness of God, we become clothed with the character that shines in our Lord himself.

We put on compassion and kindness.  Compassion is literally the state of being attuned to someone else’s suffering. It is the exact opposite of what we mean by “do-gooder”.  The do-gooder does good, all right (or at least does what he regards as good), but does it all from a safe distance, does it all with his hands but is careful to leave his heart out of it, lest his heart become wrenched, never mind broken.  The compassionate person, on the other hand, is completely different; the compassionate person’s heart is attuned to someone else’s suffering, even if there is very little that that person can do with her hands. If you were afflicted or tormented yourself, which person would you rather have with you: the do-gooder who will only tinker remotely, or the compassionate person who may only be able to resonate with your pain? — always the latter, for the latter will in the long run be vastly more helpful and healing than the tinkerer.

We put on kindness as well. Kindness is holding our neighbour’s wellbeing as dear as our own.  Such kindness has about it none of the negativities surrounding “do-goodism”. In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry the word “kind” was used of wine; wine was said to be kind when full-bodied red wine had no sourness about it. Such wine was rich and delightful but without any sour aftertaste.  The same word is used by our Lord himself when he says, “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is — is what, easy? The English translations say “easy”, but the Greek word is CHRESTOTES, and everywhere else it means kind. An ox-yoke was said to be kind when the yoke fit so well that it didn’t chafe the animal’s neck. “Yoke” is a common Hebrew metaphor for obedience to Torah.  When our Lord tells us that his yoke is kind he means that our obedience, an aspect of our faith in him; such obedience to him won’t irritate us, chafe us, rub us raw – or render us sour.

When we put on Christ, continues Paul, we put on lowliness, meekness and patience. Lowliness is humility, and humility, you have heard me say one hundred times, is simply self-forgetfulness.

Then what about meekness? Meekness is strength exercised through gentleness.  All of us have strengths; to be sure, we have weaknesses as well, but all of us have strengths. We can exercise our strengths heavy-handedly, coercively, domineeringly, or we can exercise our strengths gently.  When Paul wrote his epistles the word “meek” was used every day to describe the wild horse which was now tamed (and therefore useful) but whose spirit had not been broken.

Patience means we are not going to explode or quit, sulk or sabotage when things don’t get done in congregational life exactly as we should like to see them done.

We put on forgiveness, and forgive each other, moved to do so simply by the astounding forgiveness we have received from our Lord himself.

 

(iii)         The final consequence of putting on Christ: we put on love, with the result, says Paul, that the congregation “is bound together in perfect harmony”. He maintains that a congregation is to resemble a symphony orchestra.         An orchestra never consists of one instrument only playing the same note over and over. An orchestra consists of many different instruments sounding many different notes at the same time. The full sound of the orchestra is what people want to hear.  Whether the full sound is a good sound or a grating sound depends on one thing: is the orchestra playing in harmony?

We should be aware of what the metaphor of harmony doesn’t mean for congregational life. It doesn’t mean that the goal of congregational life is uniformity or conformity; and it doesn’t mean that voices which shouldn’t be heard all the time shouldn’t be heard at all.  (The sharp crack of the timpani drum and the piercing note of the piccolo aren’t heard often in an orchestra, but when they need to be heard they should be heard.)

It is love, says the apostle, and love only, which renders congregational life harmony rather than cacophony.         For it is such love which renders our life together honouring to God, helpful to us, and attractive to others who may yet become Christ’s people as they too are persuaded to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. For as they do this, they will find, as we have found already, that to put on him is also to put on that human nature which God has appointed for us.         And to clothe ourselves in this is to find that clothes do indeed make the man — and the woman too.

 

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                     

June 2007

 

Ephesians 4:25-32       Exodus 23:1-9      Matthew 5:21-24; 43-48

 

[1]      What must it have been like, that day in the temple, when Jesus braided a whip (it would have taken him 10 or 15 minutes to braid the whip; plainly his violence was premeditated; we can’t pretend anything else), while his eyes flashed fire and his voice skinned people as he kicked over tables and scattered money?  What must it have been like to see our Lord enraged?

 

What’s more, Jesus was angry not once but many times.  He was livid whenever he saw religious hucksters fleecing defenceless people; livid again whenever he came upon church leaders who caused followers to stumble; livid once more whenever he ran into hard-hearted people who cared not a whit about the suffering of those who had suffered for years.

In view of the fact that Jesus was angry on so many occasions I am surprised that the church has customarily assumed that anger of any sort is sinful. In view of the church’s distortion of what it means to follow Jesus I am no longer surprised at the apathy that surrounds us everywhere in our society; no longer surprised that even the worst apathy — the kind that invites victimization — is now paraded as a virtue.  I have never doubted that our Lord turned water into wine; I am just as certain that the church regularly turns wine into water, not least where it fails to grasp the nature of our Lord’s anger and thereby fosters the pseudo-virtue of apathy.

At the same time, angry as our Lord is on many occasions he will yet die for the very people who have enraged him.         We must always remember this and take it to heart concerning our own anger. Our Lord’s anger at people never inhibits his love for them.  He will give up his life — gladly give it up — for the same people who have infuriated him. Having been angry with them (rightly angry with them), he yet never disdains them, doesn’t ignore them, doesn’t dismiss them, doesn’t write them off as lesser creatures not worth his time and attention and energy. The people who have made him boil he will yet love with his last breath.

From our Lord’s example it is plain that apathy is inexcusable in any Christian. It is plain, according to scripture, that Christians are commanded to be angry when situations call for anger. “Be angry”, the apostle Paul tells his readers.  “Be angry”, he insists, “but do not sin.”  We are to be angry even as we are not to sin in our anger.         Plainly anger can curdle into sin.  Then when is anger sin?

 

[2]         Anger is sin whenever anger gives way to revenge.  Revenge impels us toward bloodletting.  Revenge pursues retaliation.  (Our Lord’s anger, we should note, never issued in retaliation.)

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was president of the USA a journalist asked him why he and his brothers “boiled over” so very infrequently. “We Kennedys don’t get angry”, replied JFK coolly, “we get even”.

Before we think the Kennedys vicious and ourselves virtuous we must understand that anyone at all can begin virtuously and end viciously. The pattern is plain. We are brought into the orbit of something that leaves us justifiably angry.  But if we are not spiritually alert, our anger at injustice becomes the occasion of temptation to revenge.  Now our anger at injustice has perverted itself into enjoyment at the prospect of revenge. We begin to nurse our anger, feed off it, rationalize the twist with which we have twisted it. The result is that anger becomes our settled disposition; anger becomes our characteristic mood, the colour of our blood, the core of our personality.

There are always telltale signs when people have fallen into carefully nursed anger (now sin) that has also become their characteristic mood. The first sign is that they imagine slights where there is none.  They speak of themselves as “sensitive”. But in fact they aren’t sensitive at all; they are merely “touchy”. Genuinely sensitive people, like Jesus, are moved at injustice, injustice that principally victimizes others. Touchy people, on the other hand, can think only of themselves.  Sensitive people forget themselves in their outrage at manifest injustice. Touchy people focus on themselves in their never-ending narcissism.

Another sign of anger that has curdled into revenge and therefore denatured into sin is over-reaction.  “Did you hear that?” someone now fumes, “I have been treated shabbily.” To be sure, an offence has occurred; but it was relatively slight.  A rowboat, rowed by someone who may be malicious but as often as not is merely inept, bumped into us.         We now launch an aircraft carrier.  We were pricked with a safety pin?  Out comes our 12-foot spear, replete with poison tip.  When word goes through a staff or a board or a committee that Mrs. “X” has a short fuse (and therefore all present are made to feel that they must step carefully), the most obvious feature of Mrs. “Short-fuse X” isn’t that she explodes quickly; it’s that she explodes over trifles, trifles that affect her.  Before long she is also telling everyone that whatever it is that has made her angry was done deliberately simply to “get” her, as all of life is now interpreted to be endless conspiracy.

When anger passes from obedience to the command of God to fodder for the evil one, when anger becomes our settled disposition, we display the destructive urge that psychoanalysts say lurks ever so deep in us.         Psychoanalysts comment a great deal on humankind’s deep-seated urge to destroy, which urge unconsciously finds satisfaction wherever it can. Before psychoanalysis noticed it scripture insisted on it and even illustrated it. We moderns try to deny it, telling ourselves that we have progressed beyond all of this. But of course no cultural sophistication, however rich, overturns anything pertaining to the Fall.

I find movies entertaining twice over.  The movie itself is entertaining, and the response of the movie-watchers in the theatre is also entertaining.  In the course of one entertaining movie-night I saw on the screen a young man playing an electric guitar.  The amplifier cut out on him.  No sound now. He fiddled with the dials on the amplifier for a while, becoming increasingly enraged. Finally he grabbed the guitar by the neck, swung it like an axe, and smashed both guitar and amplifier in a fit of destructive fury.  At this point the movie-watching audience laughed, laughed uproariously, as though something enormously funny had occurred.

Psychoanalysts maintain that one reason for laughter is this: what we are found laughing at points to something deep inside us whose subject-matter we cannot discuss or admit in polite company.  Laughter is the smokescreen behind which we can bring out what is ever so deep in us yet which is not normally socially acceptable, not customarily aired in polite company.  This is why we laugh at off-colour jokes, laugh at racist jokes, and laugh at exhibitions of destructive rage.  The anger-fuelled urge to destroy courses deep inside fallen humankind. Expressing it isn’t socially acceptable. Therefore socially acceptable vehicles are sought that will allow it to emerge.  Humour is such a vehicle.

Once anger has moved from a right response at injustice to a settled disposition we wish to nourish inasmuch as it feeds us; once this has occurred anger quickly turns into hatred.

Years ago when I naively (and non-biblically) had vastly more confidence in the political enterprise to transmute the human situation, I became disillusioned with both the political right and the political left. My disillusionment with the political right came first, and I fled to the left.  From the political left I heard a high-flown vocabulary about concern for the poor and solidarity with the disadvantaged.  But I didn’t find much concern for the poor, certainly no willingness to make any sacrifice for the poor.  I found enormous anger at the rich born of envy of the rich.  I have yet to meet a socialist who isn’t a closet capitalist.  I have met many who maintained in one breath that they were committed socialists and who complained in the next breath that their investment portfolio wasn’t performing as well as expected.  Anger as a settled disposition, residual rage bent on revenge, will invariably turn us into people whose apparent quest for righteousness is merely the disguise that hatred wears.

 

[3]         Then how do we leave the very pit of hell where settled anger smoulders all but inextinguishably?  We leave it only by looking up, looking up at the One who is light and love and life. As we look to him who is light, love, life and therefore truth we must allow his truth to x-ray us ruthlessly.

(i)         First we must allow ourselves to be interrogated as to the command of God never to seek revenge.  Have we really heard the command of God?  Do we intend to obey him? Do we know that the Hebrew word (and the Greek word too) for obedience has the grammatical form of intensified hearing?  (In other words, if we don’t obey then we have never profoundly heard, regardless of what we say we have heard.)  Revenge is always forbidden God’s people.         “Never avenge yourselves” God insists; “vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.”  We are not to finesse the matter of revenge at all.  (By “finesse” I mean exact revenge, thereby satisfying ourselves, all of this done with as much stealth and sophistication as needed to keep us appearing anything but vindictive.)  We are instead to leave the entire matter with God.

There is a crucial point we must understand this morning.  When God says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay”, he does not mean that we can forget about exacting revenge because he is going to exact it for us, and exact it more painfully than we ever could ourselves. We are not to leave vengeance to him on the understanding that he is infinitely vengeful — as if he had a heart as depraved as ours.

For years I watched Bobby Clarke, the most talented hockey player with the Philadelphia Flyers, use his stick to cut down and cut up opposing players as though his stick were a scythe.  Opponents, needless to say, reacted with heavy stickwork of their own. At this point Clarke always acted as if he had been treated unfairly, as if he were the victim of a “first-strike” policy implemented by the opposing team.  With his posture of victimization Clarke let it be known that revenge was now in order. But Clarke never tried to avenge himself.  He let two goons do it for him: Dave “The Hammer” Schultz and Bob “Mad Dog” Kelly. Clarke could safely leave revenge to his two team-mates since they could exact it much more thoroughly.

This is not what is going on when God says, “Don’t you avenge yourselves; leave it with me.” We must never think that God can be counted on to act on our behalf in a manner commensurate with our depravity.  God’s command to us means something entirely different; namely, the whole matter of revenge we should simply forget.         The jab, the insult, the offence that has brought out our lurking revenge we should lay before God and leave there.         We aren’t trusting God to exact revenge on our behalf; rather, we are trusting God to work his unique work for good in an evil situation which has so enraged us that we passed the bounds of rationality days ago and are incapable of any objectivity concerning it.  We are trusting God to do something positive, something good, something restorative with a situation that we, in our upset, cannot assess accurately, and in our anger can only make worse.  We are forswearing vengeance not in order to allow God to exact it for us and exact it more painfully than we ever could; we are forswearing it because we now know that what we are bent on he isn’t.  Where we can only add to the world’s distress (even as we acquit ourselves self-righteously for doing so), he can uniquely relieve the world’s distress. Therefore we are to leave vengeance with him.  Note: we are not to leave vengeance to him; we are to leave our vengeance with him; that is, lay it before him and walk away from it ourselves.

Our first responsibility is to hear the command of God; really hear it; that is, obey him.

(ii)         Our second responsibility is to admit that our heart is every bit as depraved as the heart of the person who has offended us.  Therefore we too need deliverance from perverted passion.  We don’t need timely suggestions, sound advice, a model to imitate; we don’t need these chiefly.  We need deliverance.

