Romans 1:16   I John 5:12

 

I: — I am not ashamed of the gospel. Why should I be? I was nine years old when I understood that provision had been made for me in the cross. At the same time I understood that because provision had been made for me, provision needed to be made for me. In other words I became aware of my nine year old sinnership. To be sure, I didn’t have a vocabulary as mature as the vocabulary I am using now; I had only the words of a youngster. My simple vocabulary, however, in no way diminished the truth of my understanding.

We should never make light of a child’s understanding of spiritual matters. After all, way back then I knew with a clarity which has never left me of God’s judgement, my peril, his promise; I knew of the sufficiency of the remedy, and I knew I had to embrace the One whose arms had already spread wide for me.

Of course I had only the understanding of the pre-teenager. Nonetheless it sank into me, indelibly, that the provision of a remedy which entailed the death of God’s Son could only mean that I was sick unto death myself and therefore should not deny my condition or slight the sacrifice made for me.

I was fourteen when I became aware of my vocation to the ministry: a vocation from the gospel (that is, from Jesus Christ himself) for the sake of the gospel. I said not a word to anyone. (I had seen too many “calls” to the ministry fizzle out like wet firecrackers.) I waited until I was twenty-three to stun my family speechless as I told them I would no longer pursue a professorship in philosophy.

When well-wishers told me that the ministry was a noble undertaking inasmuch as religion was helpful and idealistic young people are best at promoting religion’s helpfulness, I shook my head. The ministry meant one thing for me, and it had nothing to do with idealism or helpfulness. Ministry was the declaration of a gospel which was neither mere idea nor ideal nor idealistic. Ministry was the service of that gospel which was — and is– God’s power for salvation.

I have never been ashamed of the gospel. If I were tempted to be ashamed of the gospel (which is to say, ashamed of my Lord himself) I needed only to recall his pronouncement:

Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and
sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes
in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

We always know that people are ashamed of the gospel when they try to tell us that people can be secret disciples of Jesus, like the clergy without number who have approached me and quietly told me that they have secretly agreed with my stand in our denomination’s struggle. But there is no such thing as a secret disciple. Jesus insists that “secret disciple” is a contradiction in terms. You must have noticed that whenever Jesus called someone into his company, in the days of his earthly ministry, he always called that person publicly. James and John, surrounded by the other men and women in the maritime fishing village; Matthew sitting at his desk at Revenue Canada, surrounded by all the crabby people who resented having to pay taxes. All such people whom Jesus called had to stand up publicly and therein declare whose they were, and therein invite the onlookers to witness their stand and hold them to it if ever they appeared to depart from it. Don’t forget Zacchaeus. Jesus called Zacchaeus out of his tree-perch and had him stand in front of a crowd as big as the crowd which gathers around the Santa Claus parade. Only then did Jesus say that he and Zacchaeus would eat together in the privacy of Zacchaeus’s home. To come to faith in Jesus Christ, to become a disciple, is to be identified before thousands as loyal to the One whom the world despises and rejects.

Let me say right now that it is not the world which is ashamed of the gospel. The world may be hostile to the gospel or contemptuous of the gospel. But the world is not ashamed of the gospel. It is the church which is ashamed of the gospel.

Recently I was handed a questionnaire which a pulpit search committee had distributed among members of a Toronto congregation. Parishioners were to indicate, among several options, which options they deemed to have greater priority. One of the options to which they could assign high or low priority was “commitment to Jesus Christ”. Faith in Jesus Christ was an option for the minister they were going to call. The fact that this item appeared in the list at all bespeaks undeniable shame of the gospel. Immediately I thought of three NT documents (the gospel of Mark, the first epistle of Peter, and the book of Revelation), all of which were written to support Christians who were unashamed of the gospel and who would never be ashamed of it even though the fact that they cherished the gospel guaranteed their martyrdom.

William Tyndale, the English translator of the bible whose translation was the foundation of the King James Version; Tyndale was executed for his work as translator. He knew what danger he was courting by putting the scriptures into English. Then why did he persist? He persisted because he was convinced that if Englishmen and -women were without an English translation of the bible they would never know the salvation of God. He was right. No room for shame here!

Contrast Tyndale with a former moderator of The United Church whose article appeared in the Toronto Star during the summer. The article concerned the “indignity” which a group called Exodus International was foisting on others. (Toronto was the venue for a North America-wide convention of Exodus International.) Exodus International consists of people whom God’s power unto salvation has brought out of a homosexual/lesbian lifestyle; these people now exercise a ministry for the sake of those who long for deliverance from the same lifestyle. Our former moderator insisted most vehemently that any offering of such help was an indignity. Am I supposed to believe that holding out hope and help and healing to any habituated person is an indignity? It is labelled “indignity” only by someone who is ashamed of the gospel.

Pat Allan is a woman of whom you likely will not have heard before now. She is a leader in a Toronto-based “exodus” ministry called New Directions. Pat insists that she was led — and enabled — to leave her lesbian lifestyle, but not because she was disgusted with herself and wanted deliverance from it. She didn’t find it repugnant at all; she saw no reason why she should. Until, that is, until she was gripped by the gospel. As the gospel possessed her she came to know first-hand that God is holy. Apprised of the holiness of God she saw that her lifestyle (with which she was content) was incompatible with holiness of God, incompatible with the holiness God ordains for his people. It was the first step in her new direction, and the beginning of a subsequent ministry. I have heard Pat Allan speak at length and I have never heard her say she regards herself as the victim of an indignity. Plainly she is not ashamed of the gospel.

 

II: — I am not ashamed of the gospel. I regard as entirely accurate Paul’s depiction of what human existence is apart from the gospel. Apart from the gospel (that is, apart from the power of God which saves those who belong to Jesus Christ) people are unrighteous. The apostle tells us all about our unrighteousness. Listen to the analysis:

(i) people neither honour God nor thank him; that is, they are Godless.

(ii) they become futile in their thinking; their “senseless” minds are “darkened”. “Senseless” in the sense that they make no sense of the truth of God; “darkened” in the sense that they are ignorant of God and daily damage themselves and others.

(iii) they pretend to be wise; and precisely by pretending to be wise, says the apostle, they make themselves fools.

(iv) they are idolaters; they give their hearts to, are won over to, spend their lives pursuing what is not God.

(v) the cap on it all, says the apostle, is that God gives them up to the consequences of their Godlessness. The consequences of their Godlessness Paul summarizes as “base mind and improper conduct”. He then fills in the details of “base mind and improper conduct” by mentioning, among others, “covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, gossip, slander, sexual impropriety, bragging, ceaseless invention of evil”. The he winds it all up with a four-word description: “foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless”.

Before you say, “I know people just like that”; before you say this, he tells us, have a look in the mirror. For what we condemn in others we exemplify ourselves. “We” and “they” have exactly the same heart condition.

Am I ashamed of the gospel? The “set” of fallen human nature is a very serious set, even as it is set concrete-hard. I might be ashamed of the gospel if the gospel were merely a “nice idea”, but entirely ineffective and useless in the face of fallen human nature. But the gospel isn’t an idea; it’s power, says the apostle, the power of God for the salvation of all who admit humankind’s powerlessness before God and entrust themselves to the empowered One whom God raised from the dead.

The people who are trapped in a crumpled automobile; do you think they are ashamed of those mechanical jaws used to wrench apart the folded-up car and free them when they have no chance at all of freeing themselves? Do you think they would ever complain that the mechanical jaws lack good taste or delicacy or subtlety? Do you think they would ever speak of the rescue-operation as an affront to their dignity?

I am not ashamed of the gospel. The only serious rival to the gospel in the twentieth century is Marxism. Everywhere Marxism is exposed as fraudulent in its claims and powerless to deliver what it promises. What has it done besides foster misery? The gospel never looked so good!

 

III: — I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation for any and all who cast themselves upon it. And why shouldn’t we do just that? In the few verses from Paul’s Roman letter which we are examining today he tells us first why he is ready to declare the gospel at Rome: he isn’t ashamed of it. Then he tells us why he isn’t ashamed of it: it is the power of God for salvation. Lastly he tells us why it is the power of God for salvation: in it the righteousness of God is operative. The gospel isn’t a storehouse of religious information. The gospel is that power which renders the righteousness of God operative. In other words, men and women whose sinnership means they are in the wrong before God are set right, righted, made right with God.

Nothing thrills me like hearing the gospel declared simply because I know there is nothing like it in the world. There are no substitutes for the gospel, period. Any part of the gospel story thrills me in its uniqueness and its effectiveness.

Think of the people in the Christmas story. They rejoice with great joy at the good news, for to them has been given a Saviour. News of a Saviour is good news, the best news, if (i) we profoundly need saving, and (ii) we cannot save ourselves. News is good news, in brief, if we are in genuine danger and cannot extricate ourselves from our peril. This good news will in turn engender great joy if — and only if — we recognize what (who) has been given to us and find that in seizing him he has already seized us even more tightly, more surely, than we shall ever seize him ourselves.

We must not reduce “power of God for salvation” to “power of God for human improvement” or “self-fulfilment” or “peace of mind” or any such thing. Of course the salvation of God, vast as it is, ultimately spells peace of mind and so on. But not primarily. In the first instance the salvation of God is a righted relationship (faith) which spells rescue from real peril, deliverance from eternal loss.

I am always on the lookout for flatterers who nod appreciatively, condescendingly in the direction of the gospel, but then immediately reinterpret and reduce words like “gospel”, “faith”, “salvation” to something which an unbelieving world will buy. Such people remind me that the English word “salvation” has roots in the Latin word “salus”. “Salus” means health; therefore salvation means health. Next I am told, in our psychology-conscious age, that health means feeling good about oneself, being integrated (was Jesus “integrated” in Gethsemane?) and “getting it all together”. No! Salvation, in scripture, is being delivered from bondage as judgement is rescinded. Before righteousness has anything to do with what is ethically right it means being put in the right with God, by God. Faith, the paperbacks tell us, is a matter of self-ownership and personal authenticity. No! Faith is the bond which unites us to Christ the Righteous One, and unites us like bondfast glue.

I am aware, as you are aware, that the work of the minister overlaps the work of the psychotherapist, the marriage counsellor, the educator, and so on. Yet there is one aspect of my work which overlaps with nothing else: the evangelist. The evangelist commends Jesus Christ to those who have not yet owned him and loved him and come to the assurance of their life in him. Plainly, the work of the evangelist is the most elemental work to be done concerning faith. The work of the evangelist is foundational, bedrock. To be sure, it is the task of the teacher to instruct believers in the implications of faith; the pastor is to guide believers in the way of faith; the prophet is to help believers to discern what the gospel requires in new historical developments. But teacher, pastor and prophet have work to do only after the work of the evangelist has been done. Believers can be instructed, guided and rendered discerning only after they have become believers.

It is incontrovertible to me that the mainline churches of our era have overlooked, or disdained, or simply repudiated the ministry of evangelism. The misdirection, heresy and collapse of the mainline churches of our era are sufficient proof to me that we neglected the work of evangelism. Why did we neglect it? We have not believed the gospel’s diagnosis of the spiritual condition of humankind. Not believing the gospel’s diagnosis we have not believed the gospel’s remedy. Not believing the gospel’s remedy we have been ashamed of the gospel. The result has been an edifice without foundation. Despite the absence of a foundation we have attempted to do something with bay windows and gabled roofs and patio decks and subtle electrical gadgetry; now we are watching the foundationless edifice settle into a sinkhole. Our denomination’s vulnerability to every wind of heresy and perfidy and apostasy; indeed it’s inability even to recognize such winds indicates that the primary aspect of Christian proclamation, the most elemental aspect, was assumed to have been done when in fact it hadn’t. Right? Wrong! It’s not that we assumed it to have been done when in fact it had not; rather, there was an implicit or explicit denial that it even needed to be done.

I cannot deny my own complicity in it all. As I look back over my own preaching I see that I have finessed one topic and subtly probed another, assuming all the while that a foundation had been laid when manifestly it had not. In my heart I always knew better. But to say this is not to excuse myself. And where I cannot be excused I can only repent. Then the throb of this note, the base-note pulse which is the foundation for whatever else is sounded, must be heard so clearly from this pulpit as to be both unmistakable and undeniable.

 

IV: — I can imagine what some of your must be thinking by now. Is Shepherd’s outlook going to shrivel? Is his mind going to narrow? Will he sound shrill? Will he turn his back on the suffering people who have exercised him for years and thump the bible instead? Of course he won’t. But he will do one thing: he will never tire of reminding the congregation of something that C.S. Lewis mentioned years ago and which a moment’s reflection render’s transparent. Lewis said, “Those who do the most effective work in this world are those who are most concerned about the next.” He is right. Those who are most concerning about that grand salvation which the power of God can effect; that is, those who know that abandoning themselves to Jesus Christ in faith rights their relationship with God now and secures it eternally — these people, transmuted by the gospel and possessed of assurance concerning their new standing with God, are precisely those who spent themselves self-forgetfully on behalf of others.

I could document this over and over. Instead I shall speak of one man, a friend for twenty-five years, who exemplifies this better than any living person I know. I speak of Bob Rumball, a United Church minister who has been on loan to the Evangelical Church of the Deaf in Toronto for thirty-five years. He became the pastor there soon after retiring as a football player with the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Toronto Argonauts. Since then he has pioneered eight mission churches for the deaf, as well as deaf ministries in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. He established a year-round camp and conference centre for the deaf; he has developed nine group homes for deaf children as well as a foster-home program. Not to mention a day-care for deaf children and the hearing children of deaf parents. As well as a centre for multi-handicapped children. Then there are the youth residence, the seniors’ residence and the elderly person recreation centre. Plus the vocational training in the sheltered workshop, the print shop and the garage. In addition Bob is found day after day in the courts, the hospitals, the jails and the probation officers, always interpreting for those who are otherwise victimized.

If you read the newspapers you will know that Bob is also chaplain to the Metro Toronto Police Department.

He has been recognized for his work:

1972 — Man of the Year, Canadian Association of the Deaf
1976 — Member of the Order of Canada
1978 — Paul Harris Fellowship of the Rotary Club of Canada
1982 — Order of Merit, City of Toronto
1982 — Canadian for Progress, The Canadian Progress Club
1985 — Gardiner Award, Council of Metropolitan Toronto

In addition, Bob is the only Canadian to be awarded the Humanitarian Award by the Lions Club International. (Other recipients have been Albert Schweitzer, Pope John 23rd, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)

At heart Bob remains an evangelist. He has conducted preaching missions throughout North America, and will continue to do so. He has remained unashamed of the gospel. He insists that the deaf person and the multi-handicapped person stand in as great spiritual need as anyone else. In other words, the humanitarian work he does on behalf of the deaf and the multi-handicapped is never a substitute for setting forth the only Saviour those people can ever have. A few weeks ago I was talking to Bob on the phone and I asked him how he would speak of his ministry in one sentence. With his customary directness he replied quoting a verse from the first epistle of John: Whoever has the Son has life; whoever has not the Son of God has not life.”

When Bob was a highschool student he was interviewed by a Toronto newspaperman who wrote a column on the highschool football player of the week. The Newspaperman asked Bob what he planned to do when he finished playing football. “I am going to be a missionary”, said Bob. The newspaperman was irked; “I asked you a serious question; give me a serious answer.” “I am going to be a missionary.” And so he has been.

The mission field is our doorstep. In the July issue of the United Church Observer one article described new developments in United Church Worship. The newest development incorporates “the tradition of godlessness.” Worship (of God) which includes elements of godlessness is, of course, a contradiction in terms and therefore illogical. Worse, however, it is blasphemous. The mission field is our doorstep. The mission field is our denomination. The mission field is our congregation.

“Whoever has the Son has life; whoever has not the Son of God has not life.” This note has not been sounded sufficiently in my ministry here. I hope to God that henceforth it always shall.

 

                                                                                            Victor Shepherd                    

 Romans 1:16-17

I like to go parties (as long as they aren’t on a Saturday night; in view of the claim I must honour on Sunday morning, I don’t party on Saturday night.) I like parties for several reasons. One reason is that I get to know what people are thinking. I’ve learned that some people will say more if they know I’m a clergyman, while others will say more if they don’t know.

Some people are more transparent, more natural, less guarded, less artificial if they don’t know I’m a clergyman; others are more straightforward, even aggressive (not to say angry) if they know I am, for then they can unload the complaint that’s festered inside them for years, a complaint about the faith or the clergy or the church or religion-at-large. Since people either know I’m a clergyman or they don’t know (there’s no third possibility), I can’t lose at a party.

At one party I attended someone moved me into a corner and then denounced the particularity of the gospel; its insufferable narrowness, its insupportable claim to exclusivity, its postured uniqueness. How ridiculous, not to say arrogant, to think that Jesus is the Son of God, that his death is the atoning event that makes the world “at-one” with God and thereby gives the world access to God. How presumptuous for Christians to speak of Jesus as “Saviour” and “Lord” when there have been (and are) many influential religious leaders. My fellow-partygoer thought that we (by “we” he assumed that he and I were in identical orbits, and it never occurred to him that here he was presumptuous) should form a pool of all people of goodwill: Christians, Muslims, Bah’ais, Buddhists, Unitarians. After all, our common denominator was our affirmation that God loves. And the affirmation was important, since all of us need to be loved, and need to be loved with greater-than-human love.

I listened patiently and then volunteered the following. One, humankind’s deepest need isn’t to be loved. Our ultimate need isn’t to be loved in that we are emotionally deprived; our ultimate need is to be saved in that we stand guilty and condemned before the just judge. Two, there’s little point in God’s loving us if he cannot save us, since his love will forever fall short of our predicament and forever remain ineffective. Three, the other religious groups with which we are to form the pool don’t believe that we need saving (the Unitarians), or don’t believe that the God who transcends us even exists (the Buddhists), or don’t believe that mercy characterises God (the Muslims). Four, the groups with whom we are to form the pool don’t share the church’s understanding of human nature, particularly of perverse human nature. Five, those early-day Christians who recognized God to love them and all humankind didn’t first think their way to the abstract pronouncement, “God is love; God loves us; so who needs the complication of incarnation and cross?” Instead, early-day Christians were first overwhelmed by the Lord of incarnation and cross; it was their experience of the crucified One Incarnate, their experience of him that impelled them to declare that God is love.

At yet another party, in only a few minutes, I had learned a great deal about the mindset of our fellow-citizens and neighbours.

 

I: — Let’s think first about the human predicament. Humanists insist that we humans are entirely self-sufficient. We may be deficient on account of misdirected will or ill-informed understanding, but we aren’t humanly defective in any way. Whatever ails humankind we can cure ourselves. As for God, if perchance God is, we might be able to know him; on the other hand, God also might be forever unknowable. In any case, say the humanists, knowing God has nothing to do with the human good and its achievability. Humankind has within it all it needs to flower magnificently. In fact humankind is ascending steadily. The possibilities for human self-fulfilment are so dazzling, open-ended and limitless as to be beyond imagining.

There is a second opinion concerning the human predicament. Those who hold this opinion (religious humanists) admit that something significant is missed when God isn’t known. There are profound human needs and aspirations and possibilities that remain unmet when God isn’t known. Something significant may be missing, say the religious humanists, but not something essential.

There is a third opinion. It’s more than opinion; it is conviction born of self-authenticating experience: it’s the conviction of those who, like early-day Christians of old, have been overwhelmed at God’s visitation to us in his Son and his victory over our self-willed futility in his Son’s death and resurrection. The conviction of these people is that while humanist and religious humanist alike are fixated on the notion that humankind is either self-sufficient or slightly deficient, in fact humankind is defective in its nature and facing destruction at the hand of him whom scripture describes as creator and destroyer alike.

These people (Christians, in other words); just because they have been take up into a truth and reality to which God alone could admit them now know that the gospel isn’t an “answer” of some sort to the questions that humankind poses concerning itself or poses concerning God; they know now that the gospel is that “answer” which exposes humankind’s questions as the wrong questions. The gospel is that “answer” which exposes humankind’s questions not as anticipations of its cure but as symptoms of its disease. The gospel is a divinely wrought solution to the human predicament which exposes humankind’s self-understanding as colossal misunderstanding. In other words, only in the light of the divinely-wrought answer (gospel) do we see that our questions weren’t the right questions; in many cases, weren’t profound questions; in some cases weren’t questions at all but merely projections of humankind’s “wish-list.”

You must have noticed that when humankind thinks about what is at the farthest remove from the human, it thinks very well; in other words, when humankind thinks about geology or algebra, it thinks well. When it thinks about what is farthest-from-human its capacity for reasoning is least warped. When, however, it thinks about what is a step closer to the uniquely human, its reasoning is somewhat warped. As our thinking concerns what is closer and closer to what it means to be a human being, our thinking is more and more warped. The social commentator, (Michelle Landsberg, for instance), displays a bias and a distortion much greater than anything found in the geologist or the mathematician. When our thinking concerns God, however; when our thinking concerns ourselves under God, our thinking is hugely warped, virtually wholly warped. For this reason the prophet Jeremiah says that the heart (the Hebrew person thinks with her heart) is twisted beyond comprehension; for this reason the apostle Paul says of us fallen people that our senseless minds are darkened; our thinking is now futile; fancying ourselves wise we have become fools. Our thinking isn’t futile when we think about the natural world, the non-human world: our thinking isn’t futile when we are doing astronomy or sub-atomic physics or physiology. But our thinking is “futile” in the sense that it doesn’t yield truth when we start to think about what it is to be human, and specifically what it is to be human under God.

Our era venerates psychology but disdains truth. As a result our psychology-conscious era is always reducing statements about truth to statements about feeling. Our era reduces the gospel’s diagnosis of our situation under God to how we happen to be feeling. We feel frustrated or futile or self-contradicted. And if we happen to employ a religious vocabulary we are said to feel guilty (merely feel guilty, of course), or perchance feel alienated from what we call “God.”

But such reductionism won’t do. The diagnosis the gospel makes is that we are estranged from the God who made us and claims us; we have repudiated our identity as those created to be covenant-partners with God who reflect his glory; we are disordered in our innermost selves since our mind/heart/will are fatally flawed. This is not how humankind of itself thinks about itself; this, rather, is the gospel’s assessment of humankind. This is the human situation under God regardless of whether we feel as happy as pigs in mud or feel as miserable as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Needless to say, in light of the truth of God concerning us it’s appropriate to feel something; there is (or ought to be) a psychological concomitant to our real situation before God just as there is an appropriate psychological concomitant to both heart disease and the surgery that corrects it. But it’s impossible to pretend that heart disease and corrective surgery are no more than how we feel.

Ultimately the gospel has to do with truth, reality, substance.

Speaking of our innermost disorder, I’m always surprised at people who complain about the news. “Why do the news reports always report bad news?”, they complain. The morning I began this sermon the Globe and Mail was full of bad news.

One major article detailed atrocities that the Iraquis have visited on the Kurds, their own people. The article, however, didn’t probe the question as to why people of the same nation kill each other over and over in history’s civil wars. Still, the article did compare the atrocities of the Iraquis to the atrocities of the Killing Fields in Cambodia a few years earlier, and then compared both of these to the atrocities of Europe fifty years ago. The last paragraph of the article quietly mentioned that the Kurds, so horribly victimised this time, have themselves committed unspeakable atrocities.

A second article discussed a huge march in Washington in support of the abortion lobby. The Globe and Mail, however, failed to mention that the abortion traffic itself is an atrocity of monstrous proportions.

A third article, written by a professor from the University of Toronto, discussed the use of brain tissue from aborted foetuses for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. It pointed out several serious ramifications of this procedure. For instance, women may become pregnant deliberately only to be aborted in order to sell foetal brain tissue. After all, said the U of T professor, in some parts of the world human body parts (kidneys, for instance) are being sold. “It is inevitable that a market for aborted foetuses will arise in Asia and Africa”, he continued, “while an underground market will emerge in the western world.” He’s right, of course. Why wouldn’t an underground market arise in the western world when aboveground markets already exist in other parts of the world?

