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Psalm 23

Psalm 23                    1st Peter 5:1-7                               Rev. 7:17                    John 10:1-18

I grew up in innermost inner-city Toronto.  And I grew up without a car. The result was that I walked everywhere or rode the streetcar (there was no subway back then). I’m at home in big cities. I’m not at home in the country, in rural areas. My grandchildren comment that I’m a deep-down sixer, not a fiver.

   Do you know the difference between a sixer and a fiver? A sixer is someone whose phone number has a 416-area code; a fiver is someone with a 905-area code. Fivers like to live in the suburbs or small towns or villages or the countryside. Because I’m a sixer I am exhilarated when I have asphalt under my feet and polluted air in my lungs.

   Then I turn to Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’  Do you know when I first saw a shepherd? I was born in 1944, and in 2011 (at age 67) I went to Israel. My tour group was bussing from Jerusalem to Jericho when we came upon a flock of sheep with a Bedouin shepherd. To be sure, I had seen sheep before, on farms in Canada.  But a shepherd? Never. Among their other tasks, shepherds protect sheep.  Sheep in Canada, however, are protected by electrified fences. In Canada a  predator isn’t driven off by a shepherd; the predator gets a shock it won’t forget.

   Despite my being a sixer, however; despite everything about me that is more citified than countryfied, Psalm 23, ‘The Shepherd Psalm,’ speaks profoundly to me. As often as I immerse myself in it I am instructed, moved, and taken deeper into the life and care and keeping of him who is the Good Shepherd, Christ Jesus our Lord.

   Today we are together going to probe Psalm 23. The sermon will be somewhat different from the customary three- or four-point sermons we hear on Sunday; the sermon today will take the form of a continuous exploration and application of the psalm, verse by verse.

Verse 1    ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ THE LORD—YAHWEH in Hebrew, is God’s proper name. A proper name specifies uniqueness. I am not humankind-in-general, nor maleness-in-general. I am Victor. uniquely me. I am irreplaceable; I am unsubstitutable. As much can be said for any one of you. A proper name always points to someone who is unique.

   Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, is not an instance of divinity, other instances of divinity being Allah or Gitchi-Manitou or Zeus or Thor or even the North American Way of Life. Yahweh, who alone delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt and alone pledged himself to Israel at Sinai and pleaded with the people to pledge themselves to him; this Lord is unique, incomparable, unsubtstitutable.

  And he (not it) is our shepherd. What if God weren’t a shepherd? A shepherd cares. What if God didn’t care? At best he would be indifferent; at worst, he would be tyrannical, even a tormentor. But God is neither indifferent nor tyrannical nor tormentor. The shepherd cares.

   To be sure, the bible speaks everywhere of God as king. This king, however, is king and shepherd at once, king and shepherd at all times. To say God is king is to say he rules effectively. His rule isn’t merely symbolic. (King Charles III is only a symbol, a figurehead, who has no political power. All power, all effectiveness, is vested in the British parliament.) To say that the Lord is king, on the other hand, is to say God isn’t a figurehead; he’s a genuine ruler. And to say that this king is also shepherd is to say that the one who rules the cosmos he has made; this one cares for everything and everyone he has made. This king cares so much for us that he will suffer to save us, and suffer for our sakes until his suffering entails nothing less than the sacrifice of himself.

   If the Lord weren’t also shepherd he would be a royal ruler who could never be trusted. (After all, he might turn out to be nasty. History has seen no shortage of rulers who were vicious.) Yet a shepherd who isn’t sovereign ruler is ultimately ineffective. (However benign he may be, he might turn out to be useless.) The shepherd who is king is always effective; and the king who is shepherd can always be trusted.

   Scripture insists that our shepherd-king will sacrifice himself for us, so very much does he love us. For this reason, our shepherd-king is also a lamb, the lamb of God. In Rev. 7:17 we are told, ‘The lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd.’ Who rules over the vast cosmos? Who is simultaneously closer to us than our own breath? It is the king on the throne (only kings get to sit on thrones) who is shepherd and lamb all at once. How much does he care, and how effective is his caring? ‘The lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd…and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’

   Because the Lord is king, his comforting us is effective finally. Because the Lord is shepherd, his rule over our lives will always be blessing ultimately. And because the Lord is lamb, we know he will always love us even  more than he loves himself. This is the God whom David of old, the shepherd-king in Israel, knew and loved and forever holds up before us in Psalm 23.

Verse 2    ‘Green pastures and still waters.’ Since much of Palestine is desert, green pastures are hard to find. Left to themselves sheep will never find green pastures in a country where grassy meadows are scarce. Sheep have to be led to them or else the sheep will fail to thrive, even perish. To be sure, the shepherd safeguards the sheep against predators; but there is no point in fending off predators unless the sheep are also provisioned. The Lord who is our shepherd can be counted on to ensure our survival.

   Make no mistake: our survival needs to be ensured, since threats abound. ‘Still waters’ are God’s gift in the face of raging waters. Raging water, whether storm or torrent or flood, is the biblical symbol for chaos.

   Chaos, biblically, is creation de-creating. Chaos is the world on the way to being a wasteland. Chaos, as environmentalists rightly remind us, is planet earth on its way to uninhabitability. Green pastures are green and will remain green only if water is present and water is ‘still.’ Raging water, however, is the biblical symbol for threats of all kinds from all quarters.

   We watch the news, and we see horrific depictions of both floods and fires. The material destruction and the human devastation are heartbreaking. Don’t pictures of burnt-out Maui and earthquaked Turkey look like morning-after pictures of saturation-bombed cities in World War II? Alert now, we think of the chaos that laps at us at all times. Disease is biological chaos at the door. Social upheaval is communal chaos around the corner. That’s why all police departments have riot squads at-the-ready: we know that social upheaval, quickly swelling, will readily collapse the social order essential to our survival. We fear mental illness just because we are aware that psychosis is chaos overtaking us and overwhelming us. Every economist knows that financial chaos is closer to us than most people grasp.

   And then there is the chaos not without, this time, but within. Every day a thousand different voices tell us that we are this or that, or we should be this or that, or we are no more than this or that. Every day a thousand different voices tell us that already we are this or that but are too naïve to see it. Then who are we, finally?

   And then there is the chaos of sin. Sin is self-willed contradiction of who we are as children of God. Sin is self-willed contradiction of our being made in the image of God. Sin contradicts my identity before God.

   In the midst of myriad threats, the psalmist knows that God can be counted on to furnish us with green pastures and still waters. He who protects us will also provide for us. Who I am before God just because God has made me who I am before him; that ‘me’ God knows and preserves in the face of threats from without and threats from within; my identity, who I am before him and therefore who I am in myself—this is what God keeps inviolate, regardless of what howls down upon me from without or whirls up from within.

   God knows who I am; God preserves who I am. Green pastures (nourishment) and still waters (chaos subdued) are God’s guarantee for God’s people.

Verse 3   ‘He restores my soul.’    It means ‘He restores me.’ The Hebrew verb that the English text translates ‘restore’ is fathomlessly rich.

   One meaning of ‘restore’ is reconcile. When God restores us he reconciles us to himself. We need to be reconciled since we ornery sinners are bent on estranging ourselves from him. To say God reconciles us to is to say he’s always bringing us foolish people home. There is always a home to go home to, and there’s always a welcome warmer than we can imagine.

   Another meaning of ‘restore’ is return.  Everywhere in the older testament to repent is to return; that is to turn so as to turn around, make a U-turn, an about-face. Such a turning, therefore, is always a re-turning. The prophet Hosea cries out to his people, ‘Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.’ (Hos. 14:1) God restores us as we return to him.

   Another meaning of the Hebrew verb ‘restore’ is revive. Jeremiah insists that God restores his people as he revives their strength and courage. (Lam. 1:11, 16)

   Not least, Proverbs (25:13) reminds us that as God restores us he refreshes us. Proverbs paints the picture of perspiring, fatigued farmhands labouring under a Middle Eastern sun when cool winds from the Mediterranean refresh them.

   The psalmist tells us God’s restoring us, in all of the senses mentioned above, serves his leading us into paths of righteousness. Paths of righteousness are simply right paths. God’s people are to walk uprightly and do what is right and therefore righteous. Paths are meant for walking. Throughout scripture, walking is the commonest metaphor for obeying. We are restored for the sake of walking rightly, walking uprightly. ‘This is the way; walk in it’, Isaiah reminds us. (30:21)

   We are not to deviate from this road. We are not to depart from it. We are not to leave off following Jesus Christ even when discipleship is difficult or unpopular or dismissed as irrelevant or mocked as silly. At all times we are accompanied by Jesus who has pioneered the way ahead for us. Since we are accompanied at all times by the One who has already traversed this path victoriously to its end, we are without excuse if we quit. And why would we quit when, on either side of the path of discipleship is, there is nothing but swamp or quicksand or desert?

   The psalmist tells us that everything God does for us in restoring us, he does ‘for his name’s sake’. ‘Name,’ in scripture, means ‘person, presence, power, purpose, and deserved reputation.’ In other words, God restores us and appoints us to righteous living just because he is who he is in his person, presence, power, purpose, and reputation. Therefore we can trust him. Therefore we can be sure the path he has appointed us to walk isn’t a dead end. Therefore we can know that he won’t abandon us or give up on us. God is always and everywhere dependable.

Verse 4    We can depend on our Lord even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Here we have to spend a little time acquainting ourselves with what scripture means by ‘death’. In our everyday conversation we modern folk equate death with the cessation of biological life. Death is simply the disappearance of biological life. But in scripture death is much more than this. In scripture death is a cosmic power, a cosmic power that works evil, and works evil to the extent that such evil is finally lethal. Evil isn’t a little wrinkle that renders human history somewhat mysterious or renders human existence occasionally inconvenient. Evil attacks, sometimes frontally but more often insidiously; evil attacks, weakens, corrupts, perverts, and finally slays.

   We should note precisely what the psalmist says in this regard: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ Death and evil are synonyms. Evil is a power that deadens. Death is a power that works evil. As cosmic powers, death and evil are identical.

   The psalmist knows he can’t avoid walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Evil is a ‘force-field’ no Christian can avoid. At the same time, as we walk the path of righteousness we also walk through the force-field of evil; we walk through it without lingering in it or becoming infatuated with it or succumbing to it.

   As the psalmist reflects on all of this he exclaims, ‘You are with me; your rod and staff comfort me.’ Do we grasp what’s happened? Up until now the psalmist has been speaking in the third person: ‘The Lord—he is my shepherd.’ Now the psalmist is speaking in the second person: ‘You are with me. He has moved from talking about God to meeting God in person; he has moved from a discussion about God to an encounter with God: ‘You are with me.’

  The God who is engaged with him is equipped with rod and staff. The rod was the shepherd’s cudgel, the shepherd’s club.  With it the shepherd drove off predators who wanted to rip up the sheep. The staff, on the other hand, was the shepherd’s implement with which he rounded up sheep who otherwise went astray. The rod dealt with attack upon the sheep from without; the staff dealt with the sheep’s proclivities to wander from within. Aren’t God’s people both under attack from without and prone to wander from within?

   The text says the One who is shepherd comforts us. In contemporary English to comfort someone is to make her feel better. Originally, however, the English word ‘comfort’ was formed from two Latin words, ‘con’ and ‘fortis’: ‘with strength. The good shepherd comforts us profoundly; he strengthens us in the face of that evil there is no way around. We are comforted to the extent that we are strengthened and equipped to resist.

Verse 5    The result of it all is a table prepared for us in the presence of our enemies, a table prepared for us precisely in the midst of our worst harassments. ‘Table,’ of course, is a reference to the Messianic Banquet, the end-time feast when all God’s people—Abraham and Sarah, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Moses and Zipporah, Joseph and Mary and Mary Magdalene, together with all God’s people from every era—are going to sit, in peace, without fear. All God’s people long for this day. But we aren’t there yet. And therefore we anticipate it. We anticipate the Messianic Banquet every time we celebrate Holy Communion. We anticipate it too every time we eat any meal. Isn’t this why we pray at every meal?

   The psalmist insists that to be comforted by God; to be strengthened and equipped—this in itself is an anticipation of the Messianic Banquet, at which Banquet evil, now defeated in the cross, will finally have been destroyed.

   In speaking of the table prepared for him the psalmist mentions oil and wine. Olive oil was used in preparing food for a feast. The same olive oil was used as a cosmetic, to make one’s face shine, a sign of radiantly good health. (Ps 114:15) Not to use oil was a sign of mourning—and there’s no place for mourning at the Messianic Banquet.

   As for wine; wine, says the psalmist, wine gladdens the human heart. (Ps 104) Wine renders a meal a celebration. To be taken up into God’s own life through faith in him can never be joyless or humdrum.

Verse 6     The psalmist concludes by reminding us of a wonderful certainty: for sure, surely, most certainly, goodness and mercy are going to follow us all the days of our life.

   Goodness is God’s character, God’s eternal nature. Mercy is the expression God’s goodness takes when God’s goodness meets our sin and our suffering. Mercy is God’s goodness overtaking us amidst all of life’s negativities and overcoming them.

    Goodness and mercy are going to follow us, follow along behind us, tag along behind us? No. ‘Shall follow’ is a Hebrew expression meaning ‘God’s mercy is behind us as the driving force of our life.’ God’s mercy is the engine behind us driving us ahead, always driving us ahead until we reach our appointed destination.

   There are days when we readily see as much and rejoice in it: ‘My life is wondrously propelled by God’s mercy!’ There are other days, however, when we soberly assess what assaults us, and we find it somewhat difficult to grasp the truth that our life is propelled by God’s mercy. And there are days, let’s be honest, when we can’t see any evidence for this at all.  What do we then? (i) We trust God for the truth and reality that right now we can’t see. (ii) We look to our Christian friends to support us, stunned as we are, as surely as the friends of a paralyzed man brought him to Jesus. (iii) We await that glorious day when we shall be able to look back on our entire life and see, finally, that indeed goodness and mercy have brought us to our goal. For then we shall be standing in the house of the Lord, which for our Hebrew friends of old meant God’s unspeakably intimate presence, and there we shall remain forever and ever.

Victor A. Shepherd                                                                                                                 September 2023

The Aaronic Blessing

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

John 15:15   Mark 10:13-16

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

The Lord bless you and keep you;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                        Be gone, unbelief, my saviour is near,

                        And for my relief will surely appear.

                        By faith let me wrestle, and he will perform;

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

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

                        Thy name to me, thy nature, grant;

                        This, only this, be given:

                        Nothing beside my God I want,

                        Nothing in earth or heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   This is how the blessing is bestowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lord bless you and keep you;

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

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

Victor Shepherd              Streetsville United Church             July 2019

Hosea: Heart-Broken Prophet of a Heart-Broken God

Hosea 2:1-20; 11:8-9     Luke 15:11-24

If we are deprived of food it won’t be long before the physical ravages of our malnutrition are evident to everyone. If we are deprived of mental stimulation or restorative sleep we’ll be manifestly deranged in no time. And if people forsake the living God, the Holy One of Israel beside whom there is none other, how long will it be before the consequent spiritual degeneration is evident to the spiritually discerning? And how long after that before there’s a deterioration and decay that even those who make little or no religious profession will nonetheless recognize, even if they describe it as a social problem (rather than as spiritual declension)?

The prophet Hosea watched it all happen among his people. Hosea, like all the Hebrew prophets (like Jesus too) used a vocabulary to speak of disobedient, God-defiant people that makes my speech appear genteel. Hosea knew that when the nerve of living faith is severed, spiritual paralysis occurs and putrefaction is underway. In other words, spiritual declension among God’s people, the spiritually discerning know, is unmistakable and undeniable if only because it is as grotesque as it is repugnant.

All the Hebrew prophets were of one mind on this matter. Hosea lived only a few decades after Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, only a few decades after Elisha, Elijah’s successor. Twenty years before Hosea cried out in heartbreak another Hebrew prophet, Amos, had cried out in rage.

Amos never minced words. He fulminated against the criminally rich who lolled about in self-congratulatory luxury while the victims they defrauded went barefoot. Religious observances, as familiar as an old slipper and no less sentimental, gave rise to warm ‘fuzzies’ within worshippers and simultaneously blunted their sensitivity to the presence and purpose and power of the God they pretended to worship. The clergy were professionals in the worst sense of ‘professional’: they were paid to keep the religious operation operating. Judges, on the other hand, weren’t paid so much as they were ‘paid off,’ bribed. Theft was cheered. Adultery was flaunted. Civic leaders exploited the people they were charged to protect.

Amos found it all unendurable. He raged in a voice that could crack rocks. “God won’t tolerate what’s underway in Israel,” he exploded; “God’s judgement is merited, just and inescapable. Israel will fall to the sword of the Assyrian. And when it happens,” Amos continued, “don’t whine or whimper that you’ve been victimized or visited with bad luck. If you wail, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’ you merely display your sin-blinded stupidity.” So said Amos.

Hosea agreed with every word. Amos’s raging denunciation is truly the word of God. And yet, said, Hosea, the word of denunciation and destruction isn’t God’s last word. God’s final word is a word of compassion; specifically it’s a promise of restoration born of God’s heartbreak.

In this regard Hosea maintained that Israel had forsaken God, and God would hide himself from Israel – but not forever. God would inflict horrific wounds upon Israel, painful beyond imagining, but these wounds would prove to be the incisions of the surgeon. The blazing judgement of God couldn’t be postponed or deflected, but the conflagration was the fire of God’s love, and because this fire was God’s love burning hot, love’s white-hot heat would cleanse and cauterize. So said Hosea.

Where Amos raged, Hosea raged too – and then wept. Where Amos denounced, Hosea denounced too – and then pleaded.

Who were these men? Amos was a shepherd-cowboy who lived in Tekoa, a wilderness area in the south of Israel much like the area that gave us John the Baptist 750 years later. Hosea, on the other hand, lived in a fertile, affluent area in the north of Israel. Both men were haunted by God’s address as God summoned them and commissioned them to announce God’s truth and God’s righteousness to God’s delinquent people.

While both men suffered as only a prophet can suffer when God in his immensity leans on the prophet, Hosea also suffered atrociously on account of his domestic situation. Hosea suffered the heartbreak and humiliation and seeming hopelessness of a husband whose wife has violated their marriage covenant and disgraced herself through her shameless promiscuity.

Hosea had a wife, Gomer. Gomer derailed. She traipsed off to the marketplace, Square One, and prostituted herself there day after day. Business was good. She became notorious. And the more notorious she became, the more her business expanded. Customers were many and precautions were few. She became pregnant, an occupational hazard of prostitutes. Hosea knew her child wasn’t his.

And then in the midst of his heartbreak it was given to Hosea to see his wife’s unfaithfulness as the mirror-reflection of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. And in his wife’s illegitimate offspring he saw as never before Israelites whose religiosity was born of the many spirits who aren’t holy.

When Gomer brought forth the first child of her unfaithfulness Hosea named the child ‘Lo-ruchamah’, Hebrew for ‘Not pitied’ or ‘Not visited with mercy.’ Gomer’s second illegitimate child Hosea named ‘Lo-ammi’, ‘Not my people’.

Hosea believed his people had to suffer through a period when God was silent; when God seemed remote; or if not remote then at least inaccessible. God’s people had to suffer through a period when they appeared orphaned because their parent wouldn’t own them, so reprehensible had they become. The people had to suffer through a period when they were devoid of God’s comfort and consolation, like lost, disgraced children whose parent now says of them, “They can’t be mine; I don’t recognize them; there’s no family resemblance at all.”

Matters had to get worse for people to come to their senses; only then could matters get better. In short, God’s judgement was step one on the road to the people’s repentance and reconciliation. It was given to Hosea to discern that judgement wasn’t the last word; God’s mercy was the final word, together with the mercy-quickened repentance and reconciliation of God’s people.

Amos’s severity Hosea endorsed, only to find severity morphing and swelling into an even greater tenderness, a tenderness that has endeared Hosea to readers for 2800 years just because Hosea’s heartbroken tenderness mirrors the heart of God.

Years later Hosea trudged with heavy step and heavier heart yet with undeflectable resolve; Hosea trudged down to Square One where crude men taunted him about the woman who had become the talk of the town and at whom men leered. The woman, of course, was Gomer, his wife. Gomer had disgraced herself, degraded herself, and, not least, made a fool of herself. And she knew it. Having reached rock-bottom, she wanted to come home.

Could she come home? Whatever made her think she could? How presumptuous of her to think there was a home to come home to. With what some people would incorrectly call sheer good luck she found in her husband a mercy that was as constant as it was incomprehensible. Then she could come home, right away – except for one matter yet to be settled. She had sold herself to a pimp. She was the pimp’s meal ticket. He wasn’t going to give her away. Hosea asked, “How much? What’s my wife worth to you?” “Fifteen shekels,” the pimp replied. Fifteen? Only fifteen? Thirty shekels was the price of a slave. Gomer had lowered herself lower than the lowest? Yes. Gomer was dirt-cheap. Dirt is always dirt-cheap, isn’t it? The day Hosea parted with fifteen shekels he was publicly identified with his worthless wife. The cachet surrounding her became the cachet surrounding him. Her reputation was his; her disgrace his. But only one thing mattered: she was home again, home with him.

And so it is with Israel, says the prophet; so it is with the church; so it is with God’s people of any era. We, the church, are the bride of Christ. Bride? Our unfaithfulness has made the church a laughing stock to those who make no profession of faith. Yet God has purchased us not for half the price of a slave but at a price he alone comprehends. “He spared not his own Son,” cries the apostle Paul in amazement. To say he didn’t spare his own Son is to say he didn’t spare himself, didn’t spare himself anything – and all of this so that he might cry to you and me as he cried to Israel, “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over? I am God and not man, the holy One of Israel, and I will not come to destroy.”

In the time that remains this morning we should summarize Hosea’s message.

I: — First, Hosea is preoccupied with having his people know God. The heart of his message is found in chapter 6, verse 6: says God, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

God didn’t want sacrifices and burnt offerings? Of course he did. They were part of the temple liturgy; they were instituted by God and the people were appointed to observe them. Since sacrifices and burnt offering were instituted and appointed by God the people could never be faulted for worshipping in accord with the temple liturgy. But Hosea’s point was this: liturgy is an outward vehicle given us to express our innermost self-abandonment to God. Liturgy is an outward vehicle for expressing our innermost offering of ourselves, our sacrifice, to God. Liturgy, however, is never an outward substitute for anything inward. Israelites were never to offer lamb or ram in the temple as a substitute for offering themselves. If liturgy – anyone’s liturgy in any era – is viewed as a substitute for the worshipper’s faith and faithfulness then liturgy is useless; worse than useless in fact, for then it affronts God and deceives us. Hosea insisted that the people’s worship in the temple be the occasion of their ever-deepening knowledge of God.

Now in Hebrew idiom ‘knowledge’ doesn’t mean ‘acquisition of information.’ In Hebrew idiom knowledge pertains to personal encounter; more profoundly, to know is to be so very intimately acquainted with an actuality as to find oneself profoundly transformed by such acquaintance. To know pain isn’t to acquire information about neurophysiology; to know pain is to be so very intimately acquainted with pain that one is different forever. To know hunger – really know hunger – isn’t to acquire information about gastrointestinal functioning; to know hunger is to be so very intimately acquainted with hunger that one’s encounter with it has rendered one forever different.

To know one’s spouse, in Hebrew idiom, isn’t to accumulate information about the person to whom we are married. To know one’s spouse isn’t merely to have intercourse with her. Rather it’s to meet her, encounter her so very intimately that one’s own life is forever different. In Hebrew idiom I know my wife only to the extent that encountering her non-defensively (that is, encountering her without trying to master her or manipulate her) has rendered me a different person (which encounter, in Hebrew, intercourse abets and intensifies.) In short, my knowledge of my wife is precisely the difference meeting her has effected in me. (If I’ve lived with her for 42 years and remain the same person then I don’t know her at all, regardless of how much information I’ve accumulated about her.)

Our knowledge of God, Hosea insisted, Hebrew that he was; our knowledge of God is the difference our engagement with God has effected within us.

When Abraham knew Sarah, Isaac was brought forth; when Isaac knew Rebecca, Jacob was brought forth. When you and I know God, what is brought forth? Hosea insists it’s ‘chesed,’ steadfast love. Hosea’s chesed, steadfast love, was so very steadfast that not even his wife’s fornicating could dissolve it. God’s steadfast love for us is so very steadfast that not even our repeated infidelities to him can shrivel it. Steadfast love, said Hosea, is what is conceived and brought forth when God’s people know him.

It’s plain that knowing God is what the church is first and finally about. “For I desire steadfast love and not (mere) sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than (mere) burnt offerings,” says the Lord. Liturgy is important, since God has appointed it. But God-appointed liturgy is a vehicle of that encounter with God through which we come to know him ever more profoundly; a vehicle of that encounter, never a substitute for it. And such knowledge of God – personal transformation through intimate acquaintance with God – will give rise to ‘chesed,’ steadfast love that aspires to honour Christ’s twofold summary of the Torah, love of God and love of neighbour.

II: — The second feature of Hosea’s message is blunt: corruption and betrayal are found everywhere. When Hosea looks out over his society he doesn’t indict this person or that, targetting the highly visible. Hosea indicts everyone. The people at large don’t know God; the society as a whole doesn’t bring forth ‘chesed.’ Everyone is guilty.

While everyone is guilty, Hosea continues, there are two groups who have especial responsibility for the deplorable state of affairs. One group consists of civic leaders and authorities. Entrusted with the public good, they have betrayed the public. “The princes of Judah have become like those who remove the landmarks,” laments the prophet.

When highly placed civic leaders or business leaders or financial wizards or drug-abusing sports stars are finally ‘found out,’ they appear startled that they are going to be prosecuted and punished. They maintain that they were doing nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that scores of others in their echelon haven’t been doing and are doing yet. Therefore, they insist, they are being singled out unfairly and targeted unjustly. In this connection the name, I imagine, that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now is the name “Conrad Black” or “Jian Gomeshi” or “Rob Ford”.

Cynicism appears to be the response that arises most readily whenever political leaders or business leaders or charity icons or sports stars are mentioned. The cynicism isn’t groundless. It’s not that the cynical person has a sour outlook rooted in a sour disposition. It’s rather that people have been let down over and over, with the result that betrayal and corruption are what they expect they are going to hear eventually concerning the people they have trusted.

Still, Hosea’s criticism of civic leaders is slight compared to his excoriation of the second group, the clergy. The guilt that the people and their public representatives bear is slight compared to the guilt that the clergy bear. “Like people, like priest,” says Hosea. He means that self-indulgent clergy can be expected to occasion self-indulgent people. Water doesn’t rise above its source; ungodly clergy will never yield godly people. He anticipates what James is going to say 800 years later: those who teach God’s people are going to be judged with greater severity.

It sounds bleak, doesn’t it; hopeless.

III: — But it isn’t bleak; it isn’t hopeless. The third and final element in Hosea’s message is glorious: God will speak through the prophet yet again and restore his people once more. Over and over, just when Israel’s future seemed bleak to the point of hopelessness, Hosea heard God promising to breathe life into his people again. As surely as Hosea said of his wife Gomer, “She may have disgraced herself and humiliated me, but she’s still my wife; we have a life together and she has a future with me more glorious than anything she has ever imagined” – as surely as this word was announced to Israel the selfsame word is announced today to the church, the bride of Christ.

What word exactly did God address to Hosea concerning Israel? – “I will betroth you to me forever…in steadfast love and mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.” God’s mercy and God’s faithfulness in turn will move the people to say to each other, in the words of Hosea, with hope surging through their hearts, “Come, let us return to the Lord….Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord….He will come to us as showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”

And then Hosea heard God say in the anguish born of the heartbreak of unalloyed love, “How can I give you up, O my people? How can I hand you over?” Whereupon God pronounced Israel – and church – to be ‘Ruchamah,’ ‘visited with God’s mercy,’ and ‘ammi,’ ‘my people.’

Seven hundred and fifty years after Hosea spoke, Jesus Christ appeared. In the Nazarene the pardon of God and the patience of God and the faithfulness of God weren’t merely spoken afresh; in the Nazarene they were embodied. Our Lord, however, embodied more than God’s love and faithfulness. In his humanity Jesus embodied the human steadfast love and faithfulness that answers to God’s, the human steadfast love and faithfulness that you and I and all humankind are called to exemplify but don’t.

Then the one thing we must do this morning is seize our Lord in faith once more, and cling to him as we cling to none other. For in clinging to him we shall find his obedient humanness transmuting ours; we shall begin to exemplify the steadfast love and faithfulness that Hosea maintained to characterize God’s people. And we shall acknowledge afresh that Jesus Christ is husband to his bride, the church; he is the hope of humankind everywhere, the corrective for society’s leaders and, not least, the restoration of the church’s clergy.

For then our Lord will prove to be the one by whom God is glorified and his people are edified. And then too there will be vindicated a three-thousand year old prophet whose wayward wife came to her senses and came home; as did a prodigal son centuries later; as must every one of us today.

Victor Shepherd          September 2016

Crucial Words in the Christian Vocabulary: [Wo]man

Genesis 1:24-31   Colossians 1:15-20     Luke 8:1-3

 

Are you an angel, a devil or an animal? As a matter of fact different writers have argued that humankind is at bottom an angel in disguise or a devil in disguise or an animal that thinks it’s more than an animal. Two decades ago Mr Desmond Morris’s book, Trousered Apes, told everyone what Morris thought: we humans are animals who dress up and think that dressing up elevates us.

What about you or me as individuals? Are we merely an insignificant cog in a powerful machine? Chinese and Korean communists would say yes. Or are we merely a twitch, as short-lived and unremarkable as any twitch? Jean Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher, would say yes. Or am I as a male a nuisance; worse than a nuisance, an oppressor whose presence ought always to be monitored? Feminists, at least many of them, would say yes.

Then what am I? What are you? Who is a human being? The question is crucial, for unless we answer it correctly our misunderstanding of what we are will impoverish our own humanness and threaten the world of the non-human as well.

In answering the question, “What is it to be human?,” let’s imagine an extra-terrestrial being, like “ET” of yesteryear, visiting us. What would an extra-terrestrial being discover about us? What should it discover?

 

I: — It would surely notice immediately that we human beings are rooted in the world of nature.   We belong to the realm of plants and animals. According to the old story in Genesis we were created on the same “day” as the animals. Animals need plants to survive. We need plants to survive. The Hebrew poet reminds us that we come from the dust of the earth. Humus is the Latin word for “earth.” We humans ought to remain humble (even though we don’t;) humans ought to remain humble because however high falutin’ we think ourselves to be, we come from humus, earth, and our remains shall return to it. We are never angelic; that is, we humans are never pure spirit, never unembodied spirit. We never escape our earth-ness. We are intimately bound up with nature. And of course the most modern ecologist agrees. Ecologists tell us that either we humans are going to rediscover and re-own our inescapable oneness with nature or we are going to perish at the hands of the nature we have poisoned.