While we may be either annoyed or mystified by the people who use “born again” language we must admit nonetheless that the promise of a fresh start in life, an ever-renewed new beginning; this is what the gospel is finally about. While many people suspect any talk of Christian experience as exhibitionistic and therefore fraudulent, our foreparents in faith were unashamed to speak unselfconsciously of what their hearts had come to know and cherish. We must never belittle the private necessity, the public significance, and the gospel-promise of a genuine change in the human heart.  The power needed to render the covetous person contented and the addicted person sober is dwarfed by the power needed to render the vengeful heart a vehicle of mercy. For this reason Jesus (who, said John Calvin, comes to us “clothed with his promises”) promises and guarantees all we need for the one and only attitude Christians are permitted to have toward their enemies: “Love your enemies and pray for those who spear you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”   Jeremiah insists that the people of Israel must seek the well-being even of the Babylonians who have captured them, taunt them, and threaten them relentlessly.  Moses insists that when an Israelite sees his enemy’s ox or ass going astray, the Israelite doesn’t say, “Let that stinker find his own animal — if he can find it before it breaks a leg”.  Instead, he must inconvenience himself and return even his enemy’s animal. Job, overwhelmed at his suffering, had to endure his friends telling him that perhaps he did wrong here or there.   Job, however, insists that there is one wrong he has not committed: he has never rejoiced at the misfortune of an enemy.

Peter tells us that when Jesus was reviled he did not revile in return. Paul tells us that when we are reviled we are to bless. To do anything else is to tell the world that we have not yet been delivered from a heart that is as cold, hard and venomous as the heart of the person whose treatment of us we deem inexcusable. Then deliverance is precisely what we need above all else.

(iii)         In the third place we are to hear and heed the command not to let the sun go down on our anger. We are not to let the sun go down on our just anger, our proper anger.  Even that anger which mirrors Christ’s; even that anger apart from which we should be culpably apathetic; even this anger must not be found in us after sunset.

In Hebrew thought the setting of the sun sets limits to many human activities. The wages of a hired man (a day-labourer) have to be paid by sunset.  Pawned goods must be returned by sunset.  A corpse has to be buried by sunset.   Anger, however justified, must not be put on the back burner, there to simmer indefinitely. Sunset sets limits even to the most righteous anger.  After all, the psalmist reminds us, “God will not always chide; he will not remain angry forever”.   If our heart is attuned to Christ’s then we should react in anger in those situations where he reacts.         But since our heart is attuned to his we shall not nourish our anger, not gloat over it, not allow it work evil and therein intensify the world’s misery. In the words of Paul, we are to give no opportunity to the devil.  Commenting on this latter statement John Calvin remarked in his quaint way 450 years ago, “If your wrath endures, the devil will take possession of your heart”. Through the prophet Isaiah God himself has said, “In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you; but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you”.

We must be found doing nothing less and nothing else.

 

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     February 2006

 

Ephesians 4:29

[1] In World War II American fliers in the Pacific theatre were provided with a package of shark repellent. As soon as the downed flier had parachuted into the water he released his shark repellent. The repellent spread out around him, forming a protective sphere within which he could survive. Inside the sphere he was safe, in no danger from sharks. If, however, he foolishly decided to move out beyond the sphere of the repellent, he would be devoured immediately.

The Ten Commandments demarcate the sphere, in a fallen world, within which we can thrive, within which there is safety and freedom. As long as we live within this sphere we shall find life blessed, wholesome, satisfying. We shall know and enjoy the freedom which God has fashioned for us. If, however, we decide to extend ourselves beyond the sphere which the commandments mark out, we shall find not freedom but enslavement; not blessing but curse; not life which thrives but death whose deadliness deadens everything around it.

Since the ninth commandment forbids us to bear false witness against our neighbour, it’s plain that to gossip is to think — foolishly — that we can live beyond the sphere of God’s protection and blessing. But we can’t. To bear false witness, to gossip, is to poison ourselves and slay others; to gossip is to let loose poison gas which renders everyone sick unto death.

We have no difficulty understanding that to try to live outside the sphere demarcated by the commandments is to embrace death; that is, we have no difficulty understanding this for some of the commandments. Murder, for instance, or stealing or adultery. Simply to think of these three instances of wickedness is to know that where they thrive we don’t; and conversely, if we are to thrive then these three are to be renounced. Murder, stealing, adultery — and gossip. Is gossip in the same class? Is it really this serious? Is it as disgraceful? as destructive? as deadly? The fact that God forbids us to bear false witness as surely as he forbids us to murder should convince any doubter that gossip is iniquitous.

 

[2] If, however, the doubter remains doubting then a moment’s reflection on what gossip does should convince us.

If we are inclined to think that gossip is a harmless amusement that merely tickles the ear, nothing more than coffee-break chatter, then we should understand that unfounded rumour can end someone’s reputation, end her career, end her life. “She is over-fond of men”, someone says with a knowing wink. Said of a dancehall entertainer the gossip would likely fall to the ground, harmless. (It might even enhance the dancehall entertainer’s business.) But said of a physician it would be ruinous.

“She doesn’t declare everything on her income tax return.” Said of the single mother trying to support herself and her family through the day-care she operates out of her home it would mobilize little. But said of an accountant it would be the end of everything.

“He is disloyal.” Said of a separatist politician from Quebec it is so far from being slanderous as almost to be a badge of honour. But said of a military officer it would mean dismissal. Captain Albert Dreyfus, an officer in the French army at the turn of the century, was accused of treason. There wasn’t an iota of evidence to support the accusation. For ten years Dreyfus and his friends struggled to clear his name. After ten years he was exonerated. By then he and his wife and his children were ruined. While he was exonerated officially, millions of French citizens viewed him as a disgrace — when all the while he was innocent.

Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian chest surgeon who worked with the Eighth Route Army in revolutionary China, nicked his finger with a scalpel one day while performing surgery on a wounded soldier. The nick seemed inconsequential. Before long, however, Bethune was dead from septicaemia. Gossip may appear no more than a nick. But some nicks are deadly!

In World War I Chlorine gas was used on enemy forces. It was a lethal substance which killed men, not instantly, but slowly and agonizingly as their lungs were seared and they choked. In other words, chlorine gas killed after it had induced terrible suffering and panic. There always remained one huge problem in the deployment of chlorine gas: unforeseen changes in wind direction. A change in wind direction brought the gas back upon those who had only recently released it. At this point the gas didn’t merely take down the enemy; it took down everyone. Gossip is just like that.

 

[3] This being the case, why do we gossip? Before we look for ultra-sophisticated analyses as to why we gossip we should be sure we understand the most elemental reason for gossip: false witness comes naturally out of the depraved human heart. It is not the case that humankind’s heart is naturally righteous or godly (if it were, the gospel would be superfluous). The human heart, rather, is by nature (fallen nature) a fountain of corruption. “For out of the heart” (this is Jesus speaking) “come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.” When we ask, “Why does gossip, malicious gossip, leap unbidden to the tongue?”, we must always recall the pronouncement of Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?”. As often as we look for a reason for our addiction to gossip we must remember that at bottom our addiction to gossip is unreasonable, irrational — as irrational as all the addictions of the corrupt heart. (Recall Kierkegaard: “Whoever claims to understand sin has never experienced it.”)

Once we have admitted that gossip is an outcropping of our innermost corruption; once we admit that the root of gossip is sunk in invisible irrationality, we can then safely attempt rational explanations for some features of gossip.

For instance, we find it virtually impossible to honour someone else’s right-to-privacy. Not wanting to honour someone else’s right-to-privacy we speculate or fantasize as to what is happening in that person’s private life. Next (and here’s the lethal step) we voice our speculations or fantasies as though they were factual. There are no grounds for doing this. But who needs grounds? What we can only guess at we utter as though it had been proven a hundred times over; all the while we know nothing at all.

We gossip, too, inasmuch as we are vindictive cowards who want to hurt someone without being held accountable for our assault. If we walked up to the person we wish to hurt and punched her in the face, we’d be in jail for assault. Then how to assault without having to account for it? Gossip. Gossip is the signature of the person who is vindictive and cowardly in equal measure.

We gossip, again, inasmuch as we are envious. Not only can we not accord someone else her right-to-privacy, we cannot accord her her right-to-possession. We cannot endure someone whose house is larger, or bank account richer, or inheritance greater, or ability grander, or children brighter. Since the disparity between someone else and us is unendurable, we have to end the disparity. There are only two ways of doing this: either we elevate ourselves or we bring her down. Only the latter is feasible. But how are we to bring her down? We can’t embezzle her savings or reduce the academic achievement of her children or diminish her talent. We can only gossip. Three words of gossip and she will be levelled; more than levelled, she will be beneath us. What a triumph! (When individuals do this, it is called gossip; when a nation does it collectively, it is called propaganda.)

 

[4] The command of God is plain: we are not to bear false witness against our neighbour. “False witness” is the English translation found in both places of the older testament where the Ten Commandments are stated, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. The English translations are identical, but the Hebrew texts behind them differ. In Exodus 20 the Hebrew text which is translated “false witness” means lying, falsehood, what is untrue. In Deuteronomy 5 the Hebrew which is also translated “false witness” refers to insincerity or frivolousness. In other words, Exodus 20 refers to the substance of what is said, while Deuteronomy 5 refers to the mood and motivation of what is said. The Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 5 recognizes that it is possible to say what is factually correct but to say it in a mood and out of a motivation which is every bit as damaging as an outright lie. When the Hebrew bible forbids us to bear false witness it forbids us both to utter what is untrue and to utter what may be true but the uttering of which arises from a mood and motivation which aim at someone else’s ruin. In Psalm 51 the psalmist maintains that God “desires truth in our inward being”. “Truth in our inward being” means both outward truth, devoid of falsehood, and inward heart-purity, devoid of insincerity or duplicity.

 

[5] As we school ourselves more profoundly in the revelation entrusted to our Hebrew foreparents we come to appreciate Israel’s horror — sheer horror — at false witness. The psalmist cries that to have malicious witnesses rise up against him is the worst thing that could befall him. (Have you ever been slandered? If you have, you will agree with the psalmist instantly.)

Our Israelite foreparents were so fearful of false witness that one witness — one witness only — was never sufficient to convict anyone in a lawcourt. Testimony given by one witness alone was worthless.

Hearsay was never permitted. If someone said, “I didn’t see it happen myself, but last week Samantha told me she saw it happen” — worthless as well.

The Mishnah stated (the Mishnah is the distillate of rabbinic wisdom); the Mishnah stated that anyone who was commonly known to be loose-tongued or mean-spirited was disqualified as a witness; that person’s testimony was worthless at all times and in all circumstances.

The Mishnah stated too that if someone were discovered bearing false witness, that person must be punished with the same punishment that would have been assigned to the accused if the accused had been convicted. In other words, if person A testified falsely against person B concerning fraud, and the penalty for fraud was five years in prison, then person A, the bearer of false witness, himself went to prison for five years. In situations where this arrangement was impossible to implement (for instance, if false testimony were offered concerning the legitimacy of a child, the false testifier couldn’t suddenly be pronounced illegitimate himself), then the person bearing false witness was lashed 40 times. If the penalty for an offence was normally 40 lashes in any case, then the person bearing false witness was lashed 80 times. In other words, our Israelite foreparents wanted everyone to know that before someone spoke so much as one syllable against another person, the speaker had better know that he must speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and do this without any insincerity, frivolousness or malice.

The Mishnah said one thing more. When a witness offered testimony concerning an offense whose penalty was death, and it was the witness’s testimony which secured the conviction, then the witness (whose testimony had been true) must nevertheless himself serve as executioner. It was felt that if someone testifying truly still had to serve as executioner, then someone testifying falsely concerning capital offenses could never live with himself if his false testimony secured a conviction followed by an execution which the false testifier himself had to implement.

Then perhaps the safest thing to do was not say anything; not bear witness at all, whether true or false; simply keep one’s lip buttoned and one’s head down. But this wasn’t permitted in Israel. The person who remained silent when he heard gossip; the person who heard gossip but did not denounce it on the spot; that person was deemed guilty of gossip himself, guilty of bearing false witness. The person who said in self-extenuation, “But at least I never repeated the gossip I heard”; that person was as much guilty of gossip as the gossiper herself. Leviticus 5 states that to hear gossip and not denounce it is to be guilty of gossip — and therefore subject to the appropriate punishment for false witness.

It is little wonder that the prophet Malachi tells us that God will flay any and all who bear false witness.

 

[6] Gossip is a curse. What is the cure?

The first stage in the cure is to hear the command of God afresh. What is the ninth commandment? that we are not to bear false witness? No! We are not to bear false witness against our neighbour. A command not to bear false witness would be highly abstract, devoid of human face and heart. But a command not to bear false witness against our neighbour reminds us constantly that we have to do with a specific, living, suffering, fragile flesh-and-blood person.

Specific? How specific? Who is our neighbour? Jesus was asked this question. He replied in his parable of the Good Samaritan. The point of the parable is this: our neighbour is the person nearby us who is in need. Our neighbour is that person who is so very proximate to us that we find ourselves bumping into her all the time: grocery store, library, dentist’s waiting room. Already she is in great need. Are we going to worsen her neediness by bearing false witness against her? We are not to bear false witness against our neighbour. Our neighbour, according to Jesus, is the person whom we meet in the course of the day’s unfolding and whose need is undeniable. To worsen that person’s suffering through gossip is unspeakable cruelty and detestable sin.

Israel, we have seen, was horrified at false witness. It did everything it could to inculcate that horror into all its people. Its approach here was similar to the approach used with teenagers who are convicted of impaired driving. Teenagers convicted of impaired driving are made to watch film-footage of motor vehicle accidents caused by impaired drivers; made to watch motor vehicle accidents whose victims are killed or crippled; made to watch all of this in the hope that horror at impaired driving will be inculcated in the teenager and remain inculcated forever.

If we could be made to see what gossip does to that neighbour whose need finds her suffering intensely already we should be horrified, for life. And a most excellent thing it would be.

There is more to the cure for the curse of gossip. The next step in the cure is to hear and heed the apostolic injunction. Look at what Paul says to the church in Colosse: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt…”. Salt, in scripture, is a sign of the covenant. Salt is a sign of the pledge God has made to us, pledging himself, promising himself, ever to be our God, never to forsake us. Grace is God’s faithfulness to his pledge; grace is God himself forever keeping the promise he has made to us. To say that God is gracious is to say that nothing will ever deflect him from his pledge and promise to be God-for-us. Because you and I are sinners God’s faithfulness meets our sin. When God’s faithfulness meets our sin, his faithfulness takes the form of mercy. Salt, then, is the sign of God’s pledge to us that he will ever stand by us and envelop us in mercy.