Question: Why do newspapers fill up with such negativity?
Reply: Because this is what’s happening.
Question: Why is this happening?
Reply: (What we say here dpends on whether we are Christian or humanist or neither.)
Question: Even if such negativies are occurring all the time, why do people want to read about them?
Reply: Because if the newspapers were filled up with sweet stories, the public would complain that the papers weren’t realistic.

People hunger for realism (as they call it.) They don’t want to be deceived or deluded. At the same time, it’s plain that people are fascinated, gripped, by the negativity they complain about but can’t flee. Plainly they are drawn to the very thing they say they wish they could escape. None the less (this point is crucial) as often as they hear of it they cannot draw the proper conclusion from it; namely, that all humankind needs saving. This truth has to be revealed; the gospel alone reveals it; and the gospel reveals the truth as the gospel renders this person and that people of the truth in whom the truth burns so brightly as to burn up all doubt about the truth.

 

II: — I’m not ashamed of the gospel. I glory in the gospel. Having apprehended as true that gospel whose truth first apprehended me, I could never then be ashamed of the gospel. Paul tells us in his Roman letter that he isn’t ashamed of the gospel just because he knows the gospel to be the power of God for salvation.

Note: the gospel isn’t chiefly information, even information about God, even information about God and us. The gospel is the power of God that effects salvation, and as we baecome beneficiaries of it we acquire information about it.

Everyone is aware that the word “gospel” means “good news.” But the gospel isn’t good news in the sense of mere announcement, mere report, mere information, like a CBC announcer reading the news. News broadcasts always report what has happened; they never make anything happen; they merely detail what is already the case. The news never forges anything new.

But the good news of the gospel is different: when the gospel concerning the saving event of Jesus Christ is declared, the power of God operates. The gospel is the only report of things past that genuinely forges a future. Information about someone who got strung up at the Jerusalem city dump in the year 30 is of no significance to us today unless disseminating the information unleashes something whose power can make new our ruptured relationship with God, can restore to us the destiny we have abandoned, and can recreate our otherwise fatally flawed nature.

We must always be sure we grasp the logical order of Paul’s understanding. It isn’t the case that he found himself haunted by, let alone wallowing in, personal unsatisfaction or frustration, then accurately analysed his predicament, then posed questions about himself and humankind in general, and finally just happened to learn that the gospel answered all his questions and confirmed his analysis. The logical order of his understanding is the reverse of all this. Perfectly content with himself, he was unforeseeably arrested by the risen one; under the impact of that seizure he was startled by a truth he couldn’t have anticipated; this truth (it amounted to a bombblast) exploded the understanding he’d carried about for years; the bombcrater that his life now was was then filled with that gospel-understanding of himself and others which his arrest and seizure at the hand of the risen one had brought with it. From that moment on he had seen countless other people undergo as much themselves simply upon hearing the gospel story. In other words, to hear the gospel story is to expose oneself to the power of God operative for the salvation of anyone at any time.

Ashamed of this? How could he be, why would he be, ashamed of what had turned his life 180 degrees, what had he seen do as much for so many more?

In 1982 a well-known British preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, died at age 83. When he retired an admirer gushed about the enormous sacrifice he had made to enter the ministry. Lloyd-Jones had first trained as a physician and then as a cardiologist. He was touted as a rising star in the firmament of British medicine. At age 30 he left his medical practice to pastor a depression-worn, working-class congregation in the Calvinist Methodist Church of Wales. Eventually he became the preacher to one of the largest congregations in London, 2000 people per service. He didn’t own an automobile until he was 51 years old, never having been paid enough to afford one. When the admirer fawned over his sacrifice he cut the fellow short. “Sacrifice? What sacrifice? What could ever be more glorious than declaring what God renders his operative power to save?” If the gospel were nothing more than a cozy bromide telling people that before God everyone is really OK after all, then Lloyd-Jones would have been a fool to give up cardiology. It was his experience and therefore his conviction, however, that the gospel alone has within it the effectiveness of him who first created the world ex nihilo, from nothing. He knew that the gospel recreates ex nihilo every time the gospel, the power of God, brings someone to faith.

I can only shake my head every time I hear newly-ordained clergymen and -women tell me they understand the primary responsibility of ministers to be facilitators. They have entered the ministry in order to facilitate. Facilitate what? I don’t know what image comes to mind when you hear the word, but the image that always swims up before me is that of grease. Ministers are greasers who lubricate the machinery of a group. No apostle ever settled for this. No apostle ever said to a congregation, “You decide on your own agenda; my vocation is to facilitate it for you. You decide what you want your religious package to be; my job is to help you get it..” No apostle ever thought facilitating anything to be his vocation. The gospel isn’t the lubricant of group dynamics. The gospel is the operative power of God himself. Only this power can triumph over the spiritual indifference, inertia or hostility that it finds everywhere.

Paul insists that the gospel is God’s power to save just because in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is rendered operative. “Righteousness” in this context has a very specific meaning. The word gains its meaning from the days of Israel’s exile in Babylon, 400 years before the advent of our Lord. The exile in Babylon was a terrible experience for the Israelites. They were far from home, aliens in a strange land, mocked and molested, demoralized; they viewed their helplessness as hopeless. And then through a Hebrew prophet whose word we find in the latter chapters of Isaiah God told them he would see them home again. He would deliver them from the oppressor, end their exile, and bring them home. Not only would God bring them home, he would bring them home with honour; and he would vindicate them before all who had despised them and therein vindicate himself as their deliverer. When God promised to make things right with them, his righteousness included all of this. Paul insists the gospel renders God’s righteousness operative. The gospel is God’s power to bring us home to him, bring us home with honour, bring us home vindicated as his sons and daughters and therein vindicate himself as our deliverer.

The gospel is God’s power wherein his righteousness operates as God puts men and women right with himself. But precisely whom does the gospel set right with God? Let the apostle tell us himself: “In the gospel the righteousness of God is made operative through faith for faith, faith from first to last.” And then he sums up everything we have pondered this morning: “Those who through faith are righteous shall live.”

Faith is simply the bond that binds us to Jesus Christ. Faith is our embracing the One whose arms first embraced us. Faith is our refusal to run past the outstretched arms of the crucified. Faith is the gospel in its own power forging its own reception within us.

And of this gospel I shall ever remain unashamed.

Victor Shepherd       

June 2000

Romans 4:6-4 

 

I: — “He’s three months old and he hasn’t been done yet”, the conscientious mother says to me. She is conscientious; she wants to be a responsible parent. Responsible parenting includes taking her child to the family physician for regular checkups, providing the nutrition which promotes growth, ensuring that inoculations and vaccinations and immunizations are received on schedule lest infectious disease overtake the child. Responsible parenting also includes getting the child “done”, says our friend.

I used to ask why. (I don’t ask why any longer, and in a minute I shall give you the reason.) The answers I used to receive were startling. (i) “My child might get hit by a car.” It wasn’t thought that baptism was a charm which fended off mishap, since it was admitted that baptism would not prevent automobile mishaps; but it was thought that when the automobile had done its worst to the child, the child’s baptism would make all the difference imaginable before God. (ii) “Until my child is baptized she won’t really have a name”. What the parent is struggling to say here is that name is associated with identity; until the child is baptized it will be lacking identity; the child will be some sort of non-person or half-person, forever humanly incomplete. (iii) Another reason for having the nipper baptized: “he needs to have his sin washed away.” If only it were this easy! If I could lighten the enormous weight of sin upon humankind by administering water I should never move away from the font. A bizarre aspect of the reply, “He needs to have his sin washed away”, was that the parent stating it appeared to be entirely unconcerned about her own sin. (iv) A fourth response to my question had to do with the notion that baptism was one facet of a multifaceted birth announcement, other facets being a few lines in the newspaper and a card sent via Canada Post.

A minute ago I said I should tell you why I no longer ask the question, “Why do you want your child baptized?” Here’s why: most of the answers I received were out-and-out superstition, and in my heart I knew that parents were simply giving back to me the superstition they had acquired from the church. When I was newly ordained and newly exposed to presbytery meetings, grave concern was expressed at a presbytery meeting that parents in our secularized society were not bringing their infants to the church for baptism as they once had. At the same meeting, I noted carefully, there was no concern about the parents who were thoroughly secularized; that is, there was no concern about evangelism, no concern about commending the gospel to ungospelized people; no concern about the spiritual life of congregations (that is, no concern about the environment of children who might be brought to the church for baptism; above all, no concern that if parents had brought their children for baptism, the congregation would have been asking parents to promise for their children what the parents did not cherish for themselves (in other words there was no concern over the fact that parents were going to be asked to perjure themselves.) Myself, I don’t feel I can fault parents for a defective understanding, even a superstitious non-understanding, of baptism, when it has been an indifferent or confused or ignorant church which has fostered the superstition in the first place. For this reason I think it inappropriate for me to ask parents why they want their child baptized; and in fact I never do.

 

II: — Then what is baptism all about?

(A) Baptism is first of all a public acknowledgement that before the all-holy God our sinnership has become a horror to us. Not an acknowledgement that we commit sins from time to time; this would be much too superficial. Not an acknowledgement that we have the spiritual equivalent of a rash: slightly unsightly, but scarcely life-threatening; an acknowledgement, rather, that we have blood-poisoning, a systemic disorder. When Peter preached, Luke tells us, men and women were “cut to the heart” and “cried out”. They were cut to the heart in that they were suddenly aware that they were disordered in their innermost core. They cried out, in desperation, inasmuch as they knew they could not alter their innermost core themselves. No wonder the gospel struck them as good news!

John the Baptist shocked people in his day not because he told sinners they should repent and be baptized; Israel had always invited gentiles to become baptized as a sign of their repentance and new-born faith. Gentiles (known popularly in Israel as “dogs”) upon coming to faith in the holy One of Israel,had always had themselves baptized as a sign that they were washing away pagan impurities. John was shocking not because of what he said; he was shocking because of the people to whom he said it. Israelites, he said, need to repent every bit as much as gentile dogs, since Israelites and gentiles have exactly the same status and standing before God. Church-membership going back for generations confers no superiority. In fact, said John, church-membership is too readily co-opted as a smokescreen behind which silly people think they can hide their sinnership from the coming judge; a smokescreen which leaves people dangerously deluded.

By now John the Baptist was in full flight. “I baptize you with water”, he continued, “but the coming one whose way among you I am preparing, he is going to baptize you with fire.” In other words, John and Jesus together administered the one baptism of God. And the one baptism of God consisted both of water and of fire.

Saturated in the prophets as both John and Jesus were, they knew that God’s fiery judgement was nothing to be trifled with. Everywhere in the Hebrew bible God’s fire cleanses those who humbly acknowledge their sinnership, even as it destroys those who do not. Daniel, whose very name means “God is my judge” (Dan-i-el), had said of God, “A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him…and the court sat in judgement, and the books were opened.” Inspired by the same Spirit the prophet Malachi had written, “The day comes, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble, says the Lord of hosts…”. Yet we must not think of Malachi’s message as bleak, for the fire of God which was to consume the arrogant would also refine the non-arrogant who admitted the legitimacy of God’s judgement upon them and who submitted to it as surely as the person with blood-poisoning gladly submits to medical expertise. Concerning these people Malachi wrote, “God will refine them like gold and silver;…those who fear his name shall go forth leaping like calves from the stall.” To be refined like gold and silver is to be precious before God and now rendered useful to him. To go forth leaping like calves from the stall is to rejoice before God with carefree exuberance.

John’s preaching electrified people and they came to him for baptism; these people welcomed God’s fiery judgement because they knew that the fire would refine them. They would be useful to God and would ever after rejoice before him with carefree exuberance. It was as if, having already passed through God’s refining fire, they were now cooling off in the Jordan.

When you and I are baptized we are publicly acknowledging our sinnership; not admitting that we behave inappropriately now and then, but rather confessing that life-threatening systemic infection is the human condition before God and we know it. In addition we are acknowledging that our sinnership merits the judgement of God. We are also publicly declaring our gratitude that God’s fire has not consumed us as we deserve but has refined us, thus rendering us useful to him. And rejoicing in all of this we are found cavorting like calves let out to frolic.

Baptism means this.

(B) It also means something more. In his letter to the congregations in Rome Paul states that in baptism the old man, old woman, was buried with Christ, so that the new man, new woman, might actually walk “in newness of life” as Christ himself stands newly raised from the dead.

The weather was frequently hot in first century Palestine; the one thing you didn’t do with a corpse was leave it lying around. A corpse wasn’t merely repulsive, it was a source of contamination. So bury it! Deep! And what has been buried should be left buried, never to be disinterred, lest others be contaminated.

Think about ambition. The “old” Victor is ambitious to gain promotion or recognition, whether in church or university or community. The “new” Victor (I trust) is eager to glorify God and magnify Jesus Christ his Son, saying with John the Baptist, “He must increase and I must decrease.”

Think about our children. What do we want for them? Are we going to settle for that greater ease, greater comfort, which succeeding generations have had in Canada for the past 150 years? Or do we want, above all else, that our children should discern God’s will for them, obey him in it, never look back, and find in him and his way for them that contentment they will never find anywhere else? Do we want this for them regardless of cost to them and separation from us? The new parent wants only the latter for his/her children.

Think about the confidence in God we say we have. The old man and woman look out over modern life with its boastful secularity, then out over the mainline church with its feebleness and foolishness — only to despair and do nothing, or get desperate and resort to gimmickry. The new man and woman, on the other hand, stake everything on the promise of God. We live in an era which bends over backwards to ensure results. We have polls and market surveys and psychological techniques. When an election is to be called, when a new product is to be marketed, when a government policy is to be changed, we know what the techniques are for “bending” people. Frankly, the “church-growth movement”, generated in the USA and exported to Canada, is one more “bending” technique. Denominations of every theological colour have pinned their hopes to the “church-growth movement” inasmuch as denominations are getting desperate for warm bodies. The new man/woman, however, does not traffic in this. The new man/woman bears witness, in word and deed, to the person, presence and promise of Jesus Christ. We are confident that Jesus Christ will, in his own way, own that witness to him which his people render him. Because he will own it the truth of the gospel will penetrate the head and heart of the most self-preoccupied secularite. Because our confidence in our Lord’s promise is unshakable we forswear any and all techniques which merely manipulate people, even as we fend off any and all temptations to doubt, discouragement and despair.

Baptism is a public declaration that the “old” man or woman, the person who blindly assumes that the world’s game is the only way to live and therefore tries to exploit the world’s game for profit; this person has been drowned, is now appropriately buried, and has given way to the new person who walks henceforth in newness of life.

(C) Baptism means something more. Everywhere in the New Testament baptism is public commissioning for Christian service. The service to which all Christians are commissioned is of the same nature as the servanthood of Jesus Christ himself. When Jesus was baptized the word which was heard from on high appeared simple enough: “Thou art my beloved Son; with Thee I am well pleased.” It appeared simple but in fact was revolutionary, in that it brought together two matters which had never been found together before. “Thou art my beloved son” comes from Psalm 2. It is God’s appointment of the king, the royal ruler, the one possessed of genuine authority. The words, “With thee I am well pleased”, come from Isaiah 42. This pronouncement is God’s approval of the servant of the Lord, more commonly known as “the suffering servant”. We read about the suffering servant at least once per year, on Good Friday. “He was despised and rejected by men…and we esteemed him not.”

At his baptism, when Jesus heard both pronouncements, he knew that his kingly authority was to be exercised through a servanthood which entailed hardship and sacrifice and social rejection.

That ministry to which all Christians are commissioned is a ministry of service, not domination. It’s a ministry of self-forgetfulness, not personal advantage. It may even entail social rejection rather than public congratulation. Every time someone is baptized, that person is being commissioned to a ministry which is one with the ministry of Jesus Christ himself. Such a ministry will unquestionably be effective as surely as it will invariably entail hardship and sacrifice.

(D) Baptism means one last thing. It means solidarity with all Christians everywhere; it means oneness with Christians throughout the world. In a word, it means that we have more in common with fellow-believers in Sri Lanka and Thailand, Ukraine and Uganda, than we have with non-Christians two blocks away. To be sure, the Christian in Thailand speaks a different language, is marked by different skin-pigmentation, knows different customs, eats different food, wears different clothing; unlike us in so many respects, yet identical with us, ultimately, in all respects. That person and we are followers of the same Lord, are invigorated by the same Spirit, aspire to the same obedience, know the same pardon, and have been appointed to the same future; namely, to praise and enjoy God eternally. However much Christians may differ socially, ethnically, linguistically, historically, what we have in common with each other is so profound and so pervasive that it eclipses our commonality with those Mississaugans who disdain the gospel. Baptism is a public declaration that the most important (because the most profound) linkage in our life is our linkage with fellow-believers throughout the world.

 

III: — There is one matter to be discussed this morning. What does all this mean when we baptize infants? Let’s be sure we understand this much: no magic is being worked in the child. The child hasn’t suddenly been given an invisible shield which magically protects him against who knows what. Neither has the child been given preferential status before God. Then what are we doing when we baptize infants?

(A) The parents are stating publicly that they want for their child everything of which baptism speaks, everything which we have examined throughout the sermon today. They want it for their child so badly that they are willing to make a public promise to God, a promise to which the congregation will hold them, that they will do everything in their power to foster in their child everything of which baptism speaks. Whatever sacrifice this may entail they will regard as a trifle compared to the riches which their child will know in Christ when the child matures to an age of discretion.

We might think of the service of baptism for infants like a cheque promising riches which is made out to the child. At this moment the parents are holding the cheque in trust. When the child matures the riches will be his/hers, as long as the person to whom the cheque is made out endorses it. They endorse it by entering upon the way of faith and obedience themselves. At this point they own the promises which were made on their behalf, and everything which the promises held out they now subscribe to themselves.

(B) When we baptize infants we are saying as well that we, the congregation, have such confidence in the understanding and integrity of the parents that we suspect neither superstition nor perjury. We are confident the parents mean what they say and say what they mean.

(C) Lastly, when we, the congregation, baptize infants we are declaring our confidence that this congregation is so gospel-possessed that it will most certainly provide the nurture and encouragement needed for Christian development.

In a word, we are saying that we feel we can baptize the child in anticipation of the child’s subsequent discipleship.

F I N I S

                                                                                              Victor A. Shepherd                                                                               

  March 1992

                                                                                             

Romans 5: 1-5

 

“Can you offer any justification for what you’ve done?”, the judge asks the accused in the courtroom. The judge is asking the person on trial if there is any extenuating reason for his behaviour, any valid explanation that would legitimate his behaviour. If there is, the judge will certainly take it into account; in fact, if there’s legitimate reason for the accused person’s behaviour, the judge will excuse the accused. If, on the other hand, the accused person lacks legitimate reason for his conduct but offers a justification for it in any case, he will instead bring forward the shabbiest self-serving rationalisation.

In everyday discourse we use the word “justification” in both senses. Every day we say, “My justification for driving through the red light is that I had in the car with me a man who had just had a heart attack and needed to get to the hospital as quickly as possible.” This is a legitimate reason for driving through the red light. Every day we also use the word “justification” for the shabbiest, self-serving rationalisation. “I drove through the red light because I needed to get home to see the opening face-off of the hockey game.

When scripture uses the word “justification” it has neither of these meanings in mind. Justification, in scripture, has nothing to do with explanations of any sort, whether genuine reasons or shabby rationalisations. When the apostle Paul insists that God justifies the ungodly he doesn’t mean that God provides an explanation, be it ever so sound, for my ungodliness; neither does he mean that God offers or entertains a shabby rationalisation for my ungodliness. When he says that God justifies the ungodly he means that God puts in the right with himself men and women who are now in the wrong with him. The one Greek word, dikaiosune, is commonly translated both “justification” and “righteousness. If we want to avoid being misled by modern English meanings we should always understand “justification” or “justify” in terms of “righteous” or “righteousness.” To say that we are justified, then, is to say that we are put in the right with God, made right with God. Obviously justification is the kernel of the gospel. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ sets people in the right with God.

“Excuse me”, the miffed person replies, insulted and indignant, “I never thought I was in the wrong. Who, after all, is in the wrong before God?” With one voice all the prophets and the apostles answer, “Everyone! Everyone is!” “There is none righteous”, declares the psalmist. Jesus himself announces that he came for the sake of the lost, the dead: the unrighteous, in other words. Our Lord stops at the foot of the tree in which Zacchaeus is perched. An hour later, when they’ve finished their meal together, Jesus exclaims to all who can hear, “Today salvation has come to this house… For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:9-10) Plainly Zacchaeus was so thoroughly in the wrong before God as to be on the edge of ultimate loss.

Jesus himself insists, “I came not to call the righteous (there aren’t any to be called) but sinners to repentance.” John bluntly tells his readers that if they deny themselves to be sinners at heart, sinners to the core, they are making God a liar. Luke says that the good news of great joy broadcast to all people on Christmas morning is this: we’ve been given a saviour; not a helper, not an inspirer, but a saviour. Since God has deemed it necessary to give us a saviour, we should be fools to tell him is gift is superfluous.

Our text tells us that we are “justified by faith.” We are set right with God through our faith in the Righteous One whom he has give us, Christ Jesus our Lord. He is that Son who is ever rightly related to the Father. To entrust ourselves to him and cast ourselves upon him; to abandon ourselves to him and remain bound to him – all of this is what is meant by “faith” – is to find that when the Father looks upon the Son he sees us included in the Son, so closely are we identified with the Son. As we cling to him in faith his righteousness clothes us; his standing with the Father is reckoned to be our standing. Intimacy with the Righteous One renders us “in the right” too.

The truth is glorious, and because the truth is glorious we must be sure we don’t falsify it. Specifically we must be sure we don’t psychologise it. We mustn’t reduce truth to feeling, actuality to sentiment. We mustn’t say that “justification by faith” means that we feel accepted, even feel we are accepted cosmically. We mustn’t say that our feelings of insecurity are rendered less piercing and our feelings of guilt are assuaged. To be sure, they may have been. It’s to be expected that our changed situation before God changes our feelings about ever so much. Still, the foundational issue isn’t our feelings but our condition: we who are in the wrong before God are set right with him as we cling in faith to the Righteous One whom he has given us.

Justification by faith is the kernel of the gospel. For this reason it must always be declared with urgency, preached with passion, surrounded by the intercession of God’s people.

 

II: — Yet the kernel of the gospel, like any kernel, germinates and brings forth fruit in abundance. Something of its abundant fruit the apostle lists in the text we are probing together.

First, as we are set right with God we have peace with God. Once again we mustn’t falsify this truth by psychologising it. We mustn’t reduce peace with God to peace of mind, peace of heart, innermost tranquillity. When a Jew like Paul speaks of peace he thinks first of shalom. Shalom is peace not in the sense of “peace in here” but “peace out there”; peace not in the sense of what I’m feeling but what has happened; peace not in the sense of inner contentment but the disappearance of outer enmity. To look for “peace in here” before there is “peace out there” is to pursue an illusion, an unreality.

On the other hand, once “peace out there” has been established, “peace in here” follows naturally and normally. The apostle maintains that as we are set right with God peace with God is established, enmity between God and us ceases, intimacy thrives.

No doubt someone is puzzled now and asks, “Enmity? What enmity? I’ve nothing against God.” The point, however, is the converse: what has God against us? As soon as we look at the parables of Jesus we have to be startled at the theme of judgement which looms so large in so many of them. Think of the parables of the wheat and the tares, the drag-net, the ten maidens, the sheep and the goats, the merciless servant, plus so many more. The elemental issue isn’t our assessment of God; it’s his assessment of us. His assessment is that we are defiant and disobedient; we are inexcusably defiant and disobedient. He finds our defiance and disobedience intolerable. His opposition to us here constitutes his enmity.