If ever we think we have left the realm of nature behind all we have to do is wait until part of our body doesn’t work properly. And if the breakdown in body-part is accompanied by pain, we can think of little else. Pain alters personality; pain is a challenge to character. Protracted pain threatens sanity. And even if there’s no pain, a very small amount of extra tissue growing in one’s brain will unhinge personality and undo stability frighteningly.

In saying that we humans never escape our earth-ness we aren’t saying there’s nothing more to us than there is to the plant or the animal. We aren’t denying the unique features of our humanness: art, music, poetry, imagination, abstract thought. They are wonderful indeed, and they are part of what distinguishes us from the animal world. Yet they all occur in us humans whose fragility is linked to the fragility of nature. William Shakespeare could write matchless plays inasmuch as the plant and animal world sustained him, there was non-toxic air to breathe, and his body hadn’t broken down to the point where his mental functioning was impaired.

In the interest of helping human beings we do massive medical research on animals. We don’t use animals just because they are plentiful and cheap; we use animals because there are the most significant physical similarities between them and us. If there weren’t then medical research with animals wouldn’t profit humans at all.

We must be sure to note that our earth-ness doesn’t diminish our humanness; it doesn’t degrade us. Instead it exalts the realm of nature. It doesn’t rob us of our honour; instead it recognizes that honour which God intends nature to have. Our affinity with nature doesn’t demean nature; instead it dignifies everything God deems necessary for us who are apple of his eye and alone made in his image.

Most people look upon reptiles, for instance, as ugly. We might fondle our dog but we’d never kiss an alligator. Still, if alligators could talk they’d say, “Shepherd, you may not be fond of me. But you had better understand that you need me while I don’t need you. Remember that, Shepherd: you need me, but I don’t need you. So if you are wise at all you won’t trifle with us alligators and with the whole realm of nature that supports us and you.

The first thing ET has to notice about us is that we are inescapably rooted in nature.

 

II: — The second truth about us humans is equally obvious: every one of us is either a male or a female, a man or a woman. “And God said,” reads the ancient text in Genesis 1, “Let us make man (’adam, mankind) in our image; male and female created he them (plural).” Two matters leap out at us here. One, the distinction between male and female God has built into the creation; two, we are human only in the context of our gender opposite. Both of these matters require comment.

There are many matters that divide people today, such as differences in wealth, in education, in social opportunity. None of these distinctions, however, is God-ordained. None is built right into the creation. All such distinctions can be overcome in principle, and many of us would say that we should do all we can to overcome them. Differences in financial resources, for instance, are glaring and gruesome. At the same time, we have graduated income tax and social subsidies in order to redistribute wealth and re-equilibrate the divisions among us fostered by disparities in wealth. In the same way we have tax-supported public education to give those who would otherwise have no educational privilege the opportunity of adequate schooling. There remains, however, one distinction in the creation that we ought not to try to overcome: the distinction between man and woman. God has pronounced our gender polarity “good” and we are not to try to transcend it in a “unisex” mentality. For this reason, for instance, scripture forbids cross dressing. Now I notice that many of the women in this congregation, my wife included, wear slacks or trousers to church. Good. There’s nothing wrong with that, for the women who wear slacks are manifestly not trying to pass themselves off as men; there’s no attempt to hide one’s gender or misrepresent oneself sexually or deceive anyone in any way. There’s no attempt to deny that one is a woman and therein deny the gender specificity that God has pronounced “good;” no attempt to obliterate the one and only distinction in the creation that God has said should never be obliterated.

The second comment to be made here: each of us is gender-specific – a male or a female – in the context of the gender opposite. To say that I’m a male is to say that I’m a male with respect to a female. To be sure, the animals are male or female too. But with the animals the male/female distinction serves only the purpose of procreation. With humans, however, the male/female distinction first serves the truth that we are made in the image of God.

This is not to say that God is either male or female, or both male and female. God is not gender specific at all. Still, when we are told that we are made in God’s image two things have to be noted. One, the individual human being is made in God’s image. The individual man, the individual woman, is made in God’s image. Two, the individual man is man only in the context of woman, and the individual woman only in the context of man.   While a dog is dog, male or female, irrespective of gender-opposite (in other words, a male dog all by itself is 100% dog), a male human all by himself can’t be 100% human, can’t be human at all. Humans are individually made in the image of God even as no individual can be individual only. Each of us, man or woman, needs our gender-opposite to be properly human.

I have said we need our gender-opposite. I haven’t said we need to be married; I haven’t said we need to be sexually active. Jesus wasn’t married, wasn’t sexually active, but was human. Indeed, so far from being deficiently or defectively human he is the instance of God’s intention for our humanness. At the same time, we should be sure to note that while Jesus wasn’t married and wasn’t sexually active he moved among women every day, moved among them with no awkwardness, and moved among them in ways that horrified the people of his day. He called at the home of Mary and Martha, unmarried women. This wasn’t done in his day. He allowed a menhorragic woman to touch him. This wasn’t done. He spoke in public with a woman of the shadiest reputation (five times married) when men didn’t even speak to their wives in public. He had several women in his larger group of disciples (Luke tells us), when some of these women were single and some were already married. It was women who were last at the cross (at least they didn’t abandon him) and first at the grave on Easter morning. Obviously they loved him. They relished his company and he relished theirs. They enriched him and he enriched them. At bottom, apart from them he wouldn’t have been human and apart from him they wouldn’t have been either. (This, by the way, is a truth that the shriller feminists fail to grasp.)

There was nothing inappropriate in these encounters. At the same time there was everything necessary in these encounters. The truth is God ordains, requires even, a mutual, complementary engagement and delight for all men and women, including those who aren’t married and never will be.

To be human is to be gender-specific and gender-complemented.

 

III: — Our extra-terrestrial visitor notices a third thing about us. We are individuals who live in societies. Both the individual and the society must be protected. When you asked an ancient Israelite his name he always gave you his name together with the name of his tribe. (Jesus belongs to the tribe of Judah .) Why? Because he knew that he is who he is only in the context of his community.

But the converse is true as well. A community differs from a crowd in that a community cherishes and protects individuals while a crowd submerges individuals. Our world is burdened with societies that trample individuals. The USSR did so for 75 years and could revert to doing so at any time. Germany did so in a Reich that lasted only 12 years but intended to last 1000. Not to mention China (the single largest nation in the world), North Korea , Indonesia (now we are identifying right-wing disdain for the individual), many countries in Africa, and of course so very many countries in Latin America that we shan’t attempt to list them. After the “disappeared” people of Argentina had remained “disappeared” for several years, the government of Argentina shamelessly announced what everyone had surmised already: the disappeared were dead. They were dead, the government announced, inasmuch as the government had killed them.

Christians must always recognize the balance between individual and society, individual and community. We must always recognize the need for the balance and the exquisite delicacy to the balance. We must always recognize why individual and community are essential to each other. After all, without the preservation of the individual the community becomes a crowd (also known as a mob.) On the other hand without the preservation of the community the individual person becomes a thing. The balance is exquisitely fine and exquisitely challenging to maintain.

One place in our society where this necessary balance is visible, together with its attendant sensitivities, is the school. Parents expect the school (which is a mini-society) to educate their youngsters for personal edification and employment, promote character formation in them, and all of this to the end of producing solid citizens. But every educator knows that no school can uphold standards of intellectual rigour and decency and deportment and civility and ethical integrity; no school can uphold these if the individual parent doesn’t or the community doesn’t. On the other hand, no conscientious parent can uphold what a school consistently undermines.

Individual and society always interpenetrate each other and regulate each other. Jesus belongs to the tribe of Judah .

 

IV: — Our extra terrestrial visitor might notice one last feature of us human beings, even though it isn’t last in importance. Then again, our “ET”’ visitor might not notice it since it isn’t obvious as our gender specificity is obvious. This feature is that we are made for fellowship with God. While we are discussing it last this morning it’s actually first. It’s not the case that our engagement with God is an add-on, a decoration, a frill, an after-thought. Rather it is the profoundest truth about us. To be a human being is to be God’s cheerful, grateful obedient covenant partner.

Christians know that human existence is always relational. When we speak of a thing like a tree or a termite we know that where trees and termites are concerned to exist is simply to be. But where humans are concerned to exist is to be-in-relation. We have already seen this with respect to gender specificity: to exist at all is to exist either as male or female; and to exist as male or female is to be-in-relation to female or male.

It’s the same with respect to God. While God doesn’t need humankind in order to be God, God has willed himself not to be God apart from humankind. God has willed himself to be God only in intimate, undeflectible covenant solidarity with humankind. And as for us, we can be human at all only as we are human in relation to him. To say that this is truth, this is reality, is not to say that everyone is aware of the truth or welcomes the truth or one day will own the truth. But it is to say that truth remains truth, reality remains reality, just because God has willed himself to be God only in relation to us and has willed us to be human in relation to him. Doesn’t Jesus say that it is his meat and drink to do the will of his Father?

If we disdain our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners we shall ravage nature, foolishly thinking that our attitude to God’s creation and our sustenance doesn’t matter.

If we disdain our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners then we, as men and women, are stuck with a hostile standoff where all we can do is torment one another. We shall then have men exploiting and brutalizing women. (This aspect of the standoff is centuries old.) Or we shall have women sneering contemptuously at men. (This aspect of the standoff is centuries old too but has come to the surface only recently.)

If we disdain our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners we shall rant and rave about our individual rights, caring nothing for anyone else. Or we shall undiscerningly support those social collectivities that promise much, deliver little, and always manage to brutalize and bury individuals.

Our appointment as God’s glad, grateful covenant partners is our call to communion with him. This dimension of the human isn’t the least and the last of many; this is the foundation of all others and their preservative as well.

We must be sure notice something too readily overlooked: it is only our appointment as God’s covenant partners that confers and conserves our dignity and worth. Even when God’s invitation goes unheeded; that is, even when there is lacking the response of faith and obedience, nevertheless the fact of God’s invitation continues to confer a dignity and worth that can’t be eliminated and can’t be forfeited. There is no other source of human dignity and worth.

When Maureen’s mother was institutionalized in a nursing home Maureen visited her faithfully, never complaining about it, thankful that such provision was available. One afternoon, having been exposed to the nursing home scene yet again, Maureen stumbled home and said to me, “There is no such thing as innate human dignity or innate human worth. Apart from God’s having appointed us to covenant partnership with him there isn’t any dignity or worth at all.” She was right.   There is no evident, observable dignity in people who are mindless, toothless, toiletless.

Then what are we?   Angel? Devil? Animal? Twitch? Cog? Feminist fodder? We are none of these. We are those creatures with whom God wanted fellowship and whom he wanted never to be without before he created so much as one atom. In fact all that he’s created he has created for the sake of us who are made in his image, who are the apple of his eye, and whom he loves, Good Friday’s cross tells us, more than he loves himself. Why wouldn’t we love him now and want only to love him forever?

 

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                   

March 2004

 

Of Trees and The Tree

Genesis 2:8-9; 15-17 

Genesis 3:1-7   Deuteronomy 21:22-23   Galatians 3:13

1 Peter 2:24   John 19:16b-30

 

I: — What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with me?  What’s wrong with the world?  What’s wrong with the world is something the world would never guess: it slanders the goodness of God.

The old, old story (saga, legend) of Genesis 3 is a timeless story about the history of every man and every woman, for “Adam” is Hebrew for “everyman” and “Eve” for “mother of all the living”.  According to the old story God has placed us in a garden abounding in trees: “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food”.  God has placed us in a setting that delights us and nourishes us abundantly.  In addition to the myriad trees in Eden (“Eden” being Hebrew for “delight”) there are two extraordinary trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The tree of life symbolizes the fact that the origin of life and the conditions of life and the blessings of life rest in God; the tree of life symbolizes this and reminds us of it.  As John Calvin says so finely, “God intended that as often as we tasted the fruit of the tree of life we should remember from whom we received our life, in order that we might acknowledge that we live not by our own power but by the kindness of God.”

In addition to the tree of life there stands the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  “Good and evil” does not mean “good plus evil”.  “Good-and-evil” (virtually one word) is a semitism, a Hebrew expression meaning “everything, the sum total of human possibilities, everything that we can imagine.”  To know, in Hebrew is to have intimate acquaintance with, to experience.  In forbidding us to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil God is warning us against intimate acquaintance with the sum total of everything that we can imagine.  He is warning us against thinking we must experience or even may experience whatever we can dream up.  In other words, God has set a limit to human self-extension; God has set a limit to our extending ourselves into anything at all that the mind and heart can invent.

Why has God set such a limit?  Why does he urge us to become intimately acquainted with everything that is both nourishing and delightful, both essential to life and culturally rich — and then in the same breath warn us not to become intimately acquainted with “good and evil”?  He sets such a limit just because he loves us; he sets this limit for our blessing.  This side of the limit is blessing; the other side is curse.  This side of the limit there is the blessing of curative medicines; the other side of the limit there is cocaine, curse.  This side of the limit there is the one-flesh union of marriage, blessing; the other side there is the curse of promiscuity and perversion with their degradation and disease.  God, who is good in himself, wants only what is good for us.

Good?  We don’t think that God is good when he tells us, “Every tree except the one tree”; we think he’s arbitrary.  After all, he didn’t consult us when he decided where the boundary line was to be; he simply told us; arbitrary.

The root human problem is that we disparage the goodness of God.  We disparage the goodness of God when we scorn the tree of life, dismissing the goodness of God and the truth of God, even as we tell ourselves that he has proscribed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he longs to bless us but just because he’s arbitrary; and not only arbitrary, but a spoilsport as well since he won’t allow us to extend ourselves into all those possibilities that would surely enrich us.

The tree of life represents discipleship; the tree of life represents what it is to be profoundly human: human beings are created to be glad and grateful covenant-partners with God.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil — prohibited! — is the alternative to discipleship, the alternative to glad and grateful covenant-partnership with God.  The root human problem, then, is that we don’t want life from God’s hand under the conditions God sets for our blessing.  We prefer an alternative; we want to be the author and judge and master of our own life.

According to our ancient story the garden of profuse creaturely delights continues to delight us as long as we hear and heed the creator who gave them to us.  As soon as we try to “improve” upon him, however; as soon as we disobey him, proposing an alternative to the covenant-partnership of discipleship, the creaturely delights no longer delight us.  They become the occasion of endless frustration, emptiness, futility, curse.

II: — The process by which we typically arrive at God-willed curse in place of God-willed blessing is subtle.  The serpent is the personification of this subtlety.  The serpent asks with seeming innocence, “Did God say?  Did God say you weren’t to eat of that one tree?”  The serpent hasn’t exactly lied: at no point does it say, “God never said….”  While the serpent never exactly lies, neither does it ever exactly tell the truth.  The serpent (subtlety personified) smuggles in the assumption — without ever saying so explicitly — that God’s word, God’s command is subject to our assessment.

The subtlety takes the form of a question that appears innocent but in fact is a doubt-producing question with a hidden agenda.  What’s more, the doubt-producing question is an exaggeration: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’”  Any tree?  There’s the exaggeration.  God has forbidden us to eat of one tree, one tree only.

Eve (mother of all the living) decides to correct the serpent.  Surely there’s no harm in correcting an exaggeration.  But for her there is, for as soon as she attempts to correct the serpent she’s been drawn into the serpent’s territory; now she’s dialoguing with a subtlety to which she isn’t equal.  When first she heard “Did God say?” the only thing for her to do was to ignore the proffered subtlety.  Correcting it looks harmless but is ultimately fatal, for now she’s been drawn into the tempter’s world.

Isn’t it the case that as soon as you and I begin to reason with sin we are undone?  As soon as we begin to reason with temptation we’re finished.  Temptation can only be repudiated, never reasoned with, for the longer we reason with it the longer we entertain it; and the longer we entertain it the faster our reasoning becomes rationalization — and rationalization, as everyone knows, is perfectly sound reasoning in the service of an unacceptable end.

As soon as Eve attempts to correct the serpent’s exaggeration she exaggerates.  “God has told us not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree; we aren’t even to touch the tree, lest we die.”  God had never said they weren’t to touch it.  They were certainly to be aware of the tree, always aware of it, and never to eat of it, never to experience it.  In trying to correct the serpent’s exaggeration, Eve now exaggerates.  In trying to undo the serpent’s distortion of the truth, she now distorts the truth.  Of course.  To dialogue with a subtlety pertaining to temptation is invariably to be seduced by it.

Eve doesn’t know it yet, but she’s undone.  She doesn’t know it, but the serpent does.  For this reason the serpent leaves subtlety behind and accosts her blatantly.  “You won’t die”, it tells her as plainly as it can, “You won’t die; you’ll be like God, the equal of God.”  It’s the tempter’s word against God’s; it’s temptation’s contradiction of God’s truth.

But God has said that we shall die if we defy him; we are going to be accursed if we extend ourselves into areas and orbits beyond blessing.  “You won’t die.”  Please note that the first doctrine to be denied is the judgement of God.  Doctrines are the truths of God, and the first truth of God to be disdained is the judgement of God.  We should note in passing that Jesus everywhere upholds the judgement of God.

Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with the result that “their eyes were opened”.  They had thought that by defying God they were going to be enlightened.  By defying him, however, they have moved to a new level of experience; their eyes are opened — but they are anything but enlightened.  They now know “good and evil”.  They now have intimate acquaintance with, first-hand experience of, what God had pronounced off-limits.  Too late, they now know too why it was pronounced “off-limits”: it’s accursed.

To sum it all up, the primal temptation to which every human being succumbs is the temptation to be like God, to be God’s rival (actually, his superior).  The primal temptation is to regard God’s truth as inferior to our “wisdom”; to slander God’s loving “No” as spoilsport arbitrariness; to regard obedient service to God as demeaning servility; to pretend that a suicidal plunge is a leap into life.  Ultimately the primal temptation is to look upon God’s goodness as imaginary, his will as capricious, and his judgement as unsubstantial.

III: — The result is that Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden.  Expelled means driven out.  By God’s decree.  Does forced expulsion strike you as too heavy-handed for a God whose nature is love?  Then be sure to understand that the forced expulsion is also the logical outcome of disobedience.  After all, Jesus insists (John 17:3) that life, eternal life, is fellowship with God. And fellowship with God is precisely what humankind repudiates.  Then a forced expulsion from the garden — a forced expulsion that issues in estrangement instead of intimacy, creaturely goods that frustrate instead of delight, daily existence that is cursed instead of blessed, and a future bringing the judge instead of the father — all of this we have willed for ourselves.  We think the expulsion to be heavy-handed?  We wanted it.
In the ancient story the cherubim, spirit-beings who safeguard God’s holiness, together with a flaming sword that turns in every direction; these guarantee that God means what he says: humankind is out of the garden, can’t find its way back in, is now living under curse, and can’t do anything about it.

IV: — We can’t do anything about it.  Only the holy one whose holiness cannot abide our sinfulness can.  Only he can.  But will he?  Has he?  Peter cries, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree!” (1st  Peter 2:24)  He himself did?  Who is “he himself”?  It is our Lord Jesus Christ, he and none other.
We must never think, however, that after Peter had denied his Lord and run away he suddenly came to the happy conclusion that Jesus is the great sin-bearer for the whole wide world.  At the cross he had concluded only that Jesus was accursed.  After all, the Torah said it all clearly: “…a hanged man is accursed by God.  Therefore, if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and you hang him on a tree, don’t leave his body on the tree overnight; remember, anyone hanged on a tree is accursed by God.” (Deut. 21:22-23)  Since Jesus had been hanged on a tree (of sorts), Jesus had to be accursed by God.  Such people weren’t accursed because they were hanged; they were hanged because they were accursed; and they were accursed because they were unspeakably debased sinners.

It was only in the light of Easter morning that Peter understood what had really happened.  It was through his Easter morning encounter with the risen one himself; it was in the light of the Father’s Easter vindication of the Son that Peter saw several things simultaneously.
[1]  Jesus was accursed; he had died under God’s curse.
[2]  Yet Jesus wasn’t accursed on account of his sin; he was accursed on account of humankind’s sin.  That is, while he was not a transgressor himself, he was “numbered among the transgressors”.  While not a sinner himself, he identified himself so thoroughly with sinners as to receive in himself the Father’s just judgement on them.
“He bore our sins in his body on the tree.”  To “bear sin” is a Hebrew expression meaning to be answerable for sin and to endure its penalty.  The penalty for sin is estrangement from God.  In bearing this penalty — demonstrated in his forlorn cry of God-forsakenness — Jesus answered on our behalf.
[3]  Because Jesus Christ is the incarnate son of God he possesses the same nature as God.  Father and Son are one in nature, one in purpose, one in will.  It is never the case that the Son is willing to do something that the Father is not, that the Son is kind while the Father is severe, that the Son is eager to pardon while the Father is eager to condemn.  Incarnation means that Father and Son are of one nature and mind and heart.  To say, then, that Jesus bore the judge’s just judgement on our sin is to say that the judge himself took his own judgement upon himself.  But of course he who is judge is also father.  Which is to say, when Jesus bore our sins in his body the Father bore them in his heart.   The just judge executed the judgement that he must; then he bore it himself and therein neutralized it, and this so that his characteristic face as Father might be the face that shines upon you and me forever.  Father and Son are one in judgement, one in its execution, one in anguish, and one in pardon.  What the Son bore the Father bore, in order that justice uncompromised might issue in mercy unimpeded.

In the light of Christ’s resurrection the truth of the cross and the nature of its curse flooded Peter.

V: — When Peter cried, “He bore our sins in his body on the tree” (the Good News of Good Friday), he went on to say in the same breath, “in order that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”

Then the only thing left for us to decide this morning is whether or not we are going to die to sin and live to righteousness.  Here only do we have anything to say, to do, to become.  We can’t do anything about Eden. We have been expelled, and rightly expelled, having disparaged the goodness of God and disobeyed the wisdom of God and disdained the blessing of God.  Just as we can’t do anything about Eden we can’t do anything about our consequent condition: we can’t overturn it, can’t right it, can’t alter it however slightly.  In the same way we can’t do anything to effect atonement, can’t do anything to make ourselves “at one” with God once more.  We can’t do anything here for two reasons.  In the first place, offenders can’t finally achieve reconciliation in any personal relationship anywhere in life.  Reconciliation is always finally in the hands of the offended party anywhere in life.  Since we are offenders any possibility of reconciliation rests with the God we have offended.
We can’t do anything to effect atonement, in the second place, just because it’s already been done.

God wrought our reconciliation to him in the cross.  To think we can improve upon it is to disdain the blessing he has fashioned for us; and this is to commit the primal sin all over again.

Then there is only one matter for us to settle.  Are we going or are we not going to die to sin and live to righteousness?  If we intend to do this today or to go on doing it today we must cling in faith to the crucified one himself.  He is the son with whom the Father is ever pleased.  Then in clinging to him in faith we too shall become that child of God who delights the Father.  He is the wisdom of God.  Then in clinging to him we shall forswear our folly and know blessing instead of curse.  In clinging to him and following him throughout life we shall know that his service, so far from servility, is in fact our glory.  His tree, the cross, is now become the tree of life.  To become ever more intimately acquainted with it is to relish the rigours of discipleship, recognizing all alternatives as the spiritual suicide that they are.

VI: — As we cling to our Lord Jesus Christ in faith the psalmist will say of us what he said of others so long ago:

They are like trees planted by streams of water,
        which yield their fruit in its season,
               and their leaves do not wither.
    In all that they do they prosper.
       For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
        but the way of the wicked will perish.     (Psalm 1:3,6)

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                             

Revised  March 2013

You asked for a sermon on The Tower of Babel. You asked for a sermon on Pentecost

Genesis 3:1-9

Part One

Anyone who loves Jesus cherishes his parables. As a matter of fact many of us came to know Jesus by means of his parables. We began hearing these stories when we were four years old. At first they were intriguing stories. As we grew older they became moving stories. As we grew older still they became revelatory stories; they revealed the truth of God concerning God, concerning us, concerning our world.

No one dismisses the parables of Jesus just because the parables don’t describe historical events. “A certain man had two sons”, Jesus begins his best-seller about the prodigal. Jesus isn’t referring to an actual historical figure, Mr. X on 42nd Street, Mr. X being a man known to everyone in Nazareth who happens to have two sons. The parable, rather, is a story that Jesus makes up on the spot. Luke tells us (Luke 15) how the parable of the prodigal came to be. Our Lord’s opponents are mumbling and grumbling and grousing and not-so-quietly accusing him of dirtying himself by befriending irreligious people. Jesus, never as stupid as his opponents think him to be, is aware of what they are saying about him. They are faulting him. In order to exonerate himself and the people he’s befriending he spins out the parable on the spot. The parable is utterly fictitious. Jesus makes it up on the spot. It is utterly fictitious, and utterly true; true, that is, in that it tells us the truth about ourselves under God, true in that it tells us the truth about God over us. Wholly fictitious, wholly true. No one denies that the parables of Jesus are revelatory just because they are fictitious.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis are parables too. Like the parables of Jesus, the parables in Genesis 1-11 tell us the truth about ourselves under God and the truth about God over us. Then why is it preachers have been expelled from pulpits for saying so, hearers have been crushed or enraged at hearing so, and congregations have been split over it all?

If someone says, “But if we admit that the first eleven chapters of Genesis aren’t historical, where will it all end? What will we deny to be historical next?” If someone advances this argument, the immediate reply is, “But if we ever admit that the parables of Jesus are parables, everything is lost!” This is not a very profound argument.

All of the parable-stories in Genesis 1-11 are profound. One such story is the Tower of Babel.

I: — Our story begins with humankind’s cry, “Let us make a name for ourselves! Let us build a city, and a tower, a tower so tall that everyone will be able to see our tower. As our city becomes famous on account of our tower, our name will be known everywhere. Let’s make a name for ourselves!”

“What’s wrong with building a tower?”, someone asks. “Is there something wrong with creativity?” Of course there is nothing wrong with creativity. God is creative. We are made in his image and likeness. We have an inborn urge to create. To stifle this urge is to impoverish ourselves and to disdain his good gift. There is nothing at all wrong with creativity.

“What’s wrong with building a tall tower, even the tallest tower?”, someone else adds. “Is there something wrong with the pursuit of excellence?” Of course there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of excellence. There is everything right with it. We need to see more of it. After all, we live in an era that congratulates mediocrity. Mediocrity is sin. The pursuit of excellence can only be commended.

“What’s wrong with building a city, the venue of civilization?”, a third questioner asks. “Is civilization bad? Is culture bad? Should we be more holy or more virtuous or more human if we lived in caves and swung from trees and ate bugs and grunted in monosyllabically?” Of course there is nothing wrong with culture. Culture is riches without which we should be humanly poorer.

“Then what is the problem with fashioning city and tower? What is wrong with making a name for ourselves?”

According to the parable the problem with making a name for ourselves is that we reject the name that God has given us. He has named us his creatures. When he names us his creatures he emphasizes both words: “his”, “creature”. He is Lord and life-giver. We come from him, we belong to him, we can be blessed only in him. Because we come from him and belong to him and can be blessed only in him, to reject him is to reject blessing and therefore be stuck with curse.

“Name”, in Hebrew, means “nature”. The name God gives us is our nature. Our nature is to be God’s loving, obedient, grateful, faithful covenant-partner. Anything else is unnatural.

But we don’t like the name God has given us. We are irked by the nature God has given us. Be his obedient covenant-partner? Surely it is servile to have to obey anyone! We want to make our own name, make a name for ourselves. The name we give ourselves will be a better name; it will render us superior.

The problem is, of course, that there is no agreement among humankind as to what this name is going to be. The name we give ourselves will render us superior? Superior to whom? If I find it demeaning to be inferior to God, how much more demeaning do I find it to be subordinate to my fellows! Then I shall have to be superior to my fellows. I shall have to give myself a name that establishes my superiority over them!

And so we set about naming ourselves.

(i) One such name is race. The name of racial superiority isn’t mentioned in polite company, yet it is a name that no one renounces readily. Professional boxing is always looking for what it calls “the white hope”: a superior caucasian boxer who can end black domination of the “sport”. Several years ago when Sean O’Sullivan was in the newspaper every day it was hoped that this Canadian welterweight (147 pounds, the most competitive division in boxing, whose champion is nearly always the best boxer in the world) would become world-champion. The media “hyped” him. The fact of the matter is, O’Sullivan was never in the top 20 welterweights; I don’t think he was even in the top 30. Still, he was “hyped” as a future champion, only to lose in the second round to a black man who has never distinguished himself. Nevertheless, for a few months we had our “white hope”.

All races attempt to make a name for themselves through pretended racial superiority. Wherever black people have assumed power in African countries they have treated brown people savagely. And if you want to commit a huge social blunder and call down someone’s fury on you, simply mistake a Japanese person for a Korean.

(ii) Another such name is harder to describe. It isn’t racial, it isn’t even nationalistic. It is deep-down ethnic. When I was studying in Britain I noticed that war films appeared on TV every week; not Hollywood movies about war, but actual film-footage of World War II: the Battle of Britain, Rommel in North Africa, submarine warfare in the North Atlantic, and so on. When I returned to Britain in the mid-80s I saw the same films on TV. I thought this must be unhealthy, since it must surely inflame anti-German hatred. And yet I kept noticing that the British appeared much fonder of the Germans than of the French, when the French had been their allies twice in this century. I was puzzled and spoke of it to one of my relatives. Whereupon he smiled cheerfully as he said, “It’s not difficult to understand why we like the Germans but not the French. The British and the Germans are descended from the same Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic stock. We and they constitute the master-people. But the French are Latins, inferior.” There is no end to the ways we can make a name for ourselves.

(iii) Another name is social class. The jokes about social-climbing are legion. The jokes are legion, of course, just because social-climbing itself is never-ending.

A woman, no longer in our congregation, tore into me one day inasmuch as she felt I hadn’t made enough of her husband’s Ph.D and his work-place position. His Ph.D had elevated him in the work-place. His work-place ascendancy issued in social ascendancy, according to this woman. By not fussing about his Ph.D I was failing to acknowledge his social superiority. Her parting shot was, “You are a phoney. You won’t recognize a Ph.D, but you worship the ground that M.D.s walk on.” (And all along I had thought myself to be rather hard on M.D.s!)

(iv) Language is another “name” we give ourselves. In our saner moments we might think that language-diversity can only be enriching. At the very least another language exposes us to another literature. What is more enriching than this? Besides, thinking in another language is a good check that our thinking really is thinking and not merely the shuffling of cliches. Yet most of the time any suggestion of another language begets suspicion and hostility.

There is a delightful touch in the parable we are probing today. When we have finished building that tower so tall that it reaches to the heavens, God still can’t see it! Our tallest tower, as high as the heavens, we think to have penetrated even the abode of God himself. But in fact our tall tower is such a pipsqueak thing that God can’t see it. The text in Genesis tells us that he has to “go down”; he has to leave his abode, get down on his hands and knees with his magnifying glass in order to see this puny fabrication.