The apostle Paul says that our speech is to be seasoned with salt. Our speech is to reflect to others the faithfulness and mercy of God himself. This is crucial; after all, we live in a world characterized by unfaithfulness and mercilessness. Christians are to be salt in this world; our speech is to be salt. Salty speech is a sign of what we are in ourselves: people who are not unfaithful to the suffering neighbour but rather who support the suffering neighbour faithfully, always enveloping him or her in mercy.

In his letter to the Christians in Ephesus Paul writes that their speech is to be “such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear”.

Our speech must fit the occasion. Of course our speech must be truthful; but more is needed. Our truthful speech must fit the context, fit the occasion. A physician who spoke the truth about a patient’s medical condition at a cocktail party would be hanged. No physician could ever plead that he was telling the truth and only the truth. The occasion is entirely unfitting, entirely inappropriate. The schoolteacher who said to the 8-year old in front of 25 other 8-year olds, “No wonder you are sleepy in class every day; your mother and father fight so much that no one can get enough sleep in your home”; the teacher who said that could never excuse herself on the grounds that she was only telling the truth. Her truth-telling does not “fit the occasion”.

The apostle insists as well that our speech is to be edifying; it is to be more than merely true, more than barely true; it is to be edifying.

And then Paul says something about which I have never heard a sermon: he says that our speech is a sacrament. He does not say in his Ephesian letter that our speech is to reflect God’s grace; he says that our speech imparts God’s grace. If human speech imparts God’s grace, then our speech is a sacrament.

Throughout the history of the church there have been bloodletting controversies over the sacraments. What is a sacrament? What is not? Protestants jump up and say, “There are two sacraments only, baptism and the Lord’s Supper”. Roman Catholics reply, “Seven; there are seven sacraments. Marriage, ordination to the priesthood, penance — plus others — are sacraments too.” At one point in the middle ages there were twelve sacraments. Not once in my reading of church history; not once have I come upon a discussion of speech as a sacrament. But the apostle Paul (whom Protestants appear to venerate above all others) plainly says that it is a sacrament. A sacrament of what? Poison gas? No! A sacrament of God’s grace.

My last point in the cure for the curse of gossip. All of us are jabbed from time-to-time. We may be jabbed verbally or non-verbally. Whether we are jabbed verbally or non-verbally, our first instinct, our depraved instinct, is to retaliate verbally. In retaliating verbally we bear false witness. We may do so by uttering gossip, or by uttering truth maliciously, since our mood and motivation are deadly. I have found there is one sure way of defusing the temptation to retaliate. When next you are jabbed, don’t dwell on the nastiness of the person who jabbed you. Instead look upon that person as your neighbour; which is to say, find out where that person is suffering. Then dwell on that person’s suffering. Wrap your heart around that person’s suffering. You will find that the temptation to gossip, the temptation to bear false witness, evaporates in that instant.

F I N I S

                                                                    Victor A. Shepherd

January 1994

Exodus 20:11*
Deuteronomy 5:20*
Matthew 15:19
Jeremiah 17:9
Psalm 51:6
Leviticus 5:1
Malachi 3:5
Luke 10: 25-37*
Colossians 4:6*
Ephesians 4:29*

 

 Ephesians 5:15-20  

 

I: — Prostitution is tragic under any circumstances. Prostitution is demeaning. Prostitution, however, that is enjoined as a religious act and defended by a religious argument is more than tragic and demeaning: it’s disgusting.

In the city of Corinth one thousand women were attached as religious prostitutes to the temple of Aphrodite. Needless to say the Christian congregation in Corinth stood out starkly against the backdrop of the temple and its sordid traffic in devotees who did obeisance to Aphrodite and all that the goddess represented. At least the Christian congregation in Corinth largely stood out starkly against the backdrop of sexual irregularities. We know, however, that the spirit of Aphrodite always lapped at the Christian congregation and occasionally infected a member or two of it.

Centuries earlier the Canaanite nations that surrounded Israel had trafficked in religious prostitution too. The word to Israel that had thundered from Sinai, however, had repudiated such degradation. The prophets in turn denounced it unambiguously. Even so, the spirit of sexual irregularity always hovered over Israel, always had to be guarded against, and occasionally had to be exorcised.

Throughout the history of humankind, whenever a goddess has been worshipped as the arch-deity, wherever “Mother-god” has been held up, the final result has always been religious prostitution and widespread sexual promiscuity. For this reason Israel refused to call God “Mother”, and refused as well to speak of the deity as “goddess”.

Throughout the history of humankind goddess-worship (Mother-god-worship) has been associated with the worship of fertility. The worship of fertility includes fertility of all kinds: agricultural fertility, animal fertility, human fertility. A key element in such worship, a key element in the chain of events, has been “sympathic magic”. Sympathic magic means that when humans are sexually active the god and goddess are sexually active too. The sexual activity of god and goddess in turn ensures the fertility of animals and crops.

When Israel was led to call God “Father”, Israel didn’t think for a minute that the God of Israel was equipped with male genitalia rather than female. Israel knew that the true and living God is not equipped with genitalia of any kind; God is not gender-specific in any sense. In calling God “Father”, however, Israel was deliberately refusing to call God “mother”; Israel was deliberately repudiating everything that the fertility cults around it associated with female deities. Israel repudiated the notion that the deity is sexually active, the notion that human sexual activity is sympathically magical, the notion that the entire enterprise is sacramentally abetted by sacral prostitution, the notion that the concomitant promiscuity has any place at all in God’s economy. Israel repudiated all of it.

Yes, Israel did occasionally use female imagery to describe God. In scripture God is said to be like a mother or a nurse or even a she-bear not to be trifled with. But while God is said to be like a mother, for instance, God is never said to be a mother, never called “mother”. On the other hand God is said to be a father and is called “Father”. Why the difference? — because of everything detailed above.

In view of all this I am stunned to find Voices United naming God “mother” and “goddess” in six hymns and three prayers. Two of the prayers name God “Father and Mother” (as in the rewritten prayer of Jesus, “Our Father and Mother…”). This plays right into the hands of Canaan and Aphrodite where sexual intercourse among the deities creates the universe. (In the creation stories of the bible there is no suggestion anywhere that the universe came into being as the result of sexual activity among the deities.) It also plays into the hands of the old notion that when a worshipper is sexually joined to a religious prostitute, worshipper and prostitute themselves become the god and the goddess. In other words, to speak of “Our Father and Mother” lands us back into everything that Israel’s prophets fended off on account of the character of Israel’s God. Hymn #280 of Voices United exclaims, “Mother and God, to you we sing; wide is your womb, warm is your wing.” This hymn squares perfectly with the fertility cults of old, together with their sacral prostitutes and their religiously sanctioned promiscuity.

 

II: — As expected, then, Voices United denies the transcendence of God. By transcendence we mean the truth that God is “high and lifted up”, as Isaiah tells us. Later a Hebrew prophet, knowing himself addressed by the holy One Himself, finds seared upon his own mind and heart, “…my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9) God is radically different from His creation, radically other than His creatures.

The distinction between God and His creation is a distinction that scripture never compromises. “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves”, cries the psalmist. In last week’s sermon I mentioned that the root meaning of “holy” is “set apart” or “different”. God is holy in that He is radically different. God is uniquely God. His creation is other than He, different from Him. To be sure, His creation is good (good, at least, as it comes forth from His hand, even though it is now riddled with sin and evil); but while God’s creation is good it is never God. The creation is never to be worshipped. Idolatry is a horror to the people of God. The creation isn’t God; neither is it an extension of God or an aspect of God or an emanation of God. God remains holy, high and lifted up. He and His creation are utterly distinct. He alone is to be worshipped, praised and thanked. We who are creatures of God are summoned to trust Him, love Him, obey Him, and therein know Him. We are summoned to know God (faith is such a knowing); but we are never summoned to be God. Indeed, the temptation to be God, to be our own lord, our own judge, our own saviour — this is the arch-temptation. Any suggestion that any human activity can render us divine (as is the case with sacral prostitution) is a denial of God’s transcendence. The old hymn known as “The Doxology”, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him all creatures here below…”, reflects God’s transcendence. In Voices United, however, “the Doxology” has been altered to “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him all creatures high and low…”. “All creatures here below” affirmed the truth that God is above us; “All creatures high and low” makes no such affirmation. In the mother-goddess mind-set God is no longer radically other than His creation; God is no longer discontinuous with the world; God and the world are a function of each other. Here God is an aspect of the world — which is to say, God (so-called) is useless to the world.

The loss of God’s transcendence is reflected in the psalm selections of Voices United. Of the 141 psalm selections in the book, only 9 retain the name LORD. (When LORD is spelled with every letter capitalized, it translates the Hebrew word YAHWEH, “God”.) Voices United has virtually eliminated “LORD” from the Christian vocabulary. The reason it has done so, according to the hymnbook committee, is because “LORD” is hierarchical and therefore oppressive. The hymnbook committee is correct concerning one matter here: unquestionably “LORD” is hierarchical; God is above us; He is “high and lifted up”; he does transcend us infinitely. But does this make Him oppressive? So far from making Him oppressive, the fact that God is above us is the condition of His being able to bestow mercy upon us. Only if God is above us, only if God transcends us, is He free from us and therefore free to act for us.

The loss of God’s transcendence shouldn’t surprise us in view of the fact that the New Age movement has infected everything in our society, the church not excepted. The New Age movement endorses pantheism (that heresy, says C.S. Lewis, which always tempts the church). Pantheism insists that God is the essence of everything or at least that God is in everything. If God is in everything or the essence of everything, then there is nothing that isn’t God. However, if there is nothing that isn’t God, then evil doesn’t exist, since evil is that which contradicts God and aims at frustrating Him, that which He in turn opposes. And if evil doesn’t exist, then neither does sin, since sin is that expression of evil that has overtaken humans. In other words, the loss of God’s transcendence plunges men and women into a confusion, a maze, where such crucial bearings as sin and evil are lost too.

Yet we are plunged into more than mere confusion; we are plunged into hopelessness. When God’s transcendence is denied, God is unable to judge us (the New Age movement finds this convenient). However, the loss of God’s transcendence also means that God is unable to save us. Only He who transcends the world so as to be able to judge it is also free from the world so as to visit it with mercy. Only the “hierarchical” God can finally be for us. Hierarchy is the condition of God’s helpfulness. The God who isn’t LORD is the God who has been handcuffed.

 

III: — Since God’s transcendence is compromised in Voices United, no one will be surprised to learn that the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the Trinity, is undervalued. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In The Hymnbook the Trinity is referred to in over 50 hymns out of 506. In Voices United the Trinity is referred to twice out of 719 hymns. Plainly, the Trinity has all but disappeared. This is no surprise. After all, if God isn’t to be called “Father”, then God certainly isn’t going to be known as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.

Why is the doctrine of the Trinity important? How is it foundational to the Christian faith? The question “Who is God?” is a question scripture never answers directly. By way of answering the question “Who is God?” scripture always directs us to two other questions: “What does God do?” and “What does God effect?” “What does God do?” refers us to God’s activity on our behalf, what he does “for us”. “What does God effect?” refers us to God’s activity “in us”.

What does God do for us? He incarnates Himself in Jesus of Nazareth. He redeems His creation in the death of Jesus, restoring its access to Him. He raises Jesus from the dead, vindicating Jesus and declaring him to be sovereign over all, Lord and Messiah.

What does God do in us? He visits us with His Spirit and seals within us all that He has done outside us. He steals over our spiritual inertia and quickens faith. He forgives the sin in us that He had already absorbed for us on the cross. He brings us to submit to the sovereign One whose sovereignty He had declared by raising him from the dead. In short, the God who acts for us in His Son acts in us by His Spirit so that all the blessings provided in the Son may become ours as well.

What God does for us in the Son is known, in theological vocabulary, as Christology. What God does in us through the Spirit is known as pneumatology. Christology and pneumatology add up to theology. Who God is is made known through what He does for us and what He does in us. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In place of the Trinity Voices United speaks of “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”. But the two expressions are not equivalent. “Father, Son, Spirit” speaks of God’s being, who God is in Himself eternally, as well as of God’s activity, what He does for us and in us in time. “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”, on the other hand, speaks only of God’s relation to the world in time. According to scripture God’s relation to the world means that He is also judge, sovereign and inspirer. Then instead of “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” we could just as readily say “Judge, Sovereign and Inspirer” — plus ever so many more. We could say them all with equal justification, even as we still wouldn’t be saying what is said by “Father, Son, Spirit”: namely, that God is for us and in us in time what He is in himself eternally, and He is in Himself eternally what He is for us and in us in time.

There is another point to be made here. “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” is sub-personal. But God isn’t sub-personal. God is Person in terms of whom we understand what it means for us to be persons. Again, for this reason, we must call God “Father” even as for reasons already mentioned we mustn’t call God “Mother”.

There is yet another point to be made here. When we speak of God (or speak to God) as “Father, Son, Spirit” we are calling God by that name wherewith He has named Himself. My name is “Victor”. I always introduce myself as “Victor” because I expect to be called Victor. I don’t care to be called “Vic” or “slim” or “mack” or “You, there”. I think it’s only courteous to call me by that name wherewith I name myself.

Surely we can be no less courteous to God. Yet more than a courtesy/discourtesy is at stake concerning God. According to our Hebrew foreparents name means nature. A change of name means a change of nature. “Jacob” means “cheater”; his name is changed to “Israel” — “he who wrestles with God”. Why the name change? Because the man himself has ceased to cheat and has become someone who will wrestle with God for the rest of his life.

To change the name of God from “Father, Son, Spirit” to anything is to repudiate the nature of the true God and to pursue a false god. To trifle with the name of God at all is to reject the One who is our only God and Saviour.

