Home » Sermons » New Testament » Hebrews

Category Archives: Hebrews

You asked for a sermon on Living for the Present or What Is Going To Happen Today?

Hebrews 3:13

I: — Psychologists tell us that the person who lives only for the present is woefully immature. The person who lives only for the present is like a child who spends all his weekly allowance the day he receives it, with the result that he has no money for the next six days. The fancy term for this kind of immaturity is “inability to delay gratification”. People who can’t delay gratification are controlled by impulses and appetites. They are exceedingly immature, chronically in difficulty with banks, mortgage companies and employers, and not infrequently in trouble with the law. Whatever they crave they have to have now, whether what they crave is punching in the nose someone they don’t like or pursuing an illicit relationship with someone they do like.

Living “in the present” in this sense of the word — instant gratification — isn’t good.

Then what about living in the past? Two things have to be said here. We must say that it’s good to have a past and to cherish the past. It’s good to cherish tradition. After all, our generation is not the first generation. And not everybody who lived before us was stupid. In other words, there is wisdom to be gleaned from the past, and we should only be fools if we ignored such wisdom. More to the point, the person without a past is like the person with no memory. Just as the person with no memory has no identity, so the person with no past has no identity — and therefore doesn’t know who he is. Without a past we can’t know who we are! Obviously it’s crucial to have a past and cherish our past.

Yet while we must have a past we must not live in the past. People who live in the past are nostalgia-freaks. They romanticize the past. In romanticizing the past they falsify the past. Romantically they create a “past” that never was. When I was a teenager my grandfather used to tell me tirelessly, “Pay no attention to those who talk about `the good old days’. They weren’t good.” My grandfather worked for the Ford Motor Company in the days before the trade unions had formed to protect workers. The stories he told me of callous exploitation, of institutional savagery, of factory owners’ cruelty and capriciousness — all this belonged to days that were certainly “old”, said my grandfather, and just as certainly were never “good”.

“Good old days?” Does anyone want see again the days that didn’t yet know vaccination and inoculation and painkiller as simple as aspirin?

We should have a past and should cherish our past. At the same time, only the silliest nostalgia-freak wants to live in the past.

Then what about the future? Once again we should anticipate a future and we should cherish the future that we anticipate. Not to anticipate a future is to live for instant gratification in the present — and we have already noted the perils of that immaturity.

At the same time, even as we anticipate our future and cherish it we must not live for the future. People who live for the future are investing everything in the future, with the result that the present is worthless. People who live for the future are counting on so very much twenty-five years from now that the present counts for nothing. People who assume that waves of happiness are going to flood them in fifteen years are plainly joyless today.

To live in the past is to bury oneself in a past that never was — and therein render the present insignificant. To live for the future is to fantasize about a future that is never going to be — and therein render the present insignificant.

Then the only thing to do is cherish both past and future yet live in the present; in fact, live in the present alone.

If we are going to live in the present alone, what can we expect to happen today?

As I mulled over the sermon-request I pondered scripture’s use of the word “today”. What does scripture associate with the word “today”? What is going to befall us today? And therefore what should we expect?

 

II (i): — Following our Lord’s healing of a paralyzed man Luke wrote, “Amazement seized them all, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, `We have seen strange things today!'” (Luke 5:26)

Amazement seized them all — all the bystanders, that is; and these bystanders cried out, “We have seen strange things today!” What were the “strange things”? Four men had brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus. Jesus had said to the paralyzed fellow, “Your sins are forgiven.” This could only have sounded silly; as silly as if you went to your physician with a terrible pain in your knee and your physician said to you, “Your knee hurts dreadfully? I want you to know that worldwide poverty is going to end.” Or suppose a victim of horrific child abuse goes to a psychotherapist, and the psychotherapist says, “Nature will soon no longer be `red in tooth and claw’; the wolf is going to lie down with the lamb.”

Both responses sound silly. Actually, they are profound. You see, excruciating pain in your knee and worldwide poverty are both manifestations of evil. Child abuse and creature-devouring-creature are both manifestations of evil. A man whose legs are paralyzed and a man whom sin has seized is a victim of evil twice over; a victim of the same evil, ultimately, twice over. So far from being silly, then, our Lord is perfectly sensible when he both forgives the man his sin and releases him from his paralysis. It is the ministry of our Lord to overturn evil: every manifestation of evil. On the same afternoon Jesus frees the man from the grip of sin and frees him from the grip of paralysis. Bystanders remark, “We have seen strange things today.”

“Strange things”. The Greek word is PARADOXOS. PARA, “against”; DOXA, “opinion”. PARADOXOS, “contrary to opinion; contrary to what people are thinking, contrary to what people expect.” Contrary to what people expect, to be sure, but real nonetheless because authored at God’s hand.

In the course of living my days I too find myself saying, “I have seen strange things today.”

Several months ago a man in Streetsville whom I knew moderately well lost his job. I knew that the man had a major drinking problem. I thought the stress of his joblessness would only worsen his drinking problem; worsen it to the point that he’d succumb to liver damage in a few months and all Streetsville would nod knowingly at the graveside and remark, “Wasn’t it too bad!” When I spoke at the Lions Club dinner in April concerning my visit to India I asked someone from the club how Mr. So-and-So was doing. How was he doing? Why, his problem had worsened until he was comatose; then he had sought help — found it, no less. Now he was released from his addiction and went to as many meetings as he needed to — at which meetings he even now spoke occasionally for the sake of other men who were suffering as he once had suffered. In addition he had found a parttime job only a few miles away. Because his “stinking thinking” had been dealt with, there was significant change in his manner and outlook. What had happened to him was contrary to what everyone had thought. Strange, isn’t it!

When I was in India last January a couple, Solomon and Salome, fed me one Sunday after church. Solomon and Salome are both gypsies. (There are 40 million gypsies worldwide, and two-thirds of them live in India.) Solomon schools young men (virtually all of them gypsies themselves) for the evangelisation of gypsies in the hinterland of India. Solomon himself is a second-generation Christian. How did his parents come to faith? Decades ago a young missionary, a young woman, no less, traipsed by herself through India’s jungle-growth for days until she came upon a band of gypsies. She stayed with them and accepted their hospitality. Equipped with nothing more than a pocket-bible, she told and retold the story of Jesus. Solomon’s father, steeped in Hinduism for generations, listened to the stories of Jesus. Eventually the one about whom the stories speak spoke himself! Strange, isn’t it! “We have seen strange things today.”

I was in my office one Saturday morning when a young man appeared at the door. He said he’d been robbed the night before. He had a job waiting for him in Saskatoon, but now he had no money for the bus ticket and needed $72. I didn’t believe him. (If you heard the tales I hear every week you wouldn’t have believed him either.) I asked him precisely where he had been promised work in Saskatoon. He told me. Calling his bluff (I thought) I telephoned the company in Saskatchewan — only to discover that my bluff had been called: he really did have a job waiting for him. It so happened that the congregation’s benevolent fund was exhausted, and it so happened too that I had been to the bank that morning to withdraw $100 for housekeeping purposes. I asked the fellow what he planned to eat for the two-and-a-half day bus-ride to Saskatoon. He hadn’t thought about eating. And so I gave him my $100. Off he went. A week later a woman in the congregation (someone who had been very critical of me, I thought; she insisted repeatedly that I am crude) told me with much embarrassment that recently a conviction that she should give me some money had overwhelmed her and remained with her. She couldn’t explain it and felt awkward doing it. I accepted her envelope — and found in it a cheque for $100.

I am not saying that we should expect to see “strange things” every day. If we did, they would no longer be strange. I am not suggesting that we should always be looking for the unusual, the bizarre, the freakish. But I am saying that we should rejoice when we are startled at the “strange things” with which God surprises us.

 

(ii) — More must be said concerning “today”. Jesus meets up with Zacchaeus and says, “I must stay at your house today.” A short while later Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house, for he also is a son of Abraham.” (Luke 19:5,9) What has happened in between these two pronouncements? “I must stay at your house today.” They move off together to the home of the diminutive cheat. A short while later, “Today salvation has happened here!” The “in between” time is crucial, for “in between” Zacchaeus resolves to repay anyone whom he has defrauded four times over; in addition to compensating those whom he has “fleeced” he gives up half of his “goods” in order to assist the disadvantaged.

The biblical word for all of this is repentance. Repentance, in scripture, is a change of mind and heart followed by a change of life. There is both an inner conviction and an outer alteration.

We should note too that when Jesus goes to the home of Zacchaeus he says, “Today salvation has come to this house.” It’s plain, therefore, that salvation is nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else than the visitation of Jesus Christ himself. Salvation isn’t an arrangement or a scheme or a plan; neither is salvation a program for bringing a psychological experience upon oneself; neither is it a philosophy like existentialism or socialism which tries to pass itself off for salvation inasmuch as it uses a religious vocabulary. Salvation is nothing more, nothing less, nothing else than the effectual visitation of the saviour himself.

At the same time the one grace incarnated in Christ and displayed in Christ and visited upon us in Christ; this one grace is not only gift but also claim.

“Today I must stay at your house”, Jesus says to Zacchaeus. He does stay at the home of Zacchaeus. What a gift to the fellow! The “gouger” who merits from Jesus only the contempt he has already merited and received from the townspeople is now graced by the one whose visit surrounds him not with contempt but with consolation; in particular that cosmic consolation that has to be called “salvation” just because it saves us from something infinitely more ominous than townsfolk contempt.

At the same time the consolation Zacchaeus now knows frees him to hear and heed and happily honour consolation’s claim upon him. He doesn’t have to have his arm twisted. He doesn’t have to be cajoled or pestered or manipulated. He knows that the gift given him — a gift without strings attached — nonetheless requires a response from him. The same Christ-bestowed freedom that freed him from his tree-top hiding-place now frees him from tight-fisted hoarding. At this point — only at this point — Jesus exclaims, “Today salvation has come to this house.” Salvation occurs as the gift of grace acquaints us with the claim of grace and the claim of grace is finally honoured — thanks to the quickening of grace.

 

(iii): — Zacchaeus’s discipleship is genuine; his renewal at the hand of Christ cannot be doubted. At the same time, the “Way” that he has newly begun to walk is not without potholes and pitfalls, booby-traps and distractions. Exactly the same has to be said of the “Way” that you and I are called to walk: not without potholes and pitfalls, booby-traps and distractions. For this reason we must listen to the writer to the Hebrews: “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called `today’, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” (Hebrews 3:13)

For as long as time lasts, every day is “today”. Today is the only time we have. The past is behind us and we can’t recover it, while the future is ahead of us we can’t access it. Today is the only time we have. Then today we must welcome fellow-believers who will tell us the truth about ourselves lest we stumble into sin; and having stumbled into it, find ourselves increasingly deluded by it and increasingly hardened in it.

If we are isolated from fellow-believers (I mean intimate fellow-believers) then we are far more likely to be spiritually sabotaged by temptations that are so subtle we can’t even perceive them. If we are isolated from intimate fellow-believers then our endless rationalization prior to spiritual disaster and our endless excuse-making after it will never be checked.

When temptation settles upon us like tranquil mist we can whisper to ourselves that the sin we are flirting with isn’t all that sinful — in “this” instance — and can therefore be indulged a little more. But temptation doesn’t always settle on us like tranquil mist; sometimes it falls on us like a wolf falling on a rabbit. On such occasions it is no time before we have lost sight entirely of the truth of God and the way of discipleship and our own vulnerability — not to mention our Lord’s grief.