The racial superiority we deem simply obvious; the ethnic advantage that is surely self-evident; the social elevation that declares itself to the world; all of these are so paltry, so puny, such trifles that God has to get down on his hands and knees to see them.

In any case we have achieved what we set out to do: we have made a name for ourselves. But others have just as effectively made a name for themselves too. They are now boasting of their superiority in blind ignorance of our boasting of ours. The consequences are far-reaching. Our story-teller tells us of two consequences. We are “scattered over the face of the earth”; which is to say, there is no community. There are crowds everywhere, but no community. The second consequence is that we do not understand each other. We talk, we listen, we even claim to hear. But we don’t understand each other. We certainly know the meaning of the talk we utter; we know the meaning of the talk we hear. We say we understand others even as we insist they don’t understand us. Everyone claims to understand but not to be understood. In other regards, regardless of the words we understand, we don’t understand each other. Of course we don’t. People understand most profoundly not with their ears but with their hearts. Our hearts are clogged and calcified. We don’t understand each other. But we keep talking anyway. We talk past each other. Our attempt at communicating has become babble. The builders of the tower of Babel can only babble.

Part Two

What is the solution to the “Babel-babble” that is endemic to humankind? Many solutions are proposed, virtually all of them one form or another of social engineering.

One man, a schoolteacher, bent my ear several times about Esperanto, an artificial language whose devotees are attempting make the international language. A common language will undo everything that the parable of the Tower of Babel describes, says this man. Most of us needless to say, find this naive, albeit harmless.

Equally naive, but not harmless, are the attempts of totalitarian states to enforce conformity, including thought-conformity. Citizens don’t appear to understand each other? don’t appear to understand their rulers? don’t seem to know their place? won’t surrender their pretension to individual superiority even as they are told to support a national superiority which finds them dead on battlefields? Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet alike insisted that people appear to understand much more quickly when threatened with torture; solutions seem to be forthcoming much more quickly when a gun is held to people’s heads. But of course what such tyrants describe as a solution is actually a brutal manifestation of the problem.

The Ba’hai religionists and the New Age ideologues are touting world-government. Why do they think that world-government is going to solve what governments on a smaller scale have never been able to solve?

The only genuine solution to Genesis 11 is the one that begins in Genesis 12. Genesis 12 begins with the calling of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham and Sarah are promised that through them all the families of the earth will be blessed. Through Abraham/Sarah and their descendants the curse of Genesis 11 will be overturned. Through Abraham’s and Sarah’s lineage there will come someone, finally, who doesn’t have to make a name for himself in that he honours the name which his Father has given him; someone who knows not only that he is the Father’s creature but the Father’s son; someone who doesn’t have to twist himself grotesquely in the attempt at rendering himself superior just because he is willing to be humbled, humiliated even, for the sake of those whose preoccupation with “climbing” is killing them. The turnaround comes fully and finally in Abraham’s descendant, Jesus of Nazareth.

The turnaround which Jesus is is magnificent as God’s triumph over humankind’s self-victimization. As magnificent as it is “out there”, as an event in world-occurrence, it is nonetheless useless for us unless what occurs “out there” also occurs “in here”. That turnaround which our Lord is is useless for me unless it also turns me around. Can it do this? Can he do this? Is our risen Lord merely risen (i.e., risen but also ineffective), or is he risen and able, able to turn us away from our self-destroying and neighbour-destroying tower-building and name-making? The event of Pentecost answers this question with a huge “Yes!”. Pentecost, after all, is the incursion of that Spirit who is simply the power in which Jesus Christ acts upon us and within us; Pentecost is the celebration not merely of Christ risen (resurrection), not merely of Christ ruling (ascension) but of Christ reversing and reforming; reversing the curse of the tower and reforming the people who are otherwise fixed forever in the curse.

On the first Pentecost, Luke tells us, there are crowds of people in Jerusalem who have come from civilized lands. They hear the apostles declare the gospel. As the apostles speak and the gospel is declared hearers understand “the great things God has done”, says Luke. Hearers, scattered in places near and far, are alike grasped by what God has done. As they are grasped by what God has done for them, God does it afresh in them. Pentecost is God’s reversal of Babel. In Jesus Christ alone, and through the power of his Spirit alone, people find that they don’t have to make a name for themselves, glorying as they are now in the name that God has given them. They don’t have to invent something like Esperanto in order to understand each other, for now they understand with a heart refashioned by the heart-specialist himself. They don’t have to exhaust themselves in a quest for superiority which only disfigures them and afflicts others. They are content to identify themselves with him who ate and drank with anyone at all and was glad to do so.

Are we still tempted to make a name for ourselves through nationality or nationalism? But Jesus Christ has made us members of his body, the church. And the church, St.Peter reminds us, is the holy nation. Are we still tempted to advertise ourselves as extraordinarily talented at tower-building? But we are now identified with the tower, “towering o’er the wrecks of time”, the cross. Are we still tempted to make a name for ourselves, give ourselves whatever nature we want to have, through that city whose cultural achievements let us strut and boast and sneer? But we are citizens of another city, the New Jerusalem. Not only are we citizens, we are heralds of this new city; we point to it and point others to it, therein pointing them away from those other cities where they trample each other in pursuit of a name that isn’t worth having.

These other cities are many, old and varied. They are Rome, Babylon, Sodom, Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Montreal, Mississauga. Jerusalem is the city that slays God’s prophets and crucifies his Messiah (i.e., Jerusalem is every city inasmuch as it spurns the gospel). Sodom is the city of those whose sensuality will prove destructive on all fronts. Rome (ancient Rome) is the city of admirable cultural accomplishment and also the site of every idolatry imaginable. Modern Beijing is the city of conscienceless cruelty. (Think of Tiannemen Square.)

Babylon is almost in a class by itself. Babylon is the city that gathers up all other cities. Babylon is the city whose paganism grows with its wealth and whose affluence swells only as a blind eye is turned everywhere. Everybody lives in Babylon; we can’t help living in Babylon. But as Christians we aren’t citizens of Babylon. We are citizens of the New Jerusalem. We belong to the holy nation; we are people of a new name and a new nature and new understanding and a new community.

There is a most important feature of the parable of the Tower of Babel which we must not fail to mention. The Hebrew bible puts forward the tower of Babel as the Hebrew equivalent of Babylon, Babel and Babylon alike being Jewish and Gentile monuments to humankind’s God-defiance. But paradoxically the literal meaning of the word “Babel” is “gate of God”. Bab-el is the gate of God. God meets us at our point of greatest defiance (the cross of him whom we crucify) and by his grace renders it the point of our access to him.

Pentecost is that miracle of grace, that miracle of the Holy Spirit, that wonder at the hands of Jesus Christ risen and ruling whereby our God-defiance collapses just because we are granted access to God. Babylon (“babble on”) is rendered the gate of God, where we hear each other as never before, understand each other, cherish each other, find community in each other — and all of this because we are no longer desperate to make a name for ourselves, but want only to be named citizens of that city which cannot be shaken, the city of God, the holy nation, the church of Jesus Christ.

Pentecost, everyone knows, has to do with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is that power whereby the victory of Jesus Christ becomes his victory in us. Our Lord was never driven to make a name for himself in that he cherished the name his Father had given him. He never had to bend himself out of shape by trying to give himself a nature he was never meant to have. He was son by nature. You and I are to become sons and daughters by faith, thereby regaining that nature we have long since forfeited through our building and babbling.

Pentecost means this: the Holy Spirit is the power by which Jesus Christ does in us what he has already achieved for us. In other words, Pentecost celebrates that power by which the wreckage of Babel-babble is turned into the gate of God, as by faith we own our place in the holy nation and in faith cling to him whose name is above every name, above all the silly, false and dangerous names we should otherwise give ourselves.

                                                                              Victor A. Shepherd        

June 1995

 

Questions people ask: How are we to understand Noah’s Ark?

Genesis 6:9-22; 8:13 & 20; 9:8-17                   Hebrews 11:1-7           Matthew 24:36-44

 

It’s the child’s all-time favourite bible story.     And why not? The story has the adventure of an ocean voyage plus the warmth of a zoo.

All children assume that the animals enter the ark two-by-two.   Few people, whether children or adults, read far enough to know that only the animals notused for sacrifice in Israel ‘s worship enter two-by-two. Animals offered up in worship enter seven-by-seven.   (Had they entered only two-by-two and been offered up in worship the species would plainly have become extinct.)

How are we to understand this ancient story?   We have to understand that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are best understood not as history but as parable.   To say that the story of Noah’s Ark is a parable doesn’t mean that it’s “untrue” any more than the parables of Jesus (fiction) are untrue. Since our Lord’s parables are his parables, they are true; that is, they tell the truth about men and women under God at all times and in all places. C.S. Lewis has said that since the Jews are God’s chosen people, their parables are God’s chosen parables — and therefore stories such as Noah’s Ark are profoundly true, everywhere and always humanly true.

I(i): — The story begins starkly:

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the

earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their

hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry

                        that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to

                        his heart. (Genesis 6:5-6)

 

God is heartbroken that the only creatures whom he has crowned with his own image and likeness persist in rendering themselves wicked.   He is sorry that he has created humankind at all.   Plainly, according to our simple, primitive story, God is distressed that those whom he fashioned the apple of his eye should turn out so badly.

The narrator of our story amplifies the matter of humankind’s wickedness: “The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” Everyone knows what is meant by “violence.” But “corrupt”? The Hebrew word translated “corrupt” literally means “destroyed.”   In other words, what God decided to destroy was already so very corrupt as to be self-destroyed.   What rendered the earth self-destroyed?   Wickedness, one of whose principal manifestations is violence.   The story-teller tells us that the earth was filled with violence. There is violence everywhere.

 

A few years ago a man in Scotland entered an elementary school, shot sixteen children, shot the teacher, and then shot himself. A parishioner wrote me a letter describing the gunman, Thomas Hamilton, as singularly wicked.

I don’t wish to make light of the schoolhouse tragedy in any way. At the same time, I don’t think that Thomas Hamilton and his trigger-finger are what the story of Noah’s Ark is about. I am not a psychiatrist, but I strongly suspect that Hamilton was deranged. Violent, yes, but a violence born of derangement.

What Noah’s story is about isn’t derangement; it’s about the violence born of sanity; the violence born of people who are perfectly sane, the violence of sober citizens and pillars of whatever community. It’s about the violence that is premeditated, calculated, implemented, boasted about. The story-teller tells us that such violence comes forth from every person’s heart, not merely occasionally from the small percentage of people who are deranged.

I’m not making light of the sixteen children in Scotland . At the same time, I don’t wish to become sentimental. Every day in Argentina the police pick up homeless children who are living on downtown streets, take them away who knows where, and execute them. Every year Thailand sacrifices thousands of twelve-year old children to the sex trade, a tourist industry that the government of Thailand encourages. Seven thousand people are murdered in the United States every year.

Let’s not forget that during the worst days of the American Civil War, 25,000 men were succumbing every day. Let’s not forget that when the city of Dresden was bombed at the end of World War II ( Dresden was a city peopled with young children and seniors, a city of no military significance whatever), 100,000 civilians died in one night. How did they die? Instantly on account of blast? No. The air-raid started a firestorm, and the firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the air, with the result that children and old folks died wretchedly through asphyxiation.

Think of the more recent “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia . The full story there has yet to be told. Serbs, of course, are worried about reprisals. They should be worried, because the people they victimized are waiting to retaliate. All of which means that our story-writer is correct: the earth is “filled with violence.” Think of the thousands slain in Rwanda ; and then the same thing in Burundi . Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian who witnessed it, says he’ll never get over it. As horrible as the holocaust was in Europe, it happened again in Cambodia through Pot Pol and the Khmer Rouge. What about Saddam Hussein and the Kurds he gassed?

But we shouldn’t point the finger at anyone. When I was a member of the ministerial association of the City of Miramichi , New Brunswick , a fellow-clergyman proposed that we have a multi-denominational service on Dominion Day, July 1st. The theme of the service was to be “Gratitude for the gift of the land.” I looked at him as though he were from Mars. “The gift of the land?” I asked. “The gift? Our foreparents took it at the point of a gun and blew away anyone who disagreed with them.”

Then there’s the violence that is no less violent for having nothing to do with nations and armies. Think of the violence pertaining to the world of labour. At one time Henry Ford employed a strong-armed thug named Harry Bennett. Bennett had many jobs. One was acting as contact-person between the Ford Motor Company and the mafia. Another job was beating up, with the help of the Ford Company’s goon-squad, anyone whom Henry Ford and family wanted beaten up. Ford was especially eager to have beaten up anyone attempting to organize auto workers. Ford had Bennett and his men beat up Walter Reuther and his brother so badly (the Reuthers were the auto workers’ first leaders) that both brothers were hospitalized for six months. Is it any wonder that unions respond with their own kind of violence? Of course it’s no wonder — even as the proliferation of violence confirms the story-teller’s line, “…and the earth was filled with violence.”

In all of this we must not overlook domestic violence. Domestic violence is a huge problem everywhere. It is no less violent for being domestic. Our society must never wink at the man who told me that he slugged his wife several times “because it’s the only language she understands.” Do you know that the call to a home where domestic violence is occurring is the most dangerous call a police officer answers? That’s why older police officers wait twenty minutes before they show up at such a home.

We shouldn’t assume that violence has to be physical in order to be violence. Violence is committed when people are violated in any way. When I was in grade nine science the day came, in our introductory study of electricity, when the teacher taught us about hydro metres. We were taught what watts were, what kilowatt-hours were, how electricity-consumption was measured in terms of kilowatt-hours, and how metres were read. Then the teacher said, “Now you youngsters in this shabby part of the city (yes, my family was poor); none of your parents has a university-degree; your parents don’t know very much; your parents wouldn’t even know how to read a hydro metre.” I thought of my poor dad, poor to be sure, yet self-taught and giving me gems every day from the book-review section of the Sunday New York Times; I thought of his fertile mind, his ceaseless quest for knowledge; I thought of how much better educated he was than was this teacher, a vulgar ignoramus who insisted on slandering my family in absentia. I knew that day that I had been violated, and the entire class with me.

The story-teller is right: the human heart foams with violence.

(ii) How does our ceaseless violence affect God? What does it do to him? “It grieves him to his heart.” God’s first reaction isn’t rage or contempt; it’s grief, sadness too deep for words. God is heartbroken. He weeps over us whom he has made in his image, over us who have rendered ourselves monstrous.

(iii) At the same time, while God is grief-stricken he isn’t immobilized. While he is saddened, to be sure, he doesn’t wallow helplessly in the swamp of sentimentality. His grief issues in judgement. His grief has to issue in judgement. Did it not issue in judgement God would be devoid of integrity. He isn’t devoid of integrity; which is to say, judgement becomes operative.

 

II: — All of which brings us to the flood. It’s right here, frankly, that the child’s delight in the parable surprises me. After all, the story of Noah’s Ark resembles a horror movie. None of us would ever want our child to witness a drowning. And the spectacle of countless bloated corpses, animal and human, might give an adult nightmares. (To be sure, the story of Noah’s Ark is no more violent than many fairy tales. Children love fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and himself a death camp survivor, has written profoundly as to how it is that violent fairy tales help children past their childhood fears. We haven’t time to probe Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic profferomgs and must leave them for another day.)

We must take time, however, to note that the story of Noah’s Ark is not telling us that God is vindictive; it does not say that God is a cruel ogre who delights in mass drownings. It tells us instead that God’s judgement becomes operative as God gives us precisely what we want. At the beginning of the sermon I mentioned that the Hebrew word translated “corrupt” in our English bible literally means “destroyed.” I mentioned too that what God’s judgement consigns to destruction is already self-destroyed. People bent on violence plainly want destruction. With our lips we all say we don’t want destruction, if only because no one in his right mind wants destruction. But that’s just the point — we who are made in the image of God, are now bent on violence, and have saddened God to the point that he can’t grieve more — we aren’t in our right mind. And therefore regardless of what we say with our lips, as violent people we want destruction, since violence always ends in destruction. God’s judgement is simply God consigning to destruction what is already self-destroyed in any case.

 

III: — Yet there is Noah. Three things are said about Noah: he was righteous, he was blameless, and he walked with God. “Blameless” means “single-minded,” what Jesus will later call “pure in heart.” “Blameless” describes Noah’s relation to God; “righteous” describes Noah’s relation to his neighbours; “walked with God” means Noah knew God intimately and endeavoured to obey him consistently. Noah and his family, together with the animals, are brought through the flood. The waters recede; total destruction is averted. The rainbow is painted into the sky. And God himself speaks: “Never again shall there be a flood over all the earth; never again shall violence go all the way down to utter destruction; never again shall the human heart, foaming with violence, precipitate total destruction.” This is God’s promise. In the bible it is called a covenant. God makes this promise to Noah, yet makes it for the sake of the entire creation everywhere. The covenant is made with Noah alone, yet the whole creation is blessed on account of it. Which is to say, the covenant is made with Noah alone, and the whole creation is blessed on account of him.

Plainly Noah is one person who represents many. The principle of one representing the many is common throughout scripture. God makes a covenant with Abraham, and through this one man all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. God makes a covenant with David, and through David all Israel is to be blessed. God makes a covenant with Noah, and the covenant is this: God has promised never to allow his creation to collapse all the way down to that self-destruction it is bent on and deserves. To be sure, when our story speaks of the flood, it speaks of God’s consigning the creation to destruction, albeit the destruction it perversely wills for itself. Yet the story concludes with God’s promise that in fact he will preserve his perverse creation however violent it might be. This promise is the gospel of Noah’s Ark.

Because God keeps the promises he makes he tells Noah to raise up children. Does it make sense to bring children into a world whose violence devours them? William Sloane Coffin jr., 17 years the chaplain at Yale University and more recently the senior minister at Riverside Church, New York City; Coffin was a liaison officer between the United States Armed Forces and Russian forces during World War II. Assigned to the Russian front, he saw scenes there that I shall not attempt to describe. After the war he received several European pastors who had pastored-on throughout the worst years of the war. One pastor said quietly, slowly, movingly, “During the worst of the fighting the front moved back and forth through my town eight times. And after the front had passed through my town, each time I spent days doing little more than bury children.”

Is it reasonable to ask Noah to raise up children in a world where children are rendered helpless victims? The fact that God will not allow his creation to sink all the way down to irretrievable self-destruction doesn’t mean that the human heart is any less lethal. After the last war the Jewish people asked themselves a terrible question: “In view of the holocaust-horror (one and a half million children burnt alive), are the Jewish people morally obliged not to have children?” Nevertheless, world-wide Jewry decided it would continue to beget and bear children, and decided this for many reasons, not the least of which was that it trusted the promise. God will never consign his creation to the fullest, uttermost destructive consequences of its self-willed violence. For the Jewish people, God’s promise, and their faith in the promise, meant more than any calculation.

Have you ever asked yourself why the world doesn’t become utterly uninhabitable as each generation adds its evil to that of the preceding generation? Why doesn’t evil accumulate, like a snowball rolling downhill, until the accumulated evil is so vast that human existence becomes impossible? Our story tells us why. God has made a covenant: he has promised that he will never abandon his creation to that total self-destruction which violent-hearted people always tend to produce.

The implications for us are obvious. If God isn’t going to abandon the world, then neither should we. If no frustration can deflect God’s commitment to the world, then no frustration should deflect ours. If God can endure seemingly-endless setbacks, so must we. The bottom line is this: we shall never be in the situation where we are seeking an end to violence and God is not. We shall never find ourselves spending ourselves on behalf of a world that God gave up on a long time ago. Our struggle can never be hopeless. God has made a promise; he will ever keep his promise. This is good news, gospel, the gospel of Noah’s Ark.

 

IV: — There is one more point for us to consider. When Noah emerges from the ark he offers up an animal in sacrifice to God. Part of the sacrifice is eaten. Up to this point in the unfolding biblical story men and women have been vegetarians. Now they are permitted to become meat-eaters. Their eating meat at meals is God’s concession to their violence: human beings kill and eat their first cousins, the animals.

But their eating meat is more than this. In Israel of old every occasion of eating meat was more than a means of satisfying hunger; it was also an act of worship. Meat — a dead animal eaten at the dinner table — was as much an act of worship as was the animal sacrificed in the temple on the Sabbath. In fact, said our Israelite foreparents, every time a family ate meat at home it was pointing to the lamb slain in the temple.

 

You and I eat meat. According to our foreparents in faith whenever we eat meat we are pointing to a lamb slain. We are not pointing to any lamb, but to the lamb, the Lamb of God; we are pointing to him who bears in himself the sin and suffering and sorrow of our violent world. In a few minutes you and I are going to go home to our Sunday dinner and eat meat of some sort. When we do this we shall be pointing to our Lord Jesus Christ, the lamb of God slain, who has been offered up on our behalf and who ever invites us to feed on him.

As we feed on him a new heart and a new spirit will become ours. A new heart and a new spirit means that we have pleaded with God to do in us whatever it takes to remove from us humankind’s characteristic violence.

 

Noah’s Ark isn’t just a story for children. It is very much a story for adults. It’s a story, a parable like the parables of Jesus. It’s about our deep-seated violence, about God’s grief, about God’s judgement. It’s also about God’s promise — he will never abandon his world, and therefore neither must we. Finally, it’s about God’s provision — he has offered up his Son as surely as Noah offered up a sacrifice — wherein you and I may find ourselves with a new heart and a new spirit. For then, like Noah, we too shall be “blameless and righteous”, those who live to bear witness to the “shalom” of God, the peace of God, that kingdom which can never be shaken and whose fullest manifestation we pray for every day.

Victor Shepherd                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                

January 2005

 

Do Seedtime and Harvest Never Cease or Five Myths That Slander God

 

Genesis 8:22

2 Kings 6:24-31

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

John 6:27-35

In the course of a food shortage in Hong Kong, decades ago, a British executive of the Bank of Hong found a British soldier staring at him.  The bank executive had come upon a half-rotten orange in the gutter and was about to eat it when the soldier hollered that the food was crawling with maggots and would certainly make him ill.  The man became hysterical, shrieking and crying.  Can’t you imagine the spectacle: a man in grey-striped formal trousers, black vest and suit jacket, bowler hat and umbrella — plainly someone from the highest echelon of Britain’s highest class – this man blubbering hysterically because he wasn’t allowed to eat his vermin-ridden garbage?

   Hunger doesn’t merely make the tummy ache.  Hunger doesn’t merely produce diseases and deformities born of protein or vitamin deficiencies.  Hunger also bewitches the mind.  Hungry people start thinking about doing, and actually do, what they would otherwise never imagine themselves doing.  Hunger exposes civilisation as no more than skin deep.  When an airliner crashed in the Andes Mountains in South America several years ago it was learned that the survivors had survived by eating the remains of fellow-passengers who had already died.  Immediately the tabloids featured headlines on cannibalism, while more thoughtful magazines probed ethical issues raised by this turn of affairs.  Hunger bewitches.

   Reflect for a minute on a story from the life of the prophet Elisha.  Syria’s army besieged the Israelite people, and these people were soon hungry.  And hungrier.  Desperate.  So desperately hungry that 80 shekels of silver (80 shekels would normally buy you 40 roasting rams or 90 bushels of grain); so desperately hungry that people were now paying 80 shekels for the head of a dead donkey.  A dead donkey’s head?  Hungry people will eat anything.  If you had only 5 shekels you could purchase half a pint of bird-droppings.  (There’s food in bird-droppings, you know; if you poke around in bird-droppings you’ll eventually find a few seeds.)   If you had no shekels what did you do?  Two Israelite women knew what to do.  “Let’s make a deal”, one said to the other; “today we’ll boil your infant son and eat him; tomorrow we’ll do the same with my son.”  One mother boiled her son and shared him with her friend.  Next day the second woman said she couldn’t.  The king was called in to settle the matter.  The king exploded and swore he would kill the prophet Elisha.

   Kill Elisha?  What did the prophet have to do with this horrible turn of events?  Nothing at all.  Then why go after him?  Hunger makes even rulers irrational, doesn’t it?  Hunger twists people’s minds until a pretzel looks like a straightedge.

   Hunger is terrible.  How terrible Jeremiah knew when he wrote, his mind reeling, “The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children….” (Lamentations 4:10)

I: — Today is thanksgiving Sunday.  Today we customarily thank God for food.  The people in our world who don’t have food, millions upon millions of them; for what do they thank God?  After all, God has promised to supply food.  He who is our creator would be a mocker if he created us only to turn his back on us.  (Human beings who turn their back on their children are sent to jail, aren’t they?)  God maintains that he’s not only creator; he’s also provider and sustainer.  Now I believe that he is.  But then, I’m not hungry.

   Still, I am persuaded that God is as good as his word.  He does provide for us creatures whom he’s fashioned in his own image.  He does keep the promise he makes: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest…shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)  I’m persuaded it’s entirely correct to thank God for food, and thank him as often as we eat it.  In the words of a common Eucharist liturgy, God does care for all that he makes.

   And yet even with God caring as much as he can care, a great many people are hungry.  Scores of thousands starve to death every day.  Far more are permanently damaged in mind and body on account of their hunger.

   On the one hand, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about food since God feeds his people as surely as God feeds the birds of the air.  On the other hand, the apostle Paul tells believers that not even famine can separate them from God’s love vouchsafed to them in Christ Jesus their Lord.  Clearly Paul knows that God feeds (as promised) yet famine occurs, and famine kills.  Famine kills even as God continues to feed.  Famine kills even as God’s love remains uncontradicted.

   Yet every day someone tells me that the fact of widespread hunger throughout the world does contradict God’s love.  Then where are we with respect to God? Where is God with respect to us?

II: — It’s plain to me that God has been slandered; perhaps slandered unknowingly (in other words, the people who have faulted him in the face of the world’s hunger have done so thinking they were telling the truth about him), but slandered none the less.  “He doesn’t care”, they have said, or “He doesn’t care enough.”  Today I wish to vindicate God’s name.  I wish to show that the appalling hunger in the world at this moment can’t be blamed on a deficient supply of food.  In clearing God’s name of the calumny that attends it I’m going to explode several myths.

MYTH #1  People are hungry because food is scarce.  In truth, food isn’t scarce.  There’s enough food in the world at this moment to feed adequately every man, woman and child.  Think of grain-production alone.  There’s enough grain grown right now to provide everyone with sufficient protein and with 3000 calories per day.  (Most of us need only 2300 per day.)  The 3000 grain-calories per person per day produced right now doesn’t include many other foods that aren’t grains, foods like beans, root crops, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and grass-fed meat.

  What’s more, sufficient food is produced right now even in those countries where millions are hungry.  Even in its worst years of famine, for instance, India has produced so much food as to be a net exporter of food.  (India has been a net exporter of food every year since 1870.)   In India, while millions go hungry, soldiers patrol the government’s six million tons of stockpiled food — which food, of course, now nourishes rats.  In Mexico, where at least 80% of the children in rural areas are undernourished, livestock destined for export are fed more grain than Mexico’s entire rural population.  There’s no shortage of food.

MYTH #2 — Hunger in any one country is the result of overpopulation in that country.  If this were the case, we should expect the worst hunger in those countries where there are the most people per food-producing acre.  But it’s not so.  India has only half the population density per cultivated acre that China has.  Yet the Chinese eat while millions in India do not.  China has eliminated visible hunger in the last 50 years.

  There’s dreadful hunger in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Yet these countries have scant population per cultivated acre.  In Africa, south of the Sahel, where some of the worst hunger continues, there are fewer people per cultivated acre than there are in the USA or in Russia; there are six to eight times fewer people in Africa south of the Sahel per cultivated acre than there are in China.

   Please note that I’ve spoken of “cultivated acre.”  We must be sure to understand that less than 50% of the world’s land that could grow food is now growing food.  (It’s plain to everyone, by even this point in the sermon, that the real barriers to alleviating hunger aren’t physical but rather political and economic.)

MYTH #3 — In order to eliminate hunger our top priority must be to grow more food.  Already you’re aware that the world is awash in food right now.  The real problems concerning feeding hungry people lie elsewhere.  For instance, land-ownership is concentrated in too few hands.  A recent United Nations survey of 83 countries disclosed that 3% of the world’s landlords control 80% of the land.  In most countries only 5% to 20% of all food-producers have access to institutionalised credit, such as banks.  The rest, the other 80% to 95%, have to get their credit from virtual loan sharks who charge up to 200% on farm loans.

   What’s more, new agricultural technology benefits only those who already possess land and credit.  It’s been documented irrefutably that strategies which simply aim at having more food produced have dreadful consequences.  Here’s what happens.  New agricultural technology (for instance, hybrid seeds that produce bigger crops from less fertiliser) attracts investors whose primary interest is investment, not food-production; i.e., new agricultural technology attracts investors who see agriculture simply as a good investment.  Moneylenders, city-based speculators and foreign corporations rush to get in on the good investment.  The new money swells the demand for land.  The price of land skyrockets.  Tenants and sharecroppers are then squeezed off the land.  These folk can’t feed themselves and now go hungry.  What about the crops that the new technology has made possible and that speculators now produce in record quantities?  These crops are luxury items (carnations, for instance, to adorn dining room tables); these luxury items are purchased by consumers in the western world and the northern hemisphere.  In other words, new agricultural technology reduces food production.

   We’ve all heard of the Green Revolution, a breakthrough in agricultural technology that promised to generate oceans of foodstuffs for the world’s hungry.  The Green Revolution was born in northwest Mexico.  Overnight the average farm size jumped from 200 acres to more than 2000.  And overnight three-quarters of the rural workforce was squeezed off the land — now with nothing to eat.  The Green Revolution found rural people hungrier than ever.

   Any attempt at remedying hunger simply through greater agricultural sophistication renders people hungrier than ever.

MYTH # 4 — The increase in population (and therefore the need for greater food production) requires the use of chemicals that are environmentally dangerous.  In fact very little pesticide or fungicide or insecticide is spread on farmland.  I know, when we hear of the tonnage of these assorted “‘cides” it sounds colossal.  For instance, the USA alone spreads 1.2 billion pounds of pesticide every year.  One-third of this, however, is used on golf courses, lawns and public parks.  Very little farmland is treated with these chemical substances.  In fact, in the USA only 5% of cropland and pastureland is treated with insecticides; only 15% with weedkillers; only one-half of 1% with fungicides.  Over half of all the insecticide used in the USA isn’t used on food crops at all.  (Most of it is used on cotton, and even then, most of the land that grows cotton isn’t treated.)

    Greater demand for food doesn’t issue in overwhelming chemical pollution.

MYTH #5 — In order to help the hungry we should improve our foreign aid programs.  The truth is, increased foreign aid will do very little to alleviate hunger.  The question we must always ask concerning foreign aid is this: when the government of a western nation sends financial aid to a hungry country, into whose hands does the money find its way?  The money falls into the hands of that tiny number of people who exercise social and political control.  This tiny number benefits; few others do.  In Guatemala, for instance, virtually all the money sent as foreign aid merely enriches still more the handful of largest landholders.