 

IV: — It’s only fair to admit that there are some fine hymns in Voices United. Not only are there fine older hymns, there are also fine newer hymns. The puzzling feature, then, is why they are mixed up together. Why does the one book contain hymns that are unexceptionable as well as those that are heretical and worse?

On second thought I don’t think there’s a puzzle. I think the mix-up is the result of the age-old temptation of syncretism. We human beings are exceedingly uncomfortable when we face a fork in the road anywhere in life. We prefer to “have our cake and eat it too.” We don’t want to have to say “No” to anyone or anything. It’s always easier to include all the options and endorse all the alternatives. We are syncretists in our fallen hearts.

Syncretism is a temptation that has always tempted God’s people. When Joshua, successor to Moses, confronted the people with his ringing challenge, “Choose this day whom you will serve. The deities of the Amorites? The deities of the region beyond the Jordan? Choose! But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD!” — plainly Joshua knew that his people could serve either the LORD or the Amorite deities but not both.

As a matter of fact Israel wasn’t customarily tempted to repudiate God; Israel was tempted customarily to combine God and Baal, God and Ashtareh, God and whatever deity the neighbouring nation was extolling. The temptation is easy to understand. God promised His people His fatherly care and protection; Baal promised the people unrestrained licence. Why not have both? Why not have holiness and hedonism at the same time? Holiness guaranteed them access to God, while hedonism guaranteed them endless self-indulgence. Why not have both? Why not have God and mammon? Why not? Because Jesus said it’s impossible. Because the prophets before him said it’s impossible.

All of which brings us to a refrain that reverberates repeatedly throughout God’s history with His people. The refrain is, “I am a jealous God.” God is jealous not in that He’s insecure and He needs to have His ego strengthened; neither is He jealous in that He craves what someone else possesses just because He lacks it. God is “jealous”, rather, in that He insists on our undivided love and loyalty. He insists on our undivided love and loyalty for two reasons. One, since He alone is truly God, He alone is to be worshipped and obeyed. Two, since He alone is truly God, He wants us to find our true wholeness in Him. He knows that since He alone is truly God we shall fragment ourselves if we don’t worship Him alone. He cares too much for us to allow us to fragment ourselves. If we persist in gathering up the gods and goddesses and add the Holy One of Israel for good measure we shall fragment ourselves hopelessly.

Everybody knows that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage. To say that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage isn’t to say that husband and wife live in a universe of two people, ignoring everyone else. But it is to say that at the heart of marriage there is that which can be shared with no one else. Two married people who relish the marvel and the riches their union brings them don’t then say, “Since marriage is so rich with the two of us in it, let’s make it richer still by adding a third person!” So far from enriching a marriage, adding a third person annihilates the marriage. To the extent that exclusivity is of the essence of marriage, then, there is a kind of jealousy that is necessary to marriage.

Israel always knew that “God and…” , “God plus…” meant “not God at all”. Syncretism is fatal to our life in God.

Voices United combines fine hymns and terrible hymns on the assumption, apparently, that “nothing should be left out; no one should feel left out; there should be something here for everybody.” For this reason what we call the “Lord’s prayer” has been re-written, “Our Father and Mother”, even as “Father, Son, Holy Spirit” is retained (twice only) for die-hard traditionalists.

But the one God we are to adore knows that if our hearts go after Him and after some other deity then we shan’t have Him and we shall fragment ourselves utterly. Apart from the folly of our self-fragmentation, He insists on being acknowledged for who He is: the One alongside whom there is no other God, even as the Hebrew language reminds us that the word for “idols” is the word for “nothings”. He is a jealous God, knowing that adding another deity will affect the marvel and richness of our life in Him exactly as adding another party affects the marvel and richness of marriage: it terminates it.

 

V: — What’s at stake in all that has been discussed today? Is only a matter of taste at stake (some people like old-fashioned hymns while others don’t)? Is only a matter of poetical or musical sophistication at stake? What’s at stake here is a matter of life or death, for what’s at stake here is nothing less than our salvation.

As soon as we understand what’s at stake here — everything — we understand the intransigence of our foreparents in matters of faith. Jude insists that we are to “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3) Why must we contend for it? Because the faith once for all delivered to the saints is under attack. It is assaulted from without the church and undermined from within the church. The assault from without isn’t unimportant; nevertheless, the undermining from within is far more dangerous. Unless we contend for, fight for, the faith once for all delivered to the saints, the truth of Jesus Christ will be cease to be known.

Peter cautions his readers against false teachers. Peter tells us that false teachers “secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them.” (2 Peter 2:1)

Paul accosts the Christians in Galatia who are already flirting with gospel-denial, “…there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ….Who has bewitched you?” (Galatians 1:7; 3:1)

Jude, Peter and Paul aren’t horrified because an alternative religious opinion is being made known; they aren’t heartsick because disinformation is being disseminated; they react as they do inasmuch as they know that where the gospel is diluted, denied, compromised, or trifled with, the saving deed and the saving invitation of God can’t be known. Where the gospel is sabotaged through “destructive heresies”, the salvation of God is withheld from men and women whose only hope is the gospel.

We must be sure we understand something crucial. We don’t contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints because we are quarrelsome people who relish controversy. We don’t contend because we are ill-tempered people are annoyed with anyone who disagrees with us. We don’t contend because we are doctrinal hair-splitters who wish to make conceptual mountains out of molehills. We contend, as apostles and prophets contended before us, because we can’t endure seeing neighbours whom we love denied access to that truth which saves.

Then contend we shall. But of course we can contend properly only if we are discerning. For this reason John writes, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1 John 4:1) Will our discerning, our testing, and our contending prevail, or are we going to be defeated? We shall prevail, for “faith is the victory that overcomes the world.” (1 John 5:4) Once again the apostle John writes, “…you are of God, and have overcome them [the false prophets]; for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)

                                       

                                                                     Victor Shepherd

February 1997

 

Ephesians 5: 18-20

 

I: — Why do we sing hymns at every service of worship? Why do we sing hymns at all? To ask this question is to find ourselves asking another question, “Why sing?” But if “Why sing?”, then also “Why make music? Why dance? Why paint? Why write poetry?”

Let’s begin with the last question. Why write poetry? Wouldn’t prose do as well? No, it would not. Poetry has what prose will never have. There is a density to poetry, a compression, a compactness which prose lacks. There is an immediacy to poetry, an intensity, a passion which prose will never have. Because of the vivid imagery in poetry there is a concreteness to poetry compared to which prose is very abstract. You must have noticed that children do not think abstractly; children think concretely. So do primitive peoples. That’s why poetry comes naturally to children and primitive peoples. Only developed societies use abstract prose. Poetry, like music and dancing, is rooted so deep in the human psyche that it could not be deeper.

Poetry plus music gives us song. We sing inasmuch as our psychic constitution impels us to sing.

And why do we sing hymns? Because God himself has reached into the very deepest depths of our heart. God, after all, is our creator. He has fashioned us in his own image. Luke tells us that all humankind has been made to “feel after” God. In addition, in Jesus Christ God has come upon us, poured himself over us, pressed himself upon us, overwhelmed us and soaked us. Every time he thinks of this St.Paul is startled afresh: “He loved me, and gave himself, for me“. St.John says, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead.” Jeremiah exclaims, “The word of the Lord is like fire in my mouth.” The psalmist cries, “The Lord…delivered me from all my fears. Look to him, and be radiant!” Mary, mother of Jesus, shouts, “My spirit rejoices in God my saviour”.

Something this profound can find expression only in a vehicle which is deeper than deep. The vehicle is poetry and music together. It is no wonder that we sing.

As the gospel informs us we learn the depth of God’s mercy, the extent of God’s patience, the scope of God’s wisdom. All of this stamps itself upon us as Jesus Christ stamps himself upon us. Not surprisingly, then, our hymns come to have a precise content, a rich substance, a specific theme and thrust. Our hymns articulate more exactly that truth of God which has seized us and now sustains us. It is surely obvious now why we sing hymns, and why we shall always sing them.

II: — What kinds of hymns should we sing? Hymns are divided roughly into two kinds: objective and subjective. Objective hymns sing about God, even sing to God. Subjective hymns sing about us. An objective hymn is “Glory be to God the Father, Glory be to God the Son”. A subjective hymn, “O that will be Glory for me”. Many hymns fall in between, embodying elements of both.

Remember, objective hymns sing about God, his person, his truth, his way with us. Subjective hymns sing about us, our moods, our feelings, our aspirations, our response. Now think about this. The New Testament is of one mind that on Calvary’s cross something was done for us, done on our behalf, done, ultimately, by God himself. What was done for us was done in order that something might also be done in us. The order is important. Scripture always moves from the objective to the subjective, from God to us. St.Peter says compactly, “Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree, in order that we might die to sin and live to righteousness”. Ultimately God did something for us in order that God might consequently do something in us.

If I were to ask you to name the best hymn in the English language concerning the cross, which hymn would you select? Many would select, “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross”. But have you ever noticed that this hymn really isn’t about the cross at all. It says nothing about the atonement. It is about the way our attitudes change when we survey the cross. When we. behold the cross we pour contempt on our pride; we count our richest gain but loss; we cease our boasting. These are all appropriate changes of attitude, to be sure. Nevertheless, the hymn is not about what was done for us on Good Friday. The best hymn about what God has effected through the cross, in my opinion, is a Christmas carol: “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” Listen to some of the lines:

“Pleased as Man with man to dwell” (an affirmation of the incarnation, the presupposition of the atonement)
“God and sinners reconciled”
“Born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth”
“Light and life to all he brings”.

Let’s sing a stanza or two of each kind of hymn, objective and subjective, to illustrate the difference. The objective hymn is “All hail the power of Jesus’ name”. Note how the music supports the theme of the hymn. The sustained notes stand out just because they are sustained; they support the theme, Crown him Lord of all”. The subjective hymn is “O brother man, fold to thy heart they brother.”

III: — Let me say that there is a place for both kinds of hymns. At the same time we must be careful to retain a proper balance and emphasis. The emphasis has to be on the objective hymn; the balance is that we bracket a subjective hymn by having objective hymns on either side of it. We sang a subjective hymn immediately prior to the sermon today: “Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand.” It is unquestionably subjective: “My sinful self, my only shame, my glory all, the cross.” Yet we began the service with an objective hymn and we shall end with one, as we always do.

Let me tell you of my experience a year or two ago. I was flown to Winnipeg to deliver the annual academic lectures at a bible college. I had never had anything to do with the place; I had never had anything to do with any bible college, and didn’t know what to expect. When I arrived I discovered that the students were not interested in academic lectures at all. Following the lectures I was asked to preach at a chapel service. For the service I selected hymns such as “A safe stronghold our God is still” and “Now thank we all our God”. The students would not sing. They stared at the hymnbook and uttered not a sound. The worship-leader, eager to save the day, jumped in and added half-a-dozen highly subjective ditties of minimal substance and maximal sentiment. Whereupon the students sang with gusto. Do those students think that their consciousness, their feelings are the measure of truth? Do they really want to sing about themselves to the exclusion of singing about God? Do they have more confidence in their own (supposed) piety than they have in the gospel? Do they think their faith is stronger than the Word and grace of God which engendered their faith? I was appalled.

Let me repeat. We should sing subjective hymns, for reasons we shall bring forward in a moment. Yet proper emphasis and balance must be maintained. After all, the gospel did not originate with us; the gospel is the self-disclosure and the self-bestowal of God.

To say that there is a place for subjective hymns is not to say that there is a place for mindless sentimentality. Years ago a hit-parade song had one line repeated endlessly: “All you need is lu-uv, doodely doodely doo”. There is a church equivalent: a ditty which consists principally of one line, and says very little. For instance, “Jesus is my friend/Jesus is my friend/Jesus is my friend/ My very own friend.” In terms of substance it doesn’t come close to the great hymns of the church. It says nothing about who Jesus Christ is, what he does, or what he calls forth from us. It is virtually mindless.

There are subjective hymns, however, which are much better than this; subjective hymns which profoundly gather up and articulate our fears, our guilt, our loneliness, as well as our exhilaration and exclamation — all in the light of the goodness and patience, the truth and triumph of God. These hymns we should sing, and sing every week. For we should be honest about ourselves and give expression to what is going on in our hearts, especially in view of the storms within and the storms without.

Think for a minute about bereavement. While it is not healthy for the bereaved person to be weeping all the time, it is equally unhealthy if the bereaved person never weeps. The person who has suffered enormous loss and yet never has a bad day thereafter is unconsciously denying her grief. What is denied is actually buried, soon festers and eventually causes greater emotional discomfort, distortion and even disability. Hymns which permit us, even encourage us, to express our suffering and sorrow in the light of God’s care are health-giving; they are the vehicle of our outcry to God as we hold up our burden to him.

If a thousand and one stresses are beginning to unravel us it is good to sing, “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto me and rest.'”

When we are newly-acquainted with the bottomless depths of our depravity and we are stunned at how vast a work of restoration remains to be done in us, we shall be glad to sing, “Sin and want we come confessing, Thou canst save and thou canst heal.” When we are feeling abandoned (and who hasn’t felt abandoned) it is good to sing, “O love that wilt not let me go”. When we are so wounded that we are beyond even shedding tears we shall sing, as our foreparents did, “Come ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish”.

In all of this we must never lose sight of one glorious truth: how we feel is no indication of where we are. Believing people are “in Christ”, to use Paul’s favourite expression. Our Lord cherishes and secures us even if we feel we are only minutes away from extinction. We are in Christ, and he will ever bind us securely to him.

A splendid hymn which gathers all of this together is “Jesus, lover of my soul”. Before we sing it I want to say a word about the tune to which the lyrics are set. One tune is in a minor key, the other in a major key. Music in a minor key moves us toward introspection, reflection. Minor-key music is haunting, evocative. Not sentimental in the sense of maudlin, but certainly sober, pensive. I like to sing in minor keys now and then, since there is a place for singing soberly, pensively. At the same time, I am especially pleased when Robin Dalgleish resolves the last chord of a minor-key hymn so that we conclude on a major-key note; our mood then shifts from pensive introspection to affirmation. Let’s sing, “Jesus, lover of my soul”, the first two stanzas in a minor key, the latter two stanzas in a major key.