When temptation falls on us like a wolf we need the instant intervention, the most brutal intervention, of Christian intimates, or else we are undone. On the other hand, when temptation settles on us like tranquil mist we need the winsome wisdom and the reasoned thoughtfulness and the gentle persuasiveness of Christian intimates, or else we shall accommodate temptation’s gradualism until our resistance is eroded. As long as it is called “today” we must exhort one another lest we succumb.

Myself, I have learned to welcome three kinds of “exhortation”, all three of which help me resist sin’s deceitfulness and its capacity to harden. One kind of exhortation is casual conversation with people who love me enough to be honest with me. Another kind of exhortation is sharp rebuke from those who may or may not love me but in any case are angry enough with me to correct me. The third kind of exhortation is by appointment. I have a Christian friend outside the congregation, a man of spiritual maturity and wisdom, integrity and insight. I see him by appointment.

What have you found helpful as a vehicle of that “exhortation” which the writer of Hebrews says we all need lest sin’s deceitfulness deceive us and harden us? What kind of exhortation works for you?

 

(iv): — Lastly, on any day we may hear our Lord say to us, “Today — with me — in paradise.” (Luke 23:43) It isn’t every day we hear this; we die only once, after all. But any day may be the day when we are relieved from our struggle and spared further suffering. Any day may be the day when our faith is crowned with sight and our discipleship rewarded and our journey brought to completion in our Father’s many-roomed house.

We must be sure to notice that on the first Good Friday our Lord said to the insurrectionist dying alongside him, “Today!” Our Lord didn’t say, “later” or “at the end of the age” or “some time in the future but I’m not sure exactly when.”

You and I do not know how we are going to die. We may die suddenly: heart-attack, massive brain-haemorrhage, motor-vehicle accident. Or we may die slowly, an inch at a time, as our final disease moves at a snail’s pace. At the end of the day it will make no difference to us, because the day ends with “Today.” “Today — with me — eternally.”

Today is all we have. It is “today” that will see the “strange things” which occur as God’s inscrutable providence brings before us what we could never anticipate or imagine.

It is “today” that can find anyone owning the visitation of Jesus Christ himself only to hear him say, “Today salvation has come even to this house!”

It is “today” that must find us doing all we can to spare each other either a gradual descent into spiritual disaster or a catastrophic collapse into it.

And it is “today” — any day — that will find our struggle ended, our suffering relieved, our journey fulfilled, our faith crowned with sight, as the one who bound us to him years ago draw us even deeper into his own heart and holds us there eternally.

Today is all we have. And therefore today we can expect it to happen.

                                                                         Victor A. Shepherd
June 1996

No Dabbling Here

Hebrews 2:9

Psalm 119:103     Song of Solomon 2:3           John 8:51

 

(“O Taste and See…”)   The judge in the wine-producing contest evaluates the work of different vintners by sipping a few drops — only a few drops — of each vintner’s wine. The judge passes only the smallest amount over his taste buds, certain that he has sniffed and sipped just enough to get the flavour.The weight-conscious guest at the dinner party knows that it would be impolite, an insult to the host, to eat nothing of the dessert the host has spent hours preparing. Yet weight-conscious as she is, she knows that to eat all the dessert she’s been served would undo her diet on the spot. Therefore she eats just enough to get the flavour of the dessert. The tiniest taste will do.Not so in scripture. To taste, for our Hebrew foreparents, customarily means to eat or drink something in a large quantity; to eat or drink something so amply as to know the fullest flavour of it. To taste, in scripture, is to know every dimension of the flavour, to know what the wine tastes like when the bottle is newly opened and also after the wine has been allowed to “breathe”; to know what roast beef tastes like on an empty stomach and what meringue tastes like on an almost-full stomach; to know what steamed lobster tastes like in a restaurant and what it tastes like at the beach. To taste, in scripture, is to eat or drink something down so amply as to absorb every aspect of the flavour in every conceivable situation.

To taste, in scripture, means even something more. It means to drink something down so thoroughly, so completely, as to drink it all up. In a peculiar English idiom we say to the child hesitating over her milk at the dinner table, “Now drink it all down.” Once she has drunk all of her milk we say she has now drunk it all up — meaning, there’s none left over.

When the psalmist cries, “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8), he has in mind all the biblical meanings of “taste”. The psalmist knows that only as we “taste” in the Hebrew sense are we ever going to “see”. Those who merely sniff and sip never “see”; those who are content to sniff and sip around God never come to “see that the Lord is good.” Only those who taste (drink down so as to gain the fullest flavour of), and only those who drink down so as to drink up (soak themselves in all that’s before them); only such people ever come to “see” — that is, know incontrovertibly, know without argument or prop, know with the immediacy and assurance of seeing anything with their eyes — only these people come to have stamped on them indelibly the conviction born of experience that the Lord is good.

How good is he? Good in what sense? Good to what end?

 

I: — The writer of the book of Hebrews declares that Jesus Christ has “tasted death for everyone.” (Heb.2:9) To say that our Lord has “tasted” death is to say that there is no dimension to death that he doesn’t know first-hand, know intimately. He knows what only the dying themselves can ever know of the feeling of isolation, of moving into something where others may nod sympathetically but can’t follow. He knows the emotional anguish of mourning one’s own death, as well as the contentment at the end. He knows the assault on one’s dignity that death so often is. He knows the hardship on one’s nearest and dearest that death visits upon survivors. (Didn’t he make special provision for his mother?)

Not only has our Lord tasted death so as to know every aspect of it; he has tasted it too in the sense of drinking it all down so as to drink it all up. Nothing remains of it to hurt us his followers, much less terrify us.

Jesus startled hearers in the days of his earthly ministry when he announced, “Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.” (John 8:52) Bystanders thought the remark presumptuous and Jesus himself ridiculous. Yet our Lord was both sane and profound. He hadn’t said, “Whoever keeps my word will never be subject to biological cessation.” That would have been ridiculous. He had said, “Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.” He meant that what he has tasted — drunk up, in fact — his disciples will never have to know. What won’t we have to know? We shall never have to taste that death which is the Father’s just judgement on sin, that death which is estrangement from God, that death which is the most horrible spiritual vacuum.

There are two factors in our never having to taste such bitterness: one, he, our Lord, has drunk it down so as to drink it all up, leaving nothing to acidify us; two, we are to “keep his word” — i.e., we are to have all of him dwelling in all of us. We are to have him — everything we know of him — penetrating, altering everything we know of ourselves. He has tasted death on our behalf; we are to welcome him and his truth. The end of it all is that our coming biological cessation is nothing more than a momentary interruption, a minor nuisance, a short-lived “time-out” — but with no power to work in us all that scripture means by “death”. Our Lord has tasted it; we now keep his word; for us, therefore, death has been rendered inconsequential.

Freud insisted that no one could contemplate her own death; no one could face — genuinely face — the prospect of her own dissolution, her own demise, so fearsome is it. But if Jesus Christ has tasted death for us; if we do keep his word, abide in him as he abides in us, then I maintain we can contemplate our inescapable death without having to fall into denial or sublimation or projection or any of the defence mechanisms we customarily deploy in the face of overwhelming threat.

At the same time, apart from Jesus Christ we do have something to fear. The unguarded speech we overhear every day tells us that people are aware, deep down, that apart from Jesus Christ they have something to fear. Recently I heard yet another radio talk show on the subject of AIDS. The interviewee was speaking at length when the interviewer, thinking he had to say something, interjected, “And all of these people with AIDS are going to die.” Those with AIDS are going to die? Only they? Everyone is going to die, with or without AIDS, infected or squeaky clean.

Think again of everyday speech. We say, “Physicians are important; they save lives.” Now I think physicians are important. They are important for many reasons, not the least of which is pain-reduction; but they aren’t important because they save lives. No physician has ever saved one single person’s life. No physician has ever prevented someone from dying, finally. One of the things that physicians do is postpone dying; they postpone it; they don’t prevent it.

The fact that people speak as they do in everyday speech merely tells us that our society has not yet grasped the gospel: only Jesus Christ has tasted death for us, and only as we live in him can we contradict Freud and know that our coming biological cessation is but a minor nuisance that doesn’t even bear on our life in our Lord.

Contrast how our society speaks with how my late friend, Ronald Ward, used to speak. Ward (former professor of New Testament Studies at Wycliffe College , University of Toronto — and the godliest man I ever met) and his wife spent the wartime years in Britain . Their neighbourhood was bombed in an air raid. Homes were levelled all around them, or at least badly damaged. Their home wasn’t hit directly but it did suffer from nearby blasts. When the “all clear” sounded and they made a pot of tea, Ward was about to drink his cup of tea when he noticed a speck of plaster dust floating in it. Normally he would have “fussed” it out with his napkin. Yet in the wake of their having survived the air raid, the speck of plaster dust was nothing. Whereupon he gulped his tea, dust speck included. “This”, said Ward, “is what Paul means in 1st Corinthians when he tells us that death has been swallowed up, ‘gulped’, in Christ’s victory.”

Jesus Christ has tasted death so as to drink it all down, swallow it all up — all to the end that we, his people, shall never have to taste death ourselves.

 

II: — The psalmist cries, “How sweet are thy words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” (Ps. 119:103) “Word” here is Hebrew shorthand for “commandment”, “command”, “direction”, “teaching”, “claim”, “shape”, “guidance”, “instruction”, “pattern”; in short, “word” means “the behaviour that befits and characterizes God’s people.” God’s “words” taken together describe the pattern that God ordains for those who aspire to godly living. All of this, says the psalmist, is sweet to his taste.

Once again, when the psalmist says the command of God is sweet to his taste he doesn’t mean he’s taken a little nibble of it and said, “Rather sweet, you know.” He hasn’t flirted with discipleship and the faithful obedience required of discipleship and said, following his flirtation, “It’s all right, but I shouldn’t want any more of it lest I appear extreme.” To say that he has tasted the command of God is to say there is no aspect to the will of God and the way of God and the law of God that he doesn’t relish; there is no dimension to the command of God and the instruction of God that he doesn’t want to consume wholly and digest thoroughly and have it strengthen him utterly and enlighten him pervasively.

The psalmist certainly knows what malnutrition looks like. Malnourished people are weak, listless, pallid, dull. Spiritual malnutrition exhibits comparable spiritual symptoms. The psalmist sees it all around him. Still, spiritual malnutrition is the one thing the psalmist himself is never going to have — just because the claim of God upon him everywhere in life is sweet. He relishes it, and has found it sweet just because he has tasted it, immersed himself in it so thoroughly that it now saturates him.

The psalmist was born 1000 years before the advent of Jesus. You and I were born 2000 years after the advent of Jesus. This fact doesn’t affect truth but it does affect vocabulary. What the psalmist called “the words of God” the apostle Paul calls “the mind of Christ.” God’s will for us, God’s way with us, God’s pattern for us; all of this is gathered up in the one expression, “the mind of Christ.” We are to taste this, and having tasted it, know that it is sweeter than honey.

What constitutes the mind of Christ, the pattern after which our faithful discipleship is to be patterned?

Jesus was bent not on pleasing himself, but on obeying his father and

loving his neighbour, his neighbour being any human being, however

repugnant, who was suffering for any reason.

Jesus was humble, lowly, in the midst of those who boasted and bragged

and strutted.

Jesus was a faithful witness to the truth, even though faithfulness to

the truth cost him everything in a world that prefers falsehood.

Jesus was patient under undeserved insult.

Jesus was uncompromising in his denunciation of sin.

Jesus was instant and constant in prayer.

Jesus denied himself repeatedly in order to minister to others.