But – and this is the most crucial “but” in the world – God opposes us only for our good. He doesn’t oppose us out of petulance or injured pride. His enmity has nothing to do with irritability. To be sure, scripture speaks of his wrath as often as it speaks of his love. But that’s because his wrath is his love burning hot; his wrath is his love scorching us awake.

One day my grade 13 French teacher had a monumental “set-to” with a student. Sandy Gosse was her name. She was intelligent. She was also an indifferent student. On this particular day she came to class without having done her homework – again. The teacher, Herbert Bremner, was livid. He was so angry that a vein in the side of his head was pulsating as though it were going to burst from the pressure and spew blood on everyone in the first five rows. By now Gosse and Bremner were locked in combat. Finally Gosse, the student, said to him, “I don’t see why you are upset. If I fail highschool French it won’t be any skin off your nose. It’s my future that’s at stake, not yours.” At this point Bremner went into orbit. I thought he was in orbit because a smart-aleck student had sassed him. A few minutes later it was plain I was mistaken: Bremner was raging because he had in front of him a student of much ability and much promise with a rich future before her, and all of this she was foolishly frittering away. She thought he shouldn’t be upset since the future she was frittering was hers. But that’s exactly why he was upset: her life was dribbling away, she was so dopey-headed as not to see this, and only his anger had any chance of jolting her awake.

Insofar as we are made right with God through faith as we embrace the Righteous One provided us, there profoundly is peace with God. While God has never ceased to love us, his love, instead of scorching us, now refreshes us. As we know peace with God we also come to know the peace of God; as we come to know peace with God there throbs within us the peace of heart we all crave. The genuine change “out there” has given rise to a realistic change “in here.”

Another consequence of being justified: we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. Hope, in scripture, is never wishful thinking; hope is a future certainty. To be set right with God is to be certain of finally sharing the glory of God. Christians are destined to be immersed in the majesty of God, the grandeur of God, the radiance and splendour of God.

We must be sure to notice two things here. First, the emphasis is on God. Not so with much preaching today where the emphasis is on us: what God can do for us, how the Christian message can profit us. Why, God is said to direct our investment portfolio, calm our nerves better than a prescription, make us social standouts and guarantee success where everyone else fails. Christian bookstores tell me that this kind of book is far and away the bestseller.

Scripture speaks differently. From cover to cover scripture is about a singular, looming, awesome reality as dense as concrete: God. The book begins, “In the beginning, God.” It ends with the magnificent picture of God’s people awaiting the final manifestation of God’s own glory. From cover to cover scripture depicts God’s relentless reassertion of his own Godness and glory in the face of our short-sighted self-preoccupation. The one thing God is never going to do is endorse our short-sighted self-preoccupation. He aims only at directing us away from ourselves to him. We have been appointed to share his glory.

To say that we are going to share God’s glory is also to say that we are going to be rendered those children of God whose resemblance to their parent is unmistakable and undeniable.

Paul tells the believers in Ephesus that Christians are God’s workmanship, his craftsmanship. Does it appear that we are? Or are we so far from the finished product that one can only conclude that the craftsman has scarcely begun?

Ever since my earliest classes in “manual training” (as it was then called) in elementary school I’ve been fascinated by woodturning lathes. A rough block of wood – angular, knotty, coarse, even bark-encrusted – is put on the lathe. At first the lathe turns very slowly; the craftsman uses a coarse tool; for the longest time only he knows what’s going to turn out, any onlooker remaining mystified. Gradually the lathe is turned faster; the cutting tool is exchanged for one more precise; onlookers can guess what the finished product is going to be. Finally the lathe is turned thousands of times per minute; the tool is the most precise the craftsman has; what comes forth is what he had in mind all along. Yet he could communicate his vision adequately only by bringing forward the finished product. Even as he looks it over with satisfaction, people crowd around him to admire it. The craftsman’s finished work brings honour to him as nothing else does.

Those who cling in faith to the crucified and are therein justified, set right with God; we are God’s workmanship. Right now the craftsman appears to be turning the lathe rather slowly (no doubt to spare us.) One day, however, it will “hum” and we shall find ourselves those children of God who bring honour to the craftsman himself. On that day the family resemblance of parent and child will be unmistakable and undeniable. On that day we shall have been brought to share the glory of God. Sharing the glory of God, we shall be rendered glorious ourselves. Knowing that this is our hope, a future certainty, should make our hearts sing as nothing else can. Of course we rejoice now in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

There’s one more consequence to our being set right with God: we rejoice in our sufferings. Do we? The person who stands convinced beyond doubt of her righted relationship with God; does even she rejoice in her sufferings? In one sense, no; at least not if she’s sane. When Jesus was being nailed to the wood he didn’t grin with pleasure and say to onlookers, “This is great stuff, you know, just great!” No one in his right mind rejoices at the onset of pain. Still, we can rejoice some time later, often a long time later, as we’re made aware of what God did with us and for us and through us during a painful episode so very painful as to eclipse everything else.

The most intense and protracted physical pain I’ve suffered occurred when I was injured in an automobile accident and hospitalised for 45 days. My father had died four months earlier. My mother had had to begin working full-time if she wanted to eat and therefore could see me only infrequently. (In fact she made only one trip to the northern Ontario hospital.) I have always felt that the accident, the different kinds of pain associated with it, the 45-day institutionalisation, the proximity to the pain of others (I’m not referring now to the pain of fellow-patients but rather to the innermost suffering of physicians and nurses whom I came to know) – all of this was of immense importance in my formation as a pastor.

And then there’s another dimension to “rejoicing in our sufferings.” I speak now of situations akin to that of Peter and John when they were abused by authorities for bearing witness to Jesus. Their faithfulness to their Lord had elicited the hostility of those who despised Jesus. They could have spared themselves by denying their Lord as Peter had denied his Lord months earlier. Now, however, in the wake of his resurrection and ascension, they were “hard wired” to him and wouldn’t even think of doing anything but bear faithful witness to him. They were made to suffer for it. Luke tells us in the book of Acts, “They left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name.” The name? The name, the name above all other names. There is honour in suffering dishonour for the right person and his truth. We rejoice in our sufferings here too.

No doubt many of you have your own stories to tell. And no doubt, therefore, you would conclude your story on the same note that concludes our text: God’s love has been shed abroad in our hearts. This is the climax of it all. Set right with God by seizing the Righteous One in faith, we rejoice in the midst of whatever life brings before us, for we know that God will use all of it for us and others. We persist in our conviction of this truth, just because God’s love has been poured out upon us, now floods us, and ever will.

Victor Shepherd  

June 1999

Lamentations 3:22-24                      Romans 5:1-5                Mark 5:1-20

 

“I hope it doesn’t rain the day of our picnic.” You and I have no control over the weather. When we hope it doesn’t rain, then, we are merely indulging in wishful thinking. Is Christian hope mere wishful thinking? No, it isn’t.

“I hope the Blue Jays win the World Series.” This is always possible but extremely unlikely. Is Christian hope a hankering after what is possible but exceedingly unlikely? No, it isn’t.

“I don’t think there’s much wrong with the world.” Some people make statements like this. They are evidently very naïve about the way world-occurrence unfolds, naïve as to the turbulence and treachery and turpitude that riddle the world. They are naïve – or else they know better but have to deny unconsciously whatever threatens to shake up their Pollyanna-ish fantasy world. Is Christian hope simple naiveness concerning the world or unconscious denial of its contradictions? No, Christian hope isn’t this at all.

Then what is it?

 

I: — Hope, for Christians, is a future certainty grounded in a present reality. The present reality is the faithfulness of God. We who are honorary Israelites recognize the landmarks that identify God’s faithfulness to his people. One such landmark is Israel ’s release from slavery in Egypt and her passage through the Red Sea and the stamp at Sinai, the gift and claim of the Ten Words, wherewith God stamped his people indelibly as surely as circumcision is indelible.

Another landmark is Joshua’s leading the same people into the promised land. Another is the renewal of God’s covenant promise to his people and their renewal of their promises to him as God met with his people in the person of David and the person of the prophets. Another landmark is God’s bringing his people back from exile in Babylon and his joining with them in the celebration of their homecoming.

The most noteworthy landmark of God’s faithfulness to his people, however, and the one that towers over all others, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Here God fulfilled his promise to his Son. And the promise now fulfilled to the Son continues to spill over onto all whom the Son summons, over onto all who cling to the Son in faith. God has promised to renew the entire cosmos in Christ. The raising of the Nazarene from the dead is the first instalment of this and its guarantee as well. Therefore the raising of Jesus Christ is the crowning landmark of God’s faithfulness.

But how is it that we believers affirm this when others do not? How is it that we see in the resurrection of Jesus the Father’s pledge and guarantee that one day the entire creation will be healed? How is it that we maintain such a hope, this “future certainty,” when so many people around us look out upon the world and see only what contradicts such a pledge? So many people look out upon the world with its turbulence and treachery and turpitude; they see only a world which, if it isn’t getting any worse, is certainly getting no better.

None of us would ever say that the world, of itself, is improving; of itself it isn’t getting better. Still, all of us at worship this morning are convinced that our hope isn’t misplaced. God has raised his Son from the dead, the climax of his many landmark acts of faithfulness. God will bring to completion that good work which he has begun in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 1:8) He will restore to its created goodness that creation which now sits evil-ridden and haemorrhaging from innumerable wounds.

Then why does our conviction remain ironfast in this matter where others appear to lack any conviction at all? In his Roman letter Paul speaks for us: “…we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God…and hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” ( Rom. 5:1-5) Right now Christians are vividly aware of God’s love flooding us; we know we are awash in God’s love. His love is the environment in which our life unfolds as surely as water is the environment in which fish thrive.

What’s more, our present experience of God’s uninterrupted love; which is to say, our present experience of God’s promise-keeping is itself part of his faithfulness to us. Our experience of his loving faithfulness prevents our hope from evaporating into nothing or worse, collapsing into despair. Our present experience of God – his love flooding us and supporting us – is an aspect of that present reality (the resurrection of Jesus) which grounds the future certainty.

In other words there are two aspects to the present reality of God’s faithfulness: one, his raising his Son from the dead as promised; two, his flooding us with his love so as to support us in our hope.

There’s a feature of this hope we mustn’t overlook: God commands his people to hope. To be sure, hope is first a gift from God. It has to be a gift first of all, since only God has kept God’s promises and only God has raised his Son from the dead and only God can flood our hearts with God’s love. Nonetheless, the hope that arises solely on account of God’s faithfulness and therefore has to be his gift to us; this hope we are also commanded to exercise ourselves. Then hope we must. We disobey God if we don’t affirm our confidence in God’s future. Indeed the mediaeval rabbis maintained that the first commandment of the ten, “Thou shalt have no other gods besides me, Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel;” this commandment was logically identical with another that our Jewish friends clung to in the middle ages, “Thou shalt not despair.”

 

II: — But we are tempted to despair, aren’t we? We are tempted to abandon confidence in God’s future when we are face-to-face with life’s frustrations and contradictions and outright bleakness. On the one hand, it is the Jewish people, from the time of Moses onwards, who have insisted that God’s people continue to hope. On the other hand, the centuries of heartrending tragedy that have befallen this people in particular is precisely what might tempt anyone to renounce hope in God’s transformation of this world.

In 1943, in the little village of Sighet , Rumania , soldiers arrived to deport the Jewish inhabitants. An old man, Dodi Feig; as soon as Dodi Feig saw the soldiers and knew what they were about, he put on his very best suit. “Why are you putting on your fine suit?” someone wailed, “You won’t need that where we’re going.” “Don’t you understand?,” replied Mr. Feig; “Because of the disaster threatening our people, because of the horrible mutilation only a train ride away, the Messiah will certainly come. He can’t fail to come in this situation. And I want to be wearing my best when I meet him.” How Dodi Feig felt; what he thought two days later I don’t even want to contemplate. I like to think he died praying the ancient prayer which so many of his fellows have recited since the time of Maimonides in the 1100s, “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah. And though he tarry, yet will I believe.”

It’s easy to see why hope is not only gift but also command. It has to be command or else world occurrence will find hope evaporating. In the face of the world’s distress we must hold up, anticipate that day, say prophets and apostles, when the world’s people will hunger no more, neither thirst any more; when nation no longer lifts up sword against nation; when God wipes away every tear from every eye. Having been given hope as gift, we must continue to honour hope as command.

 

II: — But why are we commanded to hope?

[a] We are commanded to hope because without hope, without confidence in the coming transformation, our faith collapses. We like to say we believe in God. In what kind of God? We believe in the God whose “search and rescue” mission in his Son is going to restore us to the uttermost. When are we going to be restored to the uttermost? When we stand before God on The Great Day and his love, only his love, yet burning as hot as it has to, burns out of us whatever dross and impurities remain in us. In the meantime we are glad that God has already begun his work of renovation within us. He began it the day we were “clothed” with Christ in faith. Still, we’d never pretend that God has finished his work within us.

The apostles are of one mind concerning God’s work of restoration. Jude exclaims, “[He will] present you without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing.” (Jude 24)   Peter writes, “[You will] be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.” (2^nd Peter 3:14) All Christ’s people have been appointed to live with him eternally without spot or blemish. Every last sin-engraved defacement; every last sin-wrought disfigurement; every last distortion within us is going to be eliminated. But we’re not there yet. At the same time we don’t want to lose sight of our destination, for if we ever lose sight of the destination we’ll wander off the way. If we wander off the way then in our discouragement or cavalierness we’ll start to indulge the sin that remains in us instead of repudiating it.

What’s more, we’ve been told we are going to be found without spot or blemish and rejoicing, and at peace. Our life isn’t joyless now, but there’s enough heartache to prevent us from saying we are rejoicing without interruption. Our life isn’t devoid of peace now, but there’s enough disruption to prevent us from saying we are at peace without qualification.

We are commanded to hope. We are commanded to hope just because our faith in God’s completion of the work he has begun in us must give way to sight on that day when we do appear before him without spot or blemish, rejoicing and at peace.

Several years ago the shell of an apartment building was erected on Bayview Avenue in the Don Valley . For some reason completion of the building was delayed, then delayed some more. At first passing motorists nodded knowingly, “It will be finished soon. It looks promising.” But it wasn’t finished. After a few years this building became an oddity, the butt of jokes at dinner parties all over Toronto . After another few years (by now we are up to 25) the building had become an eyesore, a piece of clutter. Eventually the building-shell was levelled. Anything that begins full of promise but doesn’t move on to completion becomes first an oddity, then an eyesore, and finally rubble. Without hope, confidence in God’s coming transformation of you and me and the entire creation, faith follows the same route, ending in collapse.

You must have noticed that the New Testament regularly links faith, hope and love. Hope is the middle term between faith and love. You see, hope keeps faith from collapsing under the weight of disappointment and delay.   Hope also keeps love from dissolving under the acids of frustration. After all, for how long can love be frustrated (as love is frustrated whenever it meets ingratitude or nastiness) and not dissolve into petulance? Only hope keeps love loving and faith clinging. It’s no wonder we are commanded to hope.

 

[b] We are commanded to hope, in the second place, because without hope the individual gives up. We quit the kingdom-work we began with such conviction and zeal. We quit working, quit struggling, quit anticipating. We just quit. Paul urges the Christians in Corinth , “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour will never be in vain.” Is our work in vain? It often appears to be in vain. Just when we are about to give up we remember: the God whose faithfulness we have known for ourselves we can count on for our work. Regardless of what appears to be happening or not happening right now, any work done in our Lord’s name and for his sake he will take up and use as an ingredient in his coming transformation of the creation.

Hope, in other words, is our confidence that what we see isn’t all there’s ever going to be. Under God there is going to be more than we can now see. Such hope has everything to do with our capacity to tolerate, even triumph in, life’s pain and confusion and occasional bleakness. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, noted again and again that prisoners who came to feel that the bleakness around them was all there was ever going to be; in other words, those who lost hope – these prisoners broke down, sickened and died at a much faster rate.

You and I don’t live in a concentration camp. Still, from time to time, even for extended periods, we are visited with frustration, perplexity, uncertainty, discomfort. Hope keeps us from giving up.

I should never pretend that such hope comes easy. In the midst of his torment Job cries out, “I feel only the pain of my own body.” In other words at that moment he’s in such pain that his pain has eclipsed everything else. On such days, says Paul, God’s people “hope for what isn’t seen” (Romans 8:24 ); that is, there’s no evidence for our hope that a neutral bystander would notice. On these days, says the apostle, we simply cling to the God whose faithfulness has raised his Son from the dead and whose faithfulness will reinvigorate us.

 

[c] We are commanded to hope, in the third place, because without hope the world is abandoned. Whether we really hope with respect to the world is made plain by our answer to one question: Does the world have a future? Oh yes, since we are Christians we quickly say, “Of course the world has a future: its future is the manifest kingdom of God .” But while we say it as if we were on autopilot do we really believe it in our heart? Because only as we believe it our heart do we refuse to abandon the world.

The most dangerous person in any society isn’t the murderer. (Murder, by the way, is the crime with the lowest “repeat” rate. Since murder is usually a crime of passion the vast majority of murderers offend only once.) The most dangerous person is the cynic. When the cynic comes upon those combating racism or environmental pollution or nuclear madness his only comment is a contemptuous, withering, “What’s the point? You can’t make any difference.” Unknowingly the cynic is forever urging people to abandon the world.

In his major theological statement, the letter to the churches in Rome , Paul maintains that the entire creation is in bondage to inferior powers that corrupt it.   But even as it is in bondage to powers that corrupt it and frustrate it the creation longs to be free from them, and longs so ardently, says the apostle, that the creation “groans,” is always groaning, to be free from them. For this reason Paul insists, in his Roman letter, that God has stamped the word “hope” upon the entire creation. “Hope” means “transformation guaranteed.” For this reason, then, the cynic who carps, “What’s the point?”, isn’t merely a threat; he’s also a blasphemer.

In view of the fact that every single arms race in human history has ended in war, and in view of the fact that even conventional weapons now have the firepower of Hiroshima-era nuclear weapons, I refuse to label “pinko” or anything like this those who work tirelessly for arms limitation.

In view of humankind’s reliance upon the sub-human world I maintain that environmental pollution is no small matter.

In view of the fact that a few years ago there were 16,000 psychiatric beds in Toronto hospitals and today there are 4,000 psychiatric beds, I am convinced that those who spend themselves for psychiatrically distressed people now living wretchedly; those who care for them shouldn’t be dismissed as bleeding-heart do-gooders. They remain the most realistic people in our society, for they know that those they care for have been appointed to an end that the townspeople saw in our Lord’s earthly ministry when a deranged man was found seated, clothed and in his right mind.

 

Hope is always God’s command. We mustn’t despair. For hope keeps faith from collapsing; hope keeps us from giving up in our kingdom-work; hope keeps the world from being abandoned.

At the same time, before hope is God’s command it is God’s gift. He presses upon us a future certainty (his creation transformed) grounded in a present reality (his Son raised and his love flooding our hearts.)

Knowing all this, we are eager to say with Jeremiah, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will hope in him.”

 

                                                                                                     Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

 March 2004

 

Romans 7:18                                              2^nd Timothy 1:12                                          Philippians 4:12 -13

 

Few people annoy us more than the know-it-all. As soon as we mention anything to him – anything, whether cars or cameras – he starts yammering as if he were the world’s expert. We’re especially irked when it becomes evident that the know-it-all knows nothing, nothing whatever about cars or cameras.

Annoying as the know-it-all always is, he’s most annoying, downright obnoxious, when he’s a religious know-it-all.

Nevertheless, while we’re certainly offended by the person who “knows it all”, we’re never going to be helped by the person who knows nothing. We’d never choose as our lawyer or physician, dentist or mechanic, someone who boasted of her ignorance. In other words, while know-it-all people offend us, people who know nothing can’t help us.

Many times in his letters the apostle Paul says “I know.” He isn’t bragging: “I know more than you.” Neither is he claiming superiority: “I know more than everyone else.” He’s simply expressing an unshakable confidence rooted so very deep in him that he could no more deny it than he could deny his own name. His “I know” is related to a profound assurance of what’s real, his place in it and its consequences for him. He’s aware that while there are situations in life where it’s properly wise and appropriately humble to say “I’m not sure”, so far as life as a whole is concerned it isn’t wise or humble to say “Who knows?”. Where life as a whole is concerned it’s distressing to be found saying “It’s anybody’s guess.” It’s distressing for us and it’s unhelpful for others. When our child comes to us jarred by what she’s heard “out there” inasmuch as what she’s heard “out there” contradicts everything she’s learned at home, it doesn’t help our child to hear us say “I’m not sure.”

When Paul soberly, humbly, yet confidently says “I know” he means “I’ve been seized by the truth; I’ve been seized by him who is the truth; I stand persuaded.” He isn’t parading himself as a know-it-all. But neither does he come to us as a know-nothing who can’t help us. He knows. And because he knows he can help us to know too.

I: — Precisely what does he know, and what should we? First of all, “I know that nothing good dwells within me.” He means “I know that nothing godly dwells within me.”

“What morbid pessimism!” someone objects. But hold on a minute. Before we label anyone pessimistic we should find out if he’s realistic. Isn’t it realistic to admit that there’s a deep-seated self-contradiction in all of us, a deep-seated perverseness in all of us of which we can’t root out of ourselves? If we think not, we should ask ourselves one or two more questions. Don’t all Christians thank God that a Saviour has been given to us. If we need saving yet are unable to save ourselves; if the saviour we need as we need nothing else has to be given to us, then there must be a twistedness deep inside us that we can’t straighten out ourselves.

And didn’t our foreparents at the Reformation describe humankind as “totally depraved”? When they did they didn’t mean that we are all wantonly immoral. They weren’t stupid; they knew that virtually everyone is vastly more moral than immoral. They did mean, however, that however good we might be morally, we aren’t godly; they meant that the human heart is in se curvatus, bent in on itself. All the depraved human heart can will is its self-perpetuating depravity. No one can will himself out of his sinnership. No one can will herself out of her unrighteousness and into the righteousness of Christ. No one can “right” his capsized relationship with God. No one can undo the warp in the human heart that wrecks even our best efforts at curing ourselves.

It’s right here – “I know that nothing good dwells in me” – that the Christian understanding of what’s wrong ultimately differs from that of the Marxist, for instance. The Marxist argues that what appears to be spiritual perverseness, incomprehensible self-contradiction, in fact is perfectly comprehensible, since human self-contradiction and self-frustration are entirely a consequence of economic disadvantage. The Marxist says there is no ingrained twistedness in us; what appears to be such is merely the product of our economic situation. All human iniquities (so-called) can be reduced without remainder to economic inequities, the Marxist says. Human beings aren’t iniquitous, sinful. They are victims of inequities, victims of economic disparities. If we get rid of the disparities we’ll thereby get rid of “sin”, so-called.

At the same time, from a different angle, the Marxist says too that all economic inequities are iniquities. Christians, however, deny that all economic inequities are iniquities. The fact that the Bronfman brothers are richer than I am isn’t iniquitous and I had better not blame my innermost depravity on it. At the same time sensitive Christians are quick to admit that economic wretchedness – grinding poverty – is a terrible thing with terrible consequences. Sensitive Christians will admit too that to be culturally deprived is to be deprived of something worthwhile. But just as surely Christians insist that regardless of our economic and cultural position or privilege there is a deep-seated deformity that has nothing to do with wealth or culture. Christians are aware that there’s a difference between the human situation and the human condition. The human situation has to do with how we are shaped by education, culture and wealth. The human condition, deeper than the human situation; the human condition has to do with our innermost rebellion against God, contempt for his claim upon us, disregard of his mercy and disdain for his truth. He wants to be lord of all life? We insist on being on our own lord. He has made us in his image? We resent the intrusion and attempt to make him henceforth in our image. He presses himself on us as friend and guide? We tell him we prefer to be independent, self-made men and women.