IV: — You must have noticed that we begin and end every service of worship in Streetsville with objective hymns. When we sing a subjective hymn it is always in the middle. (Remember what I said about emphasis and balance!) Have you ever noticed how the written gospels begin and end? Matthew and Luke begin with the annunciation of the birth of Jesus, Messiah, Saviour and Lord; they end with a narrative of the resurrection. Mark begins with a comment on Christ’s public ministry, and ends with his appearance to startled women. John begins with the foundational Word, with the insistence that the entire creation was made through this Word which became flesh. John ends with the risen one commissioning Peter to feed the flock of God. The written gospels neither begin nor end with people looking in upon themselves, fishing around inside themselves for who knows what. They begin and end with with a ringing declaration of the purpose of God in Christ and the fulfilment of that purpose. Shouldn’t this be the way we begin and end a service of worship?

Look at Paul’s letters. They begin with the apostle’s saying, “Grace and peace”. They end with the very same affirmation. Grace is the faithfulness of God whereby God keeps his promise to be our God and not give up on us. Grace points to God’s mercy-riddled steadfastness. Peace, shalom, is God’s end-time restoration of the creation when everything which contradicts the love of God and the truth of God, everything which harasses God’s people, will be dispelled forever. Every epistle begins and ends with the pronouncement of grace and peace.

What happens in the middle of the epistle? Highly disturbing stuff. In Corinth one parishioner was committing incest and appeared not to be the slightest bit upset about it. Some women in the congregation were dressing like streetwalkers and speaking out with comparable brazenness. Some charismatics were trying to turn the service of worship into an emotional exhibition.

In Galatia some church-members were bent on circumcising everything in sight, thinking that in order to be a Christian you first had to become a Jew. Paul was so angry about this that he boiled over and wrote, “If you are so knife-happy why don’t you go all the way and castrate yourselves?” In Colosse some church folk had decided to go in for asceticism: bizarre diets and silly self-denials, none of which was going to help their discipleship at all.

Nevertheless, at the conclusion of every epistle Paul speaks of grace, and only of grace. In other words, regardless of what silliness is going on in congregational life, however painful the truth he has to tell, however ridiculously some people have skewed the gospel, he concludes it all by commending his people to the faithfulness of their God who has promised never to fail them or forsake them. Isn’t this how we should conclude our service of worship?

V: — This morning it remains for us to hear how we are to sing. We are to sing with the same exuberance, ardour and unselfconsciousness that intoxicated people sing with at a party. Paul noted how many of the townspeople in the city of Ephesus became drunk regularly. He told the Christians in Ephesus that they shouldn’t be filled with fire-water; they should be filled with the Spirit (capital “S”!), “singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.”

Centuries earlier still the psalmist had cried, “Sing praises to God, sing praises.” Isaac Watts, perhaps the best hymnwriter in the English-speaking world, said, “Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God.”

F I N I S

                                                                          Victor A. Shepherd

October 1993

 

Ephesians 5: 21-33   Galatians 3:28

 

1] Last year 120 women in Canada were murdered by their husbands (or ex-husbands, lovers or “live-ins”). One-third of these slain women had been raped or strangled or sodomized. Wife-abuse is dreadful I hear of it often; women who have had to leave home on account of the beatings they have endured from their “spouse”. Recently I have heard the stories of women from the more effusive, more demonstrative Christian denominations whose husbands abuse them and then throw Ephesians 5 at them: “Wives, be subject to your husbands…”. Scripture is brought forward to legitimate the shabbiest treatment of a human being who is supposed to be one’s dearest.

Even where there isn’t abuse, the verse from Ephesians is still cited as legitimating the superiority of husband over wife (and by extension, usually, the superiority of male over female). It is assumed now that the husband is boss over his wife; he is chief, master, sovereign, while she in turn is subject, servant, even serf. In any case, he is the ruler and she is the ruled. By extension it is assumed that males ought to be company presidents and females office clerks; males prime ministers and females backbenchers.

When women justly rise up against this they lay much of the blame for it at the feet of St.Paul. Feminists hate him. He is the nasty fellow responsible for any and all notions of inferiority visited upon women.

 

2] Before we deal with the apostle this morning we should glance briefly at the history of the treatment of women. As a matter of fact the treatment accorded women has not been uniformly bad. At different periods of history some societies have been matriarchal; that is, those societies were ruled by women. On the other hand, any society under Arab rule has rendered women shockingly inferior. During the golden age of feudalism (in the middleages) women could own real estate and could serve as lord of the manor. Nevertheless during the 17th century the status of women declined; and during the 19th century it declined abysmally.

In his letter to the church in Galatia (which letter is traditionally known as the charter of Christian liberty) Paul states without qualification that in Jesus Christ there is neither male nor female. Regardless of how any society or any subgroup in a society treats women, in Christ men and women stand on level ground. In Christ there is neither male domination nor female subservience. When the apostle exclaims, “In Christ there is neither male nor female” he is not saying that sexual differentiation has been blurred (men are still men, women still women, and vivez la difference!); he is insisting that in Christ any notion of gender superiority is groundless, false, iniquitous.

The truth is, Paul has been blamed for the social enslavement of women when few people have done as much for their liberation.

 

3] If you doubt this you need only consider the mindset of ancient Greece. Socrates maintained that being born a woman is divine punishment, since a woman is halfway between a man and an animal. To be sure, Socrates did say that a woman could serve in the armed forces — after all, he argued, a female dog is as useful to a shepherd as a male dog.

Aristotle noticed that a swarm of bees is led by one bee in particular; it has to be a king bee, since males are by nature more fit to command than are females. Aristotle maintained that men show their courage by giving orders, while women show their courage by following orders.

In ancient Athens women took no part in public affairs, never appeared with men at meals, never appeared with men on social occasions.

The Greek Stoic philosophers who came after Socrates and Aristotle maintained that women are but a distraction and a temptation.

Things were better in ancient Sparta. In fact at one point Sparta’s women owned two-thirds of the nation’s land. Things were better too in ancient Egypt. But Sparta and Egypt never did influence the world as Athens did.

In the Roman era (following the Greek era) a woman was permitted to accompany her husband socially but was still regarded as humanly inferior.

In Jewish circles it was little better. While the Hebrew bible depicted many women as heroes (Deborah, Ruth, Rahab) rabbinic teaching (that is, the teaching of the rabbis in contrast to the teaching of scripture) generally devalued women. It was regarded improper for a man to speak to a woman in public, even if she were his wife. If a married woman spoke to a man on the street, said the rabbis, her husband could divorce her on the grounds that her conversation was incipient adultery.

 

4] How revolutionary Jesus was! Every day he spoke with women in public. They spoke with him. He included women (both married and single) in his band of disciples. They traipsed around with him and supported him. Scandalous behaviour! He permitted a woman (in public, no less) to wipe his feet with her hair, when a woman whose hair wasn’t tied up was looked upon as a seductress.

Paul certainly knew the gospel accounts of Jesus. Paul certainly knew how revolutionary Jesus had been, and just as certainly he endorsed it. Paul mentions female believers by name — itself part of the Jesus revolution. He speaks of Syntyche and Euodia, two women in the congregation in Philippi “who struggled beside me (not under me!) in the gospel.” These women were on a par with the apostle himself in his ministry. Paul speaks of Prisca and Aquila as “fellowworkers in Jesus Christ.” Prisca and Aquila were a married couple. Two things leap out at us here. One, Paul mentions the woman’s name, Prisca, ahead of her husband’s. (How often do people today refer to the Shepherds as “Maureen and Victor” — in that order?) Two, he addresses her as Prisca, not as Priscilla, Priscilla being a diminutive which, like any diminutive, suggests that someone is not quite grown up. At the conclusion of his Roman letter Paul mentions several church leaders by name, among whom are eight women.

As all of you know, one qualification for being an apostle was to have been an eye-witness of the resurrection of Jesus. Women were the first witnesses of the resurrection. (By the way, in view of this how anyone could question women’s ordination to the ministry is beyond me.) Women regularly preached and prayed aloud in early Christian worship. Women regularly exercised leadership in the earliest church. The revolution which Jesus launched Paul did not stifle. He practiced what he preached. In Jesus Christ there is neither male nor female.

 

5] It is time for us to examine the text which has been misread so widely and which has been the occasion of so much suffering.

(i) The first thing we must notice is really profound: in Ephesians 5 verse 21 precedes verse 22! The instruction to husbands and wives is preceded by the instruction to everyone, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” THIS IS FOUNDATIONAL. Before any puffed-up husband reminds his wife that she is supposed to subject herself to him, he needs to be told that he too is supposed to subject himself to her. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ”; this is the foundational statement which controls everything that follows. Mutual subordination, mutual subjection, mutual self-denial is what the gospel requires of every Christian.

Males who think they can use the text as a pretext for abusing their wives or coercing women must understand one thing: “be subject to” does not mean “obey” (see below). Paul never says that a wife is to obey her husband.

(ii) Second point. When Paul says that the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, domineering males conclude that since Christ is sole, sovereign lord of the church, therefore the husband is sole, sovereign lord of his wife. Not so! Nevertheless, Paul certainly maintains that there is a similarity between Christ’s being head of the church and the husband’s being head of his wife. There is an aspect to Christ’s headship which is the model for the husband’s headship. It’s clear, isn’t it, that our understanding of this passage hinges on our understanding of the meaning of “head” and the meaning of the verb “subject”.

In everyday English “head” can mean literally that part of my body which is attached to my neck, or it can mean figuratively chief, boss, director, commander, controller, ruler, governor. The head-waiter is the fellow who bosses the other waiters. The head of the Royal Bank is the chief of the bank whose word has to be obeyed.

The Greek word Paul uses for head is KEPHALE. It literally means that part of the body which is attached to the neck. But KEPHALE never means, even figuratively, chief or ruler or boss. The Greek word which means chief or ruler or boss is ARCHON — and Paul never says that the husband is the ARCHON, ruler or boss, of his wife. Never! He says, figuratively, that the husband is the KEPHALE of his wife.

Then what is the figurative meaning of KEPHALE? Figuratively, KEPHALE means source of being, origin of being; it does NOT mean someone of superior rank. Jesus Christ is head of the church in that he is the source of the church’s being, the origin of the church’s existence. When Paul says that the husband is head of the wife he has in mind the second creation saga in Genesis 2. There the man or husband is spoken of as the source or origin of the woman’s existence. (In the first creation saga man and woman are created together. In the second, however, woman is made from man (from his rib). Man is the source of woman’s life. (Paul refers to the second creation saga elsewhere in his epistles.)) His point here is that she “comes” from him, NOT that the husband is the wife’s boss or commander or ruler.

The older testament was first written in Hebrew, later translated into Greek for the benefit of Jews who didn’t know Hebrew (most of them). Paul knows Hebrew (he was trained by Rabbi Gamaliel); yet Paul always quotes the o.t. in Greek, there being little point in quoting it in a language his readers could not understand (Hebrew).

Now the Hebrew word for head is ROSH. Where head (ROSH) has the force of chief, ruler, boss, commander, etc., the Greek o.t. uses ARCHON. Where ROSH has the force of “source of life” or even “example” (a meaning found in military contexts) it customarily uses KEPHALE. Paul speaks of the husband as the KEPHALE of his wife, never as the ARCHON of his wife.

The predominant theme of Ephesians is the unity of Christ and his people. (It is not to be denied that Christ is ruler or sovereign over the church. But this is not the theme of the epistle.) This predominant theme — unity — forms the context of the passage under discussion. Paul emphasizes this unity between husband and wife and between Christ and the church by quoting Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh”) in Ephesians 5:31-32: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the church.”

KEPHPALE, “head”, is also used figuratively in military contexts to speak of the front-line soldier who is first in line of fire: the shock-troop in World War I who was first over the top, absorbing enemy fire, the G.I. in World War II who was first on the Normandy beach on D-Day. Today we would say the point man. During the unpleasantness on the Oka reserve two summers ago an officer of the Canadian Army walked deliberately, purposefully, toward the native barricades telling his armed foes that he and his men were moving down the road, barricades or not. The officer who was out in front incurred the greatest risk. In fact he was defenceless. He was the head soldier. It is precisely in this sense that Paul uses the military analogy of head, KEPHALE. All of us know that Paul was exceedingly fond of military metaphors. He loved to compare the Christian life to soldiering.

The husband is head of his wife, then, in the sense that he is like that soldier who incurs the greatest vulnerability, the greatest risk, who is most self-forgetful — all for the sake of others. The husband is head of his wife in that he renounces all concern for safety and self-protection for the sake of his wife. (The husband is head of his wife in that he is willing to “take in on the chin” for her.) Note what Paul says in verse 23: “For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is its saviour.” To be sure, Jesus Christ is both Saviour and Lord. But the one aspect of Jesus Christ to which Paul refers in this discussion is Christ’s saviourhood. As saviour, Jesus renounced all security, safety, self-protection. For the sake of his people, the church, he incurred extraordinary vulnerability. This is what the husband must do for his wife. Remember, the husband is head of his wife not in the sense of ARCHON, ruler, chief, boss, but in the sense of KEPHALE, the soldier who will incur extraordinary risk for the sake of those to whom he has pledged himself.

(iii) What about the word “subject”? What does it mean? It does not mean “obey”. The Greek verb “to obey” is HUPAKOUO. Paul uses it frequently. He maintains for instance, that children are to obey their parents. BUT NOWHERE DOES PAUL SAY THAT A WIFE IS TO OBEY HER HUSBAND. The verb “be subject to” is HUPOTASSO. It means to give of oneself, even to give of oneself sacrificially. It means to renounce oneself, deny oneself, surrender one’s rights for the sake of someone else. But it does not mean to lie down in front of a brute and say, “Step on me”. Christians recognize that other people — all sorts of other people — have a claim on us. Our spouses therefore have a claim on us too. To be subject to someone is to recognize that that person has a claim on us. The Christian wife recognizes that her husband has a claim on her. He is a needy person; she has resources for helping him. He should be able to count on her help. She must be willing to deny herself for the sake of her needy husband. But this never means “You have licence to abuse me”.