   

What happens overseas is much like what I’ve seen in Canada.  When I was a pastor in New Brunswick and lived closer to corruption than I do in Ontario, the federal government of Canada launched its “LIP” programme.  (“L.I.P.”: local initiative project.)  Ottawa was handing out millions to small communities in order to help the poorest people in them survive.  My village received an LIP grant.  The grant amounted to thousands of dollars ($200,000 in today’s money.)  In my village four men worked five days per week for twenty weeks, building a small vault in the local cemetery.  The vault was so small it would hold only two caskets.  These four men laid one concrete block per day each.  (Think of it: four men each laying one concrete block per day for twenty weeks.)  Who were the men who pocketed the money?  Were they the poorest in the village whom the programme was meant to help?  Of course not.  Poor people aren’t “connected”; poor people don’t have access to the levers of influence and favours.  But well-to-do people have such access.  In my village it was the sons of the richest, those with connections, who siphoned off the government “goodies.”

   Next year our village received another LIP grant, this time to put a washroom (worth $75,000 in today’s money) in a small building that was used four hours per week.  Same story.  Third year, third grant.  But not one needy person was ever hired for any of these projects.

   Increased foreign aid won’t feed hungry people.  But it will build highways and bridges, thereby making land a better investment.  Land that is now a better investment attracts investment speculators who then use the land for purposes unrelated to food production.

   Historically, it was different in England and America.  In England political changes ended the landholding arrangement of feudalism and gave people access to land, at the same time that additional political changes gave common people protection against the powerful, the wealthy and the state.  In the USA a constitution (it had to be secured by force of arms) guaranteed the people freedom from the oppressions that had ground down common people in Europe for centuries, which oppressions America would fend off at any cost.  The oppressions fended off in the English and American revolutions are the oppressions we see in developing countries today.  Political change, not foreign aid, is what feeds people in the long run.

With respect to the short run I want to say a word here about mission support from the local church.  It’s important.  When the late Dr. Allen Knight, an agricultural missionary who spent years in what was then Angola, spoke to my congregation in Mississauga about the “Seeds for Africa” programme, the congregation supported him without hesitation.  We knew we could trust him.  The money we gave for seeds purchased seeds; money given for well-drilling actually drilled wells.  People were fed.  When my friend Dr. Peter Webster was performing surgery in Africa and schooling villages in preventive medicine, any monies he received from friends and congregations were used for their designated purpose, used for that purpose only, and used immediately.  We must never diminish our support for trustworthy Christian workers who are doing front-line work among needy people.

Have you heard enough this morning to convince you that God doesn’t merit the slander that is customarily heaped on him?  God is defamed repeatedly on the grounds that he doesn’t keep the promises he makes; he doesn’t care for all that he has made; day and night and seedtime occur without interruption to be sure, but the harvest doesn’t — say those who tell us that God lies.

   I trust you are persuaded that the presence among us of hungry people, together with the bodily and mental distortions that hunger produces, can’t be blamed on God.  He is as good as his word; he does care for all that he has made.  And for this reason he is to be praised.

III: — God is to be praised even more, for not only has he provided bread, he’s provided the bread of life.  No one lives by bread alone.  Without bread we humans disappear; without the bread of life we humans remain fixed — fixed in what?  Fixed in our perverse rebellion against God, fixed in our deadly defiance of him, fixed in our frustration and futility, which frustration and futility we can either rage against or surrender to but in any case can’t remedy.  Still, the Creator of us all doesn’t give up on us.

   Because God won’t give up on us he’s forever pressing the bread of life into our hands.  The bread of life isn’t made anew each day, but it’s offered anew each day.  “I am the bread of life”, says Jesus, “whoever comes to me will never hunger again.” (John 6:35)  The bread of life became available to us when provision was made for us in the cross.  Now it’s offered afresh as often as our Lord steals upon anyone anywhere and says, “Why don’t you stop running past my outstretched arms?”

   No one lives without bread; no one lives most profoundly by bread alone.  Only the bread of life can restore men and women made in the image of God to the favour of God.  Only the bread of life can relieve us of the consequences of our rebellion against God by releasing us from the rebellion itself.  Only the bread of life can reconcile us where we are estranged, thaw us where we are frozen and sensitise us where we are unresponsive.

   In his 2nd letter to the congregation in Corinth Paul is glad to acknowledge that God provides seed and bread.  Unquestionably he’s grateful for seed and bread.  Yet his ecstatic exclamation, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” plainly pertains to him and only to him who is the bread of life, Christ Jesus our Lord.  Then the bread of life we must seize or seize afresh today.

   

The church has only one mission: to offer Jesus Christ to any and all, near and far.  For in offering him, the one through whom and for whom all things have been made (John 1:3,10), we shall remind detractors that God has kept his promise to provide seedtime and harvest; and in offering him, the bread of life, we shall recall rebels to their rightful ruler, to their Father, as it turns out, from whom they henceforth receive eternal life.Victor Shepherd   October 2014

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Our Father Abraham

 Genesis 17:1-8; 15-22

      Psalm 47        Hebrews 11:8-12        Luke 1:67-80

 

Whenever we bring out our family photo albums and look at our ancestors – great-grandfather, grandmother, father, and then finally ourselves – it’s easy to see a family resemblance. Our ancestor’s jaw or hairline or nose is evident generation after generation.

More important than the biological family that we were born into and whose traits we’ve inherited, however, is the family of God. The family and household of God, scripture reminds us, consists of those whom the truth and reality of God has startled and stimulated. The family and household of God consists of those whom God’s presence and persistence has roused from spiritual slumber and who have found themselves jabbed awake or won over or wooed into loving the One who comes upon different people in different ways but always to the end of rendering us his children.

To be sure the nature of the response varies from person to person. Some are taking their first, tentative steps in faith, fending off detractors who tell them that faith is no more than unconscious fantasy and love for their Lord no more than disguised love for themselves. Others have lived close to him for years and want only to move closer to him. No matter. All alike belong to the family of faith, and all share a family resemblance with their foreparent in faith.

Foreparent? Yes. Everywhere in scripture, newer testament and older testament alike, Abraham is deemed the ancestor of God’s people. Abraham is acknowledged the prototype of the believing person, the model for all believers in all eras and in all circumstances. Abraham is the ancestor whose spiritual “genes”, as it were, are found in all whom the gospel captivates.

 

I: — What is the first family resemblance that is traceable from Abraham to you and me? The first is that we live by God’s promise. Abraham’s story begins with his obedience to God’s command: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Abraham is invited and summoned to step out from his comfortable familiarities and step towards a new land, step into a new future. What land? We don’t know its name. It’s spoken of only as “the land of promise.” Abraham is invited and summoned to move out into a future that appears radically uncertain and therefore radically insecure.

Then is Abraham merely naïve? Is he simply foolish, even stupid? Not at all, for Abraham isn’t stepping into a vacuous future; he isn’t stepping into a cosmic hole or into cosmic treachery. He’s stepping into a future that appears uncertain and insecure from a human perspective, to be sure; yet this future is already filled with the God whose faithfulness and goodness Abraham knows he can trust. At this point Abraham begins to live by the promise. But of course living by promise makes sense only if the promise is going to be kept. Then to live by promise is to live trusting the promise-keeping God. Abraham steps out confident that God will unfailingly keep the promises he has made to Abraham. Only the promise-keeping God can we trust, and only the promise-keeping God should we trust.

It has always been the conviction of the Church that the promise God made to Abraham concerning land – “Go to the land that I will show you” – is fulfilled in the kingdom of God . The promise of land made to Abraham doesn’t entail real estate; the promise is fulfilled in the kingdom of God .

The kingdom-promises of God are manifold.

[i] Here’s one. “Whoever comes to me I never turn away.” This is the promise of ready welcome, of free forgiveness, of a Father’s eagerness to embrace any and all who are fed up with living in the “far country” and want only to go home where they belong. This promise guarantees that any penitent who looks homeward is going to find arms of mercy that seize her even as her sin is forgiven and forgotten forever.

[ii] Another promise. “Whoever gives to one of these little ones a cup of cold water…will not lose his reward.” This is God’s guarantee that the work we undertake in the name and Spirit of our Lord for the sake of his people; our work in this regard will unfailingly be fruitful even if we don’t see the fruit. The work we undertake for God’s people he will invariably use to enhance others and to increase our own faith and enlarge our opportunity for service.

[iii] Another promise. “The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” “Will keep”? The Greek word phulassein means “will garrison (it’s a military metaphor), will safeguard” our life in Christ and our identity in Christ regardless of what howls down upon us. As often as we are assaulted in life Christ’s grip on us will always be stronger than our grip on him, with the result that we are garrisoned within that “fort” which Jesus Christ unfailingly is for his people.

[iv] Another promise, as profound as it is simple: “I will never fail you or forsake you.” It is simple, isn’t it. At the same time, what could be more profound? After all, don’t other people fail us as surely as we fail them? Worse still, don’t we fail ourselves? And as for forsaking, don’t others forsake us as surely as we forsake ourselves? All of us have said and done what left others looking at us sideways, muttering to themselves, “And I thought I knew who he was.” All of us have said and done too what left us shocked at ourselves, saying to ourselves, “I always thought I knew who I was.” What else is this but to be self-failed and self-forsaken? In the midst of all such distress, whether inner or outer, there continues to sound forth that throbbing, bass note of our lives, “I will never fail you or forsake you.” This throbbing, bass note determines the rhythm of our lives; it’s the downbeat of our lives; it’s the first beat in the bar, the predominant beat, as we step ahead as people of promise: “I will never fail you or forsake you.” He who raised his son from the dead is never going to abandon you and me to that deadliness by which we are otherwise victimized, even self-victimized.

[v] Concerning the congregation here in Schomberg there are two promises taken together that move me over and over: Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” and “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed…nothing is impossible to you.” David Bloomer has told me several times of the days when the worshipping congregation here was down to four or five people. They sat at the front of the church and the minister, wanting to be less formal amidst so few people, pulled up a chair before them and simply related to them in a conversational tone what he had meant to preach that day. I am moved at the promise-clinging faith of people like David and Betty and a couple others who didn’t give up, didn’t turn angry or bitter, didn’t do anything except trust that with God a promise made is a promise kept. It is because of their Abrahamic confidence that there’s a congregation here today.

Living by promise is always an adventure. It’s as much an adventure in 2004 as it was for Abraham. For like him, you and I don’t know what life is going to bring before us. We don’t know which people, what events, what kind of challenges or assaults or griefs or opportunities are going to appear from nowhere, loom before us and linger with us. We can’t anticipate them.

Myself, I noticed years ago that virtually all of the disastrous downturns that I feared might happen to me didn’t happen. In other words, my anticipation of negativities was groundless. On the other hand, the assaults that clobbered me (one of which at least brought me as close to being admitted to hospital as I’ll ever come without being admitted) I couldn’t anticipate in any case. We tend to fear what turns out not to happen, and we can’t anticipate what does happen. Then we are left having to live by the promises of God.

   Promises, plural. Yes, the promises of God are manifold. Nonetheless, said John Wesley, all the promises of God recounted in scripture are gathered up in one, overarching, grand promise. There is one grand promise that comprehends them all: it’s the promise of shalom, salvation. The promise of shalom, salvation, is the promise that on the day of our Lord’s appearing we are going to be found fully restored, every last defacement of God’s image in us remedied, every last disfigurement addressed, every last sin-wrought flaw healed. We are going to be found restored. The book of Hebrews says it succinctly: “There is a Sabbath rest (restoration: in the wake of the Fall “rest” is restoration) promised the people of God.”

Knowing that this grand promise is going to be kept, like Abraham of old we step forward in life knowing that whatever else the adventure brings, it always brings with it the unfailing goodness of the promise-keeping God. He will not fail us or forsake us.

 

II: — While we are thinking of family resemblances on Christian Family Sunday we should realistically admit that there are some family resemblances we wish weren’t there. There is an unsightliness here or there, a blemish, even an ugliness, which appears from generation to generation. We wish it weren’t so, but it is.

As much can be said about Abraham’s life under God and about ours too. Abraham is journeying with his wife into foreign territory. The king of this foreign country, a fierce fellow, starts eyeing Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Abraham sees that this king has lecherous designs on Sarah.   Abraham, frightened now to the point of near-panic, thinks to himself, “This man is going to rape Sarah. If he thinks she’s my wife, he’ll kill me in order to have her. But if he thinks she’s only my sister, he’ll rape her in any case but spare me.” In that dreadful moment of screwed-up thinking that is as understandable as it is inexcusable Abraham blurts, “She’s my sister; she’s only my sister.” Truth to tell, Abraham did this twice. He lied to save his skin.

Are you and I any different? In a moment of intense pressure haven’t we falsified ourselves, falsified someone else, exaggerated, lied or simply fallen silent because in our cowardice we panicked before the consequences of telling the truth? When was the last time we were dead wrong before our children but wouldn’t admit it because the loss of face would have been too humiliating? Haven’t we given silent, tacit consent to malicious gossip, wickedly untrue, because we didn’t have courage enough to stand up for the person our silence victimized, and didn’t have courage enough to contradict the crowd we wanted to include us? Haven’t we all behaved in a manner that could never be squared with a profession of faith in Jesus Christ, and immediately pleaded any number of “reasons” that will never extenuate us?

Abraham lied to spare himself even as he exposed his wife to sexual molestation. This can only be a hideous, grotesque disfigurement in our spiritual forefather. Yet we must admit that it is part of the family resemblance, since the same cowardly abandonment is found in us.

God’s people are those whom scripture speaks of as his “peculiar treasure.” Unquestionably we are God’s peculiar treasure. And yet the treasure is tarnished. We shouldn’t be cavalier about this. At the same time, neither should we be paralysed by it. You see, because God has promised that there will always be more mercy in him than there is sin in us, we shouldn’t write ourselves or others out of the household and family of God just because the treasure is tarnished. Tarnished treasure is still treasure. What matters finally isn’t that our discipleship is perfect; what matters is that we aspire after consistency. John Calvin was fond of saying that what mattered finally was aspiration not achievement.

In a moment of panic Peter says, “Jesus? Never heard of the man.” Once? Three times. Still, eventually Peter is the acknowledged leader of the church in Jerusalem . Everyone knows what happened yet no one is writing him off.

Mark accompanied the apostle Paul on a missionary journey. Mark was only nineteen years old. He became homesick and returned home. Paul, of course, was disappointed. More than disappointed, he pronounced Mark unfit for apostolic work and refused to have Mark accompany him on his next missionary journey. Barnabas, on the other hand, Barnabas thought Paul to be wrong with his “one strike and you’re out” approach. Barnabas thought Mark should be given another opportunity. And so Barnabas took on Mark as missionary companion. Eventually Mark gave us the gospel that bears his name. Barnabas proved himself right in the episode with Mark, Paul wrong. Paul must have known he was wrong, for he subsequently wrote, “I’m not perfect…but I press on.”

In our Abrahamic venture what matters is that we press on.   What counts is our aspiration. We aspire to be worthy of our Lord Jesus Christ who has called us. And as God continued to use Abraham despite Abraham’s treachery, God’s promise is that he will continue to use us. Martin Luther said it so well: God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. God will ever use us despite the disfigurement we can’t hide.

 

III: — All of which brings us to the last family resemblance we are going to discuss today. Abraham is called out of the city of Haran . Haran is Toronto , Montreal , Newmarket , Aurora , King. Abraham and his family are called away from this. They are to distinguish themselves from that city which doesn’t know Abraham’s God and behaves as not knowing Abraham’s God. Abraham and his people are to have a different outlook, different convictions, different commitments. God’s people are always and everywhere different simply for being God’s people. We are therefore to think and do differently. We must distance ourselves from the outlook, convictions and commitments of those who aren’t Abraham’s descendants.

Yet Abraham doesn’t shun the city in principle. Instead, having distinguished himself from the city, having distanced himself from it as it were, he intercedes for the city; he pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah . This twofold movement, withdrawal from our city for the sake of commitment to our city with its people and problems and perverseness; this twofold movement is a pronounced family resemblance of the household of God. As the people of God we are called to an orientation different from that of our society so that we can exercise a ministry of intercession for the sake of our society.

Judicious balance is required here. Lack of balance results in two polarized positions. One segment of Christendom wants to repudiate utterly the society around it. These people speak of the need to keep oneself “unspotted from the world.” They uphold a religious isolationism that seeks to preserve the church by segregating the church from a society which they describe as godless. Such isolationism renders the people of God irrelevant.

The other pole in Christendom is determined to be “with it.” No isolationism for them. No self-distancing from the world at all. They identify with the world uncritically. While they are quick to tell us they love the world just because God loves the world, they fail to understand that they and God don’t love the world in exactly the same sense. God loves it to redeem it. They love it to ape it. Such uncritical aping renders the people of God useless.

The truth is, Abraham is neither irrelevant nor useless. Abraham stands back from his society precisely in order to be able stand with it. Abraham refuses to identify himself with the society in order to be free to intercede for the society. We who are possessed of Abraham’s faith must grasp what is to be done here and why: we who are citizens of the kingdom of God first are never citizens of that kingdom only; we remain citizens as well of a realm to which God has appointed us just because he has appointed himself to it, for indeed “The earth” – the whole earth – “is the Lord’s,” says the psalmist.

In order to exercise a ministry of intercession for our society we have to have a mind informed by the mind of Christ. As Paul puts it, “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God remake you so that your whole attitude of mind is changed.” (Rom. 12:1) Christians are mandated to be aware of what enhances human existence and what is degrading; what enhances community life and what destroys it. We have to be aware of what is important and what is indifferent. Some people will agree with us; many will not. No matter. When Abraham set out he was a minority; when he interceded for Sodom he was a minority. All that matters is that we discern the truth of God and do it.

At all times we must return to the balance of the twofold movement: God’s people can be helpful in a society only if they are first holy – distinct in some sense. (The root meaning of “holy” is “different.”) Conversely, we are genuinely holy only if we intend to be helpful (God’s holiness, remember, always aims at helping us.)

Some of the people who are most committed to a holy intervention in the world may be people whom we think initially to be world-denying. Thomas Merton, instance. Thomas Merton was a Roman Catholic Trappist monk in rural Kentucky . Yet when members of the churches in the USA were involved in voter registration drives for Afro-Americans; when Christians gave leadership in the civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam war demonstrations, it was Thomas Merton whose writings and conversations and wisdom informed these leaders and infused them, even as Merton wrote and spoke from within a monastery. Merton not only informed and infused; he reminded Christians relentlessly that unless they were immersed in Jesus Christ they would soon have nothing to say or do or be concerning the society around them.

Long before Merton, long before me, Abraham knew.

-Abraham knew about the society he would neither fawn or nor forsake.

-Abraham knew as well that the treachery of his own heart didn’t disqualify him as God’s servant.

-Above all, Abraham knew what it is to live in the land of promise, knowing that no uncertainty or insecurity outweighs the substance and truth of the God who unfailingly keeps the promises he makes.

Abraham’s is the family resemblance we want to recall and glory in on this day, Christian Family Sunday.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

May 2004

 

With What Do We Struggle? With Whom?

Genesis 32:22-32

 

One of my friends, a pipe-smoker, found himself sitting in a meeting beside a fellow who was also a pipe-smoker. My friend told the other man where pipe tobacco could be purchased in Toronto for 75 cents a tin less than anywhere else. But this tobacco shop isn’t easy to find. And so my friend described in complicated detail how one gets to this shop, buried as it is among the back streets and alleys of innermost inner Toronto – all for the sake of 75 cents. When the meeting concluded my friend learned he’d been talking to Charles Bronfman, one time owner of Seagram’s Distilleries, owner of the Montreal Expos Baseball Club, owner of the Montreal Canadiens Hockey Club, owner of so very much more that he, Bronfman, has forgotten just how much more.

All of us have had an experience like this. We’ve all encountered someone whose identity we weren’t aware of, and came to be embarrassed by what we had said to the person we didn’t recognize. Or perhaps we weren’t embarrassed following such an encounter; perhaps we were amused or even delighted as we discovered that the woman who had sat at the lunch table with us was the Lieutenant Governor or the vice president of the Royal Bank.

 

I: — Today we are looking at a story, three thousand years old, that speaks of a man wrestling all night with someone whose identity he learned only in the morning. Jacob wrestles during the night. He is locked in a desperate struggle. In the night’s thickest darkness he thinks he’s contending with another man. In the bright light of the new day he learns who his “antagonist” was: it was God himself. It’s only at the end of the life-and-death encounter, only when Jacob has struggled, hung on, fought through, that he learns the identity of the one he’s contended with throughout a night he had thought was never going to end.

At some point in our lives all of us have dark nights. At some point all of us struggle with something that resists us, thwarts us, threatens to overwhelm us. From a human perspective it appears to be a struggle with a purely human situation or a merely human opponent. In the bright light of a new day, however, we learn that through it all we were contending with nothing less, no one other, than God himself.

You see, because God is present to all of life, every situation in life, every encounter in life, every struggle in life, every engagement, anywhere in life, is also an engagement with God ultimately. From a human perspective it appears to be no more than a purely human struggle, terrible as this often is. Yet since God abandons no one, since God forsakes nobody, any struggle anywhere in life is ultimately a struggle with God.

Let me say right now that because our Lord Jesus Christ was profoundly forsaken by his Father on Good Friday in Gethsemane and on Calvary for our sakes; because our Lord Jesus Christ was profoundly God-forsaken for our sakes, there is no human being, anywhere in the world, who is God-forsaken now or ever will be.

This is not to say that there’s no one who doesn’t feel God-forsaken. At some point we all feel God-forsaken, even as in truth we never are.

Neither is this to say everyone has come to faith, is going to come to faith, or wants to come to faith. I am not pretending that because God forsakes no one therefore everyone is now a secret believer. Still, the fact that some have not yet recognized God and acknowledged him; the fact that some have never heard of him; the fact that some have heard of him but choose to ignore him; none of this means that he is now ignoring them. God ever remains that “Other” with whom all men and women are involved at all times, whether they are aware of it or not. What appears to be only a human situation, however difficult, is also, always, an encounter with God.

What are some of these situations? Disappointment, depression, despair, bereavement; temptation to revenge, temptation to bitterness, temptation to that peculiar form of insanity wherein we know that sin is sin, know that a terrible price is attached to committing it, yet perversely want to commit it anyway. In all of these situations we can simply lie down and quit, overwhelmed; or we can wrestle and keep on wrestling until daybreak.

Jacob wrestled during the night. Darkness is a rich biblical symbol suggesting turbulence, threat, loneliness, and fear. As Jacob wrestles he cries to his opponent, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

In my work as pastor I see much human distress, and see many people attempting to cope with that distress. Some give up. Others say, “I’ll never quit. I have to see this situation through to some resolution. I can’t let it go until something in this struggle has been wrested to my good. I have to prevail until my prevailing finds me a different person.”
A few years ago I sat at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with a man who was struggling desperately to recover his sobriety. He had had a “slip” and had been on a terrible drunk. He was now coming off it, and he was frightened. He was afraid of going into the “DTs”, the delirium tremens, wherein the suffering alcoholic has nightmares that are beyond any nightmare that any of us can imagine. As many of you are aware, alcoholic persons are overtaken by the “DTs” not when they are drunk but when they are becoming sober. Therefore there is one, unfailing way to avoid the horror: get drunk again. But of course to do this is to give up; it’s to walk away from the struggle and forfeit the blessing awaiting us on the other side of the struggle. This man wasn’t going to give up. He was going to struggle. He sat beside me, shaking like a leaf, perspiration pouring down his face, frightened, sick, but determined to see it all through to the end, because he knew deep down that at the end there really was blessing: sobriety. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was certainly an authentic sight: a man determined to wrestle through a night that might be longer than he thought and darker than he imagined, in the midst of which he cried out, in effect, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

Recently I spoke with an ex-convict who had been “on the street,” as he put it (i.e., out of jail) for eighteen months. He had been a “paper hanger” – a writer of rubber cheques, worthless cheques. He had been “on the street” several times over in the past few years, but had been able to stay on the street only for a week or two before he succumbed to temptation yet again and wrote another bad cheque. Then it was back to jail. He had repeated this pattern for twenty years. Now he was on the street once more. Eighteen months of freedom was more than he had had in two decades.  He could never be described theologically sophisticated. Nevertheless every morning, he told me, he cried to someone, somewhere, to keep him on the street for one more day; just one more day. He was going to wrestle through each night until daybreak.

I’ve never been tempted to “hang paper.” But we’ve all been tempted by something else, in some other direction. And hasn’t the temptation been so awful, so visceral, that our stomach turned and our knees shook? And wasn’t the struggle so very intense just because the outcome was so crucial for us? At the time we thought it was only a human struggle, only a struggle we were having with ourselves. Unbeknown to us it was more than that; it was a struggle that involved the living God.

No one makes light of bereavement. I don’t doubt that it’s dreadful. The more we loved and were loved by the one we’ve lost the more deeply our bereavement bites. C.S. Lewis, professor of English Literature and Christian thinker, married in his fifties. He was wondrously happy. He felt his “ship had come in.” Within three years, however, he went from husband to widower. Upon the death of Joy Davidman, his wife, he spelled out his anguish in a little book, A Grief Observed. He begins the book, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness….I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.” He adds, “I was happy before I ever met my wife. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources;’ I shan’t do so badly….Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘common sense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.” (I speak carefully here, carefully and reticently, since my wife hasn’t died – yet.) We’ve all seen bereaved people give up. We’ve all seen bereaved people quit, go under, and wait for the undertaker to close the lid a second time. And we’ve also seen bereaved people wrestle agonisingly through a long, dark night of turbulence, loneliness and fear. They keep on wrestling. Come daybreak, they want – and are going to receive – that blessing they’ve refused to forfeit.

You may have noticed a distinction in the situations I’ve described: while our society doesn’t fault someone for being bereaved, it does fault someone for being fraudulent or alcoholic. But all such social distinctions have no bearing whatever on the struggle in which people find themselves. What difference does it make whether they landed in the turbulence through their fault, someone else’s fault, or no one’s fault? One of the features of Jacob’s struggle had to do with the fact that he had cheated his brother Esau. When he finds himself wracked Jacob fears that maybe Esau has caught up to him and is going to retaliate; Jacob fears he’s struggling for his life, and all of this on account of his own wrongdoing. But whether we struggle on account of our own wrongdoing or not is beside the point. All that matters is that we don’t give up just because at the end of it all there is going to be blessing for us.

Struggles are legion: the struggle against habitual negative thinking; the struggle against a besetting temptation which, from a rational standpoint, is silly and yet continues to mesmerize us until we are tempted to keep on staring at it like a rabbit staring at a snake, then to find that it’s got us; the struggle against mind-bending disappointment more painful than a punch in the mouth; the struggle against disillusionment that threatens to curdle our spirit and shrivel our heart for the rest of our life.

In all of this there is turbulence, loneliness and fear. In all of this it appears we’re engaged in a difficult human situation only, contending with a human reality only. Yet because God is the environment in which all of life unfolds, ultimately we wrestle with him.

 

II: — In the old, old story of Jacob the dawn comes at last. Light is a biblical symbol for order and wholeness. As light – order and wholeness – overtakes Jacob, he is asked his name.

Now to us modern folk someone’s name is merely a means of labelling that person. To say that my name is Victor doesn’t mean I’m victorious in any sense. My name is simply a label that keeps me from being confused with Bill or Tom or Jerry.

For Israelite people, however, “name” meant “nature.” Someone’s name was her chief characteristic. If an Israelite were named “Victor” it was because he was victorious, or he wouldn’t have that name.

The name “Jacob” means cheater. Jacob is asked his name (he had earlier cheated his brother Esau) and he replies, “Cheater; that’s my name; that’s who I am.” From a human perspective a person is what she does. She cheats? Then she’s a cheater. Name and nature are one.

This, of course, is how we regard other people but never how we regard ourselves. If someone lies to us once, just once, we say he’s a liar. But if we lie, and lie more than once, we never identify ourselves privately or announce ourselves publicly as a liar. Anyone else who boasts is a boaster; anyone else who commits adultery is an adulterer. The truth is, what we predicate of other people must be predicated of us as well. As surely as we insist other people name themselves by what they do, we name ourselves by what we do.

Then what’s your name, and what’s mine? It all depends on what we do. How would others speak of us? Cheater, liar, manipulator, exploiter, complainer, worrier, weeper, whiner, tantrum-thrower?

“Not fair,” you say; “there’s more to me than that.” But we never make this concession to other people. “Still not fair,” you say, “because we are being ‘named’ precisely where we are struggling most valiantly.” Correct. The sarcastic person who is struggling with all his might to rid himself of his deep-dyed sarcasm is still labelled, and labelled contemptuously, “acid-tongue.” The bereaved person who is struggling is still labelled, and labelled contemptuously, “blubberer.”

Despite the apparent unfairness of it all there remains something positive, health-promoting, about it. When Jacob admits his name, “cheater,” he then – and only then – receives the blessing. The blessing is a new name. He is no longer named “Jacob” but rather “ Israel .” New name means new nature, new principal characteristic. New name means new nature, new identity, new future. We know what “Jacob” [Ja-kob] means: cheater. And “ Israel ?” “ Israel ” [Yisra-el] means “he who contends with God.” The alcoholic who says, with painful honesty, “yes, I am an alcoholic: that’s who I am” – this person is on the threshold of the blessing: contented sobriety. Any person who honestly, painfully (honesty is always painful) admits her name: liar, luster, habitual negative thinker, fault-finder, adulterer – any such person is on the threshold of a new name, a new nature, a new identity, a new future.

It all happens for Jacob at dawn, after the struggle through the long, dark night. It happens at dawn, when light brings order to his life and wholeness as well.

 

III: — Naming and renaming are crucial throughout scripture. Jesus says to Simon, “‘Simon’? That’s no name for you. From now on I’m going to call you Petros, Peter, the rock. Rocky. That’s it. ‘Rocky’.” New name, new nature, new identity, new future.

We reply, “But Peter didn’t appear rock-like for quite a while. After Jesus had named him “Rocky” didn’t he deny the Master, three times over? Wasn’t he among the disciples who abandoned the Master at his most agonising hour?” Then why does Jesus call him “Peter, The Rock, Rocky”? Because our Lord knows that when someone is given a new name he conforms himself to that name. He becomes what, who, he’s been named.

We all know how this operates at the purely psychological level. If you keep telling a child he’s stupid he’ll believe himself to be stupid and act stupidly. If you keep telling a child she’s superior she’ll believe herself superior and act like the snob she is. People conform themselves to the name wherewith they are named.