“I know that nothing good dwells within me.” By “good” Paul means the ultimate good, godliness. It’s this that we can’t fashion for ourselves. He never denies that people are capable of lesser goods. He admires the ethical conduct that morally serious people display. That is certainly a good we are capable of. He admires the learning of learned people. That is a good we ought to treasure. He acknowledges the helpfulness of Roman government and doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of this good. Still, he denies that we fallen men and women are capable of the good, that godliness which consists of adoring surrender to God and the godly conduct that arises from it.

Speaking of government; however good it is, the odour of scandal, of self-serving corruption, always hovers around it. Speaking of moral conduct; however good it is, our innermost perversity invariably twists it into self-righteousness. And self-righteousness always has two spin-offs: contempt towards other people and defiance towards God. For other people are now beneath us and God is now superfluous to us.

When the apostle says he knows that nothing good dwells within us he means that our innermost deformity corrupts even our best. Because we concur in his realistic assessment of the human condition we insist he isn’t pessimistic. And because we concur in his realistic assessment we shall regard as unrealistically optimistic, naively optimistic, the utopian cure-alls that popular psychology and popular education promise even as they produce so very little.

“I know that nothing good dwells within me.”

 

II: — Yet the apostle insists just as strongly that the good is closer to us than we imagine, available to us right now, for the good is to be found in someone else: “I know the One in whom I have put my trust” – he reminds Timothy, a younger man on whom the older man’s experience and wisdom won’t be lost. If Paul’s realism stopped with his assessment of human perversity, the human condition would be hopeless. But he doesn’t stop there. He’s certain of the one who can remedy it: “I know the One in whom I have put my trust.”

According to the Hebrew mind to know something isn’t to have information about it. According to the Hebrew mind to know hunger isn’t to possess information about malnutrition. Rather, it’s to have first-hand acquaintance with hunger, to have intimate experience of hunger, and to have been altered by the intimacy. To know one’s spouse is to have first-hand acquaintance with her, intimate experience of her, and therein to be forever different oneself. When Paul exclaims “I know the One in whom I have put my trust” he’s telling us he lives in the sphere of intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ – the result of which is that his life has been altered and now remains different.

The apostle isn’t bragging like the religious know-it-all. But neither is he an unhelpful know-nothing who can only say, “God? Faith? Whatever? Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Then why doesn’t he say more about his experience of Jesus Christ” someone queries; “Why doesn’t he spell it out in greater detail?” The reason he doesn’t is simple: one, if he tried to spell it out in greater detail he could never do justice to it; he’d appear silly and sentimental; he’d resemble the person who has come upon overwhelming beauty yet says nothing, or virtually nothing, since no language is adequate to such beauty. Two, he’s aware that if he attempts to say more about his intimacy with his Lord, what he says will only appear to cheapen something so very precious that it ought never to be cheapened. The most intimate aspects of marriage we don’t publicize in detail. We refrain from publicizing marital intimacies not because we’re ashamed of them, but rather because no language can do justice to the intimacy; and besides, speaking publicly of marital intimacies merely cheapens them. Nevertheless, when we come upon other people fruitfully married we’re aware that the intimacy we cherish they cherish too.

For the same reason, when Paul says simply, quietly, profoundly, “I know the One in whom I have put my trust”, he feels he’s said enough; whereupon he waits for us who share his experience to nod knowingly with him.

While he says little more, in this respect, than “I know the One in whom I have put my trust”, he does say something more. He says, “God who has begun a good work in you will bring it to completion.”(Phil. 1:6) The good work mentioned here is the good work, God’s redemptive work; that is, God’s work of reaching us in our innermost twistedness and straightening out our innermost deformity and remedying a human condition that is otherwise irremediable.

I don’t get to hear much preaching. But whenever I do (chiefly on my holidays) I ask myself two questions: (i) Does the speaker know the One in whom she has put her trust? Does she ooze intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ? Or is she merely stringing together religious clichés, however cleverly? (ii) Does she glow with the realistic optimism that here, in this encounter, there is pledged to us the profoundest human transformation? I don’t care whether the preacher is eloquent or clever or smooth. I care only whether she breathes out a credible conviction that she “has tasted and seen that the Lord is good” and can therefore encourage others to know for themselves that in our Lord Jesus Christ there has been given to us the healer of our deepest deformity.

The author of a poem or novel is someone whose mind and heart have been set on fire and who describes her vision so as to draw us readers into her vision and thereby find our lives changed by it as our hearts are ignited too. An author does this. An editor, on the other hand, is someone who tides up spelling and corrects punctuation and ensures that the book is attractively packaged. An editor discusses someone else’s experience and testimony. But an author has “been there” herself; she writes – and can write – only what she knows.

When Paul exclaims “I know the One in whom I have put my trust” he’s telling us he isn’t an editor bringing forward someone else’s experience and testimony. He’s met someone whose acquaintance has made his life forever different. He wants only for us to “know” this One ourselves.

 

III: — We must never think that Paul’s experience of his Lord floats above the nitty-grittiness of life. He isn’t a religious hobbyist whose “religion” parallels the experience of the short-wave radio hobbyist who picks up a voice from a South Sea island. No doubt it’s thrilling to pick up the voice of a fellow ham-radio operator from a South Sea island, but it has nothing at all to do with what we have to face tomorrow morning. More profoundly, Paul writes “I know how to live when things are difficult and I know how to live when things are prosperous….I am ready for anything through the strength of the one who lives within me.”

We’re all aware that life has ups and downs. We don’t need the little man from Tarsus to remind us. Or do we? When my daughters were children they liked to watch “Wonder Woman” on TV. Whenever Wonder Woman wanted to she could leave behind the frustrations of this world. She could rocket straight up, travel at supersonic speed, deflect bullets with her wonder-bracelets. Children are captivated by someone who can leave all frustrations behind. But the day comes when either the child remains a child forever (even though she’s thirty-five), or the child grows up and learns that frustrations can’t be left behind: they have to be endured.

When I say “frustrations” I don’t mean petty annoyances, irritations. I mean reversals. One afternoon my mother was diligently at work at her desk when her boss lurched around the secretaries’ work-area like a beaten prize-fighter staggering from corner to corner. He kept mumbling, with dazed expression, “I’ve fired; I’ve just lost my job; I’ve been fired.” He wasn’t saying this because we wanted to inform the secretaries; he was babbling; he was punch-drunk.

I have been concussed four times. Each time I have regained consciousness feeling exceedingly confused and disoriented. As the confusion and disorientation have subsided, pain has set in. The upsets we sustain in life are much like concussion. First there is confusion and disorientation; as these recede the pain of the blow settles upon us. Wonder Woman may be able to fly above it all but we can’t.

I’d never want to suggest that life is always and everywhere jar and jolt. To be sure there are days, many days, when the sky is blue and the sun is shining and we feel so good we couldn’t imagine ourselves feeing better. There are even days when we feel we own the world, so exhilarated are we.

And then there are other days, days when we’ve been assaulted, or fear we’re going to be. On these days even the prospect of getting out of bed is daunting. There are days when our children are such a delight we wonder why we didn’t have ten. And there are days when our children are the occasion of more anxiety than we ever thought possible. We understand Paul when he writes, “I know what it is to be up and what it is to be down. I am ready for anything through the strength of the one who lives within me.”

We Presbyterians are rooted in what’s called “The Reformed Tradition.” The Reformed Tradition moved from the Sixteenth Century Reformers to the Seventeenth Century Puritans. Our Puritan ancestors used to speak quaintly of “the perseverance of the saints.” By this expression they didn’t mean that God’s people were mysteriously rendered superhuman. By “the perseverance of the saints” they meant “God’s perseverance in his saints.” They knew whereof they spoke. While life is never easy, it was even more difficult in the 1600s. Our Puritan ancestors were always aware that life moves from mountain-top exhilaration to abysmal misery and back again as life surges and abates. Yet they were aware too that at life’s end they had been brought through it all, storm-tossed to be sure, yet without bitterness, without rancour or resentment; and above all, with faith intact. It was the Lord whom they knew who did this for them and in them.

Conclusion: — Then what is it you and I know today?

[1] We know that nothing good, nothing godly, dwells within us, of ourselves.

[2] But we also know something grander, deeper than this: we know the One in whom we have put our trust, and we are confident as to the outcome of our knowing him: he who has begun a good work in us is going to complete it.

[3] And we know that amidst life’s abundances and life’s scarcities alike, we know how to live – for we know that he who is in us is greater than anything that is in the world.

 

                                                                                                     Victor Shepherd                         

April 2005

Romans 8:15-27

 

A bereaved person can’t help weeping. A happy person can’t help smiling. The person “tickled” by a good joke can’t help laughing. In all these situations the appropriate response springs forth spontaneously, without reflection or deliberation. The bereaved person doesn’t deduce that since he’s bereaved he should weep. Neither does the happy person conclude that she should smile. The response arises spontaneously as a result of her situation.

 

I: — In exactly the same way the apostle Paul tells us that the Christian can’t help crying, “Abba, Father”. The cry comes forth from us as a result of our intimacy with God. We don’t labour at ten stiff books of theology, note that God is said to be Father to all to whom Christ is brother by faith, ascertain that we are possessed of faith, and finally conclude that God is our Father. On the contrary, whether our knowledge of theology is great or little, our situation – we who cling to Jesus Christ in faith are sons and daughters of God by adoption – moves us to exult spontaneously “Father, my Father”, from the bottom of our hearts. We cry this instantly, immediately, not inferentially.

When Jesus spoke to his Father he used the Aramaic word “Abba”. Aramaic was the language   Jews spoke with each other in First-Century Palestine. When Jews spoke with Gentiles they spoke Greek; but with fellow-Jews they conversed every day and conducted business every day in Aramaic. In First Century Palestine, however, no Aramaic-speaking Jew called God “Abba”. The word was deemed to be too intimate. The person who addressed God in this manner would be deemed disrespectful, over-familiar, presumptuous even. The only Jew found to be using the word of the Father was Jesus. The disciples overheard him using it several times throughout his earthly ministry. They overheard him using it, most pointedly, in Gethsemane on the eve of his terrible trial. Terrible as the trial was, it couldn’t deflect him from the intimacy he had long known with his Father, an intimacy his disciples thought to characterize him. Our Lord was acquainted with his Father at such profound depths of intimacy and warmth and trust and confidence that the word sprang unbidden to his lips.

Yet while it sprang to Christ’s lips it didn’t spring to his alone. Paul maintains that faith binds us intimately to Jesus, and our intimacy with the Son is one with our intimacy with the Father. Christians therefore find themselves crying spontaneously “Abba, Father”. We don’t think about the matter and then conclude that God is – or might be – our Father after all. Instead we are constrained to cry, impelled to, because our intimacy with the Father issues in exultation as surely as the happy person smiles or the bereaved person weeps or the startled person gasps. In the context of our intimacy with him who is our Father our exultation, “Father”, couldn’t be more natural.

 

II: — I have found that when people are informed of all this they assume that Christians are supposed to live ten feet off the ground, never quite touching the earth.   They assume that anyone who genuinely utters the cry, “Abba, Father”, is someone whose faith has elevated her just high enough to be beyond the turbulence and pain and contradictions of life. You see, if we are living ten feet off the ground we are close enough to the earth to observe all the negativities with which life afflicts people, yet also far enough above them all as to remain unaffected by pain and disappointment and heartbreak, and therefore unperturbed. Newer Christians especially are frequently puzzled at first and soon guilt-ridden. They assume that if their faith is real, they should be beyond the reach of life’s turbulence and treachery. Since they aren’t beyond the reach of life’s turbulence and treachery, they begin to doubt the reality of their faith, perchance even concluding that they aren’t Christians after all.

Over and over a pastor meets people who think that God has played a dirty trick on them. They assumed that faith meant riding above life’s “crunches”, and now they find themselves crunched several times over. They feel God has let them down. If they had more nerve, they’d curse him – like Job’s wife. Lacking such nerve, they blame him for deceiving them, or they blame themselves for their insufficient faith. Both responses are wrong.

The apostle who knows that Christians are constrained to cry “Abba” knows that we groan as well. “We who have the first fruits of the Spirit;” he writes, “we groan inwardly.” Paul groans himself. Doesn’t he tell us of his thorn in the flesh that causes him relentless pain and embarrassment? All God’s people groan, for in all of us there are found simultaneously unspeakable intimacy with our Father and indescribable pain over a frustration or a wound that remains unrelieved.

We should note more carefully what Paul says. In Romans 8:15 he exclaims, “We have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry ‘Abba, Father’ it is God’s Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are God’s children now.” Then in Romans 8:23 he says that the whole creation is groaning in labour pains; we are part of the creation and therefore we are groaning too; and we whom God’s Spirit has brought to intimacy with the Father – we are groaning inwardly while we wait for adoption.” Wait for adoption? Eight verses earlier he told us we already had it; already we were sons and daughters of God, admitted to God’s family, knowing an intimacy with him that only family members can know. “Wait for adoption”? More specifically he says we are waiting for the “redemption of our bodies”.

The apostle is always profound. On the one hand by faith we are, right now, sons and daughters of God. We know we are, and our heartfelt intimacy with our Father is as much attestation as we need. On the other hand, there remains much about us that is struggling to be born, struggling to come to the full light of day, struggling for a fulfilment so far denied it. We are gloriously adopted now, and we also wait for the full manifestation of that adoption. Until then, we exult ecstatically and groan painfully at the same time.

[i] The most obvious situation is that of the person who is terminally ill, the person who is dying one inch at a time. He groans, for he is struggling to be released from all that inhibits the fullest expression of his human creatureliness and his spiritual sonship. He’s frustrated.

Worse than the predicament of the person with the terminal disease is the predicament of the person with the non-terminal, neurological disease. Neurological diseases force severe disabilities on people and force people to live with those disabilities, in that the worst neurological diseases leave people alive for such a long time. Meanwhile, the sufferer is longing to emerge into that freedom – “the redemption of our bodies” Paul calls it – when the adoption we already cherish will be made manifest.

[ii] What about the person who is chronically mentally ill? What about her family? We wouldn’t want to be heard saying, “Wouldn’t it be less wearing for everyone if Mrs. X simply slipped away in her sleep? Wouldn’t it bring huge relief to her and to everyone around her?” We wouldn’t want to be heard thinking this out loud. Still, we can’t help thinking it.

My blood runs cold when I think of severely schizophrenic people and their families who are caught up in the round of psychiatrists, pharmacists, ministers, police, the courts, assorted provincial services, and institutionalizations. Both the chronically disturbed and their family are struggling in anticipation of a better day. But until that day, they groan; all of them.

[iv] What parent hasn’t groaned, and groaned some more, concerning an adolescent son or daughter’s emergence into sane, sober, godly adulthood? I’m not questioning for a minute that parents are groaning inwardly, frequently outwardly, through their adolescent’s struggle. I do question, however, whether it’s sufficiently understood that the adolescents themselves are suffering with a suffering worse than the suffering of many adults, if not most.

I often think that older adults regard adolescent stress much too cavalierly. When I was a teenager, moping and moaning, my mother frequently expostulated, “Why the hang-dog expression? Don’t you know these are the best days of your life? You have no mortgage payments to worry about, no car payments.” To be sure, I didn’t have mortgage payments to worry about. So what. Those days were the worst days of my life and I never want to see them again. If older adults were aware of the suicide rate among teenagers, and were aware that the suicide rate has increased 300% in the last 25 years, older adults would sing a different tune.

I’m not suggesting that all teenagers are pained or frustrated to the point of being at risk.   But many are. Neither am I suggesting that all parents feel confused, set upon, unappreciated and helpless.   But many do. In both teenager and teenager’s parent something is struggling for expression, and struggling for an expression denied for now.

[v] And then we groan concerning ourselves. Isn’t there something deep in all of us that longs for expression, or fuller expression, but hasn’t yet found it? Don’t we crave release from intra-psychic wounds, acquired decades ago, whose after-effects have not only scarred us but continue to inhibit us decades later?   What wouldn’t we give to be freed from emotional wounds that remain booby-traps, and too frequently embarrass us as we react in a way that observers find startling, and more than startling, find incomprehensible and sometimes even threatening?

I never make light of mental difficulties. I never joke about them. Think of phobias, for instance. People who aren’t phobic (most of us) are always tempted to make light of the woman who is panic-stricken if she sees a feather or the man who faints if he climbs higher than two feet. Psychiatrists tell us that phobias are virtually incurable. People afflicted with them suffer, and suffer a long time.

And then of course if we are serious at all we groan as we await our ultimate deliverance from the sin that still dogs us. To be sure, it’s only because of our intimacy with our Father, “Abba”, that we are even aware of our lingering depravity. (The spiritually inert, needless to say, are also spiritually indifferent.) Those admitted to the wonder of the light, admitted to intimacy with him who is the light; they are appalled at the shadows within them that his light casts. I’m tired of the burden my sin is to others. I’m also tired of the burden my sin is to myself.

Everyone is groaning somewhere.   Everyone has to be groaning somewhere, since the apostle tells us that “the whole creation is groaning in labour pains”.

 

III: — Then are you and I simply suspended between the ecstatic cry of intimacy with our Father and the groan of our frustration and disappointment? Are we going to be suspended indefinitely?

Our Lord Jesus knew both cry and groan, but he wasn’t suspended indefinitely. He knew an intimacy with his Father that is the foundation of ours, as his disciples found him repeatedly taken up, while at prayer, into an immediacy and intensity before his Father that his disciples subsequently came to know for themselves. He also knew an anguish, in Gethsemane and at Calvary (not to mention at many points throughout this earthly ministry) that we can’t penetrate. He both exulted and groaned simultaneously.

But not forever. He was resurrected. And because he shares his resurrected life with us, we have been appointed to a resolution wherein we shall rejoice, simply exult, without a simultaneous anguish. Within a few verses of Paul’s speaking both of cry and groan he makes two staggering assertions. One, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Two, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

Why is it, how is it, that nothing can separate us from God’s love? It’s because God’s power, wherewith he raised Jesus from the dead, is the same power wherewith he binds you and me to the risen One in whose company we are flooded with God’s love.

Why is it, how is it, that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us? It’s because the Son who was borne through everything that made him groan is now glorified and guarantees that our groaning will give way to glorification.

Scripture is fond of obstetrical metaphors. Paul uses them frequently. He uses one in Romans 8 when he says that the entire creation, in the era of the Fall, is groaning in labour. But no woman in labour labours forever. Labour ends in birth.   Jesus uses obstetrical metaphors. He too speaks of a woman in labour. He maintains that however difficult, however protracted, a woman’s labour might be, when her child is born she puts it all behind her, forgets it all, out of the sheer joy of the child she has long awaited and now has in her arms. In exactly this sense the day has been appointed when you and I put behind us, forget without trying to forget, the years in which we exulted and groaned simultaneously just because on that day we are going to be found exulting only, overtaken by our emergence into the bright light of a new day.

Question: Is this a future development? Yes. Is it only a future development, exclusively a future development? No. Already we have tasted it. Already we have glimpsed the Promised Land and have even begun to live in it. Already our exultation outweighs our anguish. Already our experience of our Father’s care assures us that the good work he has begun in us he is unfailingly going to complete.

 

IV: — Today is Communion Sunday. The elements, bread and wine, tell us not merely of body and blood but of a body broken and of blood shed. They remind us then of our Lord’s anguish, the day-by-day anguish which is the human lot in the era of the Fall, as well as his more intense anguish of crucifixion, as well as his most intense anguish of the dereliction when he couldn’t help gasping, “Why have you forsaken me?” He groans.

Yet even from the cross he addresses his Father as “Father”; even from the cross he speaks the word of intimacy that he used every day, especially when he prayed. He exults.

And as he is raised from the dead he enters into promised glory, lives in it forever, and from it promises us a glory that will be the fulfilment of our exultation and the cancellation of our groaning. For on that day, Charles Wesley reminds us, we are going to be “lost in wonder, love and praise”.

 

                                                                                                          Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

 July 2005

Romans 8:22-25

 

 

“I hope it doesn’t rain the day of the picnic.” You and I have no control over the weather. Hoping it doesn’t rain is nothing more than wishful thinking. Is Christian hope wishful thinking in the face of all that we can’t control?

“I hope the Toronto Blue Jays win the World Series.” They might win it; it’s possible to be sure, even though it’s extremely unlikely. Is Christian hope a hankering after what is extremely unlikely?

“I hope we’ll soon learn to get along together, and class hostility, social conflict and financial exploitation will soon be a thing of the past.” Anyone who speaks this way is most naïve concerning human nature and utterly ignorant of human history. Is Christian hope childlike naïveness with respect to our nature and inexcusable ignorance with respect to our history?

 

I: — For Christians hope is a future certainty grounded in a present reality. The present reality is the faithfulness of God. God’s faithfulness is marked out by major landmarks (promises he has kept) in his involvement with his people, an involvement he won’t renounce on behalf of a people he won’t abandon. One such landmark is Israel’s release from bondage in Egypt and its deliverance at the Red Sea. Another landmark is Joshua’s leading the same people into the long-promised land. The landmark that towers over others, however, and gathers them up into itself, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Here all the promises of God find their fulfilment. Here the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel and to Israel’s greater Son overflows out onto all flesh, Jew and Gentile alike, out onto all whose faith-quickened seeing acknowledges the presence and power and purpose of God in Jesus of Nazareth. God had promised to renew the entire creation in Christ, liberating the creation from its bondage to the evil one, freeing it from its frustration and allowing it to flower abundantly. God’s raising his Son from the dead is the decisive moment of this promised liberation and is therefore the landmark of God’s faithfulness.

Question: how is it that we who are believers affirm this while unbelievers do not? Believers and unbelievers alike live in the same world, suffer the same pain, undergo the same treachery and turbulence and tragedies. Yet believers speak of God’s faithfulness as the ground of their hope while unbelievers see no evidence of faithfulness and no reason to hope. Then why do believers persist in hope while unbelievers don’t? Believers continue to hope, continue to insist on a future certainty despite present contradictions, never feel that their hope is misplaced because “God’s love has been shed abroad in our hearts.” (Rom. 5:5) At this moment believers are aware of God’s love flooding them. Our present experience of God is itself part of God’s faithfulness to us. This too is part of the present reality undergirding a future certainty. In other words there are two aspects to the present reality of God’s faithfulness: one is what God has done for us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; the other is what God has done in us as the Holy Spirit has soaked us in the Father’s love again and again. No wonder we look with confidence to the transformation of men and women, nature and universe, as the entire creation is finally healed.

Such hope is certainly a gift from God inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus Christ and our Spirit-wrought inclusion in that resurrection is a gift from God. While such hope is plainly a gift, however, it isn’t gift only; it’s also a command. God commands his people to hope. To be sure, it’s only as he gives us hope that he commands us to hope, yet command us to hope he most certainly does. For this reason the mediaeval rabbis used to say that the arch sin is despair.

 

II: — Despite the fact that hope is both gift and command, despair remains humanly understandable. Life’s contradictions are just that: contradictions. Life’s frustrations, suffering so very intense and protracted as to leave behind whatever lesson we might need to learn through suffering, life’s unrelieved bleakness for unnumbered people: all of this renders despair humanly understandable.