Jesus found his joy and blessedness in everyday, glad obedience to his

Father in heaven.

All of this is gathered up in “the mind of Christ”. And this is what the psalmist knew, even though his vocabulary for it was different. Still, the psalmist, like his spiritual descendants today, knew that obedience is joy and blessedness when our obedience is thorough and consistent, persistent and uncompromising; when, in a word, we don’t sip or nibble or sniff but rather taste the command and claim of God.

 

III: — Lastly, the woman speaking in that biblical love poem known as “The Song of Solomon”; this woman says of her beloved, “Compared to other men, the man I love, the man who loves me, is like a lily among brambles; he’s like an apple tree among the trees of the wood…his fruit is sweet to my taste.” (Song of Solomon 2:3 NRSV) Then she adds, “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention for me was love.”

The Song of Solomon is a love poem replete with eroticism. The church has often been embarrassed by this eroticism (I’m not) and has tried to tell us that the Song of Solomon is really about Christ’s love for his people. It isn’t. Neither is it about our love for God. It’s about a creaturely gift, a creaturely good: romantic love. And such romantic love, says the woman in the poem, she has tasted.

To taste love isn’t to love a little bit; to taste love isn’t to “try it out”; to taste love isn’t to mouth the tiniest morsel. To taste love is to plunge ourselves into love, bathe in it, inhale it, guzzle it, drink it down so thoroughly that we can’t imagine there being any love left over and going to waste. To do this is to learn with the unnamed woman that love is sweet.

The Song of Solomon happens to speak of one creaturely good, romantic love. By extension, however, we can speak of other creaturely goods: movies, drama, poetry, fiction, sport, bird watching, opera, dancing, gardening, kite flying, music, sailing. There is a sweetness in all of these, a delight so deep as to be too deep for words, given to those who taste but not given to those who dabble. Then dabble we won’t and taste we must.

“But doesn’t such ‘tasting’ suggest we might be in danger of overdoing it, of going overboard, of tasting creaturely goods so much as to forget to taste and see that the Lord is good?” On the contrary, just because we have already tasted and seen that the Lord is good we shall not confuse a creaturely good with that pre-eminent good which is God himself; just because we have already tasted and seen that God is good we won’t confuse a creaturely gift with that pre-eminent gift which is, as Paul reminds us, “eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6:23 ) Just because I know who God is I don’t expect my wife to be God, don’t even expect her to be super-human, don’t expect her to be any more than wife. And yet, just because she is God’s gift to me, Maureen is ever so sweet to my taste! Creaturely goods are seen in proper perspective when our gaze is first fixed upon him who has given them to us. As we taste him — and see that he is good; as we taste his claim upon us — and find discipleship sweeter than ever we imagined; it is then that we are free to forswear dabbling and immerse ourselves in creaturely gifts, only to find them sweet as well.

It all begins with a man exclaiming, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” It ends with a woman saying of her beloved, “His fruit is sweet to my taste.”

Victor Shepherd

April 2007

 

Boldness: A Distinguishing Characteristic of Christians

Hebrews 4:14-16

   Acts 4:13    John 11:14    Colossians 2:15    Proverbs 28:1

 

What single word says the most about the Christian life?  I imagine that most people would say “love”.  Others would say “faith”.  A few might say “discipleship”.  In the book of Acts, however, the single word that is used most frequently to speak of the Christian life is “boldness”.  Christians are bold. They speak boldly. They act boldly.

Actually the one Greek word PARRHESIA is translated by many different English words in scripture: boldness, forthrightness, frankness, confidence, plainness, outspokenness.  The one Greek word admits, even requires, so many different translations in that it resembles shot silk.  Shot silk is a textile that is dyed a particular colour; blue, for instance. As light falls on blue shot silk from different angles; as the angle of vision on the part of the viewer changes, the blue colour takes on slightly different hues: blue-shiny, blue-flat, blue-grey, blue-black.  It is still blue, but because of the shot silk it is always a variegated blue, a blue with constantly changing nuances depending on the angle at which light falls on it as well as on the angle from which the viewer views it.

So it is with the word “bold”.  Bold, yes, but not in the sense of cheeky; bold, but not in the sense of pushy or nervy or smart-alecky.  The latter kind of boldness only puts people off.  There is nothing to commend a boldness that is little more than rudeness.

In the book of Acts the apostles are said over and over to speak and act boldly, frankly, openly. A dozen different English words are used in any translation of the bible to translate the one Greek word (PARRHESIA) that describes the public demeanour of Christians. There is a forwardness about them that isn’t cheeky, a directness that isn’t discourteous, a forthrightness that isn’t insensitive, an outspokenness that isn’t saucy, a bluntness that isn’t brutal, a plainness that isn’t brazen, a confidence that isn’t cocky.  This characterizes Christians, says Luke, even as it first characterized him who is the Christians’ Lord.

 

I: — Speaking of confidence, the book of Hebrews exhorts us, “Let us with confidence (“boldly”) draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”  We don’t doubt our need of mercy or our need of help.  We need mercy inasmuch as we are sinners whose sinnership is so deep in us that by comparison deep-seated medical problems such as systemic infection appear almost superficial.  We need help inasmuch as we are chronically needy people whose fragility is exposed every day. Every day we are clobbered by someone’s heavy artillery, infected with someone’s poison, caught off guard with a surprise attack.

The fact that we need mercy and help, however, does not guarantee that mercy and help are available. Yet it is the promise of the gospel that what we can’t generate of ourselves, God supplies out of his sheer kindness.  As we look to God, to the sovereign one himself, says the book of Hebrews, we see that the sovereign’s throne is occupied by grace!”

Doesn’t this startle you? Most people expect a throne to be occupied by power, sheer power.  They feel that if they are lucky such power might be slightly benign. (After all, in the history of the world a benign or benevolent sovereign has been so rare as to render his subjects exceedingly fortunate.)  But the throne that is above all thrones is occupied by grace.  This takes my breath away. My life is ruled ultimately, as your life is ruled ultimately, as the entire cosmos is ruled ultimately by grace — grace being the sin-forgiving, all-embracing, unimpedable favour and blessing of God.

Because grace rules, grace is effectual; grace isn’t a useless warm fuzzy as ineffective as a pipedream.  Grace penetrates; grace permeates; grace achieves what grace alone can achieve. At the same time, because it is grace that rules, that “Other” to whom we look and in whose presence our lives unfold; this “Other” is neither an arbitrary tyrant nor a heartless judge.  From my first breath to my last breath my life, with all its labyrinthine convolutions and subterranean murkiness and who knows what else; my entire life is gathered up in and comprehended by and riddled with grace. Therefore I can look to God knowing that he wants only to bless me.  And since grace rules, since grace is sovereign, I can look to God knowing that nothing can impede the blessing he wills for my life. Then I must always with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.

The author of Hebrews insists that there is one ground of our assurance that grace rules; one ground, therefore, of our confident drawing near to the throne of grace to receive mercy and help.  The one ground is this: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has withstood all the assaults that render us prone to collapse and all the temptations that render us prone to corruption.  Resurrected and ascended, he has been crowned sovereign.  It is entirely reasonable to draw near with utmost confidence, for now we know we shall surely find mercy and help.

Our confidence isn’t cockiness.  Still, we have been emboldened to approach expectantly the only ruler the world will ever have and know that we shall be met with grace and nothing but grace.

 

II: — The angle of vision changes slightly and the same word takes on a slightly different hue. Peter and John have been hauled up before religious authorities.  The officers of the church courts (who pride themselves on being religious experts and procedural masters) assume that they will be able to convict, humiliate and dismiss or punish the two disciples of Jesus whose faithfulness to him has landed them in trouble with the church courts. How surprised they are to find that there is something about Peter and John that they can’t quite put into words, something that they can’t do anything about, but also that they can’t deny.  Luke writes, “When they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and then they recognized that these two had been with Jesus.”

Uneducated, common men — yet bold.  In first century Palestine “uneducated” didn’t mean “ignorant,” let alone “stupid.”  It meant “without formal rabbinical training, without a degree in theology”. “Common” meant “having no professional status”.  Yet it is these two men who are possessed of something that ecclesiastical authorities can’t handle; and whatever it is that possesses them, it arises from their having been with Jesus.

The boldness of Peter and John isn’t cockiness.  Their boldness is conviction plus courage plus transparency.         Living in the company of Jesus supplies this.

I am the last person to belittle learning of any kind, including theological learning. (After all, I make my living from teaching theology.)  At the same time, a pastor’s having passed an examination in theology will never benefit his congregation unless he has been with Jesus and continues to be. Congregations that are discerning at all know this; they aren’t fooled. For eight years I sat on a committee that assessed candidates for the ministry.  The committee was made up of different kinds of people: clergy, businesspeople, teachers, others holding postgraduate university degrees. Many of them struck me as naive about who should or should not be ordained to the ministry and entrusted with a congregation. But there was one kind of person who was never fooled: the middle-aged housewife with the slenderest formal education of anyone on the committee. The godly fifty-year-old homemaker with a grade ten education was never taken in by big words or paper credentials or letters of recommendation or impressive-sounding arguments. She intuited the appropriate boldness (conviction, courage and transparency) of the candidate who had been with Jesus.  She was able to recognize its presence (or absence) inasmuch as she throbbed with it herself.

I profit enormously from scholars who genuinely are scholars.  That is, I profit enormously in terms of rich mental furnishings and intellectual stimulation. After all, scholars excite fellow-scholars.  Yet as often as I like to think I am a scholar I remember that I am always a needy human being; I am a fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer with all humankind, whether scholarly or illiterate.  And therefore when I need help more than I need stimulation I look to those who are “uneducated and common”.  They have neither formal theological training nor professional status, yet they sustain me and nourish me and encourage me.  Such people (for me) are the sober alcoholic, the person addicted to anything at all who has come to know a great deliverance, the mother of the disabled child whom nothing and no one except our Lord has kept unembittered and unresentful and even radiant for years, the parishioner who could never preach a sermon yet understands her pastor’s struggle and loves him through his bouts of emotional spasticity.  Nothing can take the place of having been with Jesus.  Professional standing and formal training are categorically distinct from this. The church authorities who attempted to stampede Peter and John learned as much. There is a conviction, a courage, a transparency; that is, there is a non-belligerent boldness, confidence, forthrightness that comes only through intimacy with our Lord.

 

III: — The angle of vision changes slightly and the root word, “bold”, now has the force of simple starkness. The disciples assume that Lazarus is sleeping.  They talk about going to wake him up.  Jesus says plainly, according to John, “Lazarus isn’t asleep; Lazarus is dead.” Simple starkness. Jesus tells them plainly, boldly, without embroidery or embellishment.  The bluntness isn’t meant to brutalize; it is meant only to recover realism.

Divorce is painful; painful to contemplate, painful to endure.  “Divorce” is a word we prefer not to use.         Biblically speaking, divorce is a manifestation of death.  Let’s not pretend anything else.  Painful as marriage-breakdown is, however, when a marriage is dead the only realistic thing to do is to say in a firm voice, “This is dead.”         Jesus was every bit as plain with respect to Lazarus.  Our Lord does not lend us a religious softening of realism; instead he insists we confront reality.  Simple starkness always befits a frank acknowledgement of reality.