If this is true at the merely psychological level, how much farther-reaching it is at the spiritual level. Because of what has occurred to believers through our Lord’s cross and resurrection; because of the Holy Spirit who cements Jesus Christ into us and us into Christ; because of all this we have been given a new name: we are son or daughter of God; we are brother or sister to Jesus Christ our elder brother; we are friend to the Friend who sticks closer than a brother. To be sure, in most of this the reality may be largely unapparent – as unapparent as it was in Peter the day Jesus called him “Rocky.” But let’s remember: the day came when stumbling Peter; the day came when fumbling, faltering, falling down Peter was acclaimed the leader of the church in Jerusalem . The day came when Peter’s influence was so widespread and so telling that people laid their sick friends in the street in order that Peter’s shadow might fall on them.

The truth is, the day has been appointed for all of us when what we have been named in Christ Jesus our Lord will cease to be only apparent and will be made fully manifest.

The apostle Paul tells us that the new nature which has been given us is “being renewed every day.” New right now, as new as it can ever be, yet always being renewed? He means that the new name/nature God has given us as a title is beginning to characterize us and will continue to characterize us until the gap between name and nature is overcome, and title and fact are one.
Like Jacob of old you and are I contending somewhere in life today. It could be in any of the areas I have mentioned; more likely it is in scores more that I have not. This makes no difference.

What matters is this: we never give up the struggle; we never quit. We are going to continue wrestling through the night, however dark or lonely or fearsome, because the day does dawn. And with the dawn, light, our lives are blessed with order and wholeness.

The reason for all this, of course, is that regardless of where we are struggling in life, with what, ultimately we are contending with the God who contends with us in the sense that he first contends for us, contends for us effectually in Christ Jesus, just because he wants only to bless us.

In Jesus Christ he has given us a new name. One day the name we’ve been given, the nature we’ve been promised, will be ours in reality. And on that day the blessing we’ve long craved because long needed will be ours, and ours for evermore.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                

 April 2004

Joseph

Genesis 39:1-23

Imagine it is Thanksgiving Sunday. The choir is singing thanksgiving music. The sopranos are singing, “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.” A few bars later the basses come in singing, “Now thank we all our God.” At this point there are two themes or motifs running through the choir anthem at the same time. A few bars later still the altos and tenors begin singing something else. Now there are several themes or motifs wending their way through the one piece of music at the same time. In the hands of an able composer such music isn’t a giant discord that jars hearers; in the hands of an able composer such music is multi-textured and marvellously rich.

Life is like this. There are many different things going on in everybody’s life at the same time. This doesn’t mean that life is therefore distressingly complicated and hopelessly fragmented. On the contrary, it means that our lives are complex. The fact that they are complex means that they are multi-textured and can be marvellously rich.

Joseph, one of our ancestors in faith, lived a life, under God, that gathered up many different themes or motifs. Under God it all issued in a life that was not only rich for Joseph, but rich for everyone whose life touched his back then; and rich as well for every one of us whose life touches Joseph’s now. Today we are going to deepen our acquaintance with Joseph, for as we meet him afresh and find our lives and his coursing through each other, we shall become richer still.

I:: — Let’s look first at the theme of God’s steadfast love. It was Joseph’s conviction that God’s love is steadfast despite the seeming jumble of events that made up Joseph’s life and appeared to contradict it.

Events often seem to unfold around us the way “pick-up sticks” fall out and fall over each other as soon as the child opens her hand and releases the sticks. We’ve all played pick-up sticks. We’ve all watched the sticks fall out helter-skelter, with no apparent order, the sticks merely sticking out higgledy-piggledy everywhere. Life appears to unfold, “fall out”, just like this.

Think of the developments in Joseph’s life over which he has no control at all. His father favours him inasmuch as he is born when his father is old and his father thereafter dotes on him. His brothers resent him. His natural gifts (including his innate business smarts) cause others to envy him. Foreign traders come along when his treacherous brothers have thrown him into a pit and carry him off to Egypt. In Egypt he’s imprisoned. Famine scourges the people. All of this is beyond his control. He hasn’t asked for any of it, isn’t responsible for it, and can’t do anything about it. It just “falls out” the way pick-up sticks fall out.

How is Joseph to react? He could have reacted the way we’ve all seen people react (the way we may have reacted ourselves) as events jumble themselves around us.

– “I’ve been victimized!”, Joseph could have said, “by my family, no less!” Who hasn’t said it?

– “Life isn’t fair!” True! Life isn’t fair. Fairness happens to be an adjective we never get to use of life.

– “I’m powerless!” He is powerless when a nasty woman slanders him and has him jailed. A psychiatrist under whom I studied told the class that powerlessness is the greatest stress anyone can undergo in a stress-ridden life.

– “I’m forever having to `skate on thin ice.’ I’m forever caught in a welter of insecurities.” He could have reacted this way, since if he fails to please Pharaoh, Pharaoh will have his head. There are a thousand insecurities that keep all of us skating on thin ice all the time.

– “I’m not appreciated!” Joseph could have reacted in this manner too. After all, he does the butler an enormous favour which the butler then forgets. The truth is, none of us is appreciated the way we feel we should be, and likely none of us is appreciated the way we ought to be.

We can always react in any of these ways, as Joseph could have too. But shouting furiously while we pound our fist on the wall won’t help. Nevertheless, there is something that will help. We grasp what it is as we follow Joseph in his ups and down all the way down to prison where the text of scripture tells us, “The Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love.”

It is years after the most turbulent period of his life that the fact of God’s steadfast love is stamped on Joseph and he sees in retrospect that God’s love has been steadfast in all circumstances. The most turbulent period was the abuse Joseph suffered at the hands of his brothers; their mistreatment, after all, landed him in Egypt and precipitated everything that befell him thereafter. One day his brutal brothers find themselves (and their families) desperate during a famine. They go to Egypt in hope of acquiring food. Joseph identifies himself to his brothers. They think now they are never going to get food, since Joseph has a long memory; they think too that not only will they not get food, they’ll get vengeance. Joseph looks them in the eye and says, “When you fellows abused me and abandoned me years ago you were bent on evil, NOTHING BUT EVIL, weren’t you!” (Now the brothers think they won’t survive another ten minutes.) “Yet the evil you intended, God has turned to good — for I can give you food.”

It’s all true for us as well. Regardless of what befalls us accidentally; regardless of what evil others visit upon us deliberately; regardless of what happens whose nature — bane or blessing — we can’t assess in the moment of its happening; regardless of what it is, God takes it all up and does something with it, something good for us or others, something that can ultimately be only an expression of his steadfast love just because steadfast love is all he himself is ultimately.

Everyone knows that when the pick-up sticks fall out, they fall out in disarray. Everyone knows that there are periods in life bleak beyond telling and black beyond describing. Everyone knows there are developments in life that seem as pointless as they are pitiless. Nevertheless, what the brothers intended for evil — and was evil — God yet wrested for good. Just because Joseph knew what God’s steadfast love had done in the worst moments of his life, Joseph would know for the rest of his life what he could count on God’s steadfast love to do — even if Joseph didn’t see it at the moment.

We who know of that incarnation which postdated Joseph have even more startling evidence of God’s steadfast love: he whose Son was victimized uniquely vindicated that Son — and therein vindicated himself — as he raised his Son and displayed him as evidence of steadfast love.

II: — There is another theme or motif in Joseph’s pick-up stick life. The theme is the forgiveness we press upon those who mistreat us. When his brothers appeared cap-in-hand before him Joseph could have done two things: he could simply have let them starve, or he could have nodded to the Egyptian police and said, “You know what to do with them.” Joseph had his brothers in his gunsight — and he refused to pull the trigger.

Never think that Joseph is a wimp. Wimps don’t forgive; wimps can’t forgive; wimps are too weak to do anything except find themselves victimized again. To forgive requires immense strength, ego-strength. To forgive means the injury that has wounded us we neither continue to absorb in ourselves helplessly nor boomerang back onto our assailant vindictively. The manifestly weak person can only invite further victimization. The seemingly strong person can only boomerang his assailant’s weapon back onto the assailant himself. It is precisely the strong person who can forgive.

A cruel way of ridding oneself of nuisance animal is to put ground glass in the animal’s food. As the animal eats, it swallows tiny fragments of sharp glass. The needle-sharp fragments perforate the animal’s digestive tract and the animal haemorrhages to death in terrible pain. Most people look upon the matter of forgiving assailants as no more than eating ground glass. Why swallow an indigestible substance that leaves us bleeding to death in terrible pain? People who think like this, of course, have it all wrong. It isn’t forgiving that amounts to swallowing ground glass; it’s resentment, it’s nursing a grudge, it’s plotting revenge, it’s biding one’s time, it’s fuelling hatred, it’s settling scores. This is the ground glass diet of those who mistake forgiveness for wimpiness.

Five hundred years after Joseph a prophet appeared, Jeremiah by name, who was mistreated much as Joseph had been. (Among other things, men with murderous hearts threw Jeremiah into a dry well hoping that they had heard the last of him.) Jeremiah survived, not in order to see whom he could pay back next — and thereby stuff himself with ground glass unknowingly; Jeremiah survived to write, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion.” (Jer. 3:22-23) To have as our portion that Lord whose faithfulness to us is great is to be steeped in his ceaseless mercies. Blessed by ceaseless mercies, how can we fail in turn to bestow them?

Forgiveness of injuries little and great is not only a sign of faith in God, it is a sign of wisdom in us.

III: — The rich complexity that was Joseph’s life discloses yet another theme: integrity. The wife of Joseph’s boss tried to seduce him. She tried not once but many times. Joseph was appalled. “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”, he retorted as Potiphar’s wife redoubled her adulterous efforts. Joseph didn’t yield.

Integrity is easy when there’s no temptation. Obedience is easy when there’s no seductive whisper. Obedience comes is difficult, however — and means worlds more — when temptation is relentless. Obedience is cheap when there’s no price to be paid for obeying. But after Joseph had cried “No!” to Potiphar’s wife she slandered him; now obedience was costly. In costly situations obedience is rendered to God and integrity is maintained in us only by grace and by grit.

In Egypt Joseph is a long way from home, a long way from anyone who knows him, a long way from prying eyes and wagging tongues which (let’s be honest) help to keep us upright. Joseph can yield to Potiphar’s wife without fear of being detected. Yet he doesn’t think about this for so much as a second. His instantaneous reaction is, “How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”

We must be careful to note what Joseph’s instantaneous response was not. He didn’t blurt, “But I might get AIDS! or “You might become pregnant!” or “Your husband might kill me!” or even “I don’t find you attractive.” Any of these responses has nothing to do with obedience to the Holy One of Israel and integrity before him; any one of these responses is mere self-interest, as much self-interest as the self-indulgence of the fornicator (albeit somewhat more prudential.) No doubt at some point Joseph said to the Egyptian aristocrat, “But I’m an Israelite!”; and no doubt she replied, “Yes, but you aren’t in Israel now!” Joseph could only have said then, “Nevertheless, Israel is in me, however much I am exiled through having to live in Egypt!”

The business person on a business trip; the schoolteacher at that convention in Montreal; the bank employee counting bills by herself in a back office (after all, the chartered banks write off millions of dollars every year because of employee theft); the preacher sitting alone in his study (nobody knows whether he’s hard at work quarrying in the granite of scripture and theology or collecting his salary for reading Sports Illustrated and McClean’s magazine) — these are the situations where we can “get away from it” (at least at some level). Therefore these are situations where we must be so schooled in the school of Christ that our instantaneous reaction is, “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” And then having said this from our heart, know with our head too that the matter isn’t over: there remains a price to be paid, as Joseph learned when his rejection of the seductress landed him in greater difficulty still.

Today, of course, a secular world and a secularized church can’t understand Joseph. Instead we are told, “Of course Joseph will yield: the Victorian era is over. Of course Joseph will yield: the sexual revolution has been with us since the pill. Of course Joseph will yield: he’s a young man beset with hormones. Of course, of course, of course….”

Joseph was simpler, profounder, godlier all at once. “How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” Twelve hundred years after Joseph an apostle appeared, John by name, who wrote to Christian friends whom temptation was hammering. “Remember”, said John, “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)

IV: — There is yet another theme, along with the other three, multiplying the richness of Joseph’s complex life: the theme of blessing. One of the most startling features of Joseph’s story is the fact that people whose lives intersect Joseph’s find themselves blessed, assisted, enhanced. To be around Joseph is to be graced and to find oneself enriched.

We all know that the opposite kind of person exists as well, the person whose mere presence is a dark cloud, a millstone, a wet blanket — and worse. Years ago I saw such a person depicted in the movie Becket. The wife of mediaeval England’s King Richard, a woman who has to be the world’s all-time nagger, is nagging him fiercely, relentlessly, as her custom is. In addition, her appearance is as off-putting as her tongue: her hair always looks to be combed by an egg-beater, her face resembles the compost pile, and her personality is as lively as a dialtone. Her ceaseless nagging finally pushes Richard over the edge; he turns on her and says, acid in every word, “You, woman, are a barren desert into which I was forced to wander.” Terrible but true. It was just the opposite with Joseph. He was an oasis in which others found themselves growing and their lives fruitful. People who gathered around Joseph found their spirits lifted and their faces brightened and their load lightened. Under God, Joseph himself prospered; through Joseph, others prospered.

God’s people are everywhere called to be salt and light and leaven. Salt forestalls putrefaction and brings out hidden flavour. Leaven (yeast) permeates dough and lightens it, obviating that indigestible lump which only gives people stomach ache. Light dispels mildew, the foul-smelling fungus that ruins anything kept in the dank. Salt, light and leaven aren’t dramatic items. As undramatic as they are, however, they are needed if others are to find their lives lightened and brightened and eased. Salt, light, leaven are scarcely noticed themselves; yet in even the smallest quantities their immediate influence is vast. Joseph was a good person to be around, for those who kept company with him found their lives bettered in every way.

V: — What was it about Joseph that gave rise to all of this? What was it about Joseph that rendered him a blessing? It was this: Joseph always knew who he was. Regardless of where he was, but especially when he was in Egypt, in all circumstances Joseph knew who he was. It’s crucial that we know who we are.

When I was admitted to The Writers’ Union a couple of years ago I was thrilled with this turn of events. I imagined myself meeting Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley and the whole host of literary luminaries. About this time I happened to be visiting a very wise man in the congregation one afternoon, and of course I managed to tell him to what august company I had been admitted. No doubt I appeared elated with this frippery, intoxicated even, but he didn’t leap to share my elation. Instead he stared at me for the longest time, face expressionless, and then said quietly, soberly, somewhat uneasily, “Victor, before you run off to The Writers’ Union, just be sure you know who you are.”

Who am I? Who tells me who I am? Who are you? And who tells you who you are? By faith in Jesus Christ I am a child of God. He makes me who I am; and having made he who I am, he — and he alone — tells me what he has made: child of God, not child of darkness or child of night of child of perdition.

Since, as the apostle Paul reminds us, Jesus Christ was known in essence ‘though not by name to patriarchs and prophets, Joseph knew the same Lord as I, knew himself born of the same Saviour as I, and found himself a beacon, a lighthouse, amidst a “crooked and perverse generation” (Phil. 2:15), as his descendant from Tarsus was to say 1200 years later.

It is by faith that we become children of God, and are therein made to be those whose lives, as complex as anyone’s, are also as rich and helpful as Joseph’s.

                                                                      Victor Shepherd        

June 1997

 

Of Wilderness and Wonder

Exodus 3:1-6

All of us wish life were easier. Troubles afflict us at every turn. They are as abrasive as sandpaper and as relentless as a dripping tap. One day someone dear to us dies, and we are bereaved. Another day disappointment steamrollers us, and we are crushed. Another day the person we always trusted betrays us, and we are flattened. Another day the political climber decides to climb above us by climbing on us, and we feel we’ve been buried.

In addition to what befalls us from one day to another there is the chronic affliction whose pain is relentless every day. One of my friends has a son with cerebral palsy. The son is markedly affected and has never been able to join in children’s games and adolescents’ cavorting. One arm is of little use and one leg drags awkwardly. Recently my friend was waiting for his son, waiting and waiting until his patience curdled into annoyance. “Hurry up!”, he shouted in exasperation, not thinking that his son couldn’t hurry up, simply not thinking at all. To his surprise his son unravelled. “Dad, I am twenty years old; all my I life I have been slow; all my life I have been last; all my life other people have told me I keep them waiting; all my life I have felt I am an impediment, a nuisance, something others endure out of social politeness even as they secretly wish they didn’t have to.” My friend was crushed at what his impatience had unleashed in his son. The son’s affliction is his physical disability; the father’s affliction is his guilt over his thoughtless reaction to his son’s helplessness.

How much easier it would be to “believe in God”; how much easier it would be to “take time to be holy” or “sense God’s presence” if only we weren’t ceaselessly distracted by our troubles!

All of us are stressed in some measure, afflicted, set upon. And all of us tend to think we are more stressed, more afflicted, more set upon than most. Yes, we admit that the human condition extends over humankind. At the same time nobody quite “knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

All of us assume that our foreparents in faith had an easier time than we are having. Surely faith came more readily for our ancestors; surely they didn’t have to struggle for faith the way we seem to have to struggle. Just imagine how much less harried they were than we! They may have suffered more physically (painkillers being unknown), but their mental anguish could never have compared to the emotional torment we are stuck with today.

All of us assume one thing more (at least assume it for a while). We think that in the midst of our intensified suffering we do have one enormous advantage over our foreparents: we can leave the bleakness of our inner or outer wilderness. Or if not leave it, at least we can find relief from it in ways they could not. We have TA,TM, TV (transactional analysis, transcendental meditation, television). In addition we can “live better chemically”, thanks to pharmaceutical companies and their helpful researchers. Whether because of prescription drugs, self-help, psychotherapy or the latest in technological sophistication, we feel that a new era, with new human potential, is just around the corner. One quick turn and the wilderness (inner or outer) will be behind us for ever!

And then the truth dawns on us, as discernment is granted to us. The wilderness belongs to the human condition! The wilderness is inescapable! To attempt to flee it is to flee life. To try to escape it — and everything about it that chafes us — is to pursue unreality. Pursuing unreality leaves us falsifying our humanity, as we magically think we can transcend the human condition. To succeed in pursuing unreality tragically lands us in the world of unreality: mental illness, derangement, psychosis.

As if whatever wilderness we live in, cannot avoid living in, were not enough, the bleakness of the wilderness is intensified whenever we suspect, with chilled heart, that God has withdrawn himself from us, turned his back on us, rendered himself inaccessible to us. God, we feel, has become deaf or indifferent. At this point our isolation (part of what it means to live in the wilderness) has worsened into desolation.

The psalmist feels that this is what has happened to him. “I commune with my heart in the night”, he tells us in Psalm 77. (Everything seems worse at night!) “I meditate and search my spirit. Will the Lord spurn for ever, and never again be favourable? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? ” Here the psalmist is pouring out his doubts about God. Perhaps God’s heart has mysteriously calcified. Perhaps God is no longer favourably disposed toward us. Perhaps God’s steadfast love has ceased, God’s faithfulness to his people somehow having evaporated. Perhaps God’s promise — “I will never fail you or forsake you” — is never going to be fulfilled.

Yet there is something more. In addition to his doubts about God the psalmist is stricken by his doubts about himself. “Has God in his anger shut up his compassion?” Everywhere in scripture there is one thing, and one thing only, that arouses God’s anger: sin. There is one thing only that perpetuates God’s anger: impenitence in the face of sin. No wonder the psalmist moans, “I commune with my heart in the night;…I search my spirit.” Plainly he would repent instantly if he knew what he had to repent of. Just as plainly he doesn’t know. He can only speculate, in his wretchedness, whether, or where, or how, or how often he has sinned so grievously as to anger God and for how long he has unwittingly remained unrepentant so as to perpetuate God’s anger. So confused is he that he isn’t even sure if he has sinned at all. Hence the question, “Has God in anger shut up his compassion?” How can the psalmist be expected to defuse God’s anger when he doesn’t even know whether sin-awakened anger is behind God’s apparent disappearance?

The wilderness intensifies, doesn’t it. First there is the human condition which can be described accurately as a wilderness. Then there is the chilling feeling that God has fallen silent, disappeared on us. Finally there is the erosion of self-confidence. As the psalmist’s self-confidence erodes (“Is God inaccessible because he has failed me or because I have failed him? How am I ever going to find out?”) he begins to spiral down; down into that mess of doubt, self-accusation, depression, short-lived protestation of innocence, longer-lived suspicion of guilt. Left alone he is going to go all the way down to despair.

Just before the psalmist crashes in despair a surge of faith short-circuits his doubt. He cries out, calling up God’s deeds of old. “I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; yea, I will remember thy deeds of old….Thou art the God who workest wonders.” His simple recollection of God’s deeds of old halts the spiral as he particularly recalls the foundational item in his people’s consciousness: deliverance through the Red Sea. The Israelite people had always believed that they had been released from slavery in Egypt only because God had taken note of their suffering, their helplessness, their isolation, their desolation; in a word, God had taken note of their horrible wilderness in the midst of Egypt’s luxuriance. The angel of death had passed over them, sparing them annihilation on their way out of Egypt. Spared annihilation then, were they going to be slaughtered when they arrived at the seaside with no way through? But a way they could never have imagined opened before them. “Thy way was holy”, the psalmist exclaims with gratitude and wonder as he recalls the last-minute deliverance, “Thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters.”

“Great waters”, “seas”, “floods” — all these terms in Hebrew symbolize one thing: chaos. Chaos is impenetrable confusion; confusion which is formless, fathomless, exitless. While there was no way out, and no way around, under God there was a way through. “Thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters.” From that moment Israel exulted ceaselessly in its deliverance.

Then the psalmist adds a line that all we wilderness-wanderers must hang on to: “Yet God’s footprints were unseen.” Israel always knew its deliverance to be real, even though God’s hand in it remained invisible to others. There was nothing about Israel’s deliverance that would dispel unbelievers’ unbelief and impel them to cry out, “Truly God is!” The literature of the nations that surrounded Israel at this point in history (particularly the literature of Egypt) contains no reference to the Red Sea event. A rag-tag bunch of social misfits managed somehow to avoid slavery in Egypt? So what! This was nothing to the nations; but to Israel, everything. As far as the nations were concerned God’s footprints were invisible (which is to say, God himself is unreal). But as far as Israel was concerned, “Thou art the God who workest wonders.”

God’s footsteps have always been unseen to all except the Spirit-attuned. When the baby was born in the cowshed, who bothered to note one more baby, born out of wedlock, whose arrival could only worsen the poverty of parents who were already poor enough? A few shepherds (and fewer wisemen), however, were overtaken by the wonder of the Incarnate Son who had been appointed Sovereign and Judge of the entire cosmos.

Years later passers-by in Jerusalem saw three crosses on a road leading out of the city. There was nothing noteworthy about the crosses, since Rome had never boasted of either patience or clemency, always preferring to crucify first and ask questions later. Nevertheless, on one cross there hung a young man whose death has ever since found the Spirit-attuned startled at the wonder of their own forgiveness.

City-life continued without interruption in the days after the unexceptional execution. To be sure, members of a small, Jewish messianic sect behaved as if something momentous had occurred. But Palestine was riddled with small, messianic sects that behaved oddly; all one had to do was wait for the sect to sputter out. The story was that some women had taken perfume to the cemetery in order to deodorize a corpse. They were met by him who was the same one they had known for months even as he was now indescribably different.

God’s footprints are unseen. Yet those in whom the Spirit has surged know that the God “who workest wonders” has come upon them.

Wonder is not a sigh of relief as the wilderness is finally left behind. Wonder is our gasp of amazement at God’s drawing near to us in the midst of that wilderness that cannot be left behind. While it is true that God’s footprints are not visible to anyone at all, it is also true that those who do not harden their heart against God come to know that the wilderness is the venue of God’s visitation. In this wilderness we are surprised and startled, made to understand and moved to give thanks. Wonder seizes us in the midst of a wilderness we had thought to be as bitter as it is barren. Now we are found exclaiming with the psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel who alone does wondrous things.” (Psalm 72:18)

It is plain that as the psalmist reflected on the wondrous deliverance at the Red Sea he knew he could not merely survive in the wilderness, but even thrive in it. We shall be persuaded that we too can thrive in it as we look to the psalmist and other foreparents in faith. After all, the varied wildernesses which overtook our foreparents were no less bleak or unpromising than ours.

Think of the prophet Hosea. His wife became a prostitute and bore three children whose father could have been anyone except her husband. When she was thoroughly used up, as discardable now as she had long been degraded, she was deemed to have a market value of fifteen shekels: half the price of a slave! Absorbing blotter-like the obscene jokes which downtown loungers had long snickered over but which Hosea was only now hearing, he made his way to the marketplace and brought his wife home. Why? Just because his love for her was greater than his outrage, sorrow and agony on account of her. Thereafter Hosea spoke the warmest word of any Hebrew prophet, steeping his people in God’s tenderest love for them. It’s not that Hosea’s life-story had a Cinderella-ending: his threw herself remorsefully at her husband’s feet and lived ever after as his dutiful, affectionate and faithful wife. There is no evidence that anything like this happened. In other words, the wilderness was not escaped. Nevertheless, through his wilderness-experience, and only through this experience, Hosea was granted the profoundest insight into the wounded heart of God. More than granted an insight into the wounded heart of God, Hosea was entrusted with the tenderest word of God. Through this one man God was able to say to all the people of Israel, “It was I who knew you in the wilderness…”. (Hosea 13:5) Hosea speaks to all who cringe self-consciously in that wilderness of public humiliation and private shame. They must know that they are uniquely qualified to speak gently of a tender love ceaselessly issuing from the God whose people embarrass him but never deflect him.

Elijah spoke God’s truth to political power; spoke God’s truth to the evil tyranny of King Ahab and his cruel wife, Jezebel. Jezebel swore she would kill Elijah. Feeling that faithfulness to God was tantamount to suicide; feeling that his life had boiled dry and might just as well blow away in the desert aridity of it all, Elijah “went a day’s journey into the wilderness…and asked that he might die.” (I Kings 19:4) To his surprise he was fed by a messenger of God. Strengthened now, he made his way to a cave where neither the earthquake nor the fire nor the hurricane (all of which were publicly verifiable) bespoke God. On the other hand, the “still, small voice” (undoubtedly heard by Elijah alone) most certainly did. Told to return home by another wilderness (the wilderness of Damascus: there really is no escape!) Elijah anoints the kings of Syria and Israel, as well as the prophet Elisha, his successor. The wilderness of fear and self-pity is yet the place where we shall know ourselves met, cherished, moved beyond our complaining self-indulgence, and reclaimed for a glad obedience which furthers God’s work in the world.

Moses knew his vocation to be that of leader. He knew too that hardship in the wilderness was vastly preferable to the security of slavery in Egypt. Through this leader God thundered to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” Eventually Pharaoh did just that. Pharaoh would have laughed, however, if he could have overheard the people railing against Moses for forty years. Life in the wilderness was certainly hard; so hard, in fact, that they clamoured for the “meat, fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic” they had had in Egypt (forgetting, of course, the wretchedness of the captivity that had reduced them to well-fed domestic animals.) Now they were left with nothing better than — nothing better than manna! Manna? The Hebrew word means “What is it?” It’s undefinable! The resources of God are unique! They do not fit any of our ready-to-hand categories. “What is it?” “It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.” (Exodus 16:15)

Leadership anywhere in life entails loneliness. To be summoned to lead in business, industry, government, church, university, hospital, community organization; to be summoned to lead is to be thrust into a wilderness of loneliness where few others (if any) understand or care.

Yet while Moses alone of all the people of Israel knows the loneliness of leadership, it is to Moses alone that God speaks as God’s fiery presence sets the bush aflame and God’s scorching truth brands itself upon him indelibly: “Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you stand is holy!” Moses speaks to all who are called to lead, and who know the loneliness that leadership entails. Moses also tells them that faithfulness to their vocation will render their wilderness holy ground. As often as their spirits sag God’s fiery presence and word will remind them.

Whenever a leader appears courage appears as well. John the Baptist exemplified courage. His clothing of animal skins gave him an earthy appearance, reflecting the untameability of the wilderness and his aversion to soft compromises. His diet was as stark as his speech: grasshoppers (noted for their protein) and wild honey. (How many bee stings had he incurred in gathering the honey?) John’s courage could come only from someone who was unimpressed by the cute games and politically correct conventions of those who had long since jettisoned transparency. John’s fearless truthfulness had found him telling Herod, the puppet-ruler of Judaea, that not even the king had a right to his brother’s wife; kingly philandering, after all, was still low-life adultery. Herod’s sister-in-law (mistress too) seethed. Luke tells us that John was in the wilderness until his public ministry began. Where was John, then, after his public ministry began? Merely in a wilderness of a different sort. Thirty years (more or less) in the wilderness for a ministry of only a few months? But what a ministry! The world will never forget the man whom Jesus pointed to as the greatest prophet to arise in Israel. John speaks to courageous people, all of whom discover, sooner or later, that courage brings on isolation and as surely as courage calls forth hostility. Just because John didn’t flee the wilderness by surrendering courage he continues to embolden all who, like him, will not compromise.

We must not forget John’s namesake, the seer of the book of Revelation. This man had been sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in exile on the island of Patmos. His faithfulness to his Lord in the face of political pressure had landed him on a wind-swept rock-pile as desolate without as John himself was within. Except that he wasn’t desolate within! Just because John was stuck on Patmos “on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” the Spirit surged over him, leaving him exclaiming, “I was on the island called Patmos, and I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” So far from excluding the Spirit, the wilderness is the condition of the Spirit’s visitation. Faithfulness to Jesus Christ in the face of persecution is wilderness to be sure, but also a wilderness where the Spirit unfailing finds us.

The wilderness surrounds us. The wilderness of shameful humiliation, the wilderness of long-term hardship, the wilderness of isolation enforced because of one’s courage, the wilderness of punishment handed out by the politically powerful; it’s all wilderness. What are we to do when we realize that this is where we live and there is no escape? We must look to our foreparents in faith, and especially to him who was most at home in the wilderness, Jesus himself.

Never attempting to flee the wilderness, our Lord deliberately sought the wilderness time and again as a place of spiritual refreshment. On the one hand he knew that life there was lean, spare, hard, even harsh. On the other hand he knew that there there were fewer distractions, fewer illusions, less likelihood of that spiritual folly which always attends affluence and its life of ease. Never naive, Jesus knew the wilderness to be the place of temptation and trial and testing. (The Greek word, PEIRASMOS, has all three English meanings.) At the inception of his public ministry Jesus was even driven into the wilderness, say the gospel-writers in deploying the word which they also use of the violent driving out of demons. (Who says that God is always and everywhere gentle?) Yet it was in the wilderness, the gospel-writers tell us, that Jesus was refreshed. Paradoxically, the place of spiritual assault is also the place of spiritual invigoration. We are sustained most profoundly precisely where we are most threatened! The resources of God abound precisely where we assume they are wanting!