In 1940, in the little village of Sighet, Rumania there pulled into the railway station the train that would soon take the villagers on their three-day trip to Auschwitz. The people were beside themselves. An old man in the village, Dodi Feig, put on his best suit, the suit he wore only a couple of times a year on extraordinary occasions of celebration. “Why are you putting on your best suit?”, someone wailed, “you won’t need that where we’re going!” “On the contrary”, replied Feig, “because of the unprecedented horror that has overtaken us, the Messiah can’t fail to come. And when the Messiah comes, I want to welcome him wearing my best.” How Dodi Feig felt three days later I can’t imagine. Many like him died praying the ancient prayer of Maimonides, “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah. And though he tarry, yet will I believe.”

Hope is God’s gift and therefore God’s command. This command, like any command, is to be obeyed. Temptation here is like temptation anywhere: temptation to doubt the goodness of God and allow oneself to violate the command of God. Yet this temptation, like any, is to be resisted. Despite life’s contradictions we are to join prophets and apostles in announcing that day above all days when the world’s wretched neither hunger nor thirst any more, when nation no longer lifts up sword against nation, when God wipes away every tear from every eye. We are commanded to hope.

 

III: — But why? Why are we commanded to hope? Because without hope, Christian faith collapses. Faith is faith in the God who won’t abandon his creation so much as a nano-second before he has restored it so thoroughly as to have all of humankind, Christian or not, ascribe him the praise that he is owed. We say we believe in God. What kind of God? The God who returns the creation to the glory with which it first came from his hand. When? To what end? Paul writes a word of encouragement to the Christians in Philippi, “I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Phil. 1:6) God has begun a good work (the good work) in them. We know what the apostle means. We like to fend off our critics humorously, “Be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.” Not only has God not finished with us yet, it appears he has scarcely begun and has ever so far to go. Then will he leave us half-recovered? Is he like a transplant surgeon who removes the patient’s damaged heart and then gives up on the surgery, leaving the patient with no heart, or with the new heart improperly connected, or with the new heart properly connected but without the after-care apart from which the heart-transplant is useless? He who has begun a good work in us is going to complete it. And he has promised to do as much for the creation writ large.

Several years ago construction was begun on an apartment building on Bayview Avenue in the Don Valley. The shell of the building was several stories high and gave every indication of eventually providing fine accommodation overlooking the Don Valley, even Lake Ontario. Then there was a dispute, unresolved, between the builder and city hall officials. Construction was halted. Every day motorists driving up and down the Don Valley Parkway nodded knowingly, “It will have to be finished soon. It can’t just stand there.” In fact it stood there for years, as builders and politicians waited for each other to blink. After several years the structure became an oddity, the butt of jokes. Another year or two and it had become an eyesore. Another year or two again and the project was abandoned, the building shell reduced to rubble. Anything that begins full of promise but doesn’t move on to completion becomes an oddity, then an eyesore, and finally rubble. Without hope, without confidence in the completion of God’s transformation, Christian faith follows the same route: beginning with promise it ends in collapse.

You must have noticed that scripture links faith, hope and love, and groups them together again and again. Hope is the middle term between faith and love. Hope keeps faith from collapsing under the burden of disappointment and delay. Hope keeps love from dissolving under the acids of frustration. Hope fortifies love and lends it resilience. Hope stiffens faith and forestalls collapse.

We are commanded to hope, in the second place, in that apart from hope the individual gives up. Apart from hope we give up, quit; quit working, quit struggling, quit sacrificing, quit living, simply quit. Paul urges the Christians in Corinth, “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.” (1 Cor. 15:57-58) Is your work in vain? Is mine? Our kingdom-work can never be in vain. The God whose faithfulness we have known for ourselves is the God whose faithfulness we can trust for our work.

One week ago today Mr. Allen Stretton, a long-time member of this congregation, died. His funeral service was conducted on Wednesday. At the reception downstairs following the service a young woman spoke with me, thanked me for the service just concluded, and then thanked me for the funeral service at which I had buried her brother several years ago. I had driven home from a cottage one afternoon in August inasmuch as I had had to bring Mary home to meet a friend. I was planning on staying in Streetsville for one evening only, then driving back to the cottage next morning. At 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon of our arrival the phone rang. I thought to myself, “I’m on holiday. I need a holiday. I’ve waited all year for a holiday. Another minister is covering pastoral emergencies in any case. I’m not going to answer the phone.” By the second ring I was thinking, “Perhaps it’s my dear wife. I’ve been away from her for three hours and perhaps she has sweet somethings to whisper to me.” And so I answered the phone. It was Carol Stretton. Her 28-year old nephew had died in distressing circumstances. Would I help? I phoned Maureen and told her I’d resume our holiday in a couple of days. Last Wednesday the young woman told me that her parents still talk about her brother’s tragic death, the funeral service, what was said, and how much they were helped. Then she kissed me and moved off to speak with someone else. Can our work ever be in vain?

“What you’ve just related has nothing to do with hope”, someone objects; “it’s improper to speak of hope when concrete results are already evident. Hope is properly hope only where what’s hoped for hasn’t appeared.” The objection is sound. In the midst of his torment Job cries out, “All I can feel is my pain.” At the moment of his outcry he can’t see even the tiniest bit of hope’s fulfilment. So far from being fulfilled, even ever so fragmentarily, hope appears simply futile. His friends think him silly for continuing to hope since there’s no evidence to suggest his hope is anything but wishful thinking; his hope seems as groundless as a child’s wish for the appearance of Mary Poppins.

The apostle Paul has just such a day in mind when he reminds the Christians in Rome, “Hope that is seen isn’t hope. For who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24) The apostle is correct. Hope is genuine hope only where what is hoped for isn’t seen. In the next verse the apostle reminds the Roman Christians that an accompaniment of hope so very necessary as to be virtually an aspect of hope is patience: Christians are patient in hope where there is no earthly evidence to support our hope and no apparent ground of our hope. No apparent ground, I must underline, for the ground of our hope is always and everywhere the faithfulness of God, promises he has kept. Possessed of such hope, we never give up, never quit.

We are commanded to hope, in the third place, for if we fail to hope the world is abandoned. Whether we are possessed of hope as scripture speaks of hope is made plain by our answer to one question: does the world have a future? Do we expect it to have a future, or have we concluded that the world can only repeat itself until it finally burns itself out and is consigned to the garbage can?

If I asked you to specify the most dangerous person in any society, what person would come to mind? The psychopath? The most dangerous person to have around isn’t the psychopath. (Besides, how many of them are there?) The most dangerous person to have around isn’t the murderer or the molester or the lunatic. It’s the cynic. The cynic is forever sneering, “What’s the use? Why bother?” The cynic’s noxious breath is breathed out everywhere. Unlike the breath of God that turned dust into life, the cynic’s breath turns life into dust. The cynic claims victories here, there and everywhere. The cynic’s victories, of course, are actually victims, victims whose new-found “What’s the use?” abandons a world that God never abandons. To be sure, the damage done by those who violate God’s creation is no little damage; far worse, however, is the damage done by cynics whose cynicism impedes the healing of the creation and disdains the signs pointing to its ultimate restoration.

In his major theological statement, the letter to the church in Rome, Paul maintains that the entire creation is in bondage as a result of the fall. The entire creation is in bondage to assorted powers that not only enslave it but also corrupt it and disfigure it. Not surprisingly, then, the entire creation “groans”, the apostle says, groans to be freed from that all that now corrupts it and disfigures it. To say that the creation groans at its frustration and longs to be freed is to say that the entire creation has “hope” stamped on it. “Hope” means “transformation and fulfilment guaranteed.” Since God has guaranteed the release, transformation and fulfilment of the creation, the cynic isn’t merely going to be proved wrong; the cynic is also going to proved a blasphemer, for the cynic has continued to say, “What’s the point?”, when there is every point to identifying and identifying himself with that restoration at God’s hand which will unfailingly appear.

Let me say it again: the cynic is a blasphemer. She maintains that struggling on behalf of a groaning world is pointless. She’s a blasphemer inasmuch as God’s struggle on behalf of a groaning world is going to issue in splendour that will redound to his praise. The cynic cruelly worsens the afflictions she could relieve and blasphemously imputes indifference or ineffectiveness to God. The cynic is the most dangerous person on the face of the earth.

What’s the point in helping feed the 4,000 people per month (half of them children) that our foodbank feeds? The point is that a banquet has been arranged for them at which they’ll be eating something besides tinned beans and Kraft Dinner.

What’s the point of resisting arms races, even as we are aware that every single arms race in the history of the world has issued in war? The point is that the day has been appointed when swords will be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.

What’s the point of tireless work on behalf of deranged people? (I trust you are aware that when I came to Streetsville there were 16,000 psychiatric beds in greater Toronto and now there are 4,000.) The point is that like the deranged man in the Gadarene hills who lacerated himself and ran around naked and shrieked appallingly; like that man whom our Lord touched as an instance of the kingdom, the deranged are divinely destined to be found, one day, seated, clothed, and in their right mind.

What’s the point of teaching underprivileged adults and ex-convicts to read? Don’t even ask the question, for blasphemy ought never to be uttered in these precincts.

If ever we abandon hope, we abandon the world. But God won’t abandon it, and I, at least, can’t bear the thought of having him lonely.

Hope, from a biblical perspective, is a future certainty grounded in a present reality. The present reality is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and our vivid experience of him. The future certainty is new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, says Peter. (2 Peter 3:13)

Hope is God’s gift and God’s command. Without such hope Christian faith collapses, the individual quits, and the world is abandoned. Glorying in our present experience of our risen Lord we can’t help crying with Jeremiah, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will hope in him.” (Lam. 3:24)

 

                                                                         Victor Shepherd

March 1999

 Romans 8:29-39

 

I: — “For I am sure that nothing, nothing seen or unseen in the entire creation, will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Nothing can separate us from God’s love?   Much seems to. Much intends to. And if we have ever ministered to people whose faith once flamed and has since flickered out, people whose faith catastrophe or torment or bewilderment has extinguished, we shall say that much appears to separate us from God’s love and seems to succeed in separating us from God’s love.

In the course of my work as a pastor in Mississauga I went to the church on a Saturday afternoon to conduct a wedding.   After the wedding I called on a church-member who was dying of AIDS. He was haemophiliac.  He needed thirteen pints of transfused blood per month.  He had acquired HIV-AIDS through the ‘tainted blood scandal’ involving the Canadian Red Cross. (You will recall that the Red Cross collected and passed on blood from people whose sexual history should have disqualified them, as even a child knows, from donating blood.) While I was visiting this man and his wife, Maureen phoned to tell me that Toronto General Hospital was trying to contact me. I phoned TGH, was told what I needed to know, and immediately drove downtown. There I found a 23-year old woman, mother of two children, who in her suicidal desperation had drunk as much bleach as she could get down.  When I saw her (specifically her colour) I knew she was dead.  Her chest was rising and falling, to be sure, since she was wired up to everything that could make her seem alive.  I prayed for her and I prayed with her family, gathered around the bed. (If you are wondering what I was doing, praying for someone I already knew to be dead, we can sort it out later.) As soon as I said “Amen” the nurse turned off the apparatus.  The oscilloscope went flat. Now everyone knew she was dead.

Sally was the dead 23-year old.  Sally’s mother had been raised in one of the poorest areas of England . Sally’s mother had worked exceedingly hard at the most menial, low-paying jobs since immigrating to Canada . She didn’t have a spare dime. Now she was left with having to care for her dead daughter’s two children.  Sally’s husband? He was an improvident alcoholic who had distressed Sally and who would soon cause more trouble for the heartbroken family.

A few weeks later, and it’s Saturday afternoon again in Mississauga ; another wedding. Ten minutes before the wedding commences (I’m about to solemnize the marriage of the Board Chairman’s daughter) the phone in my study rings. I’m told that a couple I married five years ago is dead, together with their two-year old son. Could I go to the family’s home right away? I told the caller I’d be over as soon as possible.  I stepped into the sanctuary and married the couple in front of me wearing my best wedding smile throughout the service.  (You wouldn’t want me to rain on your daughter’s parade, would you?) Then I went to the home that death had harassed.

Five years earlier I had married this couple, both of them schoolteachers. Recently the husband had become depressed. He was admitted to the psychiatric ward of Etobicoke General Hospital . On this Saturday afternoon he had walked out of the hospital, gone home, picked up an axe and decapitated his two-year old son in front of the boy’s mother.  Then he had decapitated his wife.  Finally he had hanged himself in the basement.  The dead mother’s parents, both 65 now, were left caring for their two-year old grandson and his dog.

In the aftermath of all of this I ministered to the grandparents as they were faithful members of my congregation.  One Sunday morning, ten minutes before the service, the grandfather knocked on my study door.         I don’t like being interrupted ten minutes before worship, since leading worship and preaching are awesome matters and I’m getting my head and heart around what I must do.  Still, I couldn’t refuse to speak with this man in his torment.  And what was on his mind, so very important that it couldn’t wait until after the service? It was the dog’s bowel movements. At one time they had been thus and so, but now….

Some of you are fond of dogs.  I’m not. I’m not eager to talk about their bowel movements – ten minutes before I conduct worship and preach.

I knew that what had brought his stammering fellow to my door wasn’t the dog’s bowel movements.  It was his anguish, an anguish that had suspended his judgement.  He was with me because he couldn’t not be there – and I knew it. I spoke with him, prayed with him, and together we went into the sanctuary to worship.  Six months later he came to see me again.  He had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

I’m not suggesting that every Saturday afternoon wedding concludes like the two I’ve mentioned.  But I do agree with Dr Leslie Weatherhead, notable British Methodist preacher and sophisticated psychologist.  In one of his books Weatherhead wrote, “If you were aware of the suffering found in the smallest hamlet in England , the smallest, you wouldn’t sleep at night.”

I can’t speak for you, but my exposure to people’s suffering has found me agreeing with Martin Luther.         Luther maintained that if faith is to thrive we have to shut our eyes and open our ears. We must open our ears because the gospel is heard, heard with our ears and heard in our hearts. We must close our eyes, on the other hand, because what we see whenever we look out on world-occurrence; what we see contradicts the gospel.  The gospel (heard) assures us that God loves us so very much he couldn’t love us more. World-occurrence (seen) shows us that God doesn’t love us at all.

Please don’t think that the incidents from my pastoral ministry that I’ve laid before you tonight are rare.  If you wanted, I could stand here all night and relate stories that would leave you aghast.

So what do you think? Does God love us? Is his love strong enough, and his love’s grip on us firm enough, that nothing will ever be able to separate us from an oceanic love vouchsafed to us in Christ Jesus our Lord?

Tonight my heart resonates with Paul’s.  Like him I am persuaded that nothing can separate us from God’s love. And like him I have every confidence in what I hear (the gospel) even as I am horrified at what I see.

 

II:         — At the same time Paul is aware that much in life aims at separating us from God’s love and may seem to have separated us.

One such thing is tribulation.  According to scripture tribulation or affliction isn’t the same as suffering-in-general. Suffering-in-general is what comes upon us because we are finite, frail, fragile creatures living in a turbulent world. Disease victimizes us. Infirmity threatens us. Pain warps us. In all such cases scripture mandates us to seek relief.  Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus consistently relieved suffering.

Tribulation, affliction, however, is different.  Tribulation is pain visited on us on account of our discipleship.         It’s pain visited on us account of our love for Jesus and our loyalty to him. In short, tribulation is pain arising from our crossbearing, which crossbearing, be it noted, Jesus appoints us to and will not relieve us of until we are in glory. Now we can always rid ourselves of our tribulation; all we need do is apostatise.  All we need do is renounce faith in Jesus Christ, strangle our love for him, withdraw the loyalty to him by which we have been publicly identified. To rid ourselves of the pain of tribulation all we need do is deny our Lord and refuse to be identified with him. As soon as we do this the world will leave us alone.  Since scripture abhors apostasy, however, the Christian response to tribulation is steadfastness.

Let me say it again: the Christian response to everyday suffering is to seek relief; the Christian response to tribulation is steadfastness, since we can’t be rid of it unless we rid ourselves of our Lord.

Then will the torment of tribulation drive a wedge between us and God’s love? We should ask those who have been tormented on account of their love for their Lord.

Ian Rennie, former minister in this congregation and my first academic dean at Tyndale Seminary; Ian Rennie quietly pointed out to me one day that for the last 25 years of his life there was a price on Martin Luther’s head. Anyone at all could have made himself wealthy by killing the man.  No one in the history of the church, Rennie insisted, had lived the truth of Ephesians 6:12 as Luther had lived the truth of this verse: “For we are contending not against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness….”  And amidst it all; on days that were dark, other days darker, and some days indescribable; on all such days Luther stood steadfast.

And then I think of Edmund Campion, Jesuit martyr in Elizabethan England. On the morning of his execution his detractors mocked him on account of his belief in transubstantiation, the notion that Jesus Christ himself, body and blood, is in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine.  “How can Christ be exalted in heaven,” his detractors mocked, “and be in the bread and wine at the same time?”   “Heaven is Christ’s palace”, Campion informed his accusers, “and you have made it his prison.”   (Did it ever occur to his accusers that if Christ couldn’t be in heaven and in the elements simultaneously then neither could Christ be in heaven in their hearts simultaneously?)         Campion, like Luther before him, died proving that tribulation cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Then Paul speaks of famine and nakedness. Famine is lethal lack of provision inwardly; nakedness (meaning death by exposure) is lethal lack of provision outwardly.  But didn’t Jesus promise his followers adequate food and clothing? In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said his followers won’t lack adequate food and clothing just because their Father knows what they need before they even ask him. Paul is saying here we can prioritize and privilege God’s kingdom and righteousness and still lack what we need. If famine and nakedness overtake us (make no mistake; they have overtaken millions), has a wedge been driven between us and God’s love, and driven twice over, since now we both lack what was promised and have every reason to be anxious?

I have never been hungry in my life, hungry through having nothing to eat day after day. But I’m told that starvation is an exceedingly painful way to die.  When Maureen and I spent a month touring Ireland (Maureen is descended from Protestants in the north, Belfast ; I’m descended from Catholics in the south, Cork) we drove to Stroketown one Sunday morning. We went to church there (and, I must add, were startled to hear the local priest welcome us to the Lord’s Table.)   After the service we visited the famine museum in Stroketown.  We staggered from exhibit to exhibit.  The Irish people who were living in ditches during the famine of the mid-1800s and who hadn’t been allowed to send their children to school; those people attempted to survive by eating grass.  Humans, however, can’t digest grass; grass makes us vomit.  They kept trying, their mouths ringed green, only to hasten their death as their grass-induced vomiting weakened them still faster.

What made the famine all the more horrible was this: the famine victims had to stand by helplessly and watch their social superiors eat sumptuously. While the poor Irish starved by the million (only one crop was affected, potatoes), rich English landowners living in Ireland exported wagonload after wagonload of food to England and the continent. Weakened Irish folk had to languish in roadside ditches while overfilled wagons rumbled past them to feed wealthy people who were already overfed.  Could any cruelty be crueler?

Next Paul speaks of peril and sword.  To speak of peril is to say that life is shot through with danger; life abounds in danger. There is the danger that arises from sheer accidentality. When Jesus spoke of the tower in Siloam that collapsed and killed a dozen men he was speaking of a construction mishap, accidentality that is no less perilous for being unintentional.

And sword? The apostle means warfare. Once again I’m surprised when my students tell me how glad they are that they didn’t live in the Middle Ages.  During the Middle Ages, everyone knows, people were mean to each other: they disembowelled each other with swords; they ‘brained’ each other with battleaxes. They burned people at the stake. They dismembered them on the rack. Weren’t people barbaric during the Middle Ages?

Alas, the students appear to be ignorant of history subsequent to the Middle Ages. All of my students were born in the 20^th Century, and they appear to be wholly ignorant of that century. Tell me: do you think Auschwitz was a human improvement on swordfighting?   When atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki human beings were vapourized alive, while survivors were condemned to lethal, lingering agony.

Does the Tyndale Seminary student really think that nerve gas is a humanitarian advance on spear-chucking?         All the major nations of the world have stockpiled nerve gas.  One lungful of it and every muscle in the body contracts.  Immediately there is intense sweating, blindness, uncontrollable defecation and vomiting, convulsions, paralysis, and inability to breathe. In the early 1980s a whiff – only a whiff – of nerve gas escaped in Colorado . Two thousand sheep perished on the spot, having undergone everything I’ve just mentioned.

Can nerve gas, nuclear explosion, you name it – can any one of these, or all of these together, separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?

Neither can “life or death”, Paul announces next.

Death we’ve already said enough about.

Life? How could life, life at full tide, ever threaten to separate us, ever separate our faith in such love? Let me ask you a question. How many marriages do you think I’ve seen thrive when a couple was financially challenged, only to fail when the same couple was financially flush?  How many people have you seen appear to possess ironfast faith when they were needy for any reason only to jettison such ‘faith’ when they were no longer needy? We should admit that life at its best is no less a spiritual threat than death at its worst.

Finally Paul speaks of principalities, powers, angels, things present, things to come, height and depth.  He has in mind cosmic powers; any and all cosmic powers, some of which we can identify and some of which we never shall.         Paul’s point is this: regardless of the nature, scope and virulence of cosmic forces, no one of them, nor all of them together, will ever be able to separate Christ’s people from Christ’s love.

 

III: — What reason does Paul have for his exuberant exclamation?  What’s the ground of his impregnable confidence?         His ground or reason is twofold; namely, what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, and what God is doing in us through the Holy Spirit.  What God has done for us in Christ is the ‘outer’ foundation of his confidence; what God is now doing in us is its ‘inner’ ground.

Now every Christian is aware that the work of Christ for us and the work of the Spirit within us are always to be distinguished but must never be separated. Therefore the one ground of Paul’s confidence is the one work of God in its twofold nature as outer and inner.

Let’s look first at the outer aspect of Paul’s confidence.  In this regard the apostle puts five unanswerable questions to us.

 

Question #1:  “Since God is for us, who can be against us?”  Plainly, nothing and no one can be against us finally, conclusively, effectively, because nothing and no one is going to overturn the Creator himself.

If Paul had simply said, “Who or what can be against us?” we’d be ready with a hundred replies: famine, peril, sword, disease, death, betrayal, treachery, accident.  If we thought a minute longer we’d also mention intra-psychic booby traps, those psychological fissures and deformities that distress us and pain others. If the apostle had simply said, “Who or what can be against us?”, and we thought two minutes longer, we’d mention sin, the old man/woman who continues to haunt us, even Satan himself.  Not only can Satan be against us; he is; he is by nature, and therefore is without let-up.

Paul, however, doesn’t ask, “Who is against us?”  He asks, rather “Since God, the living, lordly sovereign creator of heaven and earth; since God is for us, who or what could ever rival him or threaten us?” Nothing, obviously.

 

Question #2:   “Since God didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t God also give us all things with him?”   Note that Paul hasn’t simply asked, “Won’t God give us everything (i.e., everything we need)?”  If he had asked that, I at least would be ready with my retort: “I’ve seen countless people live and die who appeared not to be given everything they need.”

The apostle’s question, however, is more profound than this.  “Since God didn’t stop short of giving up his Son, would he ever stop short of giving us what we need to be his people, the apple of his eye?”

There’s an allusion here to Abraham of old; Abraham and Isaac; Abraham and Isaac trudging with leaden foot and breaking heart up Mt. Moriah . Abraham’s faith is to be tested by the summons to offer up Isaac, his long-awaited son, his only son, only son, (the text in Genesis drives home to us.) And then, when obedient Abraham raises the knife above Isaac, a ram appears and Abraham’s son is spared.

Does God love you and me less than Abraham loved Isaac?  He loves us more. After all, when God’s love for us met our profoundest need God’s long-awaited Son, his only Son, wasn’t spared but rather was given up for us all.         Abraham’s love for Isaac was ultimately spared the most terrible heartbreak. God’s love for you and me didn’t spare God heartbreak.  Instead God loves you and me at the price of incomprehensible anguish.