The verb “be subject to” (HUPOTASSO) also has a military background. Imagine a platoon of soldiers moving through enemy territory. Every soldier in the platoon has been trained for a task which is essential to the wellbeing of the entire platoon. If one soldier hangs back, then the entire platoon is endangered. A soldier who did this and then tried to excuse himself on the grounds that he was trying to protect himself, that it wasn’t in his interests to expose himself to risk, that his first concern was to guarantee his own survival — such a soldier would be reminded quickly that it was his responsibility to subject himself to his platoon-mates. He should suspend his self-interest for the sake of his mates who need him. He should support them, do whatever he can to help them, demonstrate his allegiance to them.

The wife is to subject herself to her husband not in the sense of being docile or wimpish or self-deprecating, but rather by recognizing his claim upon her — just as the church subjects itself to Christ and demonstrates its allegiance to him. The wife is to support her husband, do whatever she can to help him, not let him down. And she does this willingly and gladly. But it’s not a matter of gritting one’s teeth and submitting oneself to a brute. No wife is called to submit to a brute. Glad self-renunciation has nothing to do with docile self-victimization.

We must be sure to notice that not only does Paul urge wives to subject themselves to their husbands; he also urges husbands to love their wives. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” The word Paul uses for love, AGAPAO, means self-bestowal, self-giving, at whatever cost. It is the word used in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave…(himself)…”. The husband who loves his wife to the point of giving himself up for her is precisely the husband who is not going to brutalize his wife or insist that she remain under his thumb.

 

6] I want to remind you again that it is not to be denied that Jesus Christ is sovereign over the church, its sole ruler and lord. But this truth is not the theme of the Ephesian letter. The theme here is the unity of Christ and his people. The theme of the passage we are discussing today is the unity of husband and wife. Paul underscores the theme of unity by quoting Genesis 2:24: “‘…a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church…”. “The two shall become one.” There is no suggestion of hierarchy in the Genesis passage Paul quotes; here; neither is there any suggestion of hierarchy in the Ephesian passage Paul himself writes.

 

7] I am aware that you asked for a sermon on what Paul really said about women, not merely what he said about wives. There are other texts therefore which we shall have to examine (for instance, the issue of hats and hair-styles). But this will have to wait for another day.

 

8] The apostle’s last word to us today is the first line of the passage we have been examining: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Husband and wife alike recognize the other’s claim in the other’s need, and want only to help at whatever cost.

                                                                 

                                                                       Victor A. Shepherd                                         

January 1993

 

 

Ephesians 6:10-20

 

I: — “Rational animal”, said Aristotle. Human beings are rational animals. Aristotle maintained that our rationality distinguishes us from pigs and goats and horses.

From a biblical perspective, however, we are not distinguished as rational animals (after all, apes have a measure of rationality) but rather as spirit-animals. We’re animals to be sure, for according to the ancient creation sagas the animals and we human beings were created on the same “day”. We differ from them however, in that we are the only animal-creatures whom God addresses. Not the only creatures whom God loves, but the only creatures to whom God speaks. God speaks to us, and his speaking to us enables us to respond; even more, his speaking to us moves us to respond. When God speaks to us he expects a response from us. We are response-able, and because we are response-able we are also response-ible; responsible to God, accountable to God. In all of this what distinguishes us from the animals is spirit. Human beings are primarily creatures of spirit.

 

II: — To say that we are primarily creatures of spirit is to say that we live, ultimately, in a world of spirit. Which is to say in turn that conflicts in our world are ultimately spiritual conflicts. Most profoundly, our world is not the scene of competing economic forces (although there certainly are competing economic forces.) Ultimately the world is not the venue of contradictory ethical theories, ultimately not the theatre of clamouring historical movements. The world is finally the scene of spiritual conflict, intense spiritual conflict: a conflict, in fact, which claims victims every day.

Those who do not grasp this are fools, scripture tells us. They are already victims in the conflict and don’t know it. If you and I are going to survive spiritual warfare, thrive amidst it, even triumph in it, then we must understand what Paul means when he says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood”. Listen to J.B. Phillips — “For our fight is not against any physical enemy; it is against organizations and powers that are spiritual. We are up against the unseen power that controls this dark world, and spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil.” Next the apostle tells us that we have to stand. He repeats himself: stand! He means several things. “Stand up to the powers; defy them.” He also means, “Withstand them; don’t succumb!” He even means, “Stand up and be counted; let everyone know where you stand.”

If we don’t see the need to stand in this three-fold sense then we are naive; we are unwitting victims of “the unseen power that controls this dark world.”

The apostle insists that the entire cosmos is shot through with evil. No institution is spared. “Organizations and powers that are spiritual”, is how he puts it; these organizations and powers are influenced by “the unseen power that controls this dark world”.

In other words, not just economics or history or politics but spirit; spirit lies behind Wal-Mart, the University of Toronto, Credit Valley Hospital, the new government of Indonesia, the Canada Council. Spirit (good or bad or both) lies behind the Ku Klux Klan, but also behind the Afro-American organizations which oppose it; behind the Mafia, to be sure, but also behind the Canadian Red Cross; behind the National Hockey League and the National Ballet and the Canadian Medical Association.

It sounds vast: the entire cosmos seethes with spirit. But not only is it vast; it is also pinpointedly individual, microcosmically personal. Spiritual conflict occurs in individuals every bit as much as in organizations and institutions.

Think of the Ford Motor Company when individuals in the Ford family did everything they could to prevent autoworkers from organizing. Harry Bennett, a tough guy from the U.S. Navy, was the liaison person between the Ford Motor Company and the underworld. The Ford family hired Bennett for more than running errands and delivering cars, however. Bennett was hired to beat up anyone who tried to organize the autoworkers. Walter Reuther, the first president of the United Autoworkers, together with his brother, was beaten so badly that they had to be hospitalized for six months.

When Ralph Nader let it be known that General Motors automobiles were structurally unsafe and GM wasn’t going to do anything about it, GM executives had Nader tailed by private detectives night and day, hoping to catch him in an indiscretion for which they could blackmail him and destroy him.

Do you think that education is spiritually neutral? The ministry of education’s outlook, the curriculum it develops and assigns to school, the societal and individual ends toward which it moulds student; there’s nothing neutral about this. Foundational to any ministry of education is what it deems to be the educational good. The ministry of education is an aspect of the provincial government. The government has been elected by the people and wants to be re-elected. At the same time it is subject to immense pressures from assorted lobby-groups. What finally surfaces in our children’s classrooms is a compromise that accommodates, in varying proportions, the mindset of the electorate, the notions of educational theorists, the specific interests of lobby-groups, and the drift of a society that is drifting farther and farther from its Christian roots. None of this is spiritually neural.

Yet lest we think that only “organizations and powers” are involved we must look to ourselves. What about us? It is to you and to me that the apostle speaks concerning “the devil’s craftiness”. Of course we can be tempted, even seduced, at our point of greatest weakness. I need elaborate no further, since temptation or seduction at our point of weakness we usually recognize quite readily. But we are in equal danger of being tempted or seduced craftily at our point of greatest strength. At our weak point we are in danger of falling flat on our face. (Not much demonic craftiness is needed to bring us down.) At our strong point we are in danger of becoming self-important and therefore self-deluded, vain, contemptuous of others and defiant of God; in short, spiritually blind. The evil one can get us where we are weak and where we are strong, and get us with equal ease. Which is to say we can be got ridiculously easily. We are much more vulnerable than we think we are.

 

III: — Then the only thing to do is to put on the whole armour of God

[1] The first item, says Paul is the belt of truth. The belt which the Roman soldier wore was a wide piece of thick leather. It protected his lower abdomen and prevented him from being disembowelled.

Truth is the truth of the gospel; the substance of the gospel. It is the substance of the gospel which gives us substance, something in our belly. Without such substance we shall always lack stomach for spiritual conflict.

The Hebrew bible (which Paul knew backwards) speaks of both the truth of God and “truth in our inward parts”. What else are our inward parts except guts, the very thing which the leather belt protects? The substance of the gospel, truth, lends us substance; and this in turn fortifies us.

[2] The second piece of armour is the breastplate of righteousness (righteousness in this context being the integrity possessed of the person rightly related to our Lord.) The breastplate protected the soldier’s heart. According to biblical metaphor our heart is the control centre for willing, feeling, and discerning. Integrity or righteousness protects our personal control centre. Not the integrity of self-made moral achievement; the integrity, rather, which comes through having Jesus Christ, the righteous one, ruling within us.

When I was a child I relished playing with my gyrotop. When the gyrotop was spinning ever so quickly I could place it on a taut string or a needlepoint and it would stand upright. Regardless of how the string was moved around; regardless of the motion of the string or needle and their quickly changing angles, the top remained upright. Its orientation never changed.

A gyrotop is only a toy. A gyrocompass, on the other hand, is for real. In World War II all submarines were equipped with a gyrocompass. It too spun at startling speed: thousands of revolutions per second. When the submarine was submerged, without radio contact or celestial navigation, the gyrocompass kept it on course. If the submarine was depth-charged and knocked about violently, the gyrocompass reset the course automatically. Without it the submarine would be lost. One hundred men cramped in a steel tube 300 feet down — and everything depending on a small item which maintained constant orientation however violent the turbulence.

Righteousness, integrity — Paul compares it to the breastplate which protected the soldier’s heart. Righteousness, or integrity, protects the control-centre of every Christian.

[3] Shoes, the third item in the Christian’s armour. Did it ever occur to you that the best-trained foot-soldier is only as good as his shoes? What good is a foot-soldier whose feet hurt so much he can’t walk?

Roman soldiers were known for their endurance, their long marches. One of Caesar’s most effective tactics was to keep his men marching when everyone else thought his men would be hunkered down, soaking blistered feet in a basin. But the feet of Caesar’s soldiers didn’t blister; neither did the men become unduly fatigued. Their footwear was better than that. Roman soldiers wore sandals, lightweight sandals made of rawhide. The shoes were light, flexible, resilient. Don’t we need shoes like that: light, flexible, resilient?

“How long do you think you can keep going?” I am asked this question by dispirited pastors and amazed United Church members every day. “Are you in it for the long haul?” I can answer all such questions are three words: light, flexible, resilient.

The shoes, which the Christian wears, are “the gospel of peace”. By “peace” Paul doesn’t mean primarily “peace in my heart”. He means shalom, the kingdom of God, God’s end-time resolution of cosmic conflict when the evil one, now defeated, is finally destroyed and will no longer afflicts God’s creation. The gospel promises this and even now anticipates it. Because I believe the promise, and because my feet are shod with the gospel (which is to say, I’ve already tasted the end-time resolution), I can keep going for as long as breath remains in me. Light, flexible, resilient.

[4] The shield of faith. It quenches fiery darts, says the apostle. One day some enemies of Rome dipped arrows in pitch, set the pitch on fire, and then shot the flaming arrows at Roman soldiers who were still 100 metres away. The arrows stuck fast in the wood and leather shield the soldier carried, and ignited it. As soon as the soldier dropped his burning shield, the next volley of arrows killed him. The solution was simple. Soak the shield in water before the battle. The flaming arrows hissed out, and the Roman line advanced.

Every soldier carried his shield on his left arm. It protected 2/3 of his body, plus 1/3 of the body of the fellow on his left. In other words, every soldier was responsible for affording a measure of protection to his colleague.

“Be sure you take faith as your shield”, Paul insists. We must take faith as our shield, not only because faith extinguishes the flaming missiles by which we are assaulted, but also because each person’s faith affords a measure of protection to others in the congregation. If I don’t take the shield of faith, you will be uncommonly exposed to the evil one’s assault on account of my negligence. In this congregation we owe each other as much protection as we can give each other. After all, we are not isolated strugglers; we are a congregation, a community, a fellowship.

[5] The helmet of salvation. The helmet protects the head. A soldier’s head is vulnerable. In modern infantry engagements 90% of fatal wounds are head wounds. A soldier is more likely to perish through head wounds than through any other kind of injury. The head is crucial.

It is the head which thinks. And it’s important to think. Jesus insists that we love God with our mind. And when Jesus heals the disturbed fellow who runs around in the graveyard mutilating himself, the townspeople find the fellow in his right mind. Paul tells the Christians in Rome that they must not be conformed to the mindset of the world around them; they must be transformed by the renewal of their mind. J.B.Phillips again: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God remake you so that your whole attitude of mind is changed.” Either our thinking is renewed at the hand of God or we are stuck in that mindset which blindly keeps on rationalizing the delusions and depravities of a world which contradicts the truth of God every day.

Peter urges us to “gird up our minds”. The usual expression is gird up one’s loins. In ancient Palestine people wore calf-length robes. If they had to do something vigorous, they picked up the back of their robe, brought it forward between their legs, and tucked it into their belt. People girded their loins when they were about to do one of three things: work, run, or fight. To gird up our minds means that we must think vigorously; and our thinking has to tell us whether we are to work, flee, or resist. It takes wisdom to survive, even triumph, in the midst of spiritual conflict. Wisdom means knowing when it is appropriate, even needful, to work, flee or resist.

[6] Lastly, the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. The sword, be it noted, is an offensive weapon. The sword of the Spirit (God’s Spirit) is the only offensive weapon the Christian has. Furthermore, it must be noted again that this offensive weapon which God empowers is the word of God or the gospel. The only offensive weapon you and I have and therefore can wield is the gospel.

To say that we wield the gospel is simply to say that the Christian community does not huddle in a corner, a pathetic in-group doing its best to protect itself in a bleak world. To wield the gospel means that we announce and embody the truth of God and the redemption of God and the undeflectability of God at all times and in all places. When Paul wrote the Ephesian letter he was in prison. He didn’t like being in prison, but he also knew that the gospel can be announced and embodied in any setting, and a prison setting is as good as any other.