Several years ago when our two daughters were teenagers the Shepherd family’s supper-table conversation swung round to Christ’s driving the fleecers out of the temple.  Mary, sixteen years old at the time, asked, “Did Jesus seek forgiveness for what he did?” “No, he didn’t”, I replied; “there is no suggestion that Jesus had any awareness of sin in himself, no awareness of guilt at all.”  “But he acted violently”, Mary came back.  “And not only was he violent” I added, “his violence was premeditated. After all, he didn’t walk into the temple, observe the exploitation of defenceless people, and then lose his temper. On the contrary, he braided the whip from a handful of cords.         He spent ten minutes doing this, ten minutes thinking about what he was going to do once he had finished braiding.         His violence was premeditated.”

Next question at the Shepherd supper-table: “Is premeditated violence ever justified on the part of the Christian?”  One more question: “Is premeditated violence ever required of the Christian?” It is painful to contemplate such a question.  No doubt it is far more painful to do violence.  Nevertheless, Jesus plainly, frankly directs us to recover realism. And so I told my children of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s complicity in the plot against Hitler, Bonhoeffer knowing that if Hitler were removed hundreds of thousands of allied and German lives would be spared.         We talked about the role of police departments, prisons, the role of United Nations’ forces (peace-keeping forces, be it noted, keep the peace by threatening violence), even the role of the school principal in forcibly expelling the student who assaults other students or teachers.  There is no point in pretending we live in a Pollyanna world where such situations don’t develop.  They do. And Jesus Christ directs his people to own the realism of these situations.

“Lazarus isn’t sleeping; he is dead.”  Our Lord speaks boldly and bluntly not to brutalize his hearers, but rather to keep them from hiding their head in the sand unrealistically. He does as much for his followers today. Herein we are to be bold as he was bold before us.

 

IV:         — Change the angle of vision once again and another nuance of “boldness” appears. Paul says of Jesus Christ, “He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them.”  Public example. Open example. Manifest example.  In other words, what he did to the principalities and powers he did boldly. He disarmed them defiantly, decisively, definitively.

Principalities and powers are any of the influences and forces that tell us who we are and make us what we are.  To say the same thing, the principalities and powers are any of the influences and forces, including all ideologies, institutions images and “isms” that give us personal identity and public identifiability.

The force can be genetic. “He’s retarded”, we say, “retarded” — as though the boy’s humanity, his entire human significance, were exhausted by his inability to do co-planar geometry.

The force can be corporate. The company you work for dismisses you.  Company executives leave you feeling that you are a failure: failure is now your personal identity.  Not only that, the manner of your dismissal publicly advertised you as a failure. Failure is now your public identifiability.

The force can be racial. “She’s black, you know, really black”. Or ethnic: “They are nice people, even if they are Chinese”.  Or social: “He’s wealthy”– pronounced with a sneer.  In every case there is a private identity and a public identifiability.

And then there are the people who work for a company or belong to an institution that really does give them a mind-set and a character-set in conformity with the company or institution itself.  I have watched someone’s mind and heart, attitude and outlook shaped increasingly by the management theory of the major corporation for which she worked, while all the while she was entirely unaware of the transmutation visited upon her.  Such people have been made what they are (or at least appear to be), and usually they are unaware of it.

The truth is, I am not any of the things I am thought to be.  I am not even what belonging to an institution has made me to be.  I am not, finally, any of the things that my friends or my employers or my upbringing have made me.         I am not even the sum total of all the influences and forces that have stamped themselves upon me, simply because Jesus Christ has disarmed all of these, and publicized his triumph.

I am a creature of God. By faith I am a child of God, a younger brother of my “elder brother” (Hebrews), Jesus Christ. I am that person whom only God knows so well as to know who I really am.  I am that child of God whose identity is known to God and guaranteed by God, which identity will be made plain to me and others on the day of our Lord’s appearing. It is enough for now that I know myself to be that one whose true, real identity is known to God and preserved inviolate by him.  It is enough for now that I know myself to be that child of God for whom there can never be a substitute, upon whom inestimable love and patience are poured out, and with whose Father I am appointed to live eternally. I do know myself to be this, and can know it on the ground that Jesus Christ has made a public example of those influences and forces that he has disarmed. He has disarmed them decisively, and every bit as boldly (in his resurrection) displayed them as inoperative. Then nothing will ever be able to deflect me from who I am before God.

 

I began today by asking you what single word best described the Christian life. Frankly, I don’t think this is a helpful exercise. No single word is adequate.

Nonetheless, a particularly rich word is the word “bold”.  Like shot silk, it’s meaning changes subtly as the angle of light falling upon it and the angle of vision of the viewer herself change.

It means confident but not cocky in our approaching that throne whose grace rules our life as well as the entire world.

It means bold yet not brazen in our transparency to the Lord whom we know and cherish.

It means stark as we own the realism of life.

It means public, open, manifest as we recall our Lord’s triumph over everything that gives us a false identity and false identifiability.

 

This one word has sustained me for years.

Victor Shepherd                                                                                          

February 2006

 

Worship: It Can’t be Hoarded

Hebrews 10:19-25

 

I watched a six year-old boy brush his teeth before going to bed.  He squeezed toothpaste onto his toothbrush – and then more toothpaste, and after that more still, great gobs of it.   I asked him what he thought he was doing.  He told me that if he used five times as much toothpaste as normal, he wouldn’t have to brush his teeth for five days.  His reasoning was sound. He erred on only one point: he didn’t know that dental hygiene can’t be hoarded.

Most things in life can’t be hoarded.  Affection can’t be hoarded.  If my wife staggers home and needs to be hugged for any reason, I hug her. I’d never think of saying, perplexed, “But I hugged you last month.”

It’s no different with worship.  What God lends us through our worship of him can’t be hoarded.  Now to be sure, our primary motive for worshipping must always be the praise and adoration of God, the public celebration of his mercy and patience and truth. And as long as this is the primary motive of our worship, we will indeed be worshipping him.   At the same time, the worship we bring to God in turn brings blessing to God’s people. Such blessing, however, can never be hoarded.  God’s gifts, like manna of old, are sufficient for us in our need at the moment of our need and the moment of the blessing.  Nothing here can be hoarded.

The text of today’s sermon reminds us of some of the blessings of worship. It indicates what God works in those who “draw near to him with a true heart in full assurance of faith.”

 

I: — The first blessing of worship, according to our text, is “a heart sprinkled clean from an evil conscience.”         Presupposed here is the truth that we have a conscience, and ought to have one. Through worship we approach God, and find that our conscience is cleansed.  Plainly the conscience that is now cleansed needed to be cleansed inasmuch as it was defiled.

Today it’s fashionable to suggest that conscience is only a legacy from infancy, a carryover from parental restrictions, a carryover nasty to the point of being neurotic and therefore distressing; a carryover, in other words, better described as a hangover. If this is the case, then we should all aim at ridding ourselves of conscience.         Wouldn’t we all be better off if we were conscienceless?

It so happens that there are people who are utterly conscienceless.   Many of them are locked up in the provincial hospital in Penetanguishene , Ontario . They are psychopaths. They can never be trusted and therefore are highly dangerous.  Some of them sleep every night with one ankle cuffed to the bed frame. They are pitiable.

Perhaps you want to tell me I’m not being fair; in fact there is not a continuum between the person whose conscience isn’t quite as sensitive as it should be and the conscienceless psychopath who has to be locked up; perhaps you want to tell me that the psychopathic mind isn’t different merely in degree but in fact is different in kind.         I won’t argue with the objection.  But I will say this: to be conscienceless is also to be shameless, and the shameless person is to be pitied.

Yes, we all understand what psychotherapists mean when they speak of adults who are “shame-bound”, and we understand why psychotherapists (and others too) deplore the inhibited life of those who are shame-bound.   We should support those who struggle to rid themselves of neurotic shame, unnecessary shame, taboo-shame that has nothing to do with what’s right but everything to do with emotional warping at the hands of coercive figures. Still, rightly deploring “shame-bound”, it would only be folly to think that all shame, in all situations, is a sign of neurosis.         The person with no sense of shame is dangerous; the person with no sense of shame is to be feared when he is in our midst and is to be pitied when he isn’t in our midst.

A gospel-sensitized conscience, a Spirit-sensitized conscience, has nothing to do with neurosis.  It has everything to do with our awareness of who God is and what he has done for us, what he now asks of us and where we have failed to render him what we owe him. When the prophet Isaiah goes to the Jerusalem temple to worship he finds himself crying before God “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.” When Jesus overtakes Peter, Peter blurts “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” Neither Isaiah nor Peter needed a mental health expert.

Those who assume we’d better off if conscience were rendered inoperative forget something crucial; namely, not all guilt is neurotic: much guilt is real.  Not all offences are mere violations of social convention; many offences offend God and wound his creatures.  All of us are perpetrators who feel guilty because in truth we are guilty and ought to feel guilty.  Because of our depravity we have a destructive streak in us that will destroy ourselves and others unchecked – unless it’s checked by a conscience that hasn’t yet been blunted.

Most significantly, our text informs us that to approach God in worship is to have our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience.  Six hundred years before the unknown author of Hebrews penned today’s text the prophet Ezekiel knew that God had given him a word for dispirited people: “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses.”

Plainly, while a fittingly sensitized conscience is unquestionably one mark of the Christian, it’s not the only mark; it’s not the most important mark; it’s not the ultimate mark. The characteristic mark of the Christian – that is, the mark by which the Christian is publicly identified and privately consoled – is the assurance of God’s pardon. “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you will be clean from all your uncleannesses.”

The apostle John is quick to admit that from time to time our hearts do condemn us; and just as quickly he adds “[and] God is greater than our hearts.”  Of course we have an evil conscience; and God is greater than our conscience, for he has already sprinkled clean water upon us and cleansed us from all our uncleannesses.

At the time of the Reformation our Protestant foreparents insisted that to know God is to know God as “propitious”. “Propitious” is one of Calvin’s favourite words.  When he’s not using the word but wants to express the idea, Calvin uses such synonyms as “favourable”, “merciful”, “benevolent”, “fatherly”. Let’s linger over the last word: “fatherly”.         Calvin never denies that God is judge; God is the just judge; God is the judge whose judgement can’t be ‘bought off’ or ignored or set aside or deflected elsewhere. Yet just as firmly Calvin insists that God isn’t judge ultimately; ultimately God is father. He judges us only for the sake of correcting us, and he bothers to correct us only because he wants to bless us with blessing greater than anything we can imagine. God, of his sheer mercy, has made us and our need his dearest cause.  We don’t genuinely know God, say our Reformation foreparents, unless we know him as propitious. Who, after all, could ever love someone who was judge only?  Who could ever adore someone who was power only?  Calvin maintains that the God who is power only is the God who can never be worshipped.

John Newton, cruel slave-trader turned clergyman, hymnwriter and spiritual counsellor; Newton ’s best-known hymn, Amazing Grace, should startle us as often as we sing the second stanza: “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” Now we know why the psalmist exclaims, “This I know, that God is for me.” (Ps. 56:9)

As we worship week-by-week God’s truth concerning us – we are those whom he has soaked in his mercy – penetrates ever more deeply into us. “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with a heart sprinkled clean from an evil conscience.”

 

II: — Our text points to yet another consequence of worship: “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.” We must be sure to note that we aren’t urged to hold fast to the good old days (that weren’t good in any case.) We aren’t urged to hold fast to the present inasmuch as we fear the future. We are urged to hold fast the confession of our hope.

What is our hope?  According to scripture hope is a future certainty grounded in a present reality. The present reality is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, rendering him victorious – plus his ascension on high – rendering him ruler, ruler over all that is. The future certainty is that his rule, known now only to his followers, will one day be made manifest. His rule, disputed and doubted if not disdained at present, will one day be indisputable.