 

Question #3:   “Since it is God who justifies us, who is going to accuse us?” Justification is one of Paul’s favourite descriptions of God’s people.  Here’s what he has in mind.

You and I are sinners. We are covenant-breakers. We repeatedly, characteristically, break our promise to God that we are going to live as his people. Instead we live as if we were sons and daughters of another parent, the devil.         In his mercy God has given us Jesus of Nazareth, the covenant-keeper. Jesus of Nazareth is the only instance anywhere in the world of a human being who keeps humankind’s covenant with the Father.

As you and I cling by faith to Jesus Christ, our faith binds us to him. In fact our faith binds us so very closely to him that we are identified with him.  Identified as we are with him, when the Father now looks upon that Son with whom he is ever pleased, he sees you and me included in the Son. When the Father looks upon the Son with whom he is pleased he looks upon you and me as those with whom he is now pleased too.  Humans who are wrongly related to God and chargeable as such; humans wrongly related to God who now cling to Christ in faith are deemed rightly related to God and therefore are beyond accusation.  Formerly capsized in our relationship to God, in Christ we are turned right side up, ‘rightwised’, rightly related to God.  God now declares us righteous in Christ; we are now ‘justified’ and can’t be charged.

 

Question #4:     “Since Christ died, was raised, sits at the right hand of the Father, and now intercedes for us, who is going to condemn us?”  Will Christ condemn us? He went to hell and back for us. His ongoing intercession for us is effectual.  He pleads on our behalf the ongoing efficacy of his atoning, pardoning sacrifice. Since the efficacy of his sacrifice he pleads effectually, nothing and no one can negate his forgiveness and find us condemned.

 

Question #5:         “Then who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?” We’ve already answered this question.

In these five unanswerable questions we have dealt with the outer aspect of Paul’s confidence. “Since…, since…, since…, since…therefore no one can be effectively against us; no will deprive us all that we need to be God’s people; no one can lay a charge against us, and no one will condemn us.

 

We must look now at the inner ground of Paul’s confidence; namely, the Spirit, and the Spirit’s work within us.

The Holy Spirit is God, God in his utmost immediacy, intensity, intimacy. The Spirit is God in his immediacy, intensity and intimacy surging within us, rendering us certain that we are God’s child now and shall never be forsaken.  The Spirit is God within us making us vividly aware of his presence and power and purpose.

Paul, we know, was angered at the congregation in Galatia . The Galatian Christians were warping the gospel into an anti-gospel legalism.  When Paul cools off enough to begin correcting them, he doesn’t begin by developing a theological argument against legalism.  Instead he appeals to their Christian experience; specifically, to their experience of the Holy Spirit.  Bluntly he asks them, “Did you receive the Spirit through hearing and believing the gospel or by submitting to legalism?”   When he asks, “Did you receive the Spirit…?”,  he’s referring to their experience of God, experience that they can no more deny than they could deny a headache if they had one, since no one can deny experience. If we were in intense pain right now it would never occur to us to deny that we were.

“Did you receive the Spirit through….?”   It’s as if Paul were asking the Galatian Christians, “That raging headache you have: did you get it because a brick fell on your head this morning or because you drank too much red wine last night?”   They could then answer the question as they saw fit.  Any answer they gave, however, would presuppose their present headache, undeniable experience. “Did you receive the Spirit through embracing the crucified in faith or by slavishly adhering to rule-keeping?”  The apostle knows two things: one, their experience of God they can’t deny; two, they came to it through faith in the gospel.

In Romans 5 Paul exuberantly exclaims, “Since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ….”   He concludes his exuberant exclamation with “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” When Paul says “Spirit” he has mind believers’ experience of God’s love flooding them.

 

When we bring together the outer and inner grounds of Paul’s confidence we understand why he is able to say with conviction that nothing will ever separate us from God’s love.  The outer ground of his conviction is the truth and reality of all that God has done in Christ for him.  The inner ground of his conviction is his experience of what God the Spirit is doing in him.

The experience of the simplest Christian is identical with Paul’s. It all leaves us exclaiming with the apostle in Galatians 2:20, “He loved me, and gave himself for me – and I know it as surely as I know my own name.”

 

IV: — “Nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The immediate ground of Paul’s confidence is his awareness of what’s been done for him and his experience of what’s being done in him.  The ultimate ground of his confidence, however, is God’s eternal purpose for his creation.

[a]         First Paul says God “foreknew” us who are his people.  Everywhere in scripture, when God is said to ‘know’ someone (Amos, Jeremiah, Abraham, Hannah) it means that God has put his hand on someone and singled out that person for a special purpose and made that person the beneficiary of a special promise.

When God not merely knows you and me but even ‘foreknows’ us it means that God’s purpose and promise come before he has even created the world. In other words, God wants a people for himself even before he has fashioned the universe. In Ephesians 1:4 Paul declares that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.” Even before he created anything God wanted a people who live to glorify him.

[b]         Then Paul says in Romans 8:29, “Those whom he foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”  God’s people are to glorify him by being conformed to Jesus Christ, our elder brother. In Colossians 1:15 Paul maintains that Jesus Christ is the image of God. You and I were created in that image. Sin has marred it. Now, however, the image of God in you and me is to be re-engraved because God had pre-appointed his own people to resemble his Son incarnate.

[c]         But God’s plan and purpose to know us, foreknow us, bring us to resemble his Son; God’s plan and purpose in this regard has to be implemented in time and space. Therefore God now calls men and women; he invites them, summons them. We who are Christ’s people have heard and heeded that call; we have ‘RSVPd’ the invitation; we have fallen in love with someone who long ago fell in love with us.

[d]         Next, says Paul, those who have responded to God’s call God has justified. We’ve already seen this word. To be justified, righteous, is to be declared rightly related to God through faith in the Son who is rightly related to his Father.

[e]         And such people, the apostle declares, God has glorified.  Has glorified ? Has already glorified? We aren’t going to be glorified until we are ‘in glory’, in heaven, and we manifestly aren’t there yet. (We are in Knox church on a summer Sunday evening.)

But, you see, so very confident is Paul that God’s undeflectable plan and purpose and promise are going to be realized that he speaks of a future event as though it had already happened just because it’s ‘as good as happened.’         Christ has already been glorified, hasn’t he?  Then his people, whose future glorification is certain, are as good as glorified now. It’s as good as done.

 

V: — And then, lest we be so thoroughly swept up in Paul’s exuberance that we’ve lost touch with our present existence, Paul brings us down to earth by insisting that on the basis of everything he’s said we are right now, at this moment, “more than conquerors.”

It’s wonderful to be a conqueror – i.e., victorious, resilient. But it’s always possible to be a conqueror (we haven’t been defeated by anything) yet be grim or sour or bitter or resentful or suspicious or simply as “edgy” as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.  To be more than a conqueror is surely to be victorious, resilient, yet also radiant.

I had listened to African-American spirituals for years, had enjoyed them (as everyone seems to) but had never reflected on them at any depth.  Then one day a man in the small, rural congregation I was serving pointed out to me that that there was no trace of bitterness in the spirituals. Think of it: slavery, with its brutality, degradation, suffering, and seeming hopelessness – and yet no bitterness in its music, no incitement to revenge, no zeal for vicious vindictiveness; only a patient waiting for God’s vindication and his people’s victory. The music is radiant.

A woman with advanced neurological disease began to tell me of an incident that had recently befallen her and her husband, himself ill with the same neurological disease.  Her story sounded grim. My face sank. She saw my face and laughed, “Oh, it’s really quite funny.”   Here’s her story.

Needing to use the toilet in the night, she transferred herself from bed to wheelchair to toilet.  In attempting to pull herself up from the toilet she lost her balance at the same time as she jammed her arm between the handrail and the wall. She fell down onto the floor with her arm up, wedged between the handrail and the wall.  Her husband heard the commotion.  He transferred himself from bed to wheelchair and set off to help her. In his excitement he capsized his wheelchair. Now he was on the floor too (in a different room), couldn’t get up, and therefore couldn’t get to a phone.         “What on earth did you do?” I asked the woman weakly.  “I knew no one was going to come along to help us until morning”, she said, “and so I spent the night reciting over and over again Psalm 34: “I will bless the Lord at all times.         His praise shall continually be in my mouth.  Look to him and be radiant.”

Just because nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord (we are loved eternally), we are certainly conquerors. More than conquerors, however, we may ever look to him and be radiant.
                                                                                       Victor Shepherd                                      
                       
24^th June 2009

Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto

Knox Church Summer Fellowship 2009

 

Romans 8:37                        Romans 12                          Revelation 5:6

 

If we spent our childhood in Sunday School and church then we were raised on a hymn that is one of the “golden oldies”, Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War.  Now it’s hard to find a recent hymnbook containing this hymn.  The hymn is deemed too militaristic, too violent.

In the days of empire-building and colonial expansion war and victory were celebrated.  But they aren’t now, and for good reason.  people in Latin America don’t pronounce the word “Conquistadores” with affection.  They can’t forget the depredations of the Sixteenth Century victors in the new world. The Conquistadores arrived with their brand new firearms and blew the head off anyone who so much as raised a spear.

At the height of the Cold War with the USSR , several years ago, one of the deadliest missiles in the nuclear arsenal of the USA was named Nike. Teenagers associate Nike with running shoes. But in fact Nike is the Greek word for “victor”, “conqueror.”   In view of the fact that such missiles are equipped with multiple nuclear warheads (i.e., one missile only delivers many nuclear devastations to many different targets), the name Nike seems more obscene than the more common four-letter word.  And of course everyone who has seen the movie “Apocalypse Now”, with its depiction of horribly burnt children, thanks to jellied gasoline; we shall never forget the military commander sniffing the dawn air as he declaims “I love the smell of napalm in the morning; it smells like victory.”

Nike: victor, conqueror – the word is used over and over in the New Testament. It’s used of our Lord. He, Jesus Christ, is victor. It’s also used of his followers. You and I are victors.

Early-day Christians were enormously comforted and strengthened every time they grasped afresh that Jesus Christ is victor, conqueror. They were comforted just because they knew that danger harassed them on every side. The book of Revelation speaks pictorially of these dangers in terms of the four horses and their riders. The white horse represents tyranny, like the brutal tyrannies of totalitarian regimes whether of the left or the right: China , North Korea , Islamic extremism, and several nations in Africa . The red horse, whose rider carried a sword, represents civil war.  There is nothing bloodier than civil war.  The American Civil War was the most atrocious spectacle the world had ever witnessed, as citizen slew fellow-citizen at the rate of thousands per hour. The black horse represents famine, together with everything humanly destructive that malnutrition brings with it.  The pale horse represents death; not “Now I lay me down to sleep” sort of death, but that death which is the power and purpose of tyranny and starvation and war. Yet even as the book of Revelation speaks loudly of these threats, it speaks more loudly still of Jesus Christ as the victor over them.

Nevertheless, the book of Revelation never suggests that Jesus is conqueror because he can out-tyrannize the tyrants or out-brutalize the brutes.  On the contrary, it speaks of our Lord as lamb, the lamb slain.  The power of the victor, then, is the efficacy of the freely-offered self-sacrifice. At the same time, let us make no mistake: the self-offered sacrifice isn’t useless, ineffective, feeble. The lamb slain, Revelation tells us, is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, God’s strength.   As this lamb is raised from the dead he comforts and encourages and fortifies his people, now harassed themselves.

 

I: — The apostle Paul shares the conviction of the early-day Christians.   He reminds the believers in Rome that because they belong to Christ, they too are conquerors.   Ironfast in his conviction and confidence here, Paul tells the Roman congregations that they are more than conquerors; coining a Greek word for his own use, he tells them that they are superconquerors.

Superconquerors?   Let’s start simply with being a conqueror.   By way of preface Paul insists that dangers and diseases and difficulties and discouragements pour down relentlessly on us.  These dangers, diseases, difficulties and discouragements appear to drive a wedge between us and God’s love for us.  Appear to; want to; conspire too; but can’t, ultimately; they can’t finally separate us from God’s love.  To be bound to Jesus Christ in faith is to be included in his victory. For this reason Paul exclaims “Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”   This is what it is to be a conqueror.

[a]         Then what is it to be more than conqueror, a superconqueror?   After all, we can’t be any more victorious than victorious.   Then what does Paul mean when he insists Christ’s people are supervictorious?

At the very least it means that our Lord’s victory does more than merely keep our heads above water; does more than get us through our dying, however miserable we might seem to be.   It means that Christ’s victory lends us resilience.   We haven’t merely survived (although survival is nothing to be made light of.) We are rendered resilient.

Following a funeral service, one never-to-be-forgotten day, I stood at a grave alongside the 65 year-old man whose 34 year-old daughter had just been commended to the care and keeping of God. His daughter, mother of two children, had committed suicide.   The man’s heartbreak was heartbreaking to see.   Family and friends consoled him briefly and moved away from the grave, leaving him and me alone. Slowly he turned to me and said, triumphantly, “Shepherd, at the funeral service today we sang the hymns in defiance of the devil.”   I could feel the resilience in the grief-stricken man who yet could thumb his nose at the cosmic powers of evil.

Speaking of defiance: have you ever noticed the defiance in the all-time favourite Psalm, Psalm 23?   “Thou preparest a table before me – where? – right in the presence of my enemies.” In the valley of the shadow of death; in the midst of harassment from all sides, the psalmist knows not only that he’s going to be sustained (the table); he’s going to be equipped to defy everything and everyone who wants to take him down. Isn’t it grand that Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, sustains his people?   It’s wonderful. We’re conquerors. Yet he does even more: he fortifies his people so that we can defy whatever wants to take us out of the orbit of God’s love.

It is the lamb whose enemies trampled him only to find him raised from the dead in the presence of his enemies; it is this conqueror who equips us with more-than-conqueror resilience.

[b] Yet there’s more than resilience in being superconquerors; there’s also radiance. It’s possible to be victorious (we haven’t been separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord); it’s even possible to be victorious and resilient (we can go on defying everything that assaults us) and yet be grim, be suspicious, be sour, be as edgy as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Elie Wiesel, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and author of Night, the 1960 book that Oprah Winfrey endorsed this year (thereby selling 500,000 copies of the new translation); Wiesel was 17 when he was liberated from Auschwitz. His mother and his sister had already been executed; his father had died in Auschwitz from slave labour and malnutrition.   Ever since the death of Martin Buber, Wiesel has been the spokesperson for worldwide Jewry. He’s a writer whose profundity and anguish and inspiration have been recognized repeatedly. Wiesel says, “Do you know why I am a Jew?   I like to sing. However bad their lot, the Jewish people can always find reason to sing.”

Speaking of singing: I had listened to African-American spirituals for years, had enjoyed them (as everyone seems to) but had never reflected on them at any depth.   Then one day a man in the small (smaller than Schomberg) rural congregation I was serving pointed out to me that that there was no trace of bitterness in the spirituals – and this fact was surely a triumph of grace and a manifestation of grace.   Think of it: slavery, with its brutality, degradation, suffering, seeming hopelessness – and yet no bitterness in its music, no incitement to revenge, no zeal for vicious vindictiveness; only a patient waiting for God’s vindication.   More than mere resilience, the music breathes radiance.

A woman with advanced neurological disease began to tell me of an incident that had recently befallen her and her husband, himself ill with the same disease.   Her story sounded grim. My face sank. She saw my face and laughed, “Oh, it’s really quite funny.”   Here’s her story.

Needing to use the toilet in the night, she transferred herself from bed to wheelchair to toilet.  In attempting to pull herself up from the toilet she lost her balance at the same as she jammed her arm between the handrail and the wall. She fell down onto the floor with her arm up, wedged between the handrail and the wall.   Her husband heard the commotion.   He transferred himself from bed to wheelchair and set off to help her. In his excitement he capsized his wheelchair. Now he was on the floor too (in a different room), couldn’t get up, and therefore couldn’t get to a phone.         “What on earth did you do?” I asked the woman weakly.   “I knew no one was going to come along until morning”, she said, “and so I recited over and over again Psalm 34: ‘I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth.   Look to him and be radiant.’”

Karl Barth, the best theologian of the 20^th Century, was a Swiss national teaching in Germany when the Gestapo removed him from his classroom at gunpoint in 1935.  Barth points out that while the New Testament says much about the harassments and assaults and afflictions that are visited specifically upon God’s people, nowhere in the New Testament is all this spoken of in terms of protest or complaint or self-pity.   “Look to him and be radiant.”

Resilience and radiance are alike part of being more-than-a-conqueror.

 

II: — The Greek verb that corresponds to the noun Nike, “victory”, is Nikan.   In several places our English bibles have the verb “overcome”. To conquer is to overcome. Paul uses Nikan in his letter to the Christians in Rome . “Don’t be overcome with evil”, he says I Romans 12; “you be sure to overcome evil with good.” We all agree.   Still, there’s little point in being told to overcome evil with good unless we are also told how to do it. And in fact the apostle tells us several times over how we are to overcome evil with good in several different situations.

For instance, we are to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.   And what has this to do with overcoming evil?   If we don’t rejoice with those who rejoice then we plainly envy them. Our envy in turn sours us. Sour petulance born of envy diminishes the joy of whose who are rejoicing.   This is evil enough. Envy – our mediaeval foreparents were correct in naming it one of the “seven deadly sins” – always moves from envy to nastiness to hatred. At this point we have moved beyond resenting the joy of those who rejoice; at this point we are quietly determined to slay them.   By rejoicing with those who rejoice we don’t give this dynamic any chance to start. By rejoicing with those who rejoice we overcome evil with good.

On the other hand, if we fail to weep with those who weep, then plainly we have no sympathy for those in distress, and we have no sympathy in that our hearts have grown hard.   Our hard-heartedness is evil enough.   Worse, by failing to weep with those who weep, we isolate them.   As we isolate those who have reason to weep we magnify their distress. Once again, in weeping with those who weep we overcome evil with good.

Another clue from the Romans letter: “Associate with the lowly; never be conceited.”   If we associate with those who aren’t lowly; if we associate with the snooty and snobby and the self-important we shall have to play their game in order to remain in their company.   Soon, however, the game will cease to be a game; it will simply be who we are. The conceited are those who lack humility. Humility has everything to do with humus, the Latin word for earth. The conceited are those who have falsified themselves to the point that they are forever denying their ordinariness, their earthliness, even their earthiness. The conceited are the self-inflated whose hot air keeps floating above the earthly, earthy ordinariness of everybody else.   At least this is what the self-important, self-inflated think – in their pathetic self-delusion. Only as we associate with the lowly do we avoid all such silly self-misperception ourselves. Only as we associate with the lowly do we overcome evil with good.

The apostle’s most obvious directive in this matter (we are still probing Romans 12) we must hear and heed: “Don’t repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” It’s easy to repay evil for evil. When we are victimized by evil our knee-jerk response is to retaliate with evil, if only to think that this is the only way we can protect ourselves.   But the Christian knows she doesn’t have to protect herself ultimately, and can’t protect herself ultimately in any case.   When our Lord was reviled, Peter tells us, he didn’t revile in return. When he was spat upon, he didn’t spit back.

Still, it’s easy to repay evil for evil.   It’s easy to do it stealthily, privately, quietly.   If we are well-practised at repaying evil for evil, we can disguise the repayment so cleverly that no one else sees it; no one else, that is, except the person whom we have paid back in the coin of evil. But in the life of Christians there are to be no devious, dark corners that cloak treachery and venom. For we are always to keep before us, always to keep hung up in our mind, what is noble in the sight of all. We are always to act in such a way that public scrutiny would find us unashamed.

Since life isn’t nearly so much a matter of occasional large items as it is the daily accumulation of smaller items, each and every day provides no end of instances where evil is to be overcome by good, resulting in what is noble in the sight of all.

 

We began today by noting that no one admires the conqueror who is cruel or coercive. We noted too that Jesus Christ isn’t this kind of conqueror.   He is first the lamb slain. He has been raised from the dead and therein vindicated as victor.   By faith we keep company with him.   As we are made the beneficiaries of his victory we are made conquerors ourselves. Therefore we can overcome evil with good. Made more than conquerors, as we overcome evil with good we shall do so resiliently, even radiantly.

 

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd             

October 2006

Romans 10:9-17

 

[1] What is evangelism? It is commending Jesus Christ to others; specifically, commending him to others who are indifferent or hostile to him. Evangelism is pointing to our Lord and pointing others to our Lord; specifically, it is pointing on behalf of those who have not yet seen him, cannot locate him, may not even know he’s around.

John Wesley, upon announcing the good news to those who were ignorant of God, indifferent to his truth, and often so spiritually unconcerned as not able to care less; Wesley wrote in his journal come nightfall, “I offered them Christ”. I like that expression: “I offered them Christ”. Needless to say, as often as we use it we don’t pretend for a minute that Christ is “ours” to offer; we don’t possess him or own him or handle him. We don’t offer him in the same sense that we offer our favourite compact disc to someone who wants to listen to music. Jesus Christ isn’t ours to dispense.

At the same time, there is a profound sense in which we do offer him. Scripture insists that God can be known only as he is declared. It is the vocation of the prophet to announce that truth of God which God then owns and honours so that the prophet’s announcement of truth becomes God’s vehicle for imparting truth; and more than God’s vehicle for imparting truth, God’s vehicle of God’s own presence and person and penetration. Conversely, where the prophet falls silent, there is no penetration of stone-hard heart and darkened mind. In this vein the apostle Paul writes, “Everyone who invokes the name of the Lord will be saved. How can they invoke one in whom they have no faith? How can they have faith in one they have never heard of? And how can they hear without someone to spread the news? And how can anyone spread the news without a commission to do so?”

Evangelism is someone with a commission spreading the news of Jesus Christ so that those who hear may call upon him and find themselves blessed with the blessing: intimacy with the God who forgives us and forges unbreakable bonds with us and cherishes us and holds in the palm of his hand all who want to be nowhere else.

In the profoundest sense, then, we do “offer” Christ. In commending our Lord we do “make him available”, as it were; as we do this he promises to render himself vivid. Vivid himself, now, and vivifying others, he looms up before those who have been unaware of him and surges over them in his truth, his love, his persistence, his winsomeness. This is evangelism.

[2] If this is what evangelism is, why do sober, sensible, sensitive people like us react instinctively, react viscerally, as soon as we hear the word? Why do we react negatively?

(i) It’s because we associate evangelism with emotional manipulation. To be sure, we all recognize that guilty people (people who are guilty before God, that is) should feel guilty; nonetheless, we suspect that guilt-feelings are often fostered artificially, magnified cleverly, exploited unscrupulously.

(ii) Then again we associate evangelism with anti-intellectualism. The evangeliser frequently strikes us as someone who offers embarrassingly simple solutions to complex questions (if he is even aware of the question); too often it seems to us that the evangelist doesn’t appreciate the tangles with which life becomes tangled; he doesn’t appreciate the struggle some people have in wrestling with matters of faith and their unbelief; he doesn’t seem bothered by the many who profess repentance and faith at evangelistic services only to be found, six months later, sunk in skepticism or cynicism or contempt towards the very event that induced their response. While it is true that we should never pander to intellectual pride, we must always accommodate intellectual difficulty. Too often the evangelist appears not to do this, not to care to, and not to be possessed of intellectual subtlety himself.

(iii) Once more, we associate evangelism with unconscious compartmentalization. Faith is compartmentalized in one box of life, thinking in another, money in another, sex in another, education in another — with the result that faith appears to have nothing at all to do with life. Evangelism is then identified with a mindless “inwardness” while life has to do with thoughtful “outwardness”.

For all these reasons we cringe upon hearing the word “evangelism”.