When, earlier in our century, the Soviet government rounded up thousands of Christians and packed them off to Siberia, these people didn’t exactly laugh. But once in Siberia, hardships and all, they joked with each other that the Russian government, vehemently atheist, had finally funded a Christian mission to the Russian north. The gospel-witness which those cheerful Christians bore there has borne fruit beyond anything anyone could have imagined.

When Paul was imprisoned in Rome the Christian community there was tiny. Five house-churches — 75 Christians? — in a city of one million. Yet Paul had wanted to get to Rome for years just because Rome was the seat of influence throughout the civilized world. At last he got to Rome. His accommodation wasn’t exactly what he had had in mind. But at least he was in Rome. And there he would wield the sword of the Spirit, the gospel, the only offensive weapon the Christian has.

How fruitfully did he wield the gospel? We have just spent 20 minutes being fortified for our struggle by the letter he wrote from prison. How much more fruitful could he be?

Seventy-five Christians in a city of one million. But no self-pity, no poor-meism. Merely a conviction that the armour God provides for God’s people in their spiritual conflicts God’s people must put on. And having put on defensive armour, God’s people must go on the offensive with the sword of the gospel, which sword will win greater victories than any Roman army ever imagined.

 

                                                                                         Victor Shepherd
June, 1998     

    Ephesians 6:10-20      1 Timothy 6:12      2 Timothy 4:7

 

The Roman soldier was the most hated person in first century Palestine. He personified everything Jewish people hated about the occupation and its detestable army. Not only had Jewish people been deprived of political self-determination, they had to be reminded of it every time the uniformed soldier marched by. In addition, they couldn’t do a thing about the arbitrary power the soldier wielded. The soldier could compel an Israelite to do anything at all. If a soldier barked, “Carry my pack!”, you put down your bag of groceries as fast as you could; you said, “Yes, sir”, and you carried his pack for as long and as far as he told you. Otherwise he might just tickle your tonsils with his sword. What grated most on Jewish people, however, was the Roman disregard of everything Jewish people held sacred, such as the temple in Jerusalem. Only the high priest entered the holy of holies, the innermost room of the temple, and even the high priest did so only once per year, on the day of atonement. General Pompey, however, had tramped around in it in his muddy boots, then had walked back outside with a smirk and had announced that he hadn’t seen a thing in the unadorned cubby-hole, never mind the God that Jews were always talking about. He had made no secret of the fact that as far as he was concerned the holy of holies was of no more significance than an outhouse. Roman soldiers were loathed.

Nevertheless, whenever Jesus spoke of them in the course of his earthly ministry he spoke well of them. A Roman officer said to him, “I am an officer; when I speak people jump. You have authority too; I know you have. My servant is sick unto death; if you but speak the word your word will free him and he will be healed”. Jesus looked around at the crowd of spectators who were disgusted that he would even speak to a soldier and said to them, “I haven’t found anything approaching this fellow’s faith among the lot of you, and you think you are God’s favourites!”

Needless to say no Jew, and therefore no Jewish Christian, would ever have wanted to join the Roman army. But no gentile Christian could. All Roman soldiers had to promise unconditional loyalty to the emperor, and no Christian could agree to this. Isn’t it startling, then, that since soldiering was alien to both Jewish Christians and gentile Christians, the apostles used pictures from soldiering to speak of Christian discipleship! Paul especially compared following Jesus to military existence over and over. Plainly he admired much about the men whom everyone else despised; plainly he saw many aspects of soldiering which the Christian must take to heart.

Today we are going to look at one or two such aspects, examine the military metaphors, in order that our discipleship might be made more resilient and of greater service to our Lord.

 

I: — The first point is simple: the soldier is trained to fight. A soldier may do other things, will do other things (such as help civilians in times of natural disaster, or search for lost children); but these tasks are ancillary to the one task for which the soldier is trained preeminently: fighting. In the same way discipleship isn’t fighting only (there are other things we do); nevertheless, discipleship is fighting always. Faith never ceases having to fight.

Faith — yours and mine — has to be contended for every day. To be sure faith is God’s gift; we can never bestow it upon ourselves. At the same time that it is God’s gift, however, faith is that for which we must struggle and contend every day. Every day faith is assaulted, and therefore every day I must resolve afresh that this day I am going to think, believe, do as a servant and soldier of Jesus Christ. Not to fight for faith every day is to succumb to despair; not to contend for faith is to fall into hopelessness; it is to surrender to the world’s way of thinking, believing, doing; it is to “go with the flow”, drift downstream, finally drift on out where the lost are drowned.

This isn’t to say that each day brings an intensity to the struggle that couldn’t be more intense. There are days like that, to be sure, as well as days — many more them — which are much less intense. But there are no days when the Christian can coast. If we are unconvinced that we must fight for faith then we should look at our Lord himself. First in the wilderness, where he is tested to the breaking point: is he going to deceive the people with bread and circuses and guarantee himself a popularity and a following he will never have by holding up the way of the cross? is there a pain-free shortcut to the kingdom of God? is obedience to his Father no more demanding than a snooze in a rocking chair? Then see our Lord again in Gethsemane: sweat pours off his forehead as though he had received a fifty-stitch gash. Then see him on the cross. He quotes Psalm 22. It begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” As he hangs he is still fighting for faith. You see, he knew what he was doing when he cited Psalm 22 as his affirmation of faith, for verse 24 of the psalm declares, “God has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and God has not hid his face from the afflicted one, but God has heard when the afflicted one cried to God“. Our Lord’s confidence in his Father is undiminished at the last; but what a struggle to get to the last!

Henry Farmer, a British philosopher whom I read in my undergraduate days, was preaching in an English church during World War II. He was preaching on God’s love for us. A Polish fellow who had escaped to England when Poland was overrun waited behind to see Farmer after the service. “Like you, I know what it is to be loved by God”, the Polish man said, “unlike you, however, I know what it is to struggle for it when the blood of one’s dearest friends is running in the gutter on a cold winter’s morning”.

I have sat with tragedy-racked people whose tragedy should have rendered faith forever impossible, according to the psychologists. Yet they hung on, groped for a while, floundered a while longer, began to claw their way out of the emotional rubble which seemed to be suffocating them, and persisted until they could finally say with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”.

Paul writes to Timothy, a younger minister, “Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called; seize this life!” Note carefully: the apostle does not say, “Fight a good fight” — this would mean, “Give it a good go, my boy, and do your best”. “Fight the good fight of faith”. Faith is the fight which we shall always have to wage in a world of unbelief, which world forever wants to render us blind, impotent unbelievers ourselves.

Faith, you see, is not only that which we must fight for; faith is also that which we must fight from. The faith we fight for is the standpoint we then fight from as we contend with everything which hammers us day-by-day. Christians, possessed by the One who is ultimate reality, engage a world of falsehood and illusion. Clinging to the righteousness of Christ, we are immersed in the world’s morass of sin, both subtle and shabby. Desiring no other leader than the one who has made us his through his costliest mercy, we journey with him in a world where he is either not recognized or not esteemed but in any case rarely espoused. Now either we fight in this environment and thrive, or we capitulate and disappear.

Frequently I remind you people of the misunderstandings which surround Jesus (the misunderstanding, for instance, he was always and everywhere “nice”; nothing could be farther from the truth). Another misunderstanding is that the Prince of Peace wants peace at any price. This notion, of course, is patently ridiculous since peace-at-any-price types never get crucified, since they never offend anyone. From the day his public ministry began Jesus was immersed in conflict without letup, as the sketchiest reading of the written gospels will disclose.

Yet because the misunderstanding persists — “Jesus calls us away from conflict” — conflict is the one thing that UCC members fear above all else. We fear conflict more than we fear heresy, more than we fear blasphemy, more than we fear falsehood, more than we fear illogical gibberish, more than we fear outright denial of our Lord. We fear conflict so much, and so dread a fight (not understanding, of course, that faith is a fight) that we will submerge convictions concerning holiness, righteousness and godliness. Congregational capitulation on matters which congregations oppose in their hearts proves this.

The earliest Christian confession, and the most elemental Christian confession, is “Jesus is Lord”. But you will look in vain for it in any official UCC publication. It is now deemed offensive (for many reasons) to say “Jesus is Lord”. The earliest Christians knew better than we just how offensive it was — for they were willing to die for it. I have watched lay-representatives from different congregations march off to presbytery determined to speak up on behalf of the congregations which have commissioned them. They are ten minutes into the presbytery meeting when a presbytery leader (usually clergy) suggests that their outlook is narrow, bigoted, uninformed, cruel, anti-Christian. Either the lay-representative asserts himself or he caves in. If he asserts himself he has a fight on his hands; but all his life he has been told that Christians don’t fight; therefore he caves in — and unrighteousness has triumphed again. If the fifty largest congregations had contended the way this congregation did in 1988 and in 1990 the face on the denomination would be entirely different. Yes, I am aware that the person who is always looking for a fight is sick; I am aware too that the person who is always fleeing a fight is faithless. Before our Lord brings peace he brings conflict. His own ministry demonstrates this.

“Fight the good fight of faith”, Paul tells the younger man, “take hold of the eternal life to which you were called; seize it!” We fight for faith and we fight from it. We fight for faith as we are assaulted by unbelief and are tempted to despair; we fight from faith as we follow our Lord as he invades a rebellious world.

 

II: — Since Christians cannot avoid life-long fighting we plainly need life-long armour. Paul explores the military metaphor once again (this time in his letter to the congregation in Ephesus) as he speaks of “the whole armour of God”. We need the whole armour of God, all of it, if ever we are going to do what he insists all Christians must do; namely, “withstand in the evil day”. (We should note in passing that since the day (ie, the present time) is evil, and since Christians neither capitulate to evil nor compromise with it, therefore conflict is both unavoidable for Christians and unending.)   In other words to be a Christian in the midst of “this present darkness”(Eph.6:12) be means that our Lord has not co-opted us for a “work bee”; he has conscripted us for warfare. Nothing less than the whole armour is needed.

The first item of armour which the apostle mentions is truth. We are to gird our loins with truth. In first century Palestine men wore an ankle-length garment. When a man “girded his loins” he reached back between his legs, pulled the back of his garment up between his legs and tucked it into his belt. He did this whenever he was about to work, run or fight. Battle dress for the Roman soldier on the other hand (and Paul is thinking here of soldiers particularly) didn’t include an ankle-length garment. Strictly speaking that which girded the soldier’s loins wasn’t part of his armour; it was his underwear which he wore beneath his armour. (Now precisely the nature of the underwear which the soldier wore as loin-girder I shall leave to your imagination, since I am known for my delicacy and refinement. Suffice it to say, however, that no male athlete is ever found without it.) The loin-girder which the Christian is always to be clothed in, says Paul, is truth. Truth is the Christian’s underwear: not flaunted, not flashy, but essential support for those who have to fight.

When the apostle speaks of truth he has two meanings in mind: truth in the sense of truthfulness (transparency, straightforwardness), as well as truth in the sense of the verities of the faith, the substance of the faith, doctrine. The Christian’s loins are to be girded with truth in both senses. We are possessed of the truth of faith, and we are transparent in attesting it before others.

In the ancient world the loins were regarded as the seat of strength and the seat of reproduction. It is only as the Christian is equipped with truth in both senses that the Christian herself remains strong in the evil day and that her witness gives birth to new Christians who do not fail to thrive in an inhospitable environment. Remember: before the Roman soldier put on a single piece of armour he put on his underwear, he girded his loins. The apostle insists that the most elemental aspect, the most basic aspect of the Christian’s preparedness is a grasp of the truth and a truthfulness which is transparent to it.

 

We haven’t time to probe every aspect of Roman armour outlined in Ephesians 6. Still, we shouldn’t leave this topic without looking at the single most important defensive item (the shield) and the single most important offensive weapon (the sword).

“Take the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one”; all the flaming arrows. The worst military defeat a Roman army suffered occurred when enemy archers ignited their pitch-dipped arrows and fired one volley into the air, like modern-day mortar fire. These arrows rained down on the Roman troops as they held their shields above their heads. Whereupon the enemy archers fired a second volley straight ahead. The Roman soldiers could not protect themselves against attack from two directions at once. In addition, whatever flaming arrows they managed to block with their wooden shield promptly set their shield on fire and they had to drop it. Now they were completely defenceless and were slaughtered.

From how many directions is the Christian assaulted at once? And how many different flaming arrows are there? There is false guilt, imposed by a world which mocks Christians for being less than perfect. There is the self-accusation which lingers from an upbringing which thought that magnifying a supposed sense of sin would magnify a sense of God’s mercy, only to find that the latter never got magnified. There is the temptation which can fall on any one of us at any time and leave us weak-kneed, so vivid and visceral can temptation be. There is disillusionment as other Christians let us down; discouragement as we let ourselves down, bewilderment as we wonder how many more attacks we can sustain from how many more directions. Faith, says the apostle, and faith alone, faith in our victorious Lord will ever keep us from going down. We shall neither be burned up slowly by the flaming arrows nor be left bleeding to death quickly. The shield was the soldier’s most important piece of defensive armour. The shield of faith finally defends Christ’s people against everything which tends to sunder them from him.

The only offensive weapon Paul mentions is the sword; “the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God”, is how he speaks of it. The Christian individually and Christians collectively must ever wield the gospel only. The church of Jesus Christ must never coerce; the only offensive weapon we have is the Word of God (the gospel) in the power of the Spirit. And if the advance of the gospel seems turtle-like and the power of the Spirit largely ineffective, too bad! The church has always behaved its worst when it forgot this and coerced people. It has coerced them militarily, coerced them economically, coerced them psychologically. Today I hear it lamented that in a secular era the church has no clout. No clout? Whoever said we were supposed to have clout? We are called to crossbearing, not to clout-clobbering. After all, it is the crucified one who reminds disciples that no servant is above her master. Because the church is no longer in a position to coerce in any way Christ’s people will have to learn what it is once again to have nothing more in our hand than Spirit-infused-gospel.

In any case the Christian whose underwear is truth, whose defence is faith, and whose only offensive weapon is the gospel is equipped for anything which may befall him in the evil day.