So unusual is this truth that even the most intimate followers of Jesus are slow to grasp it. Jesus draws a huge crowd around himself as he teaches for days on end. Matter-of-factly he tells the disciples that the crowds, on whom he has stomach-wrenching compassion, need to be fed. “How can we feed these people in the desert?”, the disciples ask, perplexed. They will see shortly that wherever Jesus Christ is present, anything that is offered to him, however slight, is multiplied so as to provide enough for everyone.

We fear the desert or wilderness largely because we assume that whatever we desert we are in, for whatever reason, will only become even more arid and barren as there is added to it the spectre of spiritual annihilation. In fact the opposite is the case. Because Jesus Christ is present the desert becomes the reservoir of riches as indescribable as they are inexhaustible. The prophet Isaiah knew whereof he spoke when he wrote, “For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.” (Isaiah 36:6)

                                                                                                    Victor A. Shepherd
April 1994

A Note on Reconsecration

Exodus 24:3-8

 

I: — What did people do before the invention of dry-cleaning? How did they ever remove stains? They didn’t. Stains worthy of the word “stain” were simply indelible.

Blood stains. Bloodstains are fixed fast in clothing. When Moses assembled the people before him, gathered blood in a basin and flung the blood out over the people, he knew what he was doing. He knew that every morning when the people put on their clothing the bloodstains would remind them.

Remind them of what? Of the promise they had made to God with their neighbours as witnesses. They had already received the Ten Commandments, the ten “words” that had forged their identity and would form their obedience ever after. On the day they received the ten “words” they had pledged themselves in gratitude to God for releasing them from slavery in Egypt, for rescuing them when they were on the point of annihilation at the Red Sea, and even for the freedom that the Commandments themselves provided them. On this occasion they had pledged their heartfelt, grateful service to God. But pledges and promises are easy to forget. Zeal evaporates. Commitment wanes. Dedication dribbles away. For this reason Moses assembled the people before him for a service of rededication, reconsecration.

The service was graphic. Since sin isn’t a trifle and can’t be pardoned cheaply; since God isn’t naïve and can’t be approached presumptuously; since the Holy One is just that – holy – and his creatures are defiled; since…; all of these considerations were gathered up in a sacrifice of oxen whose blood was reserved. Half of the blood was thrown against the altar, the altar being the symbol of God’s presence among his people. The other half of the blood was thrown over the people, the sign that they owned the sacrifice that admitted them to God’s presence and allowed them to survive in God’s presence. As the blood seeped into their clothing they renewed their pledge and promise to God, crying out together, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”(Exod. 24:7)

Those people never got the bloodstains out of their clothing. Every morning they clothed themselves with the sign and seal of their reconsecration to the Lord.

 

II: — Actually the sacrifice that Moses had offered was an anticipation, a foreshadowing, of that one, effectual sacrifice that the Son of God himself would make, a sacrifice of such a nature as never to have to be repeated. On the eve of this sacrifice Jesus called out, “Father, the hour has come.” It was that “hour” of which he had spoken again and again throughout his earthly ministry. Now he was consecrating himself to the Father with utmost intensity. “For their sake (i.e., for the disciples’ sake) I consecrate myself”, he cried, “that they also may be consecrated in truth.” (John 17:19) Jesus consecrates himself to the Father in order that his disciples may consecrate themselves too.

To consecrate, in scripture, is to dedicate or set apart a person to a sacred purpose related to the service of God. Jesus dedicates himself to the service of his Father so that his disciples will do the same as they discern the particular service to which God has appointed them. You and I are disciples too. Then our Lord has done as much for us in order that we might consecrate ourselves to God as well.

Today, in our annual service of Sunday School Teacher Dedication, we are recalling our Lord’s consecration to the Father’s appointment in expectation that these teachers will consecrate themselves (or reconsecrate themselves) to the service to which God has called them. And yet this service is more than a service of reconsecration for Sunday School Teachers, with the rest of the congregation looking on as spectators. Today’s service is a service of reconsecration for everyone of every age and every situation. To be sure, what the eighty year-old brings to the service is different from what the eight year-old brings. The eighty year-old brings her mature experience of the God who has confirmed himself in her life time without number. The eight year-old brings the curiosity and the mental pictures that flood her whenever she hears the word “God.” But under no circumstances must we ever say, “Eight? Only Eight?”

 

III: — To say “only” would be to sneer at the One whose hand has been on these children in Streetsville since they were born, even before they were born. It was as a mature man, gripped by a vocation he could neither doubt nor deny nor escape, that Jeremiah heard God say, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jer. 1:5) Let’s be sure we note the precise details here: before Jeremiah was born God knew him, God formed him, God consecrated him, God appointed him. To be known by God is to be given an identity before God, an identity that no occurrence in life, good or bad, can alter or affect, never mind destroy. To be formed by God is to be given that bodily existence that is crowned with the ineradicable image of God himself. To be consecrated by God is to be set apart for a specific purpose. To be appointed by God is to have that specific purpose named. All of this transpired before Jeremiah was born.

Before Jeremiah alone was born? Of course not. Scripture says as much about Samuel, about Paul, about John the Baptist. In other words, this is the truth for every human being. I was fourteen years old when I became aware of my vocation to the ministry. But I have never assumed that the day I became aware of my vocation is the day God thought it up. The children whom our Sunday School teachers are to teach in the coming church-year: before these children were born God knew them, formed them, consecrated them and appointed them. The fact that these children aren’t yet aware of their vocation doesn’t mean that God hasn’t yet appointed them to it. He has.

Needless to say, one person’s vocation isn’t a carbon copy of another’s. Needful to say, any person’s vocation can assume different expressions in the course of life as God directs us here or there, uses us in this manner or that, summons us to attend to developments that no one could foresee. Plainly, then, what matters above all else is that we never trifle with or disregard that Spirit-sensitivity wherein we daily discern the tasks to which God summons us. Since it matters above all else that we never trifle with or disregard such Spirit-sensitivity ourselves, it matters above all else that we foster the environment, the atmosphere in which others will abhor trifling with or disregarding the selfsame Spirit-sensitivity needed for their obedience to God.

 

III: — In other words, we must always endeavour to provide the environment in which our Sunday School children come, little by little, to discern and own all that God fashioned for them before they were born. We adult believers are to provide such an environment. Our faith, our manifest possession at the hands of the gospel, our prioritizing of public worship and private prayer, our unselfconscious dinner-table conversations where as much is caught as taught; above all, our glorying in our own vocation – it’s all to provide the atmosphere in which a child’s faith may germinate and thrive.

Whenever I think of such an atmosphere I think of the development in Corinth which Paul addressed forthrightly. Different individuals had come to faith in Jesus Christ after they were married. They were now believers but their spouse was not. What were they to do? There were some “hardliners” in the congregation there who said, “Since light has nothing to do with darkness, and since those who lie down with dogs get up with fleas, the believing person should leave the unbelieving spouse.” Paul disagreed most emphatically. He maintained that the believing partner should continue to live with the unbelieving spouse, for in doing so the believing partner would provide the atmosphere, the environment, in which the unbelieving spouse might come to faith. Listen to the apostle’s exact wording: “For the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband.” (1 Cor. 7:14) The apostle isn’t pretending that the faith of one spouse can be transferred to the other or credited to the other. At the same time, if the unbelieving partner is ever to be “infected” with faith, there has to be contact with someone who is currently contagious. Therefore the believing partner shouldn’t abandon the spouse who hasn’t been faith-infected – yet. It’s the same with our Sunday School children. The teachers who have consecrated themselves to the service of the Sunday School children are doing so for the sake of those children in order that the children eventually consecrate themselves to the service of God. To this end teachers provide the atmosphere wherein faith can be quickened in children, vocation discerned, God’s appointment owned – and all of this not once but many times over in the course of the child’s development. That to which God consecrated and appointed children before they were born they can come to know and own only after they’ve been born. And they will come to know it only as they are consecrated by that environment in which faith and discernment and obedience are the atmosphere inhaled and exhaled week after week.

Several years ago on Teacher Dedication Sunday I preached a sermon, Where Are They Now?, in which I spoke of the Sunday School teachers I had had as a youth. I can still recall every one. I can still recall the idiosyncrasies of each; I can still recall what I gained from each. How is it I can recall all of this? How is it I can do so with merriment and gratitude? It’s because they shaped me profoundly, and shaped me profoundly, I am sure, even when they were scratching their head and wondering if anything was “getting through.” We must never underestimate our influence with young people.

In 1931 Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught a confirmation class of rowdy boys in Wedding, a working-class district of Berlin. Bonhoeffer himself belonged to the old German aristocracy. One of his grandparents had been a piano-pupil of Franz Liszt, the piano virtuoso of his era. Bonhoeffer’s father was a neurologist, professor at Berlin University’s Faculty of Medicine and director of the Berlin Neurological Hospital. His older brother was chief lawyer for Lufthansa airlines. The pastor in Wedding had died unexpectedly. The confirmation class was without a teacher. Bonhoeffer was asked to fill in. In 1931 Germany was economically destitute. These boys came from families who had nothing. The first time Bonhoeffer walked up the stairs to the second-floor room where the class was to be held the boys threw lunch-box remains down the stairwell at him. At the end of each class-period the boys went home to an urban squalour that only inner-city slums of the depression era could produce. In order to be closer to the boys Bonhoeffer moved out of his own home and rented a room where the boys lived. When he saw the deprivation the boys lived with daily, Bonhoeffer put aside his holiday plans (overseas travel) and instead took the class on a two-week holiday to the Harz Mountains. It was the first time that most of the boys had seen anything but asphalt and grime. Listen to what Richard Rother, a member of that class, had to say about their teacher:

In the course of time we…confirmands from the slums of Berlin were scattered to the four winds. We were shocked and deeply moved to hear that our pastor had to die a cruel death as a martyr in the discipleship of Jesus Christ in April 1945. [Bonhoeffer was hanged three weeks before the Americans liberated his part of Germany.] The gratitude which I feel for having had such a pastor in our confirmation class makes me write down these recollections.

Richard Rother, conscripted in 1943 (twelve years after the class), survived the war. He wrote this tribute to his teacher 33 years after his exposure to Bonhoeffer.

 

V: — There is one more matter to be discussed this morning. What is the qualification for consecrating ourselves to the service of God? In his second letter to Timothy the older man, Paul, writes, “If anyone purifies himself from what is ignoble, then he will be a vessel for noble use, consecrated and useful to the master of the house, ready for any good work. So shun youthful passions and aim at righteousness, faith, love and peace along with those who call upon the Lord from a pure heart.” (2 Tim. 2:21-22) The key to consecration is shunning youthful passions.

 

We must be sure to understand what the apostle means by “youthful passions” and why they are to be shunned if we are serious about consecrating ourselves to God’s service. “Youthful passions” are the vehement, intense preoccupations of young people. A facial pimple is sufficient ground for suicide. A phone call from the class beau brummel precipitates mania. Not being asked to the highschool prom is the end of the world. “Youthful passions” are the passionate, exaggerated, horizon-filling, life-consuming preoccupations of younger people who attach utmost passion to what is decidedly less than utmost important.

Young people do this? Adults do it too! Middle-aged people do it; elderly people do it. All of us tend to attach utmost passion to what is far from utmost important. All of us attach utmost passion to what is frivolous, froth, fleeting, shallow, unsubstantial, inconsequential. Our new car has a disc-player that can find musical tunes by key signature. Wow! The Dow-Jones average shifted a smidgen and the value of our RRST went up $9.43. Awesome! The apostle insists that the key to consecrating ourselves to the service of God is the shunning of “youthful passions” regardless of our age. Since nature abhors a vacuum, even as we shun youthful passions we are to aim at righteousness, faith, love and peace.

Then with single-minded heart we (not just Sunday School Teachers but all of us) are going to preoccupy ourselves with our Lord Jesus Christ, his consecration of himself for our sake, our consecration of ourselves for our children’s sake, and all of this in order that together we shall renew our promise to God; we shall resolve to discern afresh our vocation, knowing that God has appointed each of us to a particular service; we shall endeavour to provide that environment wherein the children entrusted to us are “infected” with that Spirit which brings them to recognize their Lord, love him, and obey him in that service to which they were appointed before they were born.

The moment of reconsecration is upon us. I don’t have basin of blood that I can fling over you. I do have a basin of water. But to fling it over you would be politically incorrect in a world whose deity is politically correctness. Therefore I shouldn’t fling it – should I.

“All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” “For their sake”, says Jesus of his people, “I consecrate myself.” For the sake of our children we are going to consecrate ourselves, afresh, right now.

 

                                                                        Victor Shepherd
September, 1998

God’s Holiness – and Ours

Leviticus 19:2

Isaiah 55:6-9                              2nd Timothy 1:8-14                      Mark 6:14 -24

 

A “holy Joe” is someone who oozes religious sentimentality, religious sentimentality devoid of worldly wisdom and earthly sense.   The holy Joe, with his head in the clouds, may be mildly amusing, even laughable, but there’s nothing about him that we want for ourselves.

The “holier-than-thou” isn’t merely unattractive; she’s downright offensive. She regards herself as spiritually superior.  Worse, she advertises herself as spiritually superior. Worst of all, she expects to be recognized as spiritually superior.  While the “holy Joe” may be somewhat amusing, the “holier-than-thou” is out-and-out repulsive.

A “holy roller” is something else again.  The “holy roller” is someone whose religion fizzes up into an emotional binge. This binge, like any binge, involves loss of self-control and a public display that most people find pitiable and repugnant in equal measure.

It would seem that the word “holy” keeps bad company.  Yet “holy” is a most important word in the Christian vocabulary. It is one of the most frequently used words in scripture.  While Presbyterians argued fiercely, 450 years ago, over predestination, in fact the “predestination” word group occurs approximately 15 times in scripture.         The “holy”, “holiness” word group, however, occurs approximately 830 times in scripture.  We use it constantly in hymns and prayers and lessons. We speak of “Holy Communion” and “Holy Scripture” and “Holy Matrimony”. Frequently the congregation sings the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy”, or one like it.  We refer to the Holy Spirit in every service.

Then what do we mean when we say “holy”?   What’s the holiness of God?   This matter is crucial to me, for I wince every time I hear God’s name used carelessly. “Oh my God, it’s begun to rain just when I was going to hang out the washing.” “For God’s sake swing the bat” someone shouts as another Blue Jay hitter is called out on a called third strike.  I wince whenever I hear God’s name used thoughtlessly.  I feel like a man whose wife has been belittled, her name sneered at and her reputation dragged through the mud.  Why do I feel like this?

I feel like this because nothing looms larger with me than the holiness of God. God’s holiness is bound up with who God is and therefore with what I’m trying to do as a minister and even with who I am as a person.  Having said this much, however, I still haven’t told you what’s holy about God or what’s supposed to be holy about us or even what the word means.

I don’t think that my telling you would be the most helpful way of approaching the topic. It would be better if we examined what’s associated with the word, for then an impression of God’s holiness would be stamped upon us forever.

 

I: (i) – Let’s start with worship.  One Sunday, John, exiled to the island of Patmos , sent there to rot by a hostile Roman government, began to worship when he – when he what? He couldn’t say at the time. A few hours later he was able to write something down.  When I saw him”, John penned in the last book of the bible, “I fell at his feet as one dead.”   Nine hundred years before John, Isaiah was at worship in the temple, the service no different from any other service, when he found himself God-engulfed. “The whole earth is full of God’s glory”, he cried out.  At this moment he didn’t chatter, wasn’t distracted by something extraneous going on in the service, didn’t comment on the preacher’s smoothness or lack of it.  He was overwhelmed.

Worship isn’t a matter of tossing off a hymn or two prayers and reading and address added. Worship is finding ourselves taken out of ourselves as we are overcome by the One whose worthiness startles us. Worship points to the holiness of God and gives us a clue to it.

(ii) – Something else associated with holiness is awe.  People are awestruck when they come upon a beauty more beautiful than they can imagine; when they are visited with a love more tender, patient, persistent than they can dream of; when they are pardoned with a forgiveness so free and full as to overflow the word.  The person who has been awestruck by any aspect of God has a clue to God’s holiness.

(iii) – Also associated with holiness is fear.  Not merely awe this time; rather, awe with something added.  All biblical faith begins in the fear of the Lord.  What is it? It’s adoration, reverence, obeisance, homage, humility; at least it’s 98% this. And the other 2%?   Pure fear, sheer fear. The 2%, sheer fear, keeps everything else honest.  It keeps our adoration and reverence from becoming presumptuous, or stale, or mindless. Let’s remember that the Jesus whom we call “gentle, meek and mild”; he said to his followers, “Don’t fear people who can merely beat you up; you fear HIM who can destroy you utterly.” Of course we are to love God. But don’t give me the line a woman gave me at the door of the church one Sunday early in my ministry: “Victor, I don’t fear God; I love him.”   John Calvin insisted that we don’t genuinely love God, profoundly love God, unless we fear him.

(iv) – Also associated with God’s holiness is God’s loftiness. He towers above us. He isn’t an extension of us or a projection of us.  He is uniquely God, exalted, transcendent.  Through the prophet Isaiah God insists, “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways.”  He isn’t our errand boy; doesn’t implement our agendas; won’t be co-opted to our self-important schemes.

A crusty atheist, veteran of the World War I, used to tell me that during the Great War Anglican bishops blessed aircraft as they rolled off assembly lines, while a few miles away Lutheran bishops blessed anti-aircraft guns designed to shoot them down.   “Now”, the crusty old fellow would say with a glint in his eye, “wasn’t that an awkward predicament for the Almighty to be in?” No, it wasn’t awkward for God at all. It was heartbreaking for him, but not awkward, since his thoughts aren’t our thoughts or our ways his ways. We don’t have him on the end of our string.         God’s loftiness is a clue to his holiness.

 

II: — If we add up the clues, we have more than a little insight concerning God’s holiness. God’s holiness is his unique Godness. God’s holiness is that which renders God entirely distinct from his creation, entirely independent of his creation, entirely independent of us.   God isn’t the noblest element in humankind.  God isn’t another word for our profoundest aspirations.   He is God, he alone is God, and he will remain God whether anyone knows him or not, acknowledges him or not, loves him or not.  Kierkegaard gathered it up pithily when he spoke of “the infinite qualitative difference” between God and us.

Earlier in the sermon I said that God’s unique Godness, his holiness, has ever so much to do with my vocation, the huge gravitational “pull” in my life.  It has ever so much to do with what moves me and motivates me, and therefore with what I am always trying to do in my ministry.  I have spoke frequently here of my summons to the ministry.  I never wanted to be a minister.  I went to university to become a lawyer, fell in love with philosophy, and decided to become a professor of philosophy.  And so I tried to suppress the vocation I knew I had had since I was 14 years old. By the time I was 23 years old I was at a crossroads in my life, the crisis upon me no little crisis. I knew that either I was going to obey the God who was hounding me or I was going to defy him disobediently and suffer for it.         I surrendered. I finished up my work in philosophy and moved over to theology.  A short while earlier my parents had given me a book as a graduation gift. In it they had written a verse from the book of Daniel: “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars for ever and ever.”

What does God’s holiness, God’s Godness mean to me?   It means, among other things, that if I ever turn my back on the summons I have received, I’m finished.  Finished in Schomberg? Finished with the ordained ministry elsewhere?   More than that. FINISHED.

What does God’s Godness mean for you?  How is it all related to you?

 

III: (i) – First of all, the apostle Paul speaks of the holy calling with which all Christians are called to faith in Jesus Christ.  The call is holy just because its whence and wither are God.  The call is holy in that it’s a call from God uniquely and it’s a call to God uniquely.

Recently a Via Rail train conductor retired after 30-odd years of working on passenger trains. When asked what single statement gathered up his work for 30 years the conductor replied, “I have spent my entire working life helping people get home.”

To be sure, it’s the task of the church, the total ministry of the church, to “help people get home.” At the same time, we must always be aware that the church’s ministry is that of a megaphone: we are merely amplifying the voice of God who sounds that summons which comes from him and calls people to him.  If our calling is from God and to God; if it originates in God, sounds forth and gathers up men and women with it, and finally returns and returns them to God, then the call wherewith we are called to faith is holy.

The holy calling by which God brings us home to him is heard in the voice of Jesus his Son as the Master invites us to become and remain disciples. Discipleship, we should note, isn’t a static matter.  We don’t become disciples and then “remain” disciples in the sense of standing still: “I am now a disciple”.  Discipleship means following.  Our Lord’s invitation is always to follow: “Follow me.”   He uses a verb tense that means “Keep on following.”   Since our Lord is always out in front of us, when he says “Follow me” he plainly means “Come to me; keep on coming.”  In other words, the holy call by which you and I are summoned to him is a call sounded relentlessly, daily.  As we do follow, come, respond, we shall find ourselves living ever more intimately with him, learning ever more from him, and rooting ourselves ever more profoundly in him.  Our faith in him is confirmed day by day.

(ii) – Yet we are not merely confirmed in faith. We are also conformed in faith, conformed to his mind and heart and will.         In other words, our holy calling issues in holy conduct, as the apostle Paul reminds us.

Paul speaks of holy conduct in terms of clothing.  We are to “clothe” ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, patience, and meekness, that peculiar display of strength that is exercised through gentleness. Yet the apostle knows too that we can appear patient with people whom we secretly view with hostility. We can posture kindness (or apparent kindness) as a way of manipulating them. We can display meekness (strength exercised through gentleness) because strength exercised through force would get us attacked.  For this reason, when he speaks of the clothing with which Christians are to clothe themselves he adds, “And above all these, clothe yourselves with love, for love binds everything together in perfect harmony.” (Col. 3:12-14) He knows that love prevents patience from degenerating into indifference; love prevents meekness from becoming manipulative.         Love is the preservative of every other item of clothing the Christian wears. Love, he says, is also what keeps our “outfit” from clashing; love keeps our clothing colour-coordinated, harmonized.

Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner we came to know two decades ago through the movie Chariots of Fire; Liddell was anything but a gifted speaker.  He admitted as much himself.  No one remembers anything he ever said.  But when the missionaries with whom he worked in China were captured by the Japanese and interned in the Japanese-run prison camp in China , his fellow-missionaries subsequently said they would never forget him.   His kindness, his patience (genuine patience); a man with the smallest ego and the largest heart; his self-forgetfulness – and above all (can you guess what’s he remembered for above all else?) his ceaseless cheerfulness under unspeakably trying conditions.   All this the people interned with him said they’d never forget.  Years later a fellow prisoner who survived wrote up the prison camp episode. He said that the most noteworthy aspect of Eric Liddell during this trying time was his unfailing good humour.

We mustn’t think that Eric Liddell had a chance to be dramatic while we have none. There was nothing dramatic about his situation.  He lived among people who were anxious, weary, nervous, frightened. Some were short-tempered, some hostile, and some treacherous.  In other words, he lived where we all live.  It was in the midst of the most undistinguished ordinariness that his holy calling issued in holy conduct.

(iii) – Holy calling, holy conduct; lastly, Holy Spirit.  If you are puzzled as to what to understand by “the Holy Spirit”, always think in terms of effectiveness.  The Spirit is the power or effectiveness of all that we apprehend in Jesus. Jesus acts in the power of the Spirit. He rolls back evil in the power of the Spirit.  He undoes paralysis and death in the power of the Spirit.  When he speaks, something always happens just because he speaks in the power of the Spirit. “Spirit” means effectiveness or power, and the Spirit is holy in that what this power effects is of God.

I wasn’t in Schomberg very long before I informed the session that I simply could not say the words “Holy Ghost.”   “Ghost” is an old English word derived from the German word “Geist”. Most of you have never heard of “Geist”. You haven’t missed a thing, and we shall say no more about the German word.   All of you have heard of “ghost”. In modern English “ghost” refers to something nobody believes to exist, something nobody has ever come upon; something devoid of all reality and therefore not a “something” at all but rather a “no-thing”, nothing.   The reason I can’t say “Holy Ghost” is that I see no point in saying “Holy nothing”. In fact, I believe God forbids me to say “Holy nothing”.

So far from being nothing, the Holy Spirit is everything where effectiveness is concerned. Without the Holy Spirit, the sermon is one person’s opinion on a religious topic. With the Spirit, the sermon is a human utterance that God adopts and renders the occasion of his speaking to us, and this in a way that is both unmistakable and undeniable.

Without the Holy Spirit the communion service is pointless tokenism, food and drink insufficient to nourish a chickadee.  With the Holy Spirit, the communion service becomes the ever-renewed embrace of the crucified himself.

Without the Holy Spirit our worship is of the same order as the cheering at a football game. With the Holy Spirit our worship is a public exclamation of God’s worthiness; and such worship, scripture reminds us, delights God.

Without the Holy Spirit the congregation is a social group of greater or less cohesion, doing more or less good work, providing a social outlet for people of like interest. With the Holy Spirit the congregation is rendered the body, hands and feet of Christ, whereby his work is done in the world.

Without the Holy Spirit the Christian life is a moral “grind” that soon becomes easy to give up. With the Holy Spirit the Christian life is a counter-cultural adventure rendered effective by God, and appointed to end in triumph and glory.

 

No one wants to be or be regarded as a holy Joe a holy roller or holier-than-thou. But we do want to be those who have been startled at the holiness of God.   As a result we want to be those who live in the company of Jesus Christ inasmuch as he has called us to him with a holy calling.  We want our intimacy with him to issue in holy conduct as we clothe ourselves in the clothing that befits Christ’s people at all times. We want to be steeped in the Holy Spirit, for we crave in all aspects of the Christian faith that invigoration and effectiveness which God alone can supply.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

September 2005

 

Concerning our Congregational Elders

Numbers 11:16-17     Judges 2:16-19     Acts 15:1-11

Concerning our Congregational Elders

 

I: — Why do all Presbyterian Churches have elders?   Why did our foreparents think we needed elders?   The simplest reason is also profound: to prevent tyranny.  Tyranny in any form is abhorrent.  All of us have an instinctive aversion to it.  While we may have been surprised at the speed with which tyranny was dismantled in the former USSR in 1989, we are not surprised at the fact that it was dismantled.  We readily understand why millions of people there couldn’t wait to get rid of political tyranny.

At the same time as we find tyranny repulsive, we have to admit that tyranny is highly efficient. Tyranny is much more efficient than any form of democracy.  Tyranny is quick, precise, conclusive.  Compared to tyranny democracy is awkward, slow, meandering, and sometimes downright silly. Clumsy and ponderous as democracy is, however, we readily agree with Winston Churchill when he stated that democracy was a terrible form of government – awkward, fumbling, bumbling, often laughable – yet we cherish democracy and will die to preserve it just because, said Churchill, all other forms of government are worse.  Tyranny is repugnant anywhere, anytime, and no less repugnant in church life.

In 16th century Switzerland (the setting of the non-Lutheran, Reformed or Presbyterian stream of the Protestant Reformation) people had long wearied of tyranny.  Religious tyranny over a congregation was exercised by a priest.         Political tyranny over the wider society was exercised by a bishop. The Presbyterian reformers got rid of both kinds of tyranny.  Congregational authority was transferred from priest to people; political authority was transferred from bishop to city council.

In our service this morning we are ordaining Barbara Bain as elder. Elders like her (that is, elders of the sort known in our church tradition) appeared in the Presbyterian stream of the Reformation in the 1500s.  Then it’s fitting for us to look more closely at our Presbyterian foreparents.

I stress Presbyterian foreparents. Methodists were another major stream of Protestants in Canada . The Methodist tradition is remarkably different. In the Methodist tradition the clergy were kings.  The Methodist clergyman simply ruled the congregation.   There was much leg work and spade work and grunt work for the people to do, but there was virtually no authority for the people to exercise. In the Methodist tradition the minister ran the church; he was boss of the congregation.  Presbyterians would never stand for this.  It was in the Presbyterian tradition that authority in the congregation was vested in lay people as a means of curtailing clergy tyranny.

Now you mustn’t think that because our Presbyterian foreparents took congregational authority away from the clergy and gave it to the people they must have thought ill of the clergy.  On the contrary it would be impossible to exaggerate the esteem in which the Presbyterian clergy were held.  Presbyterian ministers were expected to be learned, sound, godly, diligent; they were expected to possess expert knowledge in scripture, theology and history. They were recognized for their learning and their sanctity.  They were esteemed.

Ministers were acknowledged to have a crucial calling and task.  Ministers were deemed to function largely as “first cousins” to the apostles in the New Testament.  In the New Testament it is the task of the apostles to hold God’s people to the truth and reality of Jesus Christ.  The apostles make sure that the people of God are acquainted with the gospel of God, and not with a counterfeit imitation of the gospel or a distortion of the gospel. The task of the modern-day minister, said our 16th century foreparents, is to make sure that it’s the truth of Jesus Christ which a congregation hears, the life of Christ which a congregation cherishes, and the way of Christ which a congregation walks.

In other words the only authority which the minister has is the authority of suasion. More precisely (said Calvin), the minister’s authority consists in this: he claims no authority for himself but endeavours to keep unobscured the unique, non-delegated authority of Jesus Christ.  The minister can only hold up the gospel, plead for its reception, endeavour to render his own life transparent to it – and then trust that Christ’s people will hear the truth and believe the truth and do the truth themselves.

We must understand that in all of this the minister was not belittled at all. Our Reformed or Presbyterian foreparents esteemed the minister.  They also insisted that the minister know his place.  And the minister’s place was to acquaint the congregation with the truth and reality of Jesus Christ.  It is never the minister’s place to coerce or control the congregation, never to “lord” it over the congregation in any way, but rather to function in a manner akin to that of the apostles.  Any congregation, said our Presbyterian foreparents; any congregation, left to itself, will drift.   This week it has drifted slightly off course concerning the gospel; next week it has drifted a little more off course; after six or eight months the congregation’s course has turned 180 degrees, with the result that the congregation has drifted into a counter-gospel without knowing what’s happened. The task of the minister is to identify the congregation’s proclivity to drift; identify it, and help the congregation to orient itself afresh to the gospel For this reason the godliness and learning and diligence and faithfulness of the minister, said our foreparents, are necessary if the congregation is to be and remain a community of Christ’s people rather than existing merely as one more social group.  Ministers are necessary if the people of God are to be constantly re-acquainted with the truth of God.   In other words, it’s not correct to say, in the Reformed tradition, that ministers are important to a congregation of Christ’s people; ministers are essential to a congregation of Christ’s people. But ministers are never to rule the congregation – said our Reformed ancestors.

 

The Reformed or Presbyterian tradition is most closely identified with the Swiss reformer, John Calvin. In Calvin’s day (Calvin died in 1564) a layperson chaired presbytery.   (This fact alone tells you how suspicious the Presbyterians were of clergy tyranny.) Presbyterianism soon moved from Switzerland and France to Scotland . The first General Assembly of the newly-reformed Church of Scotland was held on 20th December, 1560 . Present were 42 church-representatives, only six of whom were clergy.