[3] But we shouldn’t cringe. The word is noble. The English word “evangel” comes from the Greek word “euaggelion”, when the Greek word simply means “good news”. Strictly speaking, it means not merely “good news”, but also “the announcing of good news”; “evangel”, then, is good news announced, good news making hearers joyful. If the gospel is the announcing of news so good as to make hearers rejoice, then we shouldn’t feel negative about the word, and shouldn’t apologize for using it. Instead we should reclaim the word; we should take it back from those who have pirated it and besmirched it. When something is tarnished anywhere else in life we don’t throw it away; we reclaim it, shine it, and display it.

Several years ago when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto one of my students in sixteenth century theology told me that whenever he went to a dance or a party he disguised the fact that he was in theology. He said that as he pirouetted his dance-partner around the floor and the inevitable question came up (“What are you studying?”), he always said, “Geology; I’m in geology.” To speak the truth — “theology” — would have meant no dance-partner (he felt).

I have noticed that when the word “evangelism” should be used some people substitute “church growth” or “outreach” lest the “dance” with their conversation-partner end on the spot. But we should use the right word. Church growth may (or may not) be an outcome of evangelism. Outreach is important, but we can reach out to people for any number of reasons yet never intend to offer them Christ. We should reclaim the word and never attempt to disguise it. The word is noble.

Then let’s display its inherent nobility. The student who told his dance-partner that he was studying geology; doesn’t he know that geology is the study of ancient inert rocks, while theology is the study of the activity of the living God, always contemporary, the maker of the only genuine future there can ever be? If someone doesn’t want to dance with that, too bad for her!

[4] Why do we evangelize? Because the good news is good; in fact, the good news is the best news there could ever be. In everyday life wouldn’t we rejoice at the good news of someone, sick unto death, who had been restored to health? Jesus says that the spiritually healthy don’t need a physician, but the sick do; and he is that physician whose cure is sure.

Aren’t we pleased when someone whose reasoning is unreasonable is restored to sanity? God’s verdict on our reasoning in matters of faith and life is (to quote scripture) “futile in their thinking”, “senseless minds darkened”, “claiming to be wise they become fools”; moreover, spiritual derangement is accompanied by degrading conduct — the bottom line. Then isn’t it wonderful news to hear that Jesus Christ can restore reason to reason’s integrity so that our thinking (with respect to spiritual matters) is no longer “dark”, “senseless”, “futile” or “base”?

Surely we would all describe as “good news” the announcement that a blind person — particularly someone born blind — was finally rendered able to see. Then to come upon someone who has been made able to see the kingdom of God, and to see it shine more brightly and more invitingly than the kingdoms of this world; this is good news magnified one-hundredfold.

What better news could there be than the news that someone, deaf to the living God for decades, has heard him, and heard him call her by name, and heard him speak truth that she had always regarded as antiquated religious opinion? She will henceforth spend the rest of her life in a dialogue that isn’t presumptuous chatter but is rather an ever-increasing fusing of her heart to God’s.

Every few weeks someone approaches me quietly and says, “Victor, several Sundays ago you said, `…………………..’ I went home and thought about it. Then I did it. I have been doing it ever since. And do you know what, Victor? It works!” Precisely what has “worked”? The grudge that had festered like the foreign body that it is; the grudge whose festering had gone from low-grade infection to blood-poisoning; someone went home and by the grace of God and by the grit that grace supplies put the grudge behind him and found a new freedom to get on with life. What is this but to receive fresh confirmation that in the kingdom of God the lame are made to walk? There are many different kinds of lameness that are made good in the kingdom of God! What news could be better?

The long-term grudge; envy that has clung to us like fly-paper; a quest for social superiority that amounted to an obsession; bondage to a besetting sin that has been so well hidden that no one else has even suspected — and then release!. The gospel offers nothing less, promises nothing less, delivers nothing less. Good news? It couldn’t be better!

We evangelize because we are stewards of the priceless good, the gospel itself. Like Wesley of old, we can only say, “We must offer them Christ.” We evangelize too inasmuch as we aren’t merely persuaded of its truth; we are possessed of him whose gospel it is. This isn’t to hold ourselves up as spiritual giants; it isn’t to indulge ourselves in a spiritual snobbishness as revolting as it is ridiculous. But it is to say with a man born blind who is now sighted, “I was blind, I can see, I know who did it for me.” In his brief letter to the Christians in Philippi Paul speaks, out of his overflowing heart, of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Is he boasting, or otherwise parading himself as spiritually superior? Immediately he adds, “Not that I…am already perfect.” Unless we say the first we have nothing to say; unless we say the second we should say nothing at all. At the end of the day evangelism is one beggar who has found bread telling another beggar where there is bread; it is inviting anyone at all to join us on a venture.

[5] Part of the sermon you asked for was, “How do we evangelize in Streetsville?” We do it here the way it’s done anywhere else.

(a) There is always the evangelism of the evangelist, the evangelism of the person whom God has called and made fruitful in addressing large crowds. Billy Graham does it, John Wesley did it, Jonathan Edwards did it, William Sangster did it. Peter did it on the day of Pentecost when he “offered Christ” to them and 3000 people closed with the offer.

(b) There is also the evangelism of the local congregation. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, British cardiologist-turned-clergyman, ministered for thirty years to a large congregation in downtown London, England. Tirelessly Lloyd-Jones insisted that it must never be assumed that all who come to church have in fact closed with the gospel-offer. For this reason he always insisted that one service in three be slanted toward helping someone onto the road of discipleship. This still left two services out of three to encourage and instruct and edify believers who are already on the road.

(c) In the third place even those services that aren’t slanted toward securing a new commitment to our Lord; even these services, any service at all, can function as a vehicle of evangelism. The theme of the service can be anything at all: doctrine, prayer, faith, ethics, some aspect of church history, music, biography, the fact and nature of evil, the installation of the UCW executive; the theme can be anything at all. What then renders any service an occasion of evangelism is the mood of the service, the indefinable “plus” of God’s Spirit, the expectancy of the congregation, the confidence that on this occasion, Sunday morning at 10:00, we are face-to-face with him whose splendour is indescribable; on this occasion God is going to surge over us afresh and we are going to offer ourselves to him anew; today, now, we are eager once more to obey him whose claim upon us we gladly acknowledge. The mood of worship — its spirit, its brightness, its joy and its solemnity, its expectancy, its warmth, its thoughtfulness — surely this moves the “almost-disciple” to wonder, seek, find, know.

When Paul speaks of the worship-services of the congregation in Corinth, the plain, ordinary, Sunday event at St. Matthew’s-By-The-Gas-Station, he doesn’t suggest that it’s boring or “old hat” or pointless because not novel. To be sure, the congregation in Corinth does what congregations do everywhere: sing hymns, read scripture, pray, preach, listen, and receive an offering. In the midst of all of this, says Paul, when an outsider enters the service, she is convicted, the secrets of her heart are disclosed (to her), she falls on her face, she worships God, and she declares that God is “really” among the Corinthian Christians. And it all happens at the most ordinary service of worship! We must never undervalue what is going on when we gather to worship. We gather; God graces us and our service; the atmosphere is rendered Spirit-charged — and throughout it the newcomer is convicted, is confronted with the truth about his innermost self, falls on his face, worships God, and goes home saying to himself, “There really was something going on there in Streetsville today!” We must never undervalue any service of worship as a vehicle of evangelism, for God himself can, and will, render any such service such a vehicle.

(d) Lastly, we must understand that the commonest vehicle of evangelism is the one most readily overlooked: casual conversation that is not deliberately evangelistic at all, yet casual conversation about matters of the Spirit that are both ever so deep in us and also on the tip of our tongue, and on the tip of our tongue just because ever so deep in us.

A few weeks ago Maureen and I and two parishioners spent an evening at Convocation Hall (University of Toronto) listening to John Updike read from his latest novel and answer questions from the audience. The evening was electrifying. Anyone who is attracted to literature would have been rendered exuberant at Updike’s knowledge of the history of literature, his profundity, his grasp of the English language, and his ability to acquaint hearers with all of this in words that anyone can understand. In the car on the way home we talked about nothing else. For days afterward the four of us were on the phone to each other; newspaper articles that spoke of Updike’s visit to Toronto were clipped and passed around; future radio broadcasts featuring Updike were marked on calendars. It’s easy to talk about something that is rooted deep in us and enthuses us. We don’t have to look for ways of talking about it; what is dear to us springs unbidden to our lips and we speak of it unselfconsciously.

Then what is dear to us? Who is dear to us? Who enthuses us? There’s no need (and no place) for artificial conversation; there’s no contriving a hidden agenda. Naturalness is what matters.

John Bunyan, the best-known Puritan author (Pilgrim’s Progress), came to faith in Jesus Christ when he accidentally overheard four impoverished women talking naturally among themselves while taking a break from homemaking tasks. He overheard them speak of what it meant to them to be bathed in God’s love for them, what it meant to know Jesus. “They sounded to me as though they had found a new world”, Bunyan wrote later. The four women had. He came upon them when they were talking as unselfconsciously as we talk about — about what? about what matters to us.

So what matters to us? Who matters to us? The commonest kind of evangelism is never planned or programmed; it just happens as surely as Christ’s people are aglow with their Lord.

                                                                      Victor Shepherd

March 1996

What Is Evangelism, and How Do We Evangelize in Streetsville?          

Romans 12     Genesis 50:15-21      Matthew 5:43-48

 

I: — The risen Lord Jesus Christ apprehended Paul in the year 30, a short time after Jesus himself was raised from the dead. Thereafter Paul always insisted that this staggering apprehension on the road to Damascus both made him a Christian and commissioned him an apostle. Three years later he went to Jerusalem and conferred with Peter, no doubt recognizing Peter as the leader of the mother-church in that city. For the next fourteen years (33-47) Paul was in Arabia (present-day Syria). We don’t know what he was doing there. No record of what he was about exists. At the end of these fourteen years, in the year 47, he returned to Jerusalem and laid “his gospel” before the apostolic leaders there; he wanted them to see that the fellow who had once persecuted Christians was now a bona fide Christian himself. In addition the apostolic leaders in Jerusalem knew that Paul was the chief gospel-witness among the gentiles, and they wanted to be sure that the gentile mission, now swelling rapidly, was informed by the gospel and not by a distortion of the gospel or a dilution of it. From 47-57 Paul evangelized relentlessly, planting numerous congregations in four different Roman provinces. Some of the congregations he planted are known to us; e.g., those in Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, Thessalonica.

Paul spent the winter of 56-57 at the home of his friend and convert, Gaius, in the city of Corinth. He planned to go to Jerusalem in the spring with money he had been collecting for starving Christians (Jewish Christians) there. In addition he felt that the money which gentile Christians had raised for this purpose would strengthen the bonds between the mother-church in Jerusalem and the largely gentile churches throughout Asia and Europe.

Paul regarded it his peculiar vocation to announce the gospel where the gospel had never been heard before. He didn’t like to build on someone else’s foundation, as he put it. He preferred announcing the good news where the name of Jesus Christ was unknown. Since the gospel had not yet been declared in Spain, Paul decided to go Spain. He was sure that the harvest there would be substantial.

What’s more, on the way to Spain he could stop in Rome. He had always wanted to visit the capital city. After all, it was the most influential city of the most powerful empire in the world. Any fruit the gospel bore in Rome would spread throughout the empire. Moreover, Paul was a Roman citizen by birth, and naturally enough he wanted to visit the city which had accorded him this rare privilege.

Accordingly, he wrote a theological treatise to the Christian people of Rome (the letter we call “Romans”), acquainting them with his theological convictions and allaying any misgivings they might have had about him.

Then it happened. While he was in Jerusalem religious authorities ganged up on him and had him charged. His trial dragged on and on. Finally he had had enough and told the Roman officials in Jerusalem that he was a citizen of Rome and it was his right to have his trial heard in Rome. Three years after he had written his theological treatise he arrived in the city, in chains. He remained under house arrest for two years. We don’t know for sure what happened to him next. Almost certainly, however, he perished in the terrible persecution of Emperor Nero, together with his friend Peter.

II: — Romans 12 is crucial. It deals with the application of Paul’s gospel to life. In the earlier chapters of the book Paul has expounded the riches of the gospel: how God makes sinful people right with himself, why all humankind needs to be made right with God, the manner in which the gospel quickens faith in people and binds them to Christ, and so on. Then beginning in chapter twelve he tells his readers how this gospel is to be lived in their day-to-day affairs. It is never enough that the gospel be understood and believed; it must always be lived. In fact, we understand and believe the gospel in order that we might live it. Truth has to be done.

III (i): — The first thing Paul puts forward in his section on what the Christian is to do is the ground of our doing anything at all. What moves the Christian to live like a Christian, to want to live like a Christian? The ground of all that we do is simply God’s mercy. Our motivation is gratitude for this mercy. J.B. Phillips, the best paraphraser of the NT, writes, “With your eyes wide open to the mercies of God.” Christians are those who have intimate acquaintance with the mercy of God. We know ourselves freed, renewed and invigorated at God’s own hand. I know that I am the beneficiary of God’s mercy. I have known since I was nine years old that as sinner I merited only condemnation; that the amnesty which God fashioned and pressed upon me I didn’t deserve at all. Therefore it had to be rooted in his mercy alone. Mercy is love poured out on those who merit no love at all and never will. That I live at all is a manifestation of God’s mercy. That I have been rendered a new creature in Christ Jesus, am sustained in this newness every day by God’s Spirit, and am destined for eternal glory; this is an even greater manifestation of mercy. It is this greater mercy which will always be the rock-bottom truth and reality of my life. And ceaseless gratitude will ever be the only worthy motivation of my Christian conduct.

Our awareness of God’s astounding mercy certainly sobers us and frequently silences us; but it never immobilizes us. On the contrary, says the apostle, our awareness of God’s mercy moves us to offer our bodies to God as a living sacrifice.

Our bodies? How do I offer my body to God? Paul means my self: to offer my body is to offer myself. I don’t offer not this or that about myself, as though I were trying to get off cheap with God; I offer my self, all of my self. Then why does the apostle say “body”? Because he is a Jew, and the Hebrew mind knows that there is no human self apart from a body. I have no self apart from my body. If my friend phones me up and asks, “Would you like to play baseball this afternoon?”, I don’t reply, “Sure, I’d love to play baseball; I’ll bring along my ball and glove; I’ll bring along my body too.” It would be nonsensical inasmuch as “I” can’t play baseball apart from my body; there isn’t even an “I” apart from my body. Neither can I honour God without my body; neither can I obey God without my body. My personhood, my identity, my innermost “I”, while not reducible to my body, is nonetheless inseparable from my body.

The last fifteen years have acquainted us with notorious scandal among television preachers who thought that they could honour God and serve God apart from their bodies. The last year has acquainted us with notorious scandal among Roman Catholic priests who thought as much too. “They” themselves could serve God while their bodies were off doing something else. Those men disgraced themselves. Our gratitude to God for our salvation must ever move us to offer God our body, our “self”, all of “us” without qualification or reservation.

My offering all of “me” to God is “spiritual worship”, says Paul. Some translations of the NT say “reasonable service”, others, “spiritual worship”. The Greek expression means both, and I am sure that Paul had both meanings in mind. It’s reasonable in that my obedient service to God is the only reasonable response to that mercy of his which has saved me. At the same time, my obedient service to God, my aspiration to live the gospel, is the only sign that my worship of God is born of his Spirit. “Reasonable service” and “spiritual worship” mean the same thing.

What it all adds up to, says the apostle, is that we are not to be conformed to the world. We are not to let the world squeeze us into its mould.

In the latter part of the twelfth chapter Paul tells us that our Christian existence unfolds in the world. Christians are committed to the world. We are not to try to live in a little religious ghetto which shuts out the big, bad world. At the same time, the very world which we are to live in and struggle for is a world to which we are not to conform.

(ii): — Now between the latter part of chapter twelve and the earlier part comes the middle part. In the middle part Paul speaks of our Christian service to the church. You see, before you and I are qualified to serve the world we must serve the church. Of course! Surely our fellow-Christians have first claim upon us. After all, it is our fellow-Christians who nurture us and encourage us and sustain us. They have to have first claim upon us, since we don’t hesitate to look to them for whatever we need whenever we need it. Furthermore, if we are unable to serve our fellow-Christians in the church (where we share a common Lord, common faith, common hope) how shall we fare in the wider world (which is meaner, tougher, more resistant, and utterly unforgiving)? The first sphere of our service is always the church.

In our service to the church Paul insists first and foremost that we not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. (“Don’t cherish exaggerated ideas of yourself or your importance…”, he says.) Paul makes this point first because he knows the church gives people the chance to be a big toad in a small pond; and not merely a big toad, a totalitarian toad. There are two reasons for this. One, compared to where our lives unfold during the week the local congregation is small. The person who has no clout at all in his place of employment (how much clout can any employee have at General Motors or CNR?) finds that he has immense clout in a congregation. Two, congregations tend to be docile in the face of someone who speaks loudly or shrilly. Most church people have grown up with the idea that they should be nice inasmuch as Jesus was nice. Now Jesus was many things, but “nice” wasn’t one of them. (C.S. Lewis maintains that according to the New Testament Jesus is tender and terrifying in equal parts, but never “nice”.) Still, he is thought to have been nice. When a powerplay unfolds in congregational life or someone browbeats another member or brings forward a not-so-hidden agenda, others decide quickly they should acquiesce in order to keep things nice. (Surely this is what has happened over and over in meetings of presbytery and conference and general council in The United Church of Canada since 1988 — never mind before.) The noisy browbeater or the powerplay specialist wins the day. The big toad in the small pond is now even bigger.

The apostle is aware of this. For this reason the first thing he says to us who are who we are only by God’s mercy is this: “Don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought to think.” We are not to cherish exaggerated ideas of ourselves or our importance. This is foundational. Without it church life either fragments or becomes the fiefdom of the local tyrant.

Having made his point here Paul next tells us that each of us is to exercise, for the good of the congregation, whatever ministry we have been given to exercise. Our ministry here, our service, is simply the exercising of the gifts which we have.

Paul is careful to note three things here. One, every Christian has a service to render the believing community, just because every Christian has a gif, a talent. Two, we should exercise only those gifts which we have; we should not attempt to exercise gifts which we don’t have. This is why he says, “If your gift is teaching, then teach (don’t attempt carpentry or accounting); if your gift is exhortation or encouragement, then exhort or encourage.” Very often in church life we expect people to exercise gifts which they manifestly don’t have. Then we are surprised when an important task in church life goes undone, or is done poorly; surprised again when the person who attempted to do it feels guilty at having done it so poorly. We are to do only what has been given us to do. We should never feel guilty for not doing what we have no gift for doing. In the third place Paul says something about the service which mercy-made Christians are to render that we must take to heart: whatever our service is, we are to render it wholeheartedly, generously, zealously, cheerfully. We are not to render it stingily, resentfully, grudgingly, miserably. “Whoever contributes, liberally; whoever gives assistance, enthusiastically; whoever does acts of mercy, cheerfully” — is how he speaks of it. There is nothing as destructive as “doing good”, so-called, which is done reluctantly, resentfully, grudgingly. Congregational life thrives when everyone’s service is recognized and encouraged; when whatever service is rendered the congregation is rendered as people have gifts with which to render it; when all of this is done with magnanimity of spirit. Not only is congregational life made to thrive, says the apostle, Christians are at this point qualified for their service to the world.

(iii): — Our service to the world Paul discusses beginning with verse 14 of chapter 12. Right off the bat he says, “Bless those who persecute you; bless them, don’t curse them.” Doesn’t that wake you up? His first point is that the service which the Christian renders the world for the sake of the world, the world throws back in the Christian’s face! But this is because of something I mentioned ten minutes ago: the world which the Christian must serve is precisely that world to which the Christian must not conform. Right off the bat, then, there is going to be a collision between the Christian and the world.

At this point the Christian is always tempted to protect himself by turning his back on the world and huddling in a corner with a blanket pulled over his head. The apostle forbids this. He forbids it because he knows his Lord forbids it. (After all, says St.John, it is the world which God so loved that he bled to death for it.) We are not to stand aloof. In fact, says Paul, we are to stand so close to the world, in such solidarity with other people, that we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. We weep with those who weep inasmuch as we are sensitive to their hurt and we care for them in the midst of their pain; we rejoice with those who rejoice inasmuch as we don’t envy whatever it is which has made them rejoice, and therefore we don’t dash cold water on their elation jealously.

The apostle insists as well that we are not to be haughty, but rather we are to associate with the lowly. J.B Phillips again: “Don’t become snobbish, but take a real interest in ordinary people.” Nothing has the capacity to foster pride, secret arrogance, like belonging to an elite. It can be an academic elite, a professional elite, an athletic elite, a religious elite. Now there is certainly nothing wrong with belonging to such elites. Why shouldn’t the academically gifted person enjoy the company of other academics, the athlete the company of fellow-athletes, and so on? At the end of the day, however, everyone who belongs to the most elevated elite is in exactly the same condition as those who belong to no elite at all: everyone is a suffering human being, fragile, lonely, sinful, facing bodily and mental dissolution — and aware of all of this together as well as aware of spiritual impoverishment. Everyone, whether elitist or not, is subject to the same heartaches, guilt and apprehension. The Christian is to “take a real interest in ordinary people” inasmuch as everyone is ultimately ordinary. At bottom our need is the same and the gospel is the same. We are alike sinners and sufferers who stand empty-handed before God and need what he alone can give us.

The last thing Paul tells us in Romans 12 about our participation the world’s life is this: we are never, but never, to seek revenge. Once we have recognized our enemy as our enemy, we don’t launch a vendetta against him which will only ruin us before it ever ruins him. Vengeance is never our responsibility simply because as soon as we are “stabbed” we lose perspective. Judgement must be left in the hands of him who is always the just judge. Our responsibility is to mirror that truth and mercy which have made us who we are. To do anything else is to be overcome by evil when, says Paul in the very last sentence of Romans 12, our task is always, and only, to overcome evil with good.

 

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd     

June 2002

Romans 12:9-13      Genesis 18:1-8        Luke 15:1-7

 

Did you come to church today expecting me to lambaste fat people?  It isn’t my task to lambaste anyone.  Besides, not all fat people are gluttons.  The truth is, many skinny people are gluttons.  The last thing I want to do is get into an argument over how fat is “fat” and how skinny is “skinny.”   We’re not going to point a finger at anyone today.         We’re going to do something much more profound and helpful.

 

I: — First of all, we have to understand that it’s good to eat.  According to Genesis God provides food, looks upon what he’s done, and then pronounces it good. According to Genesis God provides food not once only, not merely initially, but continuously as he promises seedtime and harvest, harvest and seedtime, the never-failing provision of our elemental bodily needs and all that our body supports. The writer of Ecclesiastes insists, “Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart.”   Then the same writer adds, “For bread is made for laughter, and wine gladdens life.” Eating, he tells us, is God’s gift.

Stained glass pictures of mediaeval “saints” often depict those folk as tubercular, malnourished, emaciated, seemingly in the last stages of starvation or wasting disease. Unfortunately, there are people who starve and there are people who suffer from wasting disease, but there’s nothing virtuous about this.  There’s nothing commendable about looking like a death camp prisoner.

Scripture extols the goodness of God’s creation. Scripture commands us to delight in whatever God has made to sustain us.  John the Baptist ate the plainest food, to be sure, if not the bizarrest food: honey and grasshoppers (high energy and high protein); but he ate. Jesus maintained that John the Baptist was anything but an anaemic wisp or frail wimp, anything but a reed trembling in the wind.  “Eat your bread with enjoyment” says the writer of Ecclesiastes; “for bread is made for laughter.”  Jean Vanier, who has spent his life on behalf of developmentally challenged men (those whom we used to call “retarded” but whom Vanier prefers to call “defenceless” – “Why do we label a man ‘retarded’ just because he can’t defend himself?” Vanier asks us) insists throughout his L’Arche communities that the food be good, the food be abundant, and a light-hearted tone, even a rollicking tone, accompany each meal. Vanier knows there’s nothing God-honouring about eating sawdust in a dismal mood. Jesus ate with relish and ate enough to be accused of gluttony.