 

III: — If you are growing weary of a sermon which explores the metaphor of fighting, be weary no longer: relief is on the way, for no soldier fights for ever. The day comes when fighting is over. It comes sooner for some soldiers than for others, but one thing is certain: we shan’t have to fight eternally. When Paul knew that the Roman government had had enough of him, knew it was going to execute him, knew he couldn’t delay it any longer, he said simply, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” His fighting days were over; he knew it, and he was glad of it.

How glad? He wrote to Timothy, a young minister, “The time of my departure has come”. Departure. ANALUSIS. A common Greek word. In everyday speech ANALUSIS was the word for unhitching a draft horse from the wagon it had hauled throughout the heat of the day; no more toil to be endured, no more strain, just rest.

It was also the word for loosening the ropes of a tent. The apostle who had journeyed across Asia Minor and Europe was striking camp again, with one journey only in front of him, and nothing at all arduous or threatening about this one.

It was also the word for unfastening the mooring ropes of a ship as the ship began its voyage home.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith; the time of my departure has come.” Departure. ANALUSIS. Rest from fatiguing work, folding one’s tent for the final journey, slipping one’s moorings for the voyage home.

 

In a day when soldiers were loathed and soldiering was despised the apostles followed our Lord in finding in soldiers and soldiering a rich picture of Christian discipleship. We must fight the good fight of faith, fight for faith and fight from faith, every day. We must be equipped with the whole armour of God, since we have to withstand in the evil day. Truth, faith and gospel are as much armour as we shall ever need. And then there comes the day when we shan’t need any armour at all, for this time the soldier has gone home.

 

                                                                                                   Victor A. Shepherd

November, 1992

            Ephesians 6:21-24        Isaiah 49: 13-18     Luke 7:36-50

 

Why do people ask “What is a Christian?” They ask because they aren’t sure, and they aren’t sure because there’s confusion as to how a Christian is to be defined. I watched an Irish clergyman on a TV program insist that IRA terrorists couldn’t be Christians because of their habit of “knee-capping” people they deem undesirable and their fondness for terror and torture. Ten minutes later the same clergyman said that baptism was all that was needed to make someone Christian, and anyone who had been baptized was by that fact a Christian indisputably. The Irish clergyman seemed to have lost sight of the fact that all the IRA terrorists had been baptized.

Josef Stalin engineered the deaths of sixty million of his own people. Stalin was baptized. (At one point he was even a seminary student.) How many communist leaders of the Russian Revolution hadn’t baptized? Virtually none. Obviously we can’t define Christians as those who’ve been baptized.

Then perhaps a Christian is someone who believes the right things about Jesus. As we all know, however, it’s possible to believe the right things – that is, stuff one’s mind with the correct mental furniture – and never become a disciple, never do the truth in John’s magnificent phrase. Our Lord himself said to such people, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ (they believed the right things) yet never do what I tell you?”

Then perhaps a Christian is someone who has undergone an especially vivid experience of some kind, a religious experience. The problem here is that there’s no end to “religious experiences,” many of them so very bizarre that we are repelled as soon as we hear of them. Just as not all the spirits are holy, so not all human experiences are helpful. Besides, psychological vividness is never the measure of truth.

A minute ago I said that people wonder just who is a Christian, or what is a Christian, inasmuch confusion abounds here. Really, there’s no need for confusion. The earliest Christians weren’t confused at all.

I: — They knew that Christians are those who love Jesus as Lord. Not everyone who met Jesus in his earthly ministry loved him. Some hissed at him: “He has a demon.” Some despised him: “He’s illegitimate.” Some discounted him: “He’s only a carpenter’s son.” Most ignored him: “Has anything noteworthy ever come out of Nazareth ?” And then there were those who loved him. At first they warmed to him the way we warm to anyone who is winsome and engaging. Then they came to love him the way we come to love those whom we know to love us. The woman who poured out her livelihood upon his dusty feet and wiped them dry with her hair; Jesus said she loved much – like Mary Magdalene, whose life he had turned completely around. Fishermen, captured by Christ, abandoned themselves to him.

But it didn’t stop there. They came to love Jesus not as an equal; they came to love him not just because another human being had loved them; they came to love him as the very presence and power of God. They adored him. Love and adoration suffused each other only to surge out over him. Their love was adoring and their adoration was loving. In other words, they loved him in a way that was different from the way they loved everyone else. For he alone was Lord.

This point is crucial. Everywhere in life you and I love those whom we don’t adore and aren’t supposed to adore. There is only one whom we are to love and adore alike: this one the earliest Christians recognized in the Nazarene whom they knew to be the Son of God Incarnate.

When I was very young (eight or ten years old) I didn’t understand why Christians would suffer martyrdom rather than deny the one they loved. I didn’t understand this because I hadn’t yet grasped the fact that people today genuinely do love Jesus. To be sure I could grasp the fact that people believed this or that about him. I could understand that people deemed him to be truth. But love him? I still remember the day it all fell into place for me. I was reading of the treatment regularly accorded missionaries in Japan . (For centuries Japan has been a difficult, dangerous field for missionaries.) I read that the “trial by fire” for these missionaries was simple: the face of Jesus was painted onto the floor. Then the missionary was told he could spare himself death if he walked on the painted face. As a child I had said to myself, “Why didn’t they walk on it? Jesus would understand. He would understand that there’s no point in dying needlessly. Walk on the portrait – and live to preach the gospel a thousand times more.” One day, however, it all fell into place. One day I grasped why those who genuinely love don’t betray the one they love. I understood why Jesuit missionaries went to their death rather than let down him who had never let them down. Would I denounce and disown my wife to spare myself? For Christians, Jesus Christ is alive and well and living among us. Denounce and disown him out of the crassest self-interest? The day I understood I never looked back. And that day I understood something more: I understood precisely what Paul meant in Ephesians 6: 24 when he speaks of “those who love our Lord with love undying.” I understood why the one and only question Jesus put to Peter on Easter morning was simply, “Peter, do you love me?”

 

II: — In the second place Christians are those who trust Jesus as Saviour. It’s crucial that we understand why. To say we trust Jesus as Saviour is to say that we trust the provision he is for sinners. The apostle John writes pithily, “God…sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1^st John 4: 10 NRSV) To say that God gave his Son as atoning sacrifice for us is to say that God himself has made for us sinners that effectual provision we could never make for ourselves. Something has been done for us. God acted to rescue us from real peril in light of our inability to rescue ourselves.

If we have difficulty understanding what the word “salvation” means in scripture we should think in terms of “salvage,” a salvage operation. A ship on the high seas, overwhelmed by raging storm, is foundering. It sends out a distress call. At this point two things can happen. It can continue taking on water until it disappears into the watery void never to be seen again. Or a salvage tug can leave the safety of a snug harbour and search out the foundering ship. Needless to say the storm that caused the ship to founder is the same storm that the salvage vessel must head into. The rescue operation at sea can happen only in the midst of that turbulence which has already claimed one victim.

The earliest Christians knew that in the cross Jesus had set aside his own safety, had immersed himself in our predicament, had drunk down the death we deserve – and all of this in order to salvage us. It was a rescue mission. Rescue from what? From the judgement of the just judge. Our Lord didn’t do all this at incomprehensible cost to himself in order to make us feel better or supply us with information we lacked. He did it to spare us real loss, final loss, amidst a peril that couldn’t be more perilous. We must never think anything else. Our Lord went to the cross to do for what us what we could never do for ourselves and apart from which our situation as sinners was hopeless before the Holy One.

One reason Charles Wesley is the finest hymn writer in the English language is simply that Charles Wesley sings more frequently about the cross than about anything else, and sings more profoundly about the cross than anyone else.

Arise, my soul, arise. Shake off thy guilty fears.

The bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears.

Before the throne my surety stands; my name is written on his hands.

 

“My name is written on his hands” is a reference to the prophet Isaiah who anticipated the atonement the Son of God would make on behalf of us all. Centuries before the cross on Golgotha Isaiah discerned the cross on the heart of God. Speaking for God, Isaiah wrote “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:16) When I was a little fellow I had this truth seared on my heart by a ditty that has stuck in my noodle:

My name from the palms of his hands

Eternity cannot erase;

Impressed on his heart it remains

In marks of indelible grace.

 

The provision God has made for me as sinner is the only provision there can ever be. It is sufficient. And I can only trust it as I entrust myself to him who has fashioned it.

We must understand how love for our Lord and trust in our Lord flow back and forth through each other. If we merely loved him we’d start to tell ourselves that the quality of our love is what saves us and we don’t need to have provision made for us. If, on the other hand, we merely trusted him for what he’s done for us we’d be where I am with my dentist: I trust the man utterly since I’m confident of his expertise, even though I don’t like him – he’s obnoxious. Our trust in Jesus Christ prevents our love for him from becoming presumptuous, while our love for him prevents our trust from becoming cold.

 

III: — There’s more. Christians are those who obey Jesus as Master, or at least those who aspire to obey him.

Now whatever Christian obedience means it doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly become “do-gooders.” “Do-gooders” – everyone’s flesh creeps as soon as the word is uttered – are those who dart around like a water spider, exuding superior wisdom and virtue, setting the world right where the rest of us are too benighted to see what needs to be done, the whole attitude crowned in a self-righteousness that reeks.

Obedience to Jesus as master has nothing to do with this picture. In the first place our motivation isn’t the accumulation of credit or public congratulation or self-produced superiority. The motivation of our obedience is simply our gratitude to the one who has rescued us, as well as our love for the same one who has loved us since we were conceived and will love us beyond our dying.

There are two forms of Christian obedience. The first is resistance to temptation.   The first form of obedience entails our discernment of temptation – temptation of any sort, seduction into sin of any description – and our resolve not to let it alight upon us but rather to repudiate it for what it is: sin-around-the-corner, disgrace before God at the least if not disgrace before others. In resisting temptation we are to renounce the world’s preoccupation with “selfism:” self-realization, self-fulfilment, self-you-name-it. After all, we understand what the world of unbelief doesn’t understand; namely, no one ever found herself by looking for herself (by definition she doesn’t know what to look for.) No one ever became happier through hoarding.

The second form of Christian obedience is self-forgetful service of the suffering neighbour. In view of the atrocious suffering all around us I’m always amazed at people who tell me they’re bored. I think I was last bored about 1953 when I was nine years old and the summer holidays seemed too long. Bored? The only people who are bored are those who haven’t yet apprehended the neighbour’s anguish or who don’t care to do anything about it.

In 1519 Martin Luther wrote a pithy theological tract, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” and followed it in 1520 with another one for which he is far better known, “The Freedom of the Christian.” In the second tract, “The Freedom of the Christian,” Luther insisted that because the Christian’s master is Christ alone the Christian is servant of no one. Yet because the Christian’s master is Christ alone the Christian is servant of everyone – since Christ came only to serve, didn’t he? In “The Freedom of the Christian” Luther insisted that the Christian lives in the neighbour by serving the neighbour in love. What does it mean to serve the neighbour in love? First we must share our material abundance with the neighbour’s material need. Then we must share the neighbour’s suffering by our closeness to her in her suffering, therein, of course, coming to suffer ourselves. In his 1519 tract, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” Luther mentioned a third way we serve the neighbour in love: we share the neighbour’s disgrace. We don’t flee the needy neighbour who is now extraordinarily needy just because he’s disgraced himself and has been ostracized for it. For the person who has disgraced himself now needs us as he’s never needed us.

When we serve the neighbour’s material neediness, said Luther, it costs us very little since we are meeting his material scarcity with our material abundance. When we share the neighbour’s suffering it costs us more since proximity to suffering entails suffering. When we share the neighbour’s disgrace it costs us everything since we are now known publicly by the same disgrace.

But wasn’t our Lord “numbered among the transgressors” when he wasn’t one? Then obedience to him means that we too must serve the neighbour whose shame is notorious.

 

IV: — Lastly Christians are those who affirm each other in Christ, and confirm each other in Christ’s way. “Affirmation:” it sounds cold, doesn’t it. “Confirmation:” it sounds mechanical, doesn’t it. A “confirmation” is what the machine in the airport spits out concerning our flight reservation. Affirmation and confirmation are moved beyond mechanical iciness when they are wrapped in affection. Only as we are possessed of genuine affection for each other do we profoundly affirm one other in Christ and confirm one another in his way.

For a long time now I’ve thought that people generally are wounded, some more than others, but virtually everyone somewhere. People are also scarred. Are they crippled as well? Do our scarred-over wounds also cripple us? I think it largely depends on the affection by which we are surrounded and in which we are bathed. Affection, huge dollops of affection, prevents wounds from crippling.

Luke tells us that Paul came upon some Christians in Lystra who were being harassed. In addition to the wounds and scars that everyone acquires in life, they were clobbered again just because they were Christians. Luke tells us that Paul strengthened these beleaguered people as he exhorted them to continue in the faith and reminded them that it is through many tribulations that we enter the kingdom of God. Tribulations: difficulties, disappointments, frustrations, opposition – these don’t cease. Yet in the face of them all we must continue in the faith. We can continue, however, only as we are bathed in affection by fellow-believers who are fellow-strugglers with us and whose encouragement is effective just because it’s so very warm.

I relish the old, old story about Moses and his tired arms. As the Israelites staggered through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land they were beset with everything that would discourage anyone, not the least of which was lethal enemies. One day they were contending with the Amalekites. As long as Moses held up his arms (for Jewish people the arm is the symbol of strength) his people prevailed. But his arms grew weary. His people were in danger of being wiped out. Two men – his brother Aaron and his friend Hur – held up his arms until the enemy was routed.

We too are on our way to the Promised Land. But we aren’t there yet. When we are assaulted, whether from without or within, we need those who are contending alongside us to hold us up. Which is to say, we are always to affirm one another in Christ and confirm one another in the way of Christ, always and everywhere steeping all of this in all the affection we can find in us.

 

What then is a Christian? Christians are those who love Jesus Christ as Lord,

trust him as Saviour,

obey him as Master,

and encourage one another in him and in his way

 

as our love for each other mirrors the love of him who loves us without measure, without condition, without end.

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                   

January 2005