In the Church of Scotland at this time the word “elder” included the minister; the minister was the teaching elder, while all other elders (what we today call lay elders) were known as ruling elders. The teaching elder (the minister) and the ruling elders (lay people) were alike called “elder.” Nevertheless they were unlike in that their respective responsibilities were never blurred. The minister was commissioned to teach; he was never permitted to rule.

 

III: — Let’s jump ahead 100 years, from the 1500s to the 1600s.  In 1647 there was published in England a document which our Presbyterian foreparents consumed every day with their oatmeal, the Westminster Confession.         The Westminster Confession stated plainly that the elders of a congregation are one with the judges of ancient Israel .

Then who were the judges of ancient Israel ? What did they do?   Having jumped ahead to 1647 we must now jump back almost 3000 years, back to 1200 BCE, back to the period of the judges.  The judges in ancient Israel were not like the courtroom judges of our day.  Present-day judges are courtroom referees whose sole responsibility is to preside over trials without favouring either party in the trial. Ancient judges, by contrast, were chiefly leaders and rulers.  They were leaders in times of controversy and conflict; they were rulers in times of peace. In the book of Judges the men and women (yes, women too; one of Israel’s greatest judges was a woman, Deborah; Deborah was so highly esteemed that she was hailed as “a mother in Israel”) – in the book of Judges the men and women who were set aside as judges were also called deliverers or saviours. We must be sure to note this point: judges are deliverers or saviours.  Obviously a judge wasn’t saviour in the sense in which God is uniquely saviour, any more than a pastor (the Latin word for “shepherd”) displaces Jesus as the “Good Shepherd”.  Jesus alone is and ever shall be the Good Shepherd. Nevertheless, in the company of Jesus the shepherd, pastors are under-shepherds.  Under God the saviour, judges in ancient Israel were recognized as saviours or deliverers.

In the older testament elders were associated with Moses as well.  Moses had led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt , on towards the glory of the Promised Land.  But between slavery and Promised Land there was wilderness.  At first the Israelites didn’t mind the wilderness.  (What’s a little hardship after the insults of slavery?)         Little by little, however, the wilderness became insufferable.  The people began to weep and cry out, “O that we had meat to eat. We remember the fish we had in Egypt , the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic.”         Moses put up with their petulance, carping and short-sightedness for as long as he could. Then he cried out to God, “I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me.” Moses was then instructed to gather together 70 elders and bring them to the “tent of meeting” (the church sanctuary).  Listen to what God says to Moses in this old, old story.   “I will come down and talk with you there.  And I will take some of the spirit that is upon you (Moses) and put it upon them (the elders). And they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it alone.”

In a word, elders are those who lead in times of conflict, govern in times of peace, support the congregation in its griefs and grievances, and ease the burden of the minister. Elders are deliverers who save the congregation from anything which impedes its work and witness as the people of God.

 

IV: — The elders of this congregation do every bit as much in 2007.  Congregational elders are often thought to be concerned with material issues; e.g., what kind of shingle we should use in re-shingling the roof. In fact, while elders may finally approve such decisions, all deliberations and decisions concerning property are made by the Board of Managers.  Elders do something else: elders ultimately set the spiritual tone of the congregation. Elders articulate the details of that “way” which they then lead the congregation into owning and walking.  Elders assess programmes in the church; assess them with a view to the truth of the gospel, the turbulence in the world, the trials and tribulations of parishioners, and the capacity of this particular congregation.

I have mentioned several times today that elders (like the judges of old) are leaders and deliverers in times of trouble.   There will always be needed here elders who can distinguish between gospel and pseudo-gospel, whose heart aches for the wellbeing of the congregation, and whose wisdom can move us beyond the starkest threats to a Christian community which anyone can recognize as well as move us beyond the subtlest threats for which extraordinary discernment is needed.

Elders have much to do with pastoral care.  The pastoral care of our congregation is crucial.  Let me say right now that our congregation is like few others that I have seen. Our congregation has affection. All congregations have civility, politeness, respect for social conventions; all congregations must have these or else the congregation would fragment. In our congregation, by contrast, I have found love; oceans of it.  As I move throughout the congregation in the course of my work I come upon warm spot after warm spot.  It’s as though I am swimming in a lake in the summertime and I find warm spot after warm spot in the lake.  Not surprisingly, then, I don’t find pastoral work difficult.   How could I find pastoral work onerous when I am customarily moving from warmth to warmth? At the same time, there’s no reason to think that pastoral contact is the exclusive purview of the minister. It’s important than all the folk who make up our congregation find themselves taken deep into the heart of someone in the congregation who cherishes them.  What I have found here I covet for all of you.  We need all the resources we can muster — imagination, industry, persistence, faithfulness — we need all there is in order to magnify affection as the atmosphere in which congregational life unfolds.  The possibilities for any elder here are limitless.

 

V: — All of you must have come to know, over the past several years, that most of the convictions of our Reformed foreparents are my convictions too.  I am convinced that there is much wisdom in the matters that our Presbyterian ancestors treasured. The place of the elder is one such matter.  For this reason I am glad of the opportunity to ordain Barbara Bain elder this morning. For she stands not only in the tradition of the elders of Israel, but specifically in the tradition of Deborah: mother in Israel, mother in Schomberg, mother to us all here as we gather week-by-week in the company of Jesus Christ our elder brother and our Father who is God over all.

 

                                                                                            Victor Shepherd            

January 2007

 

When Forty Doesn’t Equal Four Times Ten

Deuteronomy 2:1-7                        Acts 1:1-5                      Acts 4:13 -22                 Mark 1:9-13

 

From late Friday afternoon to early Sunday morning is only a day-and-a-half. Then why are we told that following his crucifixion Jesus was in the tomb three days? It’s not because first-century Christians couldn’t count. Rather it’s because “three” is the Hebrew expression for “a little while.”

In the same way “forty” is the Hebrew expression for “a long time.” You must have noticed how often the number forty occurs in the bible. What’s more, “forty” means not merely “a long time” but “a sufficiently long time;” sufficient time to learn something important or do something important or be marked by something significant. Don Cherry told me that when Bobby Orr arrived in the NHL, despite Orr’s immense talent it took Orr six months to learn how to skate an onrushing forward off towards the boards as the forward came down the ice. A Hebrew writer would say it took Orr forty days to learn this, forty days being time sufficiently long for a person to learn or do or be marked by something significant.

 

I: — Moses and the Israelites were said to be forty years in the wilderness. There they were schooled in much, trained for much, tested by much. You and I live in a wilderness of sorts too. The wilderness can be outer (we are visited with affliction of some sort) or inner (we are burdened intra-psychically.) What we learn in life’s wilderness is important. For there we are schooled, trained, tested again and again. In fact, all God’s people, ancient or modern, develop in the wilderness as we can develop nowhere else.

The wilderness is never without the element of the unpredictable. There’s always something untamed about it, something uncontrollable. In addition wilderness existence is always lean, sparse, spare. There aren’t a great many comforts in the wilderness.

Once they were in the wilderness the people of Israel forgot how terrible slavery had been. They forgot how demeaning it was to be a slave at all. They whined at their wilderness hardship and wanted to go back to Egypt . Moses wouldn’t let them. Moses knew, as every spiritual leader knows, that the wilderness (whether outer or inner) is where we have to live once God has called us out of slavery and has made us his people and has set our feet on the road to the promised land. Either we keep stepping ahead toward the promised land or we retreat into bondage. Moses kept the people stepping ahead.

Now don’t cringe when you hear the word “wilderness.” The wilderness isn’t all bad. Life in the wilderness is rigorous, to be sure, but it isn’t unrelieved misery. In fact some people prefer to live in the wilderness; they are profoundly contented there: Elijah, for instance, Israel ’s greatest prophet; and of course Elijah’s near-clone, John the Baptist; Jesus too. Sometimes our English bibles tell us Jesus went to pray “in a solitary place” or “a lonely place” or wherever. All these English expressions translate one Greek word that simply means “wilderness.”

If Jesus can live contentedly in the wilderness, then all God’s people can too. Once we are in the wilderness we find that life is less cluttered. There are fewer distractions. Life here is starker, to be sure, yet just for that reason more transparent, more authentic, less disguised, with fewer false faces. Life in the wilderness is certainly elemental, but not for that reason miserable.

John the Baptist wasn’t miserable in the wilderness. On the contrary he was at home there. He was a man of truth who exposed falsehood and phoniness at all times. He didn’t have a closetful of clothes, but he knew he could wear only one outfit at a time. His diet wasn’t rich or fancy, but no one ever thought John to be frail. He wasn’t surrounded by social-climbing flatterers, but there were simple people, devout, discerning people, who knew he was a prophet and loved him. Above all, John’s wilderness vocation was publicly endorsed by Jesus. What more could anyone want?

The words “wilderness” and “temptation” seem to go hand-in-hand. But the Greek word for “temptation,” peirasmos, means testing as well as temptation. It so happens that every temptation is also an occasion of testing, refining. In other words, the outcome of every episode of temptation is (or should be) refined character. Scripture states clearly that God tempts no one in the sense that God seduces no one into that sin which God abhors. (How could he?) But everywhere scripture maintains that God tests us, and tests us always with a view to refining us. As our character is refined under God, as we are ridded of useless accretions and disfiguring impediments, as we learn to let go all that merely distracts us from our discipleship, we are a step closer to the promised land. Simply put, where life is leaner, elemental, uncluttered, we can grow in godliness and wisdom as we can grow nowhere else.

Actually, living in the wilderness is simple. I didn’t say easy; I said simple. You see, once we know what our obedience to Jesus Christ requires of us, the only matter we have to settle is courage. Once we know what uncluttered discipleship asks of us, the only thing we need to ensure our refining is courage.

When The United Church of Canada convulsed in May 1988 I wrote a 4500 word article for a newspaper that was reprinted over and over from coast to coast, hundreds of thousands of copies. I have no regrets over what I did, even after I learned the price tag attached to it. When my article appeared several United Church ministers sidled up to me and said, “Victor, I agree with everything you’ve written. But I’m not going to say anything publicly lest I derail my career in the church.” I told them they were self-serving cowards. Is anyone surprised that psychological profiles of the clergy show them to be wimps?

Then I look away from clergy to the people I see all around me and I am speechless at their courage. Think of the courage of the person hobbled with arthritis who takes three times as long as anyone else to get to work but who goes nonetheless.

Think of the adolescent who excuses himself when the party starts to get out of hand and comes home by himself, knowing what he will have to face at school on Monday morning.

Think of the mother with little formal education who knows that her child is being treated unfairly by school authorities or hospital authorities and who intercedes for her child even though she’s no verbal match for these better-educated folk and has been put down by them before.

Think of the moderately schizophrenic person who is ill enough to be distressed and awkward yet sane enough to know she’s distressed and awkward and who knows as well that she’s stigmatized by it all. What kind of courage does she exhibit every day?

C.S. Lewis points out that some people boast of their vices. The cheater may boast of her dishonesty and the seducer of his lechery. But there’s one vice, says Lewis, that no one ever boasts of: cowardice. We view cowardice with disgust when we see it in others and view it with shame when we find it in ourselves.

Courage is what we need for leaving our thousand-and-one enslavements behind and stepping ahead in our pared-down, uncluttered life toward the promised land. For it’s courage that sees us through to the other side of our wilderness-testings, and sees us emerge with our character refined.

 

II: — We are told something more about “forty.” We are told that the risen Jesus appeared to his followers during the forty days after Easter and interpreted his earthly ministry to them. The risen one had to interpret his earlier ministry to them, since they had understood so little of it – in fact they had misunderstood virtually all of it – when he was with them before his crucifixion. If you read the gospel of Mark carefully you will notice that the disciples look bad everywhere. Parents bring their children to Jesus, and the disciples thrust them away. Samaritan villagers treat Jesus rudely, and the disciples want heaven-sent fire to consume the dull-witted wretches. The direction of Christ’s entire earthly ministry is towards self-forgetfulness, and the disciples squabble over which of them will be greatest in the kingdom of God . “Keen but clueless” is the only way we can speak of the disciples.

Therefore the risen one must school them in the force and thrust of his earthly ministry. But for how long? For forty days; i.e., for as long as it takes clueless disciples to learn what they need to know. Clearly they need time sufficient to move from pre-Easter error to post-Easter understanding.

For how long will our Lord have to school you and me? For as long as it takes to get us clued-in and have our understanding of him match our ardour for him.

Think of the story of the Transfiguration. Peter, James and John ascend the Mountain with Jesus. The three disciples find themselves face-to-face with Elijah and Moses. Moses is the giver of the Torah, the Way which God appoints his people to walk day-by-day. Elijah is Israel ’s greatest prophet, the forthright truth-teller who points out where God’s people have departed from the Way, and who calls them to return to it. The three disciples hear the voice from the cloud: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him; obey him.” Then Moses and Elijah are seen no more, since their work is now gathered up in the Son who is the Way to be walked, the Truth to be cherished, and the Life or inspiration of it all. The three disciples are left alone with Jesus.

Peter says “Awesome! What a scene! Let’s see it again.” Peter wants to spend the rest of his life bathed in psycho-religious ecstasy. Moments of such ecstasy may come upon you and me. But life can’t be lived here. Instead the voice is heard, “This is the Son who reveals my nature and purpose: heed him.” Then Jesus and the three disciples go down the hill into the village where they find an epileptic boy who foams and thrashes and has fallen into cooking fires and horse troughs and nearly killed himself a dozen times over. The boy’s father is both heartbroken and terrified. Christian discipleship always binds us to the world’s anguish, to sickness, encripplement, danger, fear, frenzy. This is where we have to be if we want to mirror our Lord’s ministry.

John’s gospel concludes with the risen Jesus reminding Peter that no two followers are called to the same expression of discipleship. Peter has to be reminded of this for two reasons. He assumes, mistakenly again, that all disciples are to be carbon copies of each other. In the second place he resents the easier time he thinks another disciple has. Jesus tells Peter to mind his own business and simply see to it that he pursues his own calling gratefully and gladly.

You and I are called to differing expressions of discipleship. Therefore we mustn’t complain about that expression which our Lord has appointed for us. Neither are we to envy anyone else’s vocation. We are to be cheerful, eager followers of him whose company and encouragement are bread for us.

Peter has the comfort of a wife. Paul has no wife. Lydia , a believer in Thyatira, is a well-to-do businesswoman. The believers in Jerusalem are poor. Most of the Christians in Corinth have no social distinction at all. Erastus, however, a member of the congregation in Corinth , is the city treasurer, the most prominent and influential civil servant in Corinth .

Today some Christians are undoubtedly called to greater financial renunciation, others to less. Most are to marry; some, however, are summoned to celibacy. Some are called to greater visibility, others to less. I knew two men in the same denomination, one of whom renounced a career as a concert pianist in order to enter the ordained ministry, while the other became a lay preacher at the same time as he remained a symphony violinist.

How long does it take us to learn all this, even to learn what our vocation is? How long does it take us to move from pre-Easter misunderstanding to post-Easter discernment and contentment? It takes “forty days.” In other words, it takes as long as the Master deems sufficient. “Forty,” remember, doesn’t mean four times ten. In some contexts “forty” means lifelong, for surely you and I shall have to keep learning what discipleship means for us as long as life lasts.

 

III: — Lastly we are told that the lame man whom Peter and John restored was forty years old. In ancient Israel someone “forty years old” was someone sufficiently old to be a credible witness. We are told that Isaac and Esau were each forty years old when they married. Chronologically they would have been closer to twenty. “Forty years old” means sufficiently old to be a believable witness.

The lame man whom Peter and John come upon; they find him begging. He asks them for money. They have none. “Silver and gold we don’t have,” they say; “but what we do have we give you: in the name of Jesus Christ get up on your feet and start walking.” And for the first time in his life the man stands and walks, however shakily. The religious authorities resent it all, since they assume that they and their bureaucracy and their schemes control God. The authorities slander the apostles and try to discredit them, yet have to fall silent when the healed man stands beside Peter and John. What can detractors say when there is standing in front of them someone whose restoration is an undeniable sign of God’s work and God’s kingdom? They can’t say anything. After all, the healed man is “forty;” he’s old enough to testify credibly.

Testimony always does two things. (i) It reconfirms the faith of the believer himself. Wherever and however testimony is rendered, whether in word or deed, whether quietly or publicly, the faith of the believer roots itself more deeply and manifests itself more noticeably and bears fruit more tellingly. Testimony always reconfirms the faith of the believer, the testifier, himself. (ii) In the second place testimony or witness – of any kind – is a megaphone that magnifies the voice of our Lord as he summons yet another person to begin following him.

In a court of law, testimony is acceptable only if it comes from someone who has first-hand experience to relate and who is truthful in relating it. First-hand experience (not second-hand hearsay) and truthfulness (not fabrication or wishful thinking) are what matter.

What does a congregation expect in its pastor? Surely that the pastor is going to be forty years old. He or she has to be a credible witness, possessed of first-hand experience to be related truthfully. When someone dear to you is dying or sin has overwhelmed you or betrayal has devastated you, only the forty year old can help. While a congregation expects this in its pastor, the pastor in turn aims at this for every member of the congregation.

 

The truth is, so relentlessly complex is our daily life, and so wonderfully rich is our Lord’s grace, that we are stepping ahead in the wilderness where we are tested and refined. We are advancing in our understanding of our Lord’s ministry and our discipleship. And in all of this we are a credible witness to others, like the healed man who walked usefully, leapt delightfully, and praised God exuberantly. We are doing all these; we are all these, at one and the same time.

Then it really is true: life begins at forty.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                              

 November 2004

 

Of Trees and the Tree

Deuteronomy 21:22-23

Genesis 3:1-7; 22-24       1st Peter 2:21-25       Psalm 1

 

I: — What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with the world? What’s wrong with the world is something the world would never guess: it slanders the goodness of God.

The old, old story of Genesis is a timeless story not about one episode in history but about the history of every man and every woman, for “Adam” is Hebrew for “everyman” and “Eve” for “mother of all the living”. According to the old story God has placed us in a garden abounding in trees: “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food”. God has placed us in a setting that delights us and nourishes us abundantly. In addition to the myriad trees in Eden (” Eden ” being Hebrew for “delight”) there are two extraordinary trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life symbolizes the fact that the origin of life and the conditions of life and the blessings of life rest in God; the tree of life symbolizes this and reminds us of it. As John Calvin says so finely, “God intended that as often as we tasted the fruit of the tree of life we should remember from whom we received our life, in order that we might acknowledge that we live not by our own power but by the kindness of God.”

In addition to the tree of life there stands the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “Good and evil” does not mean “good plus evil”. “Good-and-evil” (virtually one word) is a semitism, a Hebrew expression meaning “everything, the sum total of human possibilities, everything that we can imagine.” To know, in Hebrew is to have intimate acquaintance with, to experience. In forbidding us to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil God is warning us against intimate acquaintance with the sum total of everything that we can imagine. He is warning us against thinking we must experience or even may experience whatever we can dream up. In other words, God has set a limit to human self-extension; God has set a limit to our extending ourselves into anything at all that the mind and heart can invent.

Why has God set such a limit? Why does he urge us to become intimately acquainted with everything that is both nourishing and delightful, both essential to life and culturally rich — and then in the same breath warn us against becoming intimately acquainted with “good and evil”? He sets such a limit just because he loves us; he sets this limit for our blessing. This side of the limit is blessing; the other side is curse. This side of the limit there is the blessing of curative medicines the other side of the limit there is cocaine, curse. This side of the limit there is the one-flesh union of marriage, blessing; the other side there is the curse of promiscuity and perversion with their degradation and disease. God, who is good in himself, wants only what is good for us.

Good? We don’t think that God is good when he tells us, “Every tree except the one tree”; we think he’s arbitrary. After all, he didn’t consult us when he decided where the boundary line was to be; he simply told us; arbitrary.

The root human problem is that we disparage the goodness of God. We disparage the goodness of God when we scorn the tree of life, dismissing the goodness of God and the truth of God, even as we tell ourselves that he has proscribed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because he longs to bless us but just because he’s arbitrary; and not only arbitrary, but a spoilsport as well since he won’t allow us to extend ourselves into all those possibilities that would surely enrich us — wouldn’t they?

The tree of life represents discipleship; the tree of life represents what it is to be profoundly human: human beings are created to be glad and grateful covenant-partners with God. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil — prohibited! — is the alternative to discipleship, the alternative to glad and grateful covenant-partnership with God. The root human problem, then, is that we don’t want life from God’s hand under the conditions God sets for our blessing. We prefer an alternative; we want to be the author and judge and master of our own life.

According to our ancient story the garden of profuse creaturely delights continues to delight us as long as we hear and heed the creator who gave them to us. As soon as we try to “improve” upon him, however; as soon as we disobey him, proposing an alternative to the covenant-partnership of discipleship, the creaturely delights no longer delight us. They become the occasion of endless frustration, emptiness, futility, curse.

 

II: — The process by which we typically arrive at self-willed curse in place of God-willed blessing is subtle. The serpent is the personification of this subtlety. The serpent asks with seeming innocence, “Did God say? Did God really say you weren’t to eat of that one tree?” The serpent hasn’t exactly lied: at no point does it say, “God never said…”. While the serpent never exactly lies, neither does it ever exactly tell the truth. The serpent (subtlety personified) smuggles in the assumption — without ever saying so explicitly — that God’s word, God’s command is subject to our assessment.

The subtlety takes the form of a question that appears innocent but in fact is a doubt-producing question with a hidden agenda. What’s more, the doubt-producing question is an exaggeration: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?'” Any tree? There’s the exaggeration! God has forbidden us to eat of one tree, one tree only!

Eve (mother of the living) decides to correct the serpent. Surely there’s no harm in correcting an exaggeration! But for her there is, for as soon as she attempts to correct the serpent she’s been drawn into the serpent’s territory; now she’s dialoguing with a subtlety to which she’s not equal. When first she heard, “Did God say?”, the only thing for her to do was to ignore the proffered subtlety. Correcting it looks harmless but is ultimately fatal, for now she’s been drawn into the tempter’s world.

Isn’t it the case that as soon as you and I begin to reason with sin we are undone? As soon as we begin to reason with temptation we’re finished! Temptation can only be repudiated, never reasoned with, for the longer we reason with it the longer we entertain it; and the longer we entertain it the faster our reasoning becomes rationalization — and rationalization, everyone knows, is perfectly sound reasoning in the service of an unacceptable end.

As soon as Eve attempts to correct the serpent’s exaggeration she exaggerates herself! “God has told us not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree; we aren’t even to touch the tree, lest we die.” God had never said they weren’t to touch it. They were certainly to be aware of the tree, always aware of it, and never to eat of it, never to experience it. In trying to correct the serpent’s exaggeration Eve exaggerates herself. In trying to undo the serpent’s distortion of the truth she distorts the truth herself. Of course. To dialogue with a subtlety pertaining to temptation is invariably to be seduced by it.

Eve doesn’t know it yet, but she’s undone. She doesn’t know it, but the serpent does. For this reason the serpent leaves subtlety behind and accosts her blatantly. “You won’t die”, it tells her as plainly as it can, “You won’t die; you’ll be like God, the equal of God.” It’s the tempter’s word against God’s; it’s temptation’s contradiction of God’s truth.

But God has said that we shall die if we defy him; we are going to be accursed if we extend ourselves into areas and orbits beyond blessing. “You won’t die.” Please note that the first doctrine to be denied is the judgement of God. Doctrines are the truths of God, and the first truth of God to be disdained is the judgement of God. We should note in passing that Jesus everywhere upholds it.

Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with the result that “their eyes were opened”. They had thought that by defying God they were going to be enlightened. By defying him, however, they have moved to a new level of experience; their eyes are opened — but now they are anything but enlightened. They now know “good and evil”. They have intimate acquaintance with, first-hand experience of, what God had pronounced off-limits. Too late, they now know too why it was pronounced “off-limits”: it’s accursed.

To sum it all up, the primal temptation to which every human being succumbs is the temptation to be like God, to be God’s rival (actually, his superior). The primal temptation is to regard God’s truth as inferior to our “wisdom”; to slander God’s loving “No” as spoilsport arbitrariness; to regard obedient service to God as demeaning servility; to pretend that a suicidal plunge is a leap into life. Ultimately the primal temptation is to look upon God’s goodness as imaginary, his will as capricious, his judgement as unsubstantial.

 

III: — The result is that Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden. Expelled means driven out. By decree. Does forced expulsion strike you as rather heavy-handed for a God whose nature is love? Then be sure to understand that the forced expulsion is also the logical outcome of disobedience. After all, Jesus insists (John 17:3) that life, eternal life, is fellowship with God. And fellowship with God is precisely what humankind repudiates. Then a forced expulsion from the garden — a forced expulsion that issues in estrangement instead of intimacy, creaturely goods that frustrate instead of delight, daily existence that is cursed instead of blessed, and a future bringing the judge instead of the father — all of this we have willed for ourselves. We think the expulsion to be heavy-handed? We wanted it!

In the ancient story the cherubim, spirit-beings who safeguard God’s holiness, together with a flaming sword that turns in every direction; these guarantee that God means what he says: humankind is out of the garden, is prevented from going back in, is now living under curse, and can’t do anything about it.

 

IV: — We can’t do anything about it. Only the holy one whose holiness cannot abide our sinfulness can. Only he can. But will he? Has he? Peter cries, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree!” (1 Peter 2:24) He himself did? Who is “he himself”? It is our Lord Jesus Christ, he and none other.

We must never think, however, that after Peter had denied his Lord and had run away he suddenly came to the happy conclusion that Jesus is the great sin-bearer for the whole wide world. He had concluded only that Jesus was accursed. After all, the Torah said it all clearly: “…a hanged man is accursed by God. Therefore, if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and you hang him on a tree, don’t leave his body on the tree overnight; remember, anyone hanged on a tree is accursed by God.” (Deut. 21:22-23) Since Jesus had been hanged on a tree (of sorts), Jesus had to be accursed by God. Such people weren’t accursed because they were hanged; they were hanged because they were accursed; and they were accursed because they were unspeakably debased sinners.

It was only in the light of Easter morning that Peter understood what had really happened. It was through his Easter morning encounter with the risen one himself, it was in the light of the Father’s Easter vindication of the Son that Peter saw several things simultaneously.

[1] Jesus was accursed; he had died under God’s curse.

[2] Yet Jesus wasn’t accursed on account of his sin; he was accursed on account of humankind’s sin. That is, while he was not a transgressor himself, he was “numbered among the transgressors”. While not a sinner himself, he identified himself so thoroughly with sinners as to receive himself the Father’s just judgement on them.

“He bore our sins in his body on the tree.” To “bear sin” is a Hebrew expression meaning to be answerable for sin and to endure its penalty. The penalty for sin is estrangement from God. In enduring this penalty — demonstrated in his forlorn cry of God-forsakenness — Jesus answered on our behalf.

[3] Because Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God he possesses the same nature as God. Father and Son are one in nature, one in purpose, one in will. It is never the case that the Son is willing to do something that the Father is not, that the Son is kind while the Father is severe, that the Son is eager to pardon while the Father is eager to condemn. Incarnation means that Father and Son are of one nature and mind and heart. To say, then, that Jesus bore the judge’s just judgement on our sin is to say that the judge himself took his own judgement upon himself. But of course he who is judge is also father. Which is to say, when Jesus bore our sins in his body the Father bore them in his heart.   The just judge executed the judgement that he must, then bore it himself and therein neutralized it, and all in order that his characteristic face as Father might be the face that shines upon you and me forever. Father and Son are one in judgement, one in execution, one in anguish, and one in pardon. What the Son bore the Father bore, in order that justice uncompromised might issue in mercy unimpeded.

In the light of Christ’s resurrection the truth of the cross and the nature of its curse flooded Peter.

 

V: — When Peter cried, “He bore our sins in his body on the tree”, he went on to say in the same breath, “in order that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”

Then the only thing left for us to decide this morning is whether or not we are going to die to sin and live to righteousness. Here only do we have anything to say, to do, to become. We can’t do anything about Eden. We have been expelled, and rightly expelled, having disparaged the goodness of God and disobeyed the wisdom of God and disdained the blessing of God. Just as we can’t do anything about Eden we can’t do anything about our consequent condition: we can’t overturn it, can’t right it, can’t alter it however slightly. We can’t do anything to effect atonement, can’t do anything to make ourselves “at one” with God once more. We can’t do anything here for two reasons. In the first place, offenders can’t finally achieve reconciliation in any personal relationship anywhere in life. Reconciliation is always finally in the hands of the offended party anywhere in life. Since we are offenders any possibility of reconciliation rests with the God we have offended.

We can’t do anything to effect atonement, in the second place, just because it’s already been done. God wrought our reconciliation to him in the cross. To think we can improve upon it is to disdain the blessing he has fashioned for us; and this is to commit the primal sin all over again.

Then there is only one matter for us to settle. Are we going to or are we not going to die to sin and live to righteousness? If we intend to do this today or to go on doing it today we must cling in faith to the crucified one himself. He is the son with whom the Father is ever pleased. Then in clinging to him we too shall become that child of God who delights the Father. He is the wisdom of God. Then in clinging to him we shall forswear our folly and know blessing instead of curse. In clinging to him and following him throughout life we shall know that his service, so far from servility, is in fact our glory. His tree is now become the tree of life. To become ever more intimately acquainted with it is to relish the rigours of discipleship, recognizing all alternatives as the spiritual suicide that they are.

 

VI: — As we cling to our Lord in faith the psalmist will say of us what he said of others so long ago:

They are like trees planted by streams of water,

which yield their fruit in its season,

and their leaves do not wither.

In all that they do they prosper.

For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish.     (Psalm 1:3,6)

 

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                                                                  

April 2003

Ecclesia Reformata et Semper Reformanda Secundum Verbum Dei

Deuteronomy 7:6-11                               Ephesians 2:1-10                                       Luke 18:9-14

(The Church Reformed and Always Being Reformed
In Accordance With the Word of God)

I: — What comes to mind as soon as you hear the word “Protestant”?   Many people have told me that they think first of protest; we Protestants engendered a protest movement, and we’ve never moved beyond a protest mentality. We exist only as we criticise someone else.

If this were the case, then Protestantism would be inherently parasitic. Parasites are creatures that can’t live on their own; they have to latch onto another creature and draw their sustenance from it.  Protestants, if protesters by definition, would forever need something to protest against or else we couldn’t survive.  Protestants, if protesters by definition, would always know what they are against but likely wouldn’t know, if they even cared, what they are for.         Protestants, if protesters by definition, would be incurable contrarians; ornery curmudgeons, chronic nay-sayers and fault-finders.

The truth is, the Latin word (always be aware that Latin is the language of the Reformation) protestare is entirely positive. Protestare means to affirm, to assert, to declare, to testify, to proclaim.  The Reformation didn’t begin negatively as a protest movement.  It began positively as an announcement, a declaration, an affirmation, a witness. There was nothing parasitic about the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century and there is nothing parasitic about the Protestant ethos now.