 

II: (i) – Then what is gluttony? Here’s the surprise: gluttony isn’t eating too much food; gluttony is being preoccupied with food, regardless of how much or how little we eat. Gluttony is that preoccupation with food that distracts us from profounder aspects of life. At some point we’ve all sat by someone at a wedding reception who couldn’t have cared less about the happy occasion.  He had no interest in the joyful send-off of the happy young couple and the future opening out before them.  He wasn’t even interested in the party that would take up the evening. Instead he was wholly preoccupied with three matters:

What’s for supper?

Will there be enough?

Is the bar free?

 

Gluttony, remember, isn’t a matter of eating too much.  Gluttony is a matter of according food a concern that’s entirely inappropriate.

Not so long ago I attended meetings of a higher court of the denomination. The issues concerned were important: how the denomination might stem its haemorrhaging and thrive again; how younger people might be reached; what sorts of challenges the next decade or two are likely to bring us.  Throughout these meetings there was sober reflection, searing pain, and ardent enthusiasm. On the way home I said to my travel companion, “What did you think of the meetings?”   “The food was sure good” he replied.  Being fifteen pounds overweight isn’t the lethal aspect of deadly-sin gluttony. The lethal aspect, rather, is being so very preoccupied with food as to lose sight of the kingdom’s collision with the world, lose sight of the spiritual contradiction all of us are, lose sight of friends and neighbours whose suffering is simply atrocious.

Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego were three young men of great promise in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar.         Nebuchadnezzar recognized their talent and wanted to make them the highest-ranking civil servants.  There was only one problem: the three young men knew whose they were, and therefore who they were. They knew, honoured and obeyed the God of Israel.  As long as they obeyed him, they were of no use to Nebuchadnezzar and his self-promotion in Babylon . Nebuchadnezzar would have to re-program them. He offered to feed the three fellows at the royal table.  They could have caviar, goose-liver pate, pheasant under glass, wine costing a thousand dollars per bottle.  Nebuchadnezzar was aware that once he had quickened a taste for elegance in the three young men; once he had introduced them to ever-ascending social elites, they would forget they were Israelites.  Faith and obedience would shrivel.  They would retain their immense abilities, of course; but now their abilities could be bent to serve Nebuchadnezzar’s purpose as he re-programmed people who were as plastic as all of us are.  Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego saw in an instant what was about to happen. They told the king they would eat cabbage soup.

It happened only in 586 BCE?  It hasn’t happened since? In 1781 John Wesley saw what was happening to the Methodist people.  Newly rendered sober, industrious and thrifty by the power of the gospel, they had spare cash that they had never had when they were drunken and dissolute. They began to frequent – not the gin shops; that was behind them – the coffee shops where both coffee and tea were consumed.  Coffee and tea, imported from halfway around the world, were enormously expensive in 18^th Century England (far more expensive than liquor.) Soon the Methodist people were hob-nobbing with other social climbers; soon the Methodist people had a cultivated, refined taste for items they couldn’t have afforded when they were face-down in the gutter.  They became preoccupied with what Wesley called “genteel tasting.” The men and women now infatuated with “genteel tasting”, Wesley noticed, gave up all sacrificial service on behalf of the suffering neighbour.  They became increasingly self-important, snobs in other words.  As they became more self-important, they became touchier, more readily affronted, quicker to take offence.  As they became quicker to take offence they became more vindictive. The spiral down in one’s character, noted Wesley, begins with that genteel tasting born of social privilege, and it ends in cruel vindictiveness born of super-sensitive snooty touchiness. Wesley’s advice? His people should get out of the coffee shops and shed their snootiness.

(ii) I am persuaded that gluttony is found among food-faddists, as well as among those who are extremists in any respect where food is concerned.  The food-faddist hears there’s something wrong with oats.  Only horses should eat them.  Or there’s something wrong with eggs.  No one should them. I’m always amused when people tell me that today’s food processing is harmful in this respect or that respect.  Do they have any idea how many more people, vastly more people, sickened, even died, decades ago when food processing was much less sophisticated? My father told me many times that when he was a boy he could remember seeing in grocery stores tins of food where the tin bulged because of the rotting underway in the sealed tins. Do we really want to go back to the days when roast pork from scrap-fed pigs gave people trichinosis if they happened to undercook it?  People tell me I shouldn’t drink Mississauga ’s tap water. I happen to think that billions of people in other parts of the world would give anything to have access to Mississauga ’s tap water.

I’m convinced that this preoccupation with food-fads is rooted in one thing: fear of dying. The health-food faddists unconsciously think they can eat their way into immortality. But we are mortal creatures. Death is inescapable. The provision God has made for our death, both physical and spiritual, is the sin-bearing Son whom he has raised from the dead and whose righteousness becomes ours through faith. Food-preoccupied people unconsciously think we can transcend our frailty and fragility.  Eating so very carefully is supposed to overturn our mortality.         Food faddism is gluttony not because these people overeat (they never overeat) but because this kind of food-preoccupation keeps us feeding ourselves lies about ourselves.

(iii) What about skinny people? Let’s be honest: many skinny people count calories as though calories were germs. Remember, a preoccupation with food-avoidance is still a preoccupation with food.  Our Lord couldn’t care less if we are ten pounds overweight.  He knows that an obsession with slenderness is a form of pride.  When the Duchess of Windsor remarked, “One cannot be too rich; one cannot be too slender,” she was touting social superiority.         A preoccupation with slenderness points to a pride that has ballooned.

(iv) The worst feature of our preoccupation with food, by far the worst feature (I’m convinced) is this: it destroys fellowship.  Food ought to be the occasion of fellowship. Even the slightest bit of food brings people together.         Think of how many people gather profitably at our weekly coffee hour following worship, where the cost of the food is pennies per person. Food is supposed to function like this; it’s supposed to be the occasion of human meeting.

But something dreadful has happened.  I have found so very many people reluctant to invite others into their homes for a meal. They are simply afraid to bring others in.  After all, the person they invite might be a better cook.         Whatever happened to the meal where food was a side issue, almost a pretext for meeting others, while the real issue was opening ourselves to others and inviting them to open themselves to us as our intertwined lives became richer than anything we had imagined?

If we are afraid to open our homes, we are also afraid to open our hearts. And we are afraid because of three preoccupations concerning food.  The first has to do with novelty: is our dinner different or unusual? The second has to do with quantity: will there be enough?  The third has to do with quality: is it cordon bleu? In no time we are so very anxious that we can’t invite others to share a meal with us.  Now our homes are closed, and with our homes, our hearts.   When food is given a false value it loses its real value.  Its real value is that it fosters friendship.

 

IV: — All of which brings me to the last point of the sermon.  In fact I introduced the last point a minute or two ago; namely, the place of hospitality in Christian discipleship.  Hospitality looms large with God’s people.  Jesus ate with many different people in many different homes on many different occasions.

On one occasion a woman off the street (today we’d describe her as a “streetwalker”, and everyone would know she wasn’t walking the street because she felt like exercising) ended up at a meal with him. Jesus had been invited to the meal; she had not.  When she arrived at the venue of the meal, the host, the homeowner, didn’t say to her, “I invited him; I didn’t invite you.”   Instead the host welcomed her when he saw that she had invited herself. Plainly his home was open.

In the course of the meal the host mentions that the woman has shown poor taste in wetting our Lord’s feet with her tears and wiping them dry with her hair. Jesus doesn’t disagree with him. Instead he uses the occasion to speak the parable of the two debtors, the point of the parable being the more we are forgiven, the more we love.  At the conclusion of the meal at least two things have happened.  The woman has been confirmed in her love for Jesus as her expression of gratitude is received and honoured, while the homeowner, the host, has come to know what he would otherwise never have known; namely, the more we are forgiven the more we love.  And it all happened just because one man opened his home to the Nazarene by pre-arrangement, and opened his home to a dubious woman on the spot. The result of it all was that Jesus was fed, a woman was honoured, and a man learned what would alter his life forever. This is what is gained all around whenever you or I offer hospitality.

The biblical word for hospitality is philexonia.  Literally it means “love of strangers”.  Hospitality is a huge item in scripture.  In the Pastoral Epistles hospitality is one of the qualifications for leadership in the Christian community.         Not only must leaders be honest; not only must they be maritally faithful; not only must they be schooled in the gospel; they have to be given to hospitality.

In ancient Israel a householder was obliged to extend hospitality, obliged to extend it to his enemy, even his worst enemy. Once his enemy had accepted the hospitality, then had taken his leave and gone on his way, the householder couldn’t pursue him for four and a half days. Jesus goes one step farther. He insists that as we accord hospitality to anyone, that person ceases to be our enemy. Hospitality scatters strangeness and overcomes enmity.

For many years I have thought that loneliness is the affliction wherewith people are afflicted. Several years ago I mentioned this in casual conversation to a congregant, a physician who, along with his wife, was born into social circles that I shall never penetrate and who has the medical fraternity as well as society’s glitterati at his feet.         In other words, he’d never be lonely, would he?  When I casually mentioned that loneliness afflicts so very many he remarked soberly, “The whole world is lonely.”         He meant, of course, the he is lonely.

A woman whose husband left her served on the same presbytery committee as I.  One evening at the presbytery committee meeting she mentioned casually that she might drive east for her holidays.  I told her, equally off-handedly, that Maureen and I and the children were going to spend ten days at Shining Waters Cabins on Prince Edward Island . Nothing more was said.  I forgot about the conversation.  Several months later she appeared, unannounced, on our doorstep at Shining Waters Cabins. She had driven from Mississauga to Summerside , PEI , in one day – to visit us. Loneliness is the affliction of our society. Yet Christians know that food is meant to foster fellowship.  And therefore we know what is required of us.

My mother was only 51 years old when my father died. She remarked to me, “The pattern of my life will change now, because I’m single again and single people are marginalized in a couple-oriented society.” “Oh no, mother”, I disagreed in my 23-year old unwisdom; “the couples with whom you and dad were friends won’t drop you now.”         I was wrong. And since then Maureen and I have made sure that we never overlook people who are not married for any reason.

Hospitality, philexonia, love of strangers, food. They all hang together. As soon as we rid ourselves of the false value of food we perceive its real value: an open home, open hearts, strangeness dispelled, enmity overcome, loneliness alleviated.

How important is hospitality?  Paul says we should pursue it, make it a priority.  Peter says we should practise it ungrudgingly.  The author of Hebrews maintains that as we show hospitality to strangers we entertain angels unawares.  Angels are messengers of God who convey God’s blessings.  In other words, in according hospitality we shall find that some of the people we receive will bring with them a word from God or wisdom from God or his comfort and consolation – all of which we should otherwise never know and enjoy.

 

Our Lord ate with anyone at all at homes, parties, weddings, anywhere.  He couldn’t care less whether we are ten pounds overweight or not. He does care, however, that we delight in the food he has given us.

Equally he cares that we avoid the preoccupation with food that gives food a false value.  Instead he insists on the real value of food.  Food fosters fellowship. Food facilitates hospitality. And hospitality dispels strangeness, overcomes enmity, alleviates loneliness. Food is even the occasion where angels are entertained; which is to say, when we eat together God himself visits us and presses upon us what we should otherwise have to do without.

 

                                                                                               Victor Shepherd

March 2006

 

                 Romans 12:14-21        2^nd Kings 6:8-23                    

 

[1]         “Everyone liked him”, the person speaking of the departed says at the funeral, “everyone liked him; he didn’t have a single enemy.” I feel dreadful whenever I hear this, because if Mr. X didn’t have so much as one enemy, then he wasn’t identifiably Christian.  Jesus had enemies without number.  Insofar as we are identified with our Lord we shall never lack enemies ourselves, and shall never lack them just because he never lacked them.

“If only we were more loving, we’d have no enemies”, someone of much sentimentality but little understanding adds.   Jesus loved without limit, patiently submitted to slander and contempt, endured torment and death for the sake of any and all, and still had enemies. It simply isn’t true that love invariably fosters love in others, that love invariably undoes the enmity strangling someone else’s heart.   The same sun that melts ice also hardens clay.         Love poured upon some people hardens their resistance into hostility.

While we are debunking myths we should debunk another one; namely, that the world is a nice place, punctuated by enmity only occasionally. Jesus never said the world is a nice place; Jesus said the entire world lies in the grip of the evil one. Jesus insists that three features characterize the evil one: absence of righteousness, absence of love, absence of truth.   The absence of righteousness is sin; the absence of love is murderous enmity; the absence of truth is falsehood and delusion.  Since Jesus insists that this is what riddles the world, I’m not about to say that the world is nice.

Let’s be honest. It isn’t only the world that seethes with enmity; the church does too.   Scripture reminds us that the church is infiltrated with enemies of the gospel. Peter speaks of false teachers who have sneaked into the church.         Paul speaks of those who mutilate the gospel.  John speaks of those who stand within the Christian fellowship but whose hearts are far from the truth.   And Jude? Jude’s entire epistle is a white-hot denunciation of those who posture themselves as church leaders yet pervert the faith and discipleship of others within it. Jude’s language (“worldly people, devoid of the Spirit, waterless clouds, fruitless trees” — he stops only because his pen ran out of ink) is so very vivid just because enemies of the gospel harass the church relentlessly.

In a world characterized by enmity we shouldn’t be surprised that to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ in his exposure of the world’s depravity means we shall find his enemies harassing us as well. Think for a minute of our Lord’s healing of the man born blind.   Who would ever oppose it? No one thinks someone suffering the tragedy of blindness should be left blind. Still, when Jesus restores sight to a blind man some people are enraged because he did it on the Sabbath. Others fume and spew because they resent his manifest authority.  Still others hate him because he looks them in the eye and says, “This man who has been blind from birth; his physical condition is an illustration of your spiritual condition.”   Now they are incensed. But our Lord hasn’t finished. “Because you think you can see, because you insist you are spiritually perceptive, your guilt remains.  And on the day of judgement you will be without excuse.”   What is utterly unobjectionable — enabling a blind person to see — quickly becomes the occasion of murderous enmity.  After this, “Bad Friday” can’t fail to arrive.  Since the world is steeped in hostilty, Jesus both asserts and proves, the apostle Paul’s reminder to young Timothy is unarguable: “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” (2 Tim. 3:12)

 

[2]         Contrary to what most people think, Christians don’t inhabit a Pollyanna world. Christians are the most realistic of all people.  Therefore we are going to admit that our enemies are just that: enemies. Enemies aren’t friends in disguise. Enemies can hurt; they’re dangerous.

Since enemies are dangerous, they can’t be trusted.  Yes, we are to love them and pray for them.  We are to love them, says Jesus, as he loved them to the end. But nowhere does our Lord tell us to trust them. He didn’t trust them himself.

While we are talking about the danger that our enemies are, we should carefully delineate the different kinds of danger they are.  One kind of danger is what our enemies can do to us outwardly.  They can slander us, cheat us, exploit us, ruin our chances for promotion at work, turn our friends against us, and so on.  None of this is to be discounted.  At the same time, however, our enemies are never as great an outward danger to us as they are an inward danger.  While they can do much to us outwardly, what they can do inwardly is far worse; namely, warp us, disfigure us, poison us.  It’s one thing for our enemies to do some one thing that hurts us; it’s another thing (and far worse) for them to turn us bitter, sour, caustic.

We need to think about this at greater length.  It’s one thing for us to be hurt; one thing and no small thing.         Yet a much greater matter is our being rendered embittered people whose cynicism and joylessness render us as welcome as bird ’flu.  It’s only wisdom to want to recognize our enemies; but it’s only folly to think that everyone is now our enemy.  A measure of paranoia may be humorous in others for a while, but only for a while; paranoia in ourselves is never funny.  And paranoia beyond the smallest measure is nothing less than tragic.

The worst kind of damage that our enemies can inflict on us is to turn us into haters. Becoming slightly paranoid means we’ve been rendered a minor psychological casualty; becoming a hater, however, means we’ve been rendered a major spiritual casualty. We must be sure we understand this point. Regardless of what kind of threat our enemies may pose to us (loss of opportunity, loss of reputation, whatever), there’s a spiritual threat they always pose: that poisonous hatred which tells everyone that our spirit has been curdled and every word we utter, every gesture we make, thereafter contradicts our profession of Jesus Christ.

The Greek word peirasmos means temptation, trial and testing all at once. When we are victimized by our enemies we are immediately tempted to hate.  But because hatred is sin, the temptation to hate is a trial before God. To succumb to the temptation and fall into hatred is to have the trial finding us guilty. On the other hand, to resist the temptation and fend off the hatred that laps at us is to be exonerated. The hatred that laps at us is also a form of testing.  Testing in scripture is a metaphor taken from the refining of precious metals. When metallic ore (ore being clumps of ugly-looking rock) is refined it is subject to intense heat and pressure.  Impurities, worthless accretions, are burned off so that only what is valuable and useful and attractive is left.  Any temptation is at the same time a testing; any temptation is that process, under God, by which the worthless accretions that besmirch our character have been brought to our attention and can now be burned out of us. When next temptation whispers to us that we have the right to hate just because we’ve been hurt, we must remember that we are in the gravest spiritual danger. We must pray to resist the temptation, and therefore to have the judge exonerate us at our trial, and thereafter to emerge with our character tested, refined, more nearly like our Lord’s who prayed for his enemies.

While we are pondering this point we should consider that text from the older testament that is quoted so often and is often juxtaposed with the teaching of Jesus. The text, of course, speaks of “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” People assume (incorrectly) that the older testament countenances vindictiveness while the newer does not. People assume (incorrectly) that the Hebrew mind is bloodthirsty and insists on limb for limb.

Not so. Just the opposite, in fact.   The force of “eye for eye” is no more than an eye for an eye.  In other words, punishment for a crime must never be more extreme than the crime itself. Punishment for a crime must never be the pretext for indulging one’s own nastiness. If someone shoplifts a garden hose in Canadian Tire we don’t jail that person for 25 years. If a teenager joyrides in our car we don’t insist on solitary confinement.  The purpose of “eye for eye” (that is, no more than an eye for an eye) is to cut off the spiral of violence before it can even begin. We know how the spiral of violence spirals: you insult me, I punch you, you stab me, I murder you. The purpose of “no more than eye for eye” is to ensure that the initial violation doesn’t precipitate a spiral of violence.

 

[3]         While we are on this topic we should understand that we are always tempted to escalate violence because we fear that we are outnumbered or outgunned. We fear that our foes are greater than our friends; we fear that we are in danger of annihilation. When someone aims his shotgun at us and we feel our puny slingshot is no match for it, we then load up our rocket launcher to make sure we aren’t outgunned. Alas, by this time we’ve lost sight of something that all biblically-informed people should never forget: God’s people are never outgunned.

The prophet Elisha tells us as much in one of the grand, old stories about him. The king of Syria , having suffered repeated military losses at the hands of Israel , concludes that his military plans are being leaked to Israel . He thinks (ridiculously) that the prophet Elisha is the source of the leak.  He decides to kill Elisha. He orders chariots and horses to surround the city of Dothan where Elisha is staying. In the morning Elisha’s youthful helper looks out, sees Syrian charioteers everywhere, knows that the city can’t defend itself, and melts down, wailing, “What are we going to do?”  Elisha cries out, “Fear not, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” The young man looks out a second time. This time, however, he’s looking through visionary eyes; he’s seeing visionary sights. He sees the mountain nearby aflame with even more horses and chariots of fire protecting Elisha. The enemies of God’s people never outnumber or outgun God’s people. The psalms in particular are full of this conviction.

In the wilderness Jesus is assaulted by the tempter, apparently alone, apparently defenceless, apparently resourceless.  When Mark narrates this incident he adds a line we customarily read past. Mark adds, “And the angels ministered to Jesus.” In fact our Lord wasn’t alone or defenceless or resourceless.   Months later, perhaps years later, when he was in Gethsemane , beside himself at the prospect not of dying but of the spiritual horror that awaited him, sweating so profusely that he dripped as though he had been gashed, Luke adds, “And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him.” What is given our Lord is given every one of his people.  For this reason John sums it all up most succinctly: “He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world.”

 

[4]         Everyone is aware that Christians are commanded to love their enemies and pray for them. Obviously it’s important for our enemies that we love them and pray for them.  (It’s important for them, plainly, since as long as we love them and pray for them we shan’t kill them.)   We are often slower to understand, however, that it’s important for us as well, for otherwise we are going to kill ourselves.  To pray for our enemies is to be taken out of ourselves, away from ourselves, away from our injuries and resentments and grudges.   To be taken out of ourselves, away from ourselves, is to see that the enemy who causes us to suffer is suffering far more himself.  Think of the person who bullies us, or who tries to.  Bullies cause people to suffer.  Yet bullies suffer enormously themselves, for deep inside every bully there beats the heart of a coward.   Now a coward isn’t a fearful person.  All of us are fearful in different circumstances.   The bravest person is fearful, for bravery occurs only in the midst of fear and has no meaning apart from fear.   The coward, on the other hand, is the person who is controlled by his fear. Can you imagine the suffering of the person who is fear-controlled day-in and day-out?

Think of the person whose hostile rage immobilizes us and silences us. Her terrible rage is born of terrible frustration, and frustration is nothing more than helplessness. It’s only as we pray for her that we can get beyond our own upset and see that she is so frustrated herself that she can’t cope.  Someone who can’t cope, and can’t help humiliating herself by her blow-up over inability to cope; this person merits our pity.

There are many ways of being underprivileged.  One way of being underprivileged is having too few tools in one’s tool box. The person whose vocabulary is so meagre he can only swear at us; the person whose explosive temper tells everyone he’s a four-year old dressed up in a man’s business suit; the person whose envy shrivels her own heart more than it damages anyone else; these people have virtually no tools in their tool box. Underprivileged?         They are so very underprivileged as to be pitiable.

At the same time, however much the nastiness of our enemies arises from their own suffering, I should never deny that some of their nastiness (like ours) arises from their perverse heart.  It arises (like ours) simply from their deep-dyed sinfulness.  But this is no reason to stop praying for them.  After all, the person who is unaware of her sin is in a dreadful way; the person who is aware of her sin and remains indifferent to it is in worse spiritual condition.         Then pray for our enemies we must, for their spiritual condition is crucial.

When we pray for our enemies our own wound, while gaping perhaps, is no longer in danger of infecting.  And when we pray for our enemies we understand as never before the prayer of our Lord concerning his enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they are blind to their own heart-condition.”

 

[5]         One aspect of a Christian approach to our enemies is how we are to regard them; another aspect of our approach is what we are to do in the midst of them. To love our enemies and pray for them never means that we are to render ourselves doormats. We should assert ourselves. Jesus declares, “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.” To love our enemies never means that we are to invite additional assaults; it never means that we subtly send out the message, “Step on me again.”   Most important, to love our enemies never means that we abandon the conviction or the truth or the integrity that called forth someone else’s hostility in the first place.  To love our enemies never means that we are to acquiesce in their evil.

In Romans 12 Paul warns us about being overcome by evil even as he urges us to overcome evil with good.         There are many ways of being overcome by evil.  One way of being overcome by evil is so to fear the assault of our enemies that we acquiesce in their evil just to avoid their assault.  We must never do this. We must always resist evil, even as we strive to overcome evil with good.

 

[6]         We all know that we live in a fallen world where enmity abounds.  Christians know too that Jesus Christ has brought with him a renewed world that has eclipsed a fallen world destined to disappear.  Therefore the final truth for all of God’s people is voiced for us by the psalmist in Psalm 56:

“This I know, that God is for me.

                                                          What can man do to me?”

 

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 April 2006