When we speak of “hope” we aren’t speaking of hopefulness, wishful thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…?” When we speak of hope we aren’t speaking of something ‘iffy’, something we’d like to see occur even though it might not occur.         When we speak of hope we are speaking of a future certainty more certain than anything the world can imagine.         Hope is a future certainty grounded in a present reality.  Our Lord’s resurrection means the crucified is Victor; his ascension means the Victor is Ruler.

When the psalmist exults “The earth is the Lord’s”, he knows that despite all appearances the world doesn’t finally belong to international financiers who make or break millions of people every day. It doesn’t finally belong to powerful nations and the disinformation that all nations traffic in. It doesn’t belong to multinational corporations who have engineered untold deprivation and suffering among marginalized people.  It doesn’t belong to ideologues whose deceptions most of us have no way of detecting until we are their victims.

We have to be honest, however: it doesn’t appear that the earth is the Lord’s.  It appears that the earth is everyone’s except the Lord’s.

We are not the first people to be jarred by the manner in which appearance contradicts truth.  The Israelite people of old looked out over the world’s treachery and turbulence and remarked, “At least we can be certain of one thing: God brought us out of Egypt . At least he’s involved with us even if he’s involved with no one else.”  The prophet Amos replied “Yes, God brought Israel out of Egypt . He also brought the Philistines out of Caphtor and the Syrians out of Kir.”  In other words, God is ceaselessly immersed in the struggle and turbulence of people everywhere. He is never a handcuffed bystander in the face of international maelstrom.

At the birth of Jesus wise men came from the east, from Persia . Today Persia appears in our newspapers as Iran . The wise men loom large in the Christmas story, the Christmas story being, of course, the narrative of God’s definitive incursion into human history.   Yes, the Son of God was born in Nazareth , a one-horse town in a backwoods province of the Roman Empire . Wise men from Iran , however, soon acknowledged him, Iran being as large as Nazareth was small. The visit of the wise men is cherished in Christian story.  After all, their recognition of the Messiah sealed the Christ’s significance for the vast Gentile world and the protracted unfolding of world history. The force of what the wise men represent ought to be at the forefront of our minds at all times today.

Jonah was sent to the city of Nineveh . He didn’t want to go; in fact at first he refused to go. Nineveh was a city in Assyria , and Assyrian cruelty was unrivalled.  Assyrian cruelty had reduced the twelve tribes of Israel to two, consuming the other ten in a holocaust that anticipated Hitler.  Eventually Jonah went grudgingly to Nineveh , and was dismayed to find the response to his preaching overwhelming.  Today Nineveh appears on our maps as Mazul, a city in Iraq .

Wise men and Iran ; Jonah and Iraq ; anyone who sees with the eyes of faith sees that the Christ who is victor is also the Christ who rules.  His kingdom is immoveable. And one day his present, effectual rule will be manifested so as to render it indisputable.

The Christian is never permitted to despair of the world, never permitted to despair of the international situation.         The world of superpower intrigue, power plays, connivance, disinformation and duplicity is nonetheless a world that God has promised never to give up on and never to abandon.

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope (hope being a future certainty grounded in a present reality) without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.”

 

III: — We are reminded, finally, that through worship we encourage fellow-worshippers. “Do not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another”, our text reads. The encouragement we receive through gathering to worship is not to be sneered at or discounted, because discouragement is always ready to spring upon us. The English word ‘courage’ is derived from the French word ‘coeur’, ‘heart’. To be dis-couraged is to be de-heartened.  To be discouraged is to have lost heart.  And such a condition laps at us all the time.

We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews. Whoever it was used a Greek word for ‘encourage’ that every Greek-speaking person in the ancient world knew well: parakalein.  The associations surrounding this word are rich.  As soon as the writer used it, readers would find their mind swimming with associations.

[1] One such association has to do with military conflict.  To encourage someone, in a military context, is to be that person’s ally. Allies are important since discipleship always unfolds amidst conflict.  To say that discipleship unfolds amidst conflict is to say that opponents are never far away; danger is never far away.  We always need allies, reinforcements.

A familiar tactic of military commanders is to divide or separate, and then conquer.  If a platoon can be isolated from the rest of the army; if a country can be isolated from other countries, then that platoon or country can be overrun readily. To cut ourselves off from worship is to cut ourselves off from the encouragement, the re-heartening, of fellow-Christians; which is to say, to cut ourselves off from allies and reinforcements.  Our defeat thereafter is a foregone conclusion.

Scripture is fond of the military metaphor just because it knows that evil is militant, aggressive.  Scripture speaks of the “hosts of spiritual wickedness” just because it knows that evil swarms.  Scripture speaks of the “demons”, plural, just because it knows that evil is pluriform, many-faceted, all-pervasive. Anyone who lacks allies in this situation is in a sorry way.  Through worship we are encouraged; we are re-heartened through the reinforcements God unfailingly provides.

[2] There are other classical associations with parakalein, encourage. One is urging someone to take up a public duty, to assume public responsibility.

I would never deny that the first function of worship, because it’s the characteristic function of worship, is the praise of God.  Worship is not a means to an end, however important and exalted that end might be. Worship is always primarily the adoration of God, the public acknowledgement of God’s worthiness.

At the same time, however, as our worship is focussed on the public acknowledgement of God’s worthiness, one of the consequences of our worship is that we hear again and again that the whole earth is the Lord’s. He loves the world more than he loves himself.  (After all, he spared not his own Son even as he has continued to spare the world.) As this truth seeps into us we are made aware that we have both opportunity and responsibility for public service in the world.

Since the whole earth is the Lord’s, there is no area or dimension of life from which he is absent.  Since the Lord isn’t absent, a Christian witness ought always to be present. As often as we gather for worship we are reminded of the inappropriateness of religious ghettoism. To worship with fellow-Christians is to encourage them to take up public responsibility.

 

There’s no point in putting a five-day dollop of toothpaste on our toothbrush.  Dental hygiene can’t be hoarded.         Neither can affection. And neither can worship.

For this reason the unknown author of Hebrews whose letter we have probed today urges us not to neglect meeting together. Inasmuch as we do worship together

we shall find that our conscience is both sensitized and cleansed;

we shall hold fast the confession of our hope, the certainty that Christ the victor rules;

we shall encourage one another as we find ourselves both provided with allies and
persuaded of our public responsibility.

 

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd          

February 2007  

A Note on the Nature of Worship

Hebrews 10:19-25    1 Chronicles 15:25 -28      Luke 4:16-21

 

What is the one church-activity that is duplicated nowhere else in the society? It’s worship, of course. Everything else the church does, and should do, other people and organizations do too. We feed the hungry; and so does Daily Bread Foodbank. We visit the imprisoned; and so does the John Howard Society. We assist the ill; and so does the Heart and Stroke Society. But no social organization overlaps the church in the church’s activity of worship. Since worship is the activity that characterizes God’s people, it’s important that we understand what worship is and why we do it.

It’s important to understand worship for another reason: people can’t be expected to do something over and over, 4,000 times in their lifetime (80 years times 50 times per year), without understanding what they are doing.   Either people come to some understanding of worship, however rudimentary, or they give up on it.

It’s important to understand worship for yet another reason: I’m convinced that if we don’t worship, don’t understand what we are about at worship, we shall soon abandon all the other aspects of the church’s mission. Unless we are re-oriented weekly (at least) to him who is the truth and reality of us and our world, we shall lose interest in assisting the ill and feeding the hungry and visiting the imprisoned.

At the same time, I’ve learned that even those who have come to church for years appear perplexed about what we do, why we do it, and why we employ words and gestures that we employ nowhere else. Today’s sermon gathers up the most frequently asked questions that have been brought to me or that I have overheard.

 

I: — WHAT IS WORSHIP?

Worship is our acknowledgement of God’s worth-ship. God is worthy; enduringly worthy. He hasn’t been worthy once only; he is eternally worth. He is worth worshipping on account of his undiminished, unceasing worthiness.

If God is worthy, how worthy is he? Paul exclaims, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” If there’s incomparable worth in knowing Jesus Christ, it can only be because he, God-Incarnate among us, is first incomparably worthy himself.

John the Baptist said he wasn’t worthy to bend down and untie the Master’s shoes (the work of a slave). John wasn’t worthy so much as to do the work of a slave? Don’t pity John on the grounds that he had low self-esteem. John never suffered from lack of self-confidence. John the Baptist simply knew himself unworthy alongside, compared to, the surpassing worth of Jesus Christ.

When the apostle John was exiled to the island of Patmos he was genuinely exiled: however much he longed to go home to Palestine he couldn’t. But John was never “exiled” in his heart; he was never without the heart’s true home. So far from languishing in misery on the island of Patmos, so far from despairing of himself, his situation, the world, even God, he cried out, in the midst of his most vivid vision, “Then I looked, and I heard around the throne…thousands and thousands saying with a loud voice, ‘Worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.’“

Worship is the acknowledgement of God’s worth-ship. His worth-ship is his never-ending worthiness. To worship, finally, is simply to admit that God is GOD. There is nothing like him and nothing else beside him. God alone is GOD.

 

II: — WHY DO WE WORSHIP?

How can we not worship if God is GOD? If we are grasped by anything of God’s immensity, God’s inexhaustibility, God’s sheer Godness, how can we not fall on our faces before him?

Please note that utilitarian benefit isn’t a motive for worshipping God. We don’t worship God because “paying our dues” on Sunday morning will get us something later in the week that we need and can get in no other way. To worship in order to get something; to come to church in a utilitarian spirit, is to demean God. We don’t worship because we regard God as useful. I find my barber useful, and therefore I go to my barber whenever I need my hair cut. But I don’t worship my barber; I use him. We worship God not because he’s an animated tool; we worship him just because he is who he is: GOD.

And yet while we don’t worship God for what he can do to advance our ‘selfist’ agendas, we worship himfor what he has done for us in accord with his agenda. He has created us. (He didn’t have to.) He bore with his recalcitrant people for centuries (despite unspeakable frustration) as he awaited the fitting moment for visiting us in his Son. He incarnated himself in Jesus of Nazareth, thereby submitting himself to shocking treatment at the hands of the people he came to rescue. In the cross he tasted the profoundest self-alienation, as the penalty his just judgement assigned for sin he bore himself, therein sparing us condemnation. He has bound himself to his church and to the world even though the world’s sin and the church’s betrayal grieve him more than we can guess. He has promised never to fail or forsake us regardless of how often we let him down. Surely to grasp all of this is to see that we owe him everything; it’s to have gratitude swell within us until we have to express it; it’s to have thanksgiving sing inside us until we have to sing it out of us. We worship as our grasp of what God has done and continues to do impels us to worship.

God feeds us like a nursing mother (says the prophet Isaiah); God forgives us like a merciful father; he is saviour of sinners and comforter of the afflicted and vindicator of the victimized. Then of course we want to worship him for what he has done for us and continues to do for us of his own free grace.

Grace. When Peter speaks of the grace of God he uses the Greek word poikilos. Poikilos means variegated, variegated with respect to colour. To speak of something as poikilos is to speak of it as diversely coloured. God’s grace is diversely coloured? Peter can only mean that God’s grace is many-splendoured. As diverse as the predicaments of life are, God’s grace meets us in all of them; his grace appears with a different hue, a slightly different shade, as our predicaments change. His grace is many-splendoured. Regardless of our predicament, be it perplexity, pain, rejection, sin, disappointment, folly, his grace is many-splendoured — and we can only adore him for it.

And yet even as we worship God initially on account of what he has done and continues to do, we worship him ultimately on account of who he is in himself . God is immense. God is eternal. God is underived. God is indivisibly simple. God is immeasurable; that is, his centre is everywhere and his circumference is nowhere. God alone has life in himself and alone lends life to anyone else. God forever moves amidst all that he has created even as he towers infinitely above all that he has created. God is holy; that is, he is uniquely, irreducibly, uncompromisingly, inalienably GOD. We worship God ultimately as our apprehension of him overwhelms us and we can only prostrate ourselves before him.

I think that Martin Luther more than anyone else was moved at the grace and mercy, the condescension and compassion of God, the self-humbling and self-humiliation of God. I think that John Calvin more than anyone else was overwhelmed at the sheer Godness of God. I think that Jonathan Edwards more than anyone else was startled at the unsurpassable “excellence” of God, as he put it in his idiosyncratic way; the profoundest attractiveness of God, winsome, compelling “beauty” of God. In other words, Luther was moved above others at what God has done for us; Calvin at who God is in himself; Edwards at the magnetism of it all. All three men could only worship as often as they reflected upon God.

III: — WHY DO WE EMPLOY UNUSUAL EXPRESSIONS?

The shortest answer to this question is, “Because the language of worship is love-language; because the physical gestures of worship are love-gestures.”   Think of love-language. When I was a child I noticed two things about my parents that my child’s mind didn’t connect. (i) My parents loved each other ardently and were unselfconsciously affectionate with each other, physically affectionate, in front of us children. (ii) They used peculiar verbal expressions to express their ardent affection, verbal expressions that made no sense to me. Because these verbal expressions made no sense to me, and because they couldn’t be found in a dictionary (that is, they weren’t English words), I assumed they made no sense to my parents. But of course these expressions of endearment

made perfect sense to my parents. Love-language isn’t found in a dictionary. Terms of endearment make no sense to the public, yet are indispensable to people whose hearts are aflame.

Years later, when I had fallen in love, Maureen and I daily used expressions that would have been nonsensical to others — if others had been allowed to hear them — even as these expressions made perfect sense to us just because they bespoke an ardour that no dictionary word could approach.

In the same way the physical gestures of worship make no sense to those outside faith, even as they make perfect sense to those inside.

Not so long ago at the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland I saw a woman approach a statue of Jesus and kiss the statue’s feet. To an unbeliever what the woman did was silly, superstitious and unsanitary. But not to her. For on the Sunday morning that I saw her, her heart was one with the heart of a woman, centuries ago, who had kissed the feet of Jesus out of gratitude for relief from a stain that was otherwise indelible.

Of course the language of worship is unusual. Isn’t our Lord unusual? Of course the vocabulary and the gestures of worship are out of the ordinary. Isn’t our salvation extraordinary?

Think about the expression, often used in hymns or liturgy, “holy, holy, holy”. It so happens that in Hebrew grammar there is neither comparative nor superlative of adjectives and adverbs. In English we say, “Apple pie is good; apple pie with ice cream is better; apple pie with ice cream and cinnamon is best.” But in Hebrew we have to say, “Apple pie is good; with ice cream, good good; with ice cream and cinnamon, good good good.” To say, “holy, holy, holy”, is to say that God is holiest; and even then, not so much the holiest of much that is holy but rather uniquely holy, incomparably holy, holy beyond telling, beyond comprehending.

The language and gestures of worship are unusual just because our love for God is oceans deeper than everyday words and gestures suggest. Commonplace expressions will never do justice to our love for him, our gratitude to him, our delight in him.

You show me the husband and wife whose household vocabulary doesn’t contain unusual terms of endearment found in no dictionary and I’ll show you a couple whose love for each other has

petrified — if ever love there was. On the other hand, to know ourselves the beneficiaries of God’s salvation (i.e., to know that only God’s mercy but certainly God’s mercy has spared us ultimate loss) is to be soaked in a gratitude that fires love, a love that seeks to express what is finally inexpressible. As soon as we attempt to express the inexpressible, customary expressions fail us and we use expressions that strike unbelievers as bizarre. Our unusual language doesn’t mean that we have a stunted vocabulary; it means that our language, rich as it is, is finally inadequate for our love for our Lord.

 

IV: — WHY DO WE WORSHIP TOGETHER?

This is a fitting question, since the emphasis in worship is always on togetherness even though faith is an individual act. Martin Luther used to say, “Each person must do his own believing, just as each person must do his own dying.” Nobody else can exercise faith for me. In the same way I can’t believe for someone else. We must each do our own believing. Scripture makes plain that while God loves a people he speaks only to individuals. Since God speaks only to the individual, only the individual can respond. Since only the individual can respond, why do we worship together? We worship together because God ultimately seeks a people for himself. The Hebrew bible speaks quaintly of “God’s peculiar treasure”. God’s peculiar treasure is a people that lives for the praise of God’s glory.

We must always remember that to come to faith in Jesus Christ (something that only the individual can do) is by that fact to be added to the body of Christ (a corporate entity). God seeks a people that witnesses to his intention for the creation before the Fall made a mess of things; namely, an earth populated by a holy people. In the wake of the Fall the earth is populated by unholy sinners. Every time we gather together for worship we attest God’s purpose: an earth peopled by a holy people.

There are 188 images or pictures of the church in the New Testament. The major image is that of a body, a living organism, the body of Christ. A body functions only as there are many different

“members” (to use Paul’s word) and as these members are related internally. A detached leg, a detached arm, a detached torso (hideous to contemplate) not one of these is a body. And even if leg, arm and torso are attached to one another but are related externally, then we don’t have a body: we have a puppet. A puppet consists of many parts, all of which are related externally. A body is present only when there are many members and these are related internally. Only then is it a living organism.

Every time we worship together, worship corporately, we hold up this truth. God so insists on a public declaration of this truth that he has promised blessings to public worship that will never be granted to private worship alone, however essential private worship may be.

 

V: — WHY DO WE DO WHAT WE DO AT WORSHIP?

What exactly do we do? Principally we do three things: we sing, we preach (or listen to preaching)[1] and we pray. Why these?

 

(i) We sing because singing provides a vehicle for our praise surpassing the vehicle of mere saying. People who are elated break into song spontaneously. Singing out loud comes naturally to those whose hearts are singing.

In worship we sing hymns; hymns are poetry; worship-singing, then, is the singing of poetry. Now poetry embodies an intensity, a compression (poetic expression is far more compressed than prose), a passion that mere prose will never embody. The singing of poetry, then, is the ultimate vehicle of praise. If our praise to God were anaemic we wouldn’t need to sing at all; mumbling would do. But just because our praise is boundless our praise has to be sung, and sung with the intensity and compression and passion of poetry.

(ii) Why do we preach (and listen)? Preaching is necessary for one reason: only God can acquaint us with himself. Only God can acquaint us with himself and inform us of himself and form us after himself. God does just this as his Word written is expounded in worship.

To be sure, preaching is a human activity. However it’s precisely a human utterance that God has promised to take up and adopt and render his own utterance. As God renders human utterance his own utterance God renders human speech about him his own speech about himself; and as we are quickened to hear God’s own speech about himself we find that his speech about himself is his word addressed to us. Now we know ourselves addressed as God speaks a word to us concerning himself that we would never be able to hear elsewhere or elsehow.

Preaching is a human event that God’s grace renders God’s event for us as the preacher’s word is forgotten and God’s self-utterance, the gospel, seizes us and sears itself upon us. For this reason preaching is found in worship.

 

(iii) The third thing we do in worship is pray. We pray because we are beggars before God. We pray because we know that what we need desperately God gives uniquely.

John Calvin was fond of saying, “Prayer is the chief exercise of religion”. Prayer is the chief exercise of religion in that it is our final self-humbling before God as we admit that we are so very needy and he is so very generous. Prayer is the final declaration of whether we believe in God and what we believe about God. Then pray we must whenever we worship, for we aren’t so foolish as to pretend we aren’t needy; neither are we so unbelieving as to think that God is stingy.

I said we do three things principally at worship. Actually there’s a fourth: we bring money. And why do we bring money? Don’t say “Because the congregation has to meet operating expenses”, although of course the congregation must. We bring money for a profounder reason. Jesus says we can’t worship God and mammon. According to our Lord there are two rival powers in the cosmos: God and mammon. We bring money to worship – enough money to constitute a sacrifice – as a sign that money is a broken power in our lives. We may possess it, but it doesn’t possess us. Our weekly offering – a crucial aspect of our worship – is a sign that money is a broken power in our lives.

 

VI: — WHO WORSHIPS?

This question can be answered briefly. The church militant worships (we who are Christ’s soldiers and servants now); and the church triumphant worships too (our foreparents who have died in the faith, for whom faith has given way to sight.) The church militant and the church triumphant worship as one.

Years ago an elderly French priest was walking home from church, one Sunday morning, when several youths began taunting him. The youths knew that very few people had been to the village church that morning. They smirked as they said to the old priest, “How many were at mass this morning, father, how many?”

“Millions”, said the old man, “there were millions at worship today.”

“Then I looked, and I heard around the throne thousands and thousands saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.” (Revelation 5:11)

                  Victor Shepherd  

July 2007

 

Because You See The Day Approaching

Hebrews 10:19-25

 

I: — What will the future be like? I don’t mean “Will there be greater electronic wizardry and paperless banking and grass that doesn’t need cutting and voice-activated computers in everyone’s home?” Of course all these things are going to come to pass, and come to pass soon. We already have a good idea as to the technological future, even though there will be more than a few surprises along the way. I mean, rather, “What will the human future be like?”

Different eras have answered this question differently. The ancient Greeks maintained that the future would resemble the past.  History is cyclical; what has been will be.  The future is entirely predictable since the cycle of history is always being repeated. Whether good or bad, blessing or bane, the wheel of history goes around and around. The future will resemble the past.

During the Victorian era a different answer was given. The human future wouldn’t resemble the past. The human future would be better. The Victorians believed in progress. They didn’t merely believe in technical progress.         (Technical progress is undeniable.   No one prefers the application of leeches to micro surgery.)  Beyond technical progress, the Victorians believed in human progress. Humankind was coming of age, entering upon its maturity.         The future would be better than the past had ever been.

In Europe the myth of progress was “outed” as sheer myth in 1914.  The Great War found the two most cultured nations in the world slaughtering each other in a manner that would have startled even blood-thirsty barbarians. On some days in World War I there were 60,000 casualties per day.  Then came 1917, the October Revolution, in Russia . A regime was established that made the Czar’s cruelties look like Halloween pranks.  Nineteen forty-five acquainted the world with the death camps.  (All of this driven, we must remember, not by uncivilized “savages” but by the most refined, cultured, educated of the Western world. Next there occurred the nuclear obliteration of cities in Japan .

Today the Arab League has vowed the extermination of every last Jewish person anywhere. And of course the medical technology that granted us relief from diphtheria and whooping cough appears relatively powerless in the face of AIDS.  AIDS, everyone knows, has wiped out an entire generation in four central African countries already, and will likely destroy many more people.

Existentialist philosophy abandoned all talk of the future concerning humankind as a whole.  Existentialist philosophy spoke only of the future of the individual existent, the solitary individual.  This person would have a future if and only if she acted “in good faith”; that is, if she were alert to the pressures of social conformity and resisted them; if she made no attempt to “keep up with the Joneses” but instead courageously made that decision (and kept on making such decisions) rooted in her own integrity and oriented to her own goals. But of course dozens of questions were begged here.  What makes one goal preferable to another?  Why is the goal I select for my life any better than the goal society as a whole pursues semi-consciously?  And hasn’t depth psychology undercut the notion of “integrity” in any case? Furthermore, if my coming death ends all of this “existential authenticity”, why not die now? Albert Camus, perhaps the best-known existentialist writer, frequently remarked, “The only intellectually defensible action is suicide.”  What kind of a future, then, did existentialist philosophy hold out?

Then what is our future, yours and mine?

 

II: — The future of humankind is wrapped up in “the Day of the Lord”, as scripture calls it, sometimes abbreviating it to “the Day.”  When the author of Hebrews wrote “because you see the Day approaching…” he assumed that his reader knew immediately what he had in mind. They and he were aware that God’s struggle with a creation that has frustrated God since the first instance of human disobedience and the welter of evil that poured over the creation as a result; God’s struggle to restore his creation will come to a climax on the the Day of the Lord. The parables of Jesus speak of this Day over and over.  The apostles mention it in every letter.  It fills the horizon of the early church’s consciousness.  God’s people look forward to it.  Its coming isn’t in doubt.  It looms so large before us that we can sense it even now.  The Day of the Lord is our future.

 

[i] God has fixed a day when the truth and reality of God will shine so very brightly as to be indisputable. Right now God – his truth, his sovereignty, his purpose – all of this is disputable. Agnosticism and atheism are defensible positions at this moment, arguably.  The day has been appointed, however, when God, known now only to faith, will be unmistakable and undeniable in equal measure.

[ii] God has fixed a day when the faith of God’s people will be vindicated.  Those who insisted that the only real power of the universe is the weakness of the crucified; those who upheld the triumph of the world’s biggest loser; those who maintained that the almightiness of God is nothing other than the limitless efficacy of his limitless vulnerability: all such people are going to be seen not has having been deluded fools but rather has always having been in the right.

[iii] God has fixed a day when the victimized and wounded of the world; the disfigured in body and mind and spirit; the crushed and submerged – are going to be blessed. What they never found in their earthly existence will be made up to them eternally.

[iv] God has fixed a day when the huge chasms that divide people now and foster rage and hostility in their hearts – the chasms of race and wealth and social privilege and opportunity — these chasms are going to be no more, and alienation will give way to reconciliation and shalom, that peace of God which is nothing less than the creation of God healed.

[v] God has fixed a day, we must add soberly, when those who have maintained for fifty years that they don’t want God and his truth and his way and his people; the day has been appointed when these folk (known only to God, we must add) will finally be given what they always said they wanted.

The guarantee of it all, insist prophet and apostle, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  God has raised his Son from the dead as the down payment, the first instalment, on the future day of the Lord.  God keeps his promises. The Day of the Lord is our future.

 

III: — This future is glorious. It looms before us now so as to determine our present.  Because this day is approaching, says the author of Hebrews, we must now, at this moment, “approach him, [draw near to him] with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” (Heb. 10:22) We can approach God and we do. But in full assurance of faith? Is full assurance of the gospel of God and our inclusion in it; is full assurance of faith something we can give ourselves?         Surely not. Then how do we gain assurance of the gospel of God and our inclusion in it?  How do we gain full assurance of faith?
When Maureen and I were courting we wrote letters to each other, hundreds of letters.  The farther apart we were geographically the more frequently we wrote. At one point in our courtship I was a student minister in a summer appointment in northern BC near the Alaska Highway; she was gallivanting around Europe . Even though our letters were love-letters there were doubtful lines (or doubting lines) in a letter from time to time. I at least would ask myself, “What exactly did she mean by that line? Was she upset with me?  Had I offended her and she wanted ‘out’ and was trying to let me down gently? And how about that oblique reference to the three American submarine sailors she and her two girlfriends met in Scotland ? Not to mention the 25-year old Israeli veteran of the Six-Day War with whom she toured Paris ?” Assurance concerning our relationship waxed and waned for several months.  But in September, when we saw each other’s face, doubt and disquiet evaporated instantly. There flourished the fullest assurance of our relationship.

It’s in the face of Jesus Christ that God’s glory shines, says Holy Scripture.  As often as we behold the face of Christ we behold the glory of God. And the glory of God, God’s people know, will fill the whole earth on the Day that God has appointed. As we continue to behold the face of Christ and see in his face the glory of God, our faith is strengthened; doubt and disquiet evaporate; and full assurance of faith flourishes. For this reason, if for no other, the purpose of the ministry is always and everywhere to point out the face of Christ and point the congregation to it.

 

In the second place, our author tells us, because we see the Day approaching we must “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.” (Heb. 10:23) The “confession of our hope” is the public acknowledgement of our confidence in the coming Day. The “confession of our hope” is our unshakeable conviction concerning God’s vindication of himself, his truth, his way, his people; God’s restoration of the victimized and scarred; God’s reconciliation of the alienated and hostile. The confession of this we must “hold fast.”  But not merely hold it fast in our hearts, privately; rather we must hold it up, hold it out; hold it up for others to see; hold it out for others to seize. We must do our hope, in other words. We hold fast the confession of our hope by doing our hope.

I saw it done in a city of which I am especially fond, New York City . On one occasion I spent an hour sitting on the steps of the NYC Library in downtown Manhattan . A black man was seated a few yards away from me. He was drunk; not comatose drunk, not even falling-down drunk, but certainly past the twilight zone. A white woman, 30 years old, sat down on the steps to change from her high heels into running shoes. (Businesswomen in NYC travel to and from work in running shoes, saving their dress shoes for office hours.) The man asked her if she could light his cigarette.         I waited to see what was going to happen next.  After all, everyone knows of the assaults in NYC, the knife-point robberies, the six murders per day, the rapes, the racial strife.  What was a young, attractive white woman going to do about a request from a drunk, black, male stranger?  She slid along the library step towards him, not so close as to be inappropriate but close enough that she could reach him.  She took out her lighter and lit his cigarette. She changed into her running shoes. Then she conversed with him for fifteen minutes. She didn’t speak to him flirtatiously, but neither did she speak to him condescendingly. She addressed him as a human being whose significance was no less than hers; she addressed him as a suffering human being whose suffering was one with hers; which is to say, one with the suffering of us all.  She addressed him as someone whose startling unlikenesses – race, gender, wealth, prospects, history – didn’t render her suspicious or superior or fearful or contemptuous or dismissive.  For her he was a fellow human being caught up in the same struggle, stuck with the same suffering, awaiting the same release.  Then with a smile, a cheerful wave, and and bright “farewell” she went on her way.

I was stunned, and stunned just because this one incident had been for me one of those moments in my life when the truth and reality of the kingdom of God , present now and known to faith, becomes startlingly vivid and luminous. It was one of those moments when the reconciliation and harmony and defencelessness that are going to characterize the Day of the Lord are aglow with God’s splendour now. It was a moment when the “hope” for God’s creation that the gospel holds up and holds out; when this hope, whose confession we hold fast, is so alive in the present that it pulsates.

What are such moments in your life?  If we are alert to them we know them to be moments in which the hope that we confess and hold fast; these are moments in which this hope is vindicated as true, vindicated as the only future the world can ever have.

 

Lastly, because the Day is approaching, says the book of Hebrews, we must “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds….” (Heb. 10:24) Everywhere else in the New Testament the word “provoke” is used in the nasty sense, as when we antagonize people, spear them, arouse them to resentment or spite or even bloodletting. Here alone scripture uses the word “provoke” in a positive sense: we are to prod each other, stimulate each other, energize each other, incite each other to love and good deeds.

A friend of mine injured her knee skiing.  More than “injure” it; she mangled it.  There was much damage to muscle and nerve.  Would her knee ever work again; that is would she be able to walk? Part of medical treatment involved having an electrode placed on the area of the injury.  An electrical jolt provoked damaged nerve and muscle, stimulated them. After all, it’s important to avoid lameness, isn’t it?  Don’t we use a jolt of electricity to re-start a heart that has stopped beating? Don’t we jolt a heart that is beating irregularly so as to get the jolted person out of danger? Proper heartbeat is important, everyone agrees.

It’s important that hearts beat in a congregation, that there be no lameness in it.  To this end, our author tells us, we have be stirred up, stimulated, provoked (in the best sense of the word) again and again.  For only then do love and good deeds appear in our midst.

In my older age I have concluded that love is genuine only where there is affection.  Frankly, I’m tired of people telling me that they love me (they mean that they won’t sabotage me) when they possess no warmth concerning me. I’m tired of hearing it said that love someone is to will the best for him (even though you can’t stand him.) In my older age I have concluded that love is love only if affection is present.

Think of what Paul says about love in 1st Corinthian 13: love doesn’t insist on its own way, isn’t resentful, doesn’t gloat when someone else is found to be wrong; love, he says, can endure anything. It all sounds good in the abstract. When we are faced with frustration or betrayal or a public skewering, however, we shall find that love is free of resentment and can “endure anything” only if we are possessed of genuine affection.

Paul told the congregation in Thessalonica that they had become “dear” to him, so dear, in fact, that he gave nothing less than himself to them. He told the people in Corinth that their affection had shrivelled, even as he urged the Christians in Rome to “love one another with affection.”

Dead or stony or frigid hearts in a congregation (at some point this means all of us) have to be stimulated yet again, jolted even, so that the heartbeat of the congregation will always be restored as affection gives rise to those “good deeds” which we otherwise resent having to do.

And what does affection within a congregation have to do with the Day of the Lord, someone asks? This.         On the Day the brightness of our Lord’s appearing will bleach away hostility, grudges, resentment. And since this Day is close upon us, our affection must swell in proportion to its proximity. At the same time we must continue to approach God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, even as we continue to hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

September 2006

 

To Chill or Cherish “One Another”

Hebrews 12:18-24

(Part One)

Smart-alecks bother me. Cain bothers me, because Cain was a smart-aleck. “Do I have to shepherd the shepherd?”, Cain taunts God in a witticism that Cain thinks is clever and funny but which God finds smart-alecky, “Can’t that shepherd shepherd himself?”

You know the story. Cain envied his brother Abel. Cain envied Abel so very intensely that his envy exploded and in his fiery rage he slew his brother. Whereupon God asked Cain, “Where is your brother?” “How should I know? Am I my brother’s keeper? Do I have to look out for that ‘creep’ who is so clueless and useless that he can’t look out for himself? He’s a shepherd. Let the shepherd shepherd himself.” (You have to read the text in Hebrew to appreciate the word-play.)

Cain’s envy; Cain’s hostility; Cain’s rage: lethal rage, murderous rage. Cain thought that by killing Abel he had gotten rid of Abel and everything about him. Cain had to learn that no human being ever gets rid of another human being. Abel’s blood cried from the ground, the text tells us; Abel’s blood continued to cry from the ground. Abel’s blood kept on crying out long after Abel himself was dead. What did Abel’s blood cry? Revenge! Curse! Wretchedness!

People still envy; people still hate; people still rage; people still slay — if not in deed at least in intent (and to God it’s all the same). The result? An inextinguishable cry: revenge! curse! wretchedness!

 

Anyone who attends to the news sees all of this illustrated every day. The world illustrates the truth of scripture ceaselessly. The world does? What about the church? What about us? We who are Christians know that the determinant of our lives is Jesus Christ our Lord. He makes us who we are; his truth, his light, his life — these make us who we are. And yet while Jesus Christ is certainly the definitive determination, the counter determination remains: Adam, Eve, Cain, and so on. In other words, we must always be alert to the spirit of Cain in us and in the church. We must be quick to identify Cain as soon as Cain insinuates himself here, with his envy, hostility, rage, murderous heart.

Prophet and apostle are realistic when they caution believing people against that carelessness which naively thinks that Cain’s spirit could never infiltrate the church. Prophet and apostle know what can arise within any congregation or Christian organization.

 

(i) [Galatians 5:26] For this reason the apostle Paul cautions the Christians in Galatia, “Don’t provoke one another; let’s not have any provoking of one another.”

A psychiatrist under whom I studied taught me that as people move into adulthood they develop adult attitudes and behaviours. But emotionally they never leave their early stages behind; just under the surface the most mature adult is still emotionally a child and an adolescent. If even the most mature adult is jabbed or prodded or pricked or provoked, what surfaces instantly is the child or the adolescent.

Do you remember when your children were very young? Two of them were sitting in the back seat of the car. The back seat was certainly big enough for both. Before you were two miles from home the two youngsters concluded that the back seat wasn’t big enough. One encroached on the other’s space. The second one jabbed the first. The first then ridiculed the second. The second then poked the first again. Ten miles from home and the back seat was a battleground.

Children? The same behaviour is seen in animals. The last time I was at the circus (few things delight me more than a circus) I watched the “tamed” lions and tigers inside the steel-mesh cage. They were all perched on their stools, sitting on their haunches, front paws between their hind legs, when one lion stuck out a paw and poked the lion beside him. The second lion ignored it. Whereupon the first lion poked his neighbour again. Now the second lion turned to the first and roared fearsomely. The first lion (the provoker) then roared back as though he had been attacked without provocation and was now highly insulted. As I watched these animals I thought to myself, “That’s my family! That’s our society! That’s humankind!”

The apostle Paul cautions us about the spirit of Abel in the congregation: “Don’t provoke one another.”

(ii) [James 4:11] The apostle James adds, “Don’t speak evil against one another.” Would we? Would we ever speak evil against one another? Yes, sadly, if envy rooted itself in us and festered into hostility.

There are two ways of speaking evil against one another. One way is to say what isn’t true. Another way, much more subtle, is to way what is true but isn’t necessary. There is much about every one of us that is perfectly true and just for this reason we should never want it broadcast. Then we ought to accord others the same consideration we want accorded us. There is much about every one of us that we don’t want broadcast not because it isn’t true, but because it is.

Paul tells us that our speech is to edify; our speech is to build up, build up both the hearer and the speaker. In addition, our speech is to impart grace. If human speech imparts the grace of God, then our speech is to be the vehicle of Jesus Christ’s self-declaration and self-giving. Unless our speech is the vehicle of Christ’s self-declaration and self-giving we are speaking evil against one another. And this, James tells us, we must not do.

(iii) [Proverbs 25:9] Next the writer of Proverbs insists, “Don’t disclose another’s secret.” Secrets are important. Secrets are essential to privacy. Privacy is essential to personhood. Personhood is essential to intimacy. Therefore secrets are essential to intimacy.

A few weeks ago I was asked, more or less casually, what I had been about for the 44 years I’ve been ordained. While the question was more or less casual, the questioner not looking for anything beyond the ‘chatty’, I decided to answer it seriously. “For the last 44 years”, I replied earnestly, “I have been preoccupied with the meaning of intimacy: intimacy with God, intimacy with others, but always and everywhere intimacy because I have little use for superficiality. In fact I can’t understand people who want to live without intimacy, although I meet such people constantly.”

Secrets (confidentiality) are essential to intimacy. We don’t have to answer every question that is put to us. There are some questions about us that we shouldn’t answer, just as there are questions about our most intimate friends that we shouldn’t answer.

There are even some questions (I have to be careful here) about our life in God that we shouldn’t answer, at least not answer for anyone at all. If someone asks us profoundly there is no harm in answering; but to answer a mocker or a trifler just because we have been asked is to throw pearls before pigs (in the words of Jesus); it’s to give what is holy to the dogs. To answer a trifler is to trivialize an intimacy that is beyond any words to articulate.

There are secrets (other people’s secrets) we ought not to disclose because to disclose them would break confidentiality; there are secrets (our own) we ought not to disclose because to disclose them would be exhibitionistic at best; at worst, to disclose them would trivialize them, cheapen them.

(iv) [Galatians 5:15] Lastly, Paul sums it all up for us as we endeavour to avoid victimizing each other here, Cain-like: “Don’t bite, devour, and consume one another.” If we begin by provoking each other, we shall end by biting, devouring and consuming each other. If we speak evil against one another, if we disclose each other’s secrets, we shall certainly bite, devour and consume one another.

Then all of this we must avoid lest the sin of Cain recrudesce and spread among us within our fellowship.

 

(Part Two)

Cain isn’t the last word, however; Jesus Christ is the last word. The blood of Abel isn’t the last cry to be heard; the blood of Jesus is. The book of Hebrews (12:24) insists, “The blood of Jesus speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.” The blood of Abel cried for revenge. The blood of Jesus announces reconciliation. Within the fellowship of the reconciled, within a congregation, there is a particular way of relating to one another.

(i) [Romans 15:7] “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.” How did Christ welcome us? Not by pretending that we aren’t sinners; not by pretending that our sinnership doesn’t make us more prickly than a porcupine and more obnoxious than an odour. Christ welcomed us, rather, by absorbing it all in himself; and having absorbed it all, inviting us to step toward him in the access he thereby created for us.

To be sure, we don’t absorb each other’s sin in the same sense that Christ has absorbed ours. After all, sin is uniquely an offence against God; he is uniquely victimized in our sin. And since only a victim can forgive, there is a welcome wherewith God welcomes us in his Son that is uniquely God’s welcome.

At the same time there is a derivative welcome that we must extend to each other as we absorb in ourselves the consequences of each other’s sin: the prickliness, the obnoxiousness, the ill-temper, the defensiveness surrounding self-interest. We absorb it, and therein we welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us.

(ii) [Romans 12:10] Yet more than a welcome is needed; warmth is needed. It’s always possible for us to deceive ourselves about the welcome we accord others; we can assume that because our welcome is polite it’s also warm; that because the invitation has been issued it’s also winsome. But this assumption is false. For this reason Paul adds, “Love one another with brotherly affection.”

On my first assignment following ordination I frequently dropped into the home of my colleague-in-ministry in rural New Brunswick. He had graduated from theology (University of Toronto) in the same year as I, but since we had never had any classes together we had never become acquainted with each other. I was glad to have a fellow-Torontonian handy when I was so far from home. As often as I dropped into his manse he and his wife welcomed me politely. They always put on the kettle and made tea, supplementing the tea with his wife’s prize-winning baking. But their welcome was never warm. As soon as we had settled and conversation had begun I was asked, “What do you think of the communicatio idiomata?” — or something like that. (Communicatio idiomata is an expression used to describe an aspect of Luther’s thought.) I replied cautiously. I was always nervous when I replied because I knew that my colleague didn’t want help with the answer; he wanted to test me. I always felt I was under review, always felt I was being examined, always felt I had to prove myself. Plainly he wanted to see if I agreed with the answer. The tricky thing was that I didn’t know whether I was supposed to agree with Luther on this point. On the one hand, my colleague, a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist, often spoke of Calvin as a second-generation Lutheran; on the other hand, he regarded Calvin as a decided improvement on Luther. Therefore I didn’t know whether the communicatio idiomata was or wasn’t, in my colleague’s opinion, one of those areas where Calvin had improved upon Luther, was or wasn’t something I in turn was supposed to approve. I never knew where I stood with this couple. Yes, they welcomed me, but they welcomed me only to put me on trial. I never felt “brotherly affection”.

How different it was in my congregation, Streetsville United Church, whose pastor I was for 21 years before going to teach fulltime at Tyndale. The congregation there abounded in affection. In that congregation I found oceanic affection. To be sure, all congregations possess civility. (Without civility the congregation would fragment.) All congregations are aware of proper procedure. (Without proper procedure nothing can get done.) But the Streetsville congregation had affection. At least in my interactions with the congregation I found myself bathed in a sea of affection.

Wherever I went as guest-preacher I commended this congregation. When other pastors told me how emotionally isolated they were in their congregations I told them they needed a “rest-cure” in Streetsville. The welcome there was shot-through with brotherly affection.

(iii) [Colossians 3:16] But of course we can’t spend all our time in the bathtub of affection. At some point we have to do something besides soak. “Admonish one another; admonish one another in all wisdom.” The apostle is being very careful here. We do have to correct one another; we do have to reprove, rebuke one another. From time-to-time we do have to disagree with someone else in the congregation; more than disagree, oppose. But our having to do this must never become an occasion for abusing or despising those with whom we disagree. The substance of the matter (disagreement, correction, rebuke, opposition); the substance of the matter is one thing. The style or manner or mood of our disagreement is something else. Yes, we must admonish each other (church-life isn’t a matter of mutual flattery); but we must admonish each other in all wisdom (church-life isn’t the occasion of “getting even”).

Think of Peter and Paul. Paul felt that Peter had “sold out” to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. The church-members in Jerusalem insisted that when Gentiles became Christians they first had to become Jews. Judaism was the stepping stone to faith in Christ. Paul thundered, “No! The gospel invites Gentiles to embrace Jesus Christ as they are without first becoming Jews.” Peter didn’t see it this way. The result? Paul said, “When I saw Peter I opposed him to his face.” Two things are to be noted here. Paul opposed Peter (no compromise), and opposed him to his face (not behind his back).

It isn’t the case that affection and admonition are mutually exclusive. Rather, they imply each other. If we truly love one another with brotherly affection, then we shall admonish each other and receive admonition without taking offense.

(iv) [1 Thessalonians 5:11] Yet our mutual admonition is always for the sake of mutual encouragement and edification. Not surprisingly, then, Paul adds, “Encourage one another and build one another up.”

To encourage is to supply with “coeur”, heart. All of us need to be supplied with heart. It’s easy to be dis-couraged, dis-heartened, have one’s heart taken away. It’s easy if only because we live in a world that is the venue of seething spirits, only one of which is holy. We live in a world that is riddled with principalities and powers, all of which are fallen. We seek refuge in a congregation that is neither better nor worse than any New Testament congregation, none of which was problem-free. Then we must be all the more careful to encourage one another, hearten one another, build each other up.

(v) [John 13:14] It all comes together in one final imperative: “Wash one another’s feet.” Our Lord says that we are to wash one another’s feet. In first century Palestine the washing of feet was the work of the lowest servant; it was the most menial of menial tasks. Who washed whose feet at the last supper? The master was the servant. It was a demonstration of our Lord’s uncontrived humility; it was an instance of self-renunciation. More than this, it was an anticipation of the self-renunciation of the cross. For there not only did the master become servant, but the Son of God became sin in order that sinners, you and I, might become sons and daughters of God.

(Victor Shepherd Westport Presbyterian Church, 2014)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Chill or Cherish “One Another”

 

The blood of Abel cries for revenge.

(i) Don’t provoke one another. (Galatians 5:26)

(ii) Don’t speak evil against one another. (James 4:11)

(iii) Don’t disclose one another’s secret. (Proverbs 25:19)

(iv) Don’t bite, devour and consume one another. (Galatians 5:15)

 

The blood of Jesus, “which speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24), announces reconciliation.

(i) Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you. (Romans 15:7)

(ii) Love one another with brotherly affection. (Romans 12:10)

(iii) Admonish one another in all wisdom. (Colossians 3:16)

(iv) Encourage one another and build one another up. (1 Thessalonians 5:11)

(v) Wash one another’s feet. (John 13:14)