If protestare means to affirm, declare, testify, what are we declaring?   To what do we bear witness?

 

II: — The Reformers upheld the priority of grace in all the ways and works of God; the priority of grace in God’s approach to us and God’s activity within us.  The Reformers maintained that over the centuries the priority of grace had become obscured as the silt of theological misunderstanding gradually covered up what ought always to be at the forefront of Christian faith, understanding and discipleship.

If people today are asked what they understand by “grace”, most of them will say “God’s unmerited favour.” They aren’t wrong. But what they’ve said is more a description than a definition.  Grace, according to scripture, is God’s faithfulness; specifically, God’s faithfulness to his covenant with us; God’s faithfulness to his promise never to fail us or forsake us, never to abandon us in frustration or quit on us in disgust.

God keeps the covenant-promise he makes to us. We, however, violate the covenant-promise – always and everywhere to be his people – we make to him. We are sinners.  When God’s faithfulness meets our sin, his faithfulness takes the form of mercy. In our reading of the apostle Paul’s letters we can’t fail to notice how often he begins the letter by stating “Grace, mercy and peace to you.” Grace, as we’ve noted already, is God’s covenant faithfulness.         Mercy is God’s covenant faithfulness meeting our sin and overcoming it as God forgives us our sin and delivers us from it.  Mercy, then, is God’s covenant faithfulness relieving us of sin’s guilt and releasing us from sin’s grip.         Peace – here’s where you have pay close attention – is not peace of mind or peace in our heart (at least not in the first instance). Peace here is shalom. Paul is Jewish, and when he speaks of peace he has in mind the Hebrew understanding of shalom.  Shalom is God’s restoration of his creation, and specifically restoration of his people.         Shalom, peace, then, is simply salvation.

Crucial to the Reformation was a biblical understanding of how all this occurs.  According to scripture, God expects us to honour our covenant with him. He looks everywhere in the human creation, only to discover that he can’t find one, single human being who fulfils his or her covenant with God.  Whereupon God says to himself, “If humankind’s covenant with me is going to be humanly fulfilled (only a human, after all, can fulfil humankind’s covenant with God), then I’ll have to do it myself.”    And so we have the Christmas story as God comes among us in Jesus of Nazareth. This is the Incarnation. And then we have the Good Friday story (“God’s Friday”, our mediaeval foreparents called it) where Jesus renders that uttermost human obedience which you and I don’t render; renders that uttermost human obedience which turns out to be obedience even unto death.   And this human obedience unto death, thanks to the Incarnation, is God himself taking upon himself his own just judgement on sinners.   This is the atonement.

In the Incarnation and the atonement the covenant is fulfilled. Jesus Christ is the covenant-keeper.  You and I, sinners, are covenant-breakers.  Then by faith we must cling to Jesus Christ our covenant-keeper.  As we cling to him in faith we are so tightly fused to him that when the Father looks upon the Son with whom he is ever pleased, the Father sees you and me included in the Son.  Covenant-breakers in ourselves, by faith we cling to the covenant-keeper with whom we are now identified before God.  And that is our salvation.

Salvation is by grace alone, since God has graciously given his Son to be the covenant-keeper on our behalf. Salvation is by faith alone, since all we need do, all we can do, is embrace the Son who has already embraced us. Salvation is on account of Christ alone, since Jesus Christ is both God’s mercy pressed upon us and human obedience offered to the Father on behalf of us all.

 

To affirm that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone is to deny all forms of merit.

(i) It is to deny all forms of moral merit.  Our salvation doesn’t arise because we are morally superior to others and therefore have a claim before God that they haven’t.  Here we should recall the parable of the two men who go to the temple to pray, one a despicable creature as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, without a moral bone in his body; the other a paragon of virtue.  The moral champion boasts before God of all his moral achievements, none of which is to be doubted.  The creep, on the other hand, can only cry “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Jesus tells us that it’s the latter fellow, the one with nothing to plead except God’s mercy – this man goes home “justified” says Jesus, where “justified” means “rightly related to God.”

(ii) It is also to deny all forms of religious merit.  Our salvation doesn’t arise from – neither is it aided by – religious observances of greater or less rigour or notoriety, as if God’s purpose were to render us hyper-religious, what psychiatrists call homo religiosus.

(iii) It is also to deny all forms of institutional merit.  Our salvation doesn’t occur because we have conformed to churchly edicts or traditions or prescriptions.

To affirm with the Reformers that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone on account of Christ alone is to recover essential truth that had gradually become silted over as century followed century.  “Nothing in my hand I bring” cries the hymn writer; “nothing – simply to thy cross I cling.”

When this gospel truth was declared people gloried in their new-found freedom.  They were freed from any and all forms of trying to placate God or curry favour with him or impress him or bribe him.  They were freed from anxiously asking themselves “Have I done enough? How will I ever know if I’ve done enough? Is my ‘enough’ good enough?” They gloried in the fact that in Jesus Christ God had done what needed to be done. Not only had God kept his covenant with humankind; in his Incarnate Son he had also kept humankind’s covenant with God. Now men and women needed only to own it in faith, thank him for it, glory in the relief it brought them and the release they could enjoy forever.  Their guilt, their anxiety, their guessing games, their insecurity – it was gone. They gloried in the freedom that God’s grace had brought them.

Either we uphold the priority of God’s grace in his way and work upon us and within us or we uphold a meritocracy of some sort, whether moral or religious or institutional, wherein we think we have to earn God’s favour, only to be left assuming that we have earned it (and now are insufferably self-righteous); or we are left assuming that we haven’t earned it (and now are inconsolably despairing.)

Grace, mercy, peace (shalom).  The priority of grace means that God’s loving faithfulness will see his people through their disobedience, through their covenant-breaking. The priority of grace means that God has pledged himself to see his people saved by his free grace for the sake of their glorious freedom before him.

 

III: — The priority of grace, continued the Reformers, entails “the priesthood of all believers.” Protestants have always been quick to speak of “the priesthood of all believers.”

I’ve been asked more than once, “If everyone’s a priest, then what’s the meaning of ordination?   Is there any place in the Protestant understanding for an ordained ministry?” Plainly there is. Before we probe what’s meant by “the priesthood of all believers”, then, we should understand the place of ordained ministry.

The ordained minister doesn’t have powers, spiritual powers, that unordained Christians lack.  To be sure, denominations customarily prescribe that it is the clergy alone who preside when Holy Communion is administered in congregational worship. We must understand, however, that this is simply to maintain order.  It isn’t the case that the clergy alone preside because the sacrament will “work” if they administer it but it won’t work if a lay person administers it. It “works” ultimately (i.e., it is a vehicle of Christ’s cementing himself ever more firmly into the believer’s life) just because Christ has pledged to give himself afresh to us, unfailingly, every time Holy Communion is administered (i.e., Christ invariably keeps the promises he makes), regardless of who administers it.   The ordained minister doesn’t have powers that others lack.

The ordained minister does have, however, a responsibility that others don’t have. Specifically, the ordained minister is essential to the church in that someone, by vocation, aptitude and study – someone has to ensure that the congregation’s understanding of Jesus Christ doesn’t drift away from that of the apostles.

The apostles are the normative witnesses to Jesus Christ. While Christ is different from James and John and Peter – that is, Christ is person in his own right and can never be reduced to the apostles – hearing and obeying Christ himself, Christ in person always takes the form of hearing and obeying the witness of James and John and Peter. In other words, we honour Jesus Christ only by honouring the normative witnesses to him.  We receive him only insofar as we receive them.  It is the responsibility of the ordained minister to see to it that the congregation doesn’t drift from the apostolic understanding of our Lord, but rather in all aspects of individual faith and congregational life the congregation conforms to the apostolic pattern of believing upon Jesus and obeying him.

Make no mistake.  Left to itself – that is, in the absence of the ordained minister – a congregation will always drift.         First of all it drifts by retaining biblical words but filling them with non-biblical meanings. Drift is underway when the word “sin” is equated with immorality.  (No one in this room is flagrantly immoral or criminal, yet everyone in this room is sinner through-and-through.)  Drift has occurred when the word “faith” is thought to mean “feeling optimistic in general.”   Drift has occurred when the word “God” comes to mean “a cosmic power in the universe that’s greater than any one of us or all of us put together.”

The next stage of drift is substituting the reading of poetry or Reader’s Digest for scripture at worship; the singing of such nonsense as “God is watching from a distance” (how could anyone endorse this drivel in light of the witness of both Testaments and the Incarnation in particular?) instead of hymns that speak of the Holy One of Israel; or as my own minister suggested one day, using juice and cookies at Holy Communion instead of bread and the cup.         Left to itself a congregation always drifts and will continue to drift until it has turned 180 degrees away from the gospel without knowing it.

Ordained ministry is essential to the church just because someone by vocation, aptitude, and study has to ensure that the congregation doesn’t drift away from what the apostle Jude calls “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

 

Then what is meant by the “the priesthood of all believers”?   In the Older Testament, priests are those engaged in the service of God, specifically in an intercessory service. “Priesthood of all believers” means that the congregation as a whole (first) and any Christian (thereafter) may and must engage in an intercessory service on behalf of his or her fellow-Christian.

Think of the matter of confession of sin.  In his tract The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) Martin Luther maintained that there are several forms of confession. One is what is done here Sunday by Sunday: as part of public worship the minister gathers up the people’s confession of sin and voices it before God, even as in the name of Jesus Christ the minister pronounces absolution (pardon, forgiveness) for the people.  This is a public, liturgical form of confession.

Then, said Luther, there’s a private form.  Someone visits the clergyman, unburdens herself concerning the sin she can no longer deny, and awaits the pastor’s pronouncement of absolution or pardon.

There’s one more form, says Luther: any Christian at all may hear a fellow-Christian’s confession of sin and pronounce absolution in the name of Christ.

We must be clear about this matter.  We are not dealing with psychotherapy, or at least not dealing with psychotherapy in the first instance.  We are dealing with something profounder than that, a spiritual matter of ultimate significance. The Reformers were convinced that since the Church is defined as the people of God rather than defined in terms of clergy function or clergy hierarchy; since the Church is the people of God then the people of God can hear each other’s confession and pronounce God’s pardon in the name of Christ.

This is not a devaluation of the ordained ministry. It is rather the elevation of God’s people.

The mother who overhears her child’s prayers at night and who listens to her child’s tearful repentance during the day is engaged in a priestly activity.  The board member who offers counsel to the fellow-board member who is too embarrassed to speak with the minister is engaged in a priestly service. Jean Vanier, the Canadian born to the aristocracy who has given himself to disadvantaged folk, especially men who are severely intellectually challenged; Vanier also spends much time visiting the impoverished, the sick, the confused, the forgotten geriatric patient in the back ward of a substandard facility. Vanier says that frequently he comes upon someone whose mental or bodily distress is overwhelming. All he can do in such a situation, he tells us, is put his hand on the sufferer’s head (a scriptural sign of intercession) and say “Jesus.” This too is priestly service.

Another dimension to “priesthood of all believers”: any Christian’s daily work, done as under the scrutiny of God, done with integrity, done conscientiously, done so as to give full value for compensation received; any Christian’s daily work, done so as to please God, has the same spiritual significance as the work of clergyman, monk, or nun.

I wince whenever I hear it said of someone offering herself for ordained ministry, “She has decided to enter full time Christian service.” Full time? What about the homemaker? Is her Christian service part time? Which part of the homemaker’s day is “Christian”?  God is honoured by the labourer who renders a day’s work for a day’s pay. God is never honoured by the clergyman who waits until the Saturday night hockey game is over before starting to think about what he’s going to say Sunday morning.

“Priesthood of all believers” means there are no higher callings and no lower callings.  There is no double standard of discipleship for ordained and non-ordained. There is only the integrity in the workplace that is to characterize whatever we do for a living. There is only the service we can render on behalf of a needy neighbour whose suffering is undeniable. There is only the word and truth, pardon and patience of Jesus Christ that all Christians are privileged to mirror to each other, since all of us are to be icons of our Lord to our fellow-believers.

 

The title of today’s sermon is Ecclesia Reformata et Semper Reformanda Secundum Verbum Dei – the Church reformed and always being reformed in accordance with the Word of God, the gospel. The truth is, no church, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, can coast.  All churches, all denominations, all congregations become silted over with accretion after accretion that may look like the gospel but in fact has nothing to do with the gospel; silted over, that is, until the gospel is obscured – unless – unless such congregation or such denomination is constantly being reformed in accordance with the gospel.

 

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd      

 February 2011                                             

Central Presbyterian Church

 

Materialism

Joshua 7:19-26                           Ephesians 5:1-5;15-20                                 Mark 12:28-37

 

I: — Materialism is blamed for everything that’s wrong with our society. Are children greedy and ill-behaved? It’s because of materialism. Are domestic tensions unravelling marriages? It’s because of materialism. Can you think of anything else that’s out of order? Blame materialism.

You must have noticed that all of us are quick to say that other people are infected with the spirit of materialism. As soon as our neighbour drives a new car or wears a new suit we announce that he’s plainly been bitten with the “bug” of materialism. It’s assumed, of course, that we are impervious to the ailment ourselves. It’s the rich woman from the Rosedale mansion, we note angrily, who denounces female factory employees asking for just a few more cents in their scanty pay-packet. It’s the television preacher with his carefully coiffed hair, we relish pointing out, railing against “Godless materialism” – even as his diamond tie pin sparkles and the income tax investigator sniffs and snoops. Everyone has the disease except us, we insist. After all, we have a perspective on materialism lacking in those who’ve already been seduced.

What is materialism, anyway? Is it as bad as it’s made out to be? Does it underlie all that’s wrong with us individually and collectively?

 

II: — William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury and a profound thinker, used to say over and over, “Christianity is the most materialistic religion in the world.” He was right. Christians believe more about matter, believe more positively about matter, and do more with matter than do the devotees of any other religious system.

[1] First of all, Christians acknowledge that God made the world of matter, the world of things. “All things bright and beautiful…The Lord God made them all” the children’s hymn declares. Since God made them, and since God is good, then all that God has made is good as well. We are to receive all that God has made with thanksgiving. We are to enjoy it all for as long as we have breath. It’s never God-honouring to disparage or disdain or declare to be evil what God has brought forth and declares to be good.

Not only are material things good; they are essential. While it’s true that we don’t live by bread alone, it’s equally true that without bread we don’t live at all. What’s more, material goods are essential not only to physical survival; material goods are essential to human survival. While it’s true we don’t live by our possessions, the person who is without possessions, the person who has nothing she can call her own; this person has been stripped of human dignity. To have nothing material, nothing whatever, isn’t merely to be materially destitute; it’s also to be psychologically deprived, psychologically warped. Quite frankly, when I get up in the morning I want to wear my own clothes. I don’t want to have to ask permission to wear someone else’s clothes. You want to sleep in your own bed. You don’t want to have to ask if there’s room in my bed for you. A modicum of material possessions is essential to human dignity. God has ordained this. However grand and lofty and mentally superior humans are compared to other life-forms, we humans remain inescapably bodily. Because of our inescapable bodiliness and its materiality, materiality is essential to our mental well-being. Depriving people of all material possessions neither enhances them humanly nor finds them mentally healthy.

[2] Christianity is unusually materialistic in another sense as well. Think of Christ Jesus our Lord. He is the eternal Word of God made flesh. By incarnating himself in Jesus of Nazareth God has conferred unspeakable worth on human flesh and therefore on everything that sustains it. If human flesh is important to God, then so is food for the body; so is clothing for it; so is shelter for it. Because the eternal Word has become flesh, matter matters. Matter matters enormously.

Think of what the Incarnate one does. He reconciles the world to the Father by means of the cross. Note: by means of the cross, not by means of a speech; not by means of an idea; not by means of a philosophy; by means, rather, of a cross. We are reconciled to God by means of coarse wood and coursing blood.

[3] Christianity is materialistic in yet another sense. Think of Christian worship. We use material items in worship all the time: water, wine, bread, money. We mustn’t forget money. The Sunday offering isn’t a convenient way of collecting funds to keep the furnace functioning. The Sunday offering of money is as “spiritual” a part of worship as reading scripture or singing hymns or praying. Money and prayer are equally spiritual, Christians insist. (If we doubt this we need only recall that Jesus spent more time in his public ministry talking about money than he did talking about any other single item.)

[4] Christian esteem for matter reaches far, far back into our Hebrew roots. When a sheaf of wheat fell out of a farmer’s arms in the autumn harvest, he didn’t go back to pick it up. He had to leave it in the field for anyone who lacked wheat. The farmer had to leave a border of grain all the way around his field. The border left behind was for anyone at all who lacked grain.

In Israel an indentured servant had to be released in the seventh year. Yet the person just released would obviously have no goods with which to begin his new economic life. Therefore when the master released the indentured servant after seven years, the master had to pile the fellow high with goods in order to give the fellow’s new beginning in life an economic foundation that would permit him to thrive.

[5] Our Lord clinches the materiality of the Christian faith in his parable of the sheep and the goats. Sheep and goats, genuine disciples and phoney disciples, are distinguished by one issue: whether they have used their material privilege to support the hungry, the homeless, the sick.

William Temple was correct: Christianity is thoroughly materialistic – by God’s appointment.

 

III: — Then why is materialism blamed for all that’s bad? If matter is blessing, how does materialism come to be curse? Curse arises the moment we covet.   We modern folk regard coveting as a trifle, nothing at all at best, a mere social impoliteness at worst. Our Israelite foreparents, on the other hand, regarded it with horror. When the apostle Paul writes to the congregations in Ephesus and Colosse he mentions coveting in the same sentence where he mentions the most lurid, vulgar sexual degeneration. He’s not suggesting that coveters are crypto fornicators. (This would be ridiculous.) He’s saying something else. He’s aware that everyone in the Ephesian and Colossian churches admits sexual degeneration to be accursed. What sexual degeneration and coveting have in common is this: both are accursed, because both are deadly.

Coveting, he knows, induces chronic discontent in people. Chronic discontent is pain of a peculiar sort, pain that gnaws and torments. Frequently I speak with couples who want a bigger house. A bigger house will have a larger dining room or living room. To be sure, the bigger house is going to plunge them another $150,000 in debt at x% per year. “How many times per year do you entertain so many people that you need this bigger room?” I ask as gently as I can. “Oh, once or twice per year.” And it’s going to cost $150,000 at x%, not to mention additional headaches? Then I learn that a close friend already has a bigger house. Wife complains about the smaller house. Husband is now shamed for not making more money, even though wife tells him (unconvincingly) she’s not blaming him. Husband mutters that he’s doing his best and suggests that if wife wants bigger house perhaps she should consider doing something about it herself. Chronic discontent has now mushroomed; it’s spread from discontent with their accommodation to discontent with each other – and this is far, far worse; deadly, in fact.

In the book of Joshua we are told that Achan covets the silver and gold belonging to the conquered enemy. Israelites are forbidden to plunder, since war is hideous at any time and Israel is not to profit from such hideousness. Achan ignores all this and takes the silver and gold he covets. Joshua , Israel ’s leader, learns what’s happened and confronts Achan: “What have you done?” “When I saw the silver and gold”, Achan replies laconically, “I coveted them.” Whereupon Achan is put to death. Just for coveting? Even after he has confessed it? Israel of old is aware that covetousness is contagious. As the contagion spreads the entire community is infected. As the infection rampages, everyone becomes hostile to everyone else because everyone envies everyone else. The entire community is endangered. Achan’s offence is vastly more serious than it appears.

Before we write off the incident as barbaric and the explanation for it as unconvincing, we should ask ourselves whether this isn’t how we regard pornography. We all admit that pornography induces what’s better not induced at all. We agree that pornography debases people made in God’s image; pornography denies the dignity of those he deems the apple of his eye; pornography dehumanizes humans whose humanness is always at risk in our world. In a word, pornography disrupts a community and endangers it. And, as we have recently come to know, pornography is more addictive than cocaine. Maybe, then, just maybe, Paul was smarter than we think when he mentions porneia and pleonexia, luridness and coveting, in the same sentence; and mentions them in the same sentence on more than one occasion. When Paul comes to state his qualifications as Christian leader he lists all the things we’d expect him to list: he’s received a commission from the hand of the crucified, etc., etc. Finally he gathers up his qualifications as Christian leader in one statement: “And I have coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel.” (Acts 20:33 )

Not only does covetousness induce chronic discontent; it induces chronic anxiety. I’ve noticed that people who lack life’s necessities are anxious. Of course they are. Who wouldn’t be anxious if she couldn’t feed her children? As people come to possess life’s necessities their anxiety decreases. As they possess life’s necessities plus a margin, a safety margin that can cover unforeseen setback and lend a little comfort, they are least anxious. As people begin to possess more, however, and more again, their anxiety starts climbing again. As they gain much more they are much more anxious. The poor are anxious on account of what they lack. The affluent are anxious on account of what they might lose. As people become still more affluent they are soon worried sick: worried about inflation, about taxes, about crises in international banking, about bad investments, about “creeping socialism”, whatever that is and however it’s thought to threaten.

Not only does chronic covetousness induce chronic discontent and chronic anxiety; it also induces chronic nastiness. The apostle James minces no words. “You desire and do not have”, he thunders, “and so you kill. You covet and cannot obtain, and so you wage war.” It’s no exaggeration. “Kill”? How many friendships have we seen disappear only to be replaced by contempt and ridicule just because someone’s material fortunes rose and someone else’s covetousness spilled over into nastiness?

The blessing wherewith God blesses us in his material provision becomes a curse the moment we begin to covet. You see, the gospel announces that matter matters. Coveters announce (regardless of what they say) that matter alone matters. The difference is huge. Since matter matters, the God who gave it is to be thanked. If matter alone matters, however, the God who gave it is to be dismissed. To dismiss the one who is our maker, our saviour, our guide, our sustainer; what is this but to live accursed?

 

IV: — If we have perverted blessing into curse, how is blessing recovered?

[1] First we have to remember who we are. Who we are is governed by whose we are. We belong to Jesus Christ. He is the one, scripture tells us repeatedly, through whom and for whom everything has been made. We belong to him. We live in his company. In his company we come to know why matter is good, how it is good, and how readily it’s perverted.

In the company of Jesus Christ we have also found a contentment that only his intimates know yet which they certainly know. Cherishing our contentment in him, we don’t have a nameless emptiness that we foolishly think to be assuaged by costlier things. We know that things will no more satisfy spiritual hunger than sawdust will satisfy bodily hunger. Knowing whose we are, we know who we are: we are those whose resistance the master’s invitation has melted as he renews every day his invitation to us – “Come to me…and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matt. 11:28-29)

[2] In the second place we are convinced that since matter matters, things can be an effective vehicle of God’s truth and God’s compassion and God’s persistent caring for all whom he has made. G.K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic, was asked if he disagreed with The Salvation Army’s methods. “Disagree?” Chesterton replied, “A brass band is a purely spiritual thing.” So is drinkable water. So is farm fertilizer. So are school textbooks.

I spoke with a missionary surgeon who left what was then Zaire and returned home after three years’ service. He couldn’t abide the crude, make-shift medical practices he was forced to adopt on account of the lack of supplies. (For instance, there was no blood bank. When he was performing surgery that entailed no little loss of blood, he had to control bleeding by inducing shock. Shock is hard to control. Sometimes too much shock was accidentally induced and the patient died. Any North American MD who induced shock to control bleeding would lose his licence immediately.) In addition he was given a few thousand dollars to purchase medicine for many thousands of people. It averaged out to 35 cents per person. What was he supposed to do with that? Penicillin is a purely spiritual thing.

The little boy who gave his sardines and crackers to Jesus did something seemingly useless. For one, once he’d given his minuscule lunch away he wasn’t going to eat himself. As for the 5,000 around him, they were never going to eat in any case. And yet – at the end of the day, thanks to the boy’s gift, he had enough to eat, and so did everyone else.

One of my friends is a physician, an internist at Sunnybrook Hospital . He sees many people in intense pain. He also sees many drug-addicted people. He tells me that people who are suffering terribly can be given morphine, heroin even, as a pain-killer. They won’t be addicted. But a comfortable person, in no pain, who is given morphine or heroin, is addicted instantly.

Matter matters. God has given it to us as blessing. Matter satisfies material need: water, food, air. Matter is the occasion whereby Jesus Christ satisfies spiritual need: wooden cross, baked bread, pressed grape wine, fleshly handshake. Materialism, on the other hand, “matter alone matters” – materialism is a form of addiction. The sign that we’re free from such addiction is that we’re free to share our material goods: house, meals, money – only then to find that the little we share is hugely multiplied in the bizarre arithmetic unique to Christ’s kingdom.

 

Addiction? In the course of thirty-five years’ ministry I’ve encountered many drug addicts. They scare me half to death.

                                                                                                  Victor Shepherd   

  April 2005

 

Ruth: The Woman and the Book

   Ruth 1:1

 

I: — Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Today we begin thinking of the build-up to Christmas, the story whose crescendo gathers force throughout Advent and is crowned on Christmas Day with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who is Messiah of Israel, Ruler of the Gentiles, Son of God, Saviour of humankind, Lord of the entire universe.

As we revisit the Christmas narratives in Matthew’s gospel we start with the genealogies. The older translations of the bible said “Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, Jacob begat…” on and on for dozens of generations.         The newer translations of the bible say “Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob…” and so on.

“Begat.” “Father of.” It sounds one-sidedly male, doesn’t it. Where are the females in the genealogy? Most women (and all feminists) would shout “Nowhere.   That’s just the problem.”   Actually among the dozens of males who “beget” in the genealogies there are a few women mentioned.  But only four. Even so, if there are only four mentioned, the four are surely going to be the four most-celebrated women in Israel ’s history: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.

No. These four aren’t mentioned in the “breeding record” of Jesus.  The four mentioned in our Lord’s ancestry are Rahab, Tamar, Bathsheba and Ruth.

Things aren’t looking good at this point, because each of these women is tainted.

Rahab was a Canaanite woman – which is to say, she belonged to Israel ’s arch-enemy. Still, when Joshua sent two spies into Canaan to assess its military strength, especially that of Jericho , Canaan ’s principal city, Rahab hid the two spies and saved their lives.  Months later, when Israel conquered Jericho , Rahab was spared. Israelite soldiers didn’t pulverize her house.  How did they know which house was hers?   She had hung a red ribbon in the window.  With today’s electrical power she would have put a red light in the window. The red light would be appropriate too, because Rahab was a harlot, we are told, a prostitute. Of the four women mentioned in our Lord’s ancestry, one is “iffy” already.

Next is Tamar. At least she’s an Israelite, not a Canaanite.  Tamar was the daughter-in-law of Judah . Her husband died.  She was childless. No one would marry her. So she disguised herself – disguised herself so thoroughly as to be unrecognisable – and then seduced Judah, her father-in- law, and bore his children.

Bathsheba.  David was already married when one day he saw a woman (a married woman) who was so gorgeous she was almost an apparition.  Bathsheba and David “carried on”, as we say today.  She became pregnant. Whereupon David arranged to have her husband murdered, subsequently marrying Bathsheba himself.

Ruth. Ruth was a Moabite. By the time Ruth was on the scene the Moabites were considered Gentiles, since the Moabites were descended from Lot ’s incest with his daughters.

Our Lord’s background is questionable several times over.   He isn’t a pure-bred. Of course his background includes Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.  But they aren’t mentioned in his genealogy.  Mentioned instead are Rahab, Tamar, Bathsheba, and Ruth.

Today we are talking about Ruth.

 

II: — The story of Ruth has always been regarded as a tale of romance. How many times have we become sentimental as we heard Ruth’s moving speech to Naomi, her mother-in-law, “Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following you. For where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge.  Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried.  May the Lord do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you.”   It is moving. Nonetheless the story of Ruth isn’t finally about romance.  It’s about a crushing episode in Israel ’s history and two different responses to the disaster.

In 587 BCE the Babylonian armies overran Israel and carried off into exile many of the people and most of the leaders.  Eventually the exiles were permitted to return.  The repatriated leaders found the people who had never been taken into exile but who had been left behind; the leaders found these people demoralized. The people were dispirited, disillusioned, confused, floundering.   The leaders knew the people had to have their morale restored.         The people had to be infused with new heart, fresh confidence, hope. Essential to all this, the leaders insisted, was ethnic purity.  Israelites were to stop marrying foreigners.  And since Moabites were hated more than other foreigners, no Moabite was to set foot in an Israelite place of worship for ten generations (two hundred years.) Two men especially, Nehemiah and Ezra, were vehement on this matter.  In fact Nehemiah’s vehemence boiled over into violence.  He was heartbroken when he came upon Jewish men who had married Moabite women and whose children couldn’t speak Hebrew.  His heartbreak heated up into white-hot anger and he fumed at these irresponsible men. “I contended with them,” Nehemiah tells us himself, “and I cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair….”  Certainly Nehemiah thought he was doing the right thing.  After all, he was maintaining the honour of God’s cause and preserving the ethnic purity of God’s people.

We mustn’t be too severe with Nehemiah.  He had a point. It was Israel ’s God-ordained vocation to be a light to the nations. But how could they ever be a light to the nations if their own light sputtered out? Nehemiah told the people the light they were supposed to be was on the point of sputtering out; they weren’t of much use to anyone.         Their children couldn’t speak Hebrew?   Then how would their children ever learn Torah, Torah being both the vehicle of God’s revelation to them and the “Way” that God appoints his people to walk? If they couldn’t learn Torah they couldn’t obey God.  If they couldn’t obey God what could they do besides meander and stumble, the blind leading the blind, as Israel ’s greater Son was to say centuries later, with everyone eventually falling into the ditch? Nehemiah had a point. He and Ezra and many other leaders proposed handling the problem this way.  One, mixed marriages were no longer permitted.  Two, foreigners were to be treated with hostility, relentless harassment driving them out of the land.  Three, the people of Israel were to ghettoize themselves and shun contact with the wider world as much as possible.

But not everyone in Israel agreed with this. In fact the book of Ruth, along with the book of Jonah, was written to protest against these policies. And now to the story itself.

 

III: — Famine arises in Bethlehem . Naomi, her husband, and her two adult sons go to the country of Moab in order to feed themselves. Naomi’s husband dies. Her two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth.  Naomi, her two sons and her two daughters-in-law live ten years in Moab . Then Naomi’s two sons die. (This is scarcely surprising, since the sons’ names are Mahlon and Chilion, Hebrew words meaning “sickness” and “consumption.”)   Naomi learns that the famine is over at home, and she starts back. Ruth and Orpah want to go back with her. Naomi cautions them. “Don’t feel obliged to accompany me,” she says; “I’m an elderly widow, too old to remarry. You women are young; you need husbands. Stay in Moab , for you are Moabites yourselves and you won’t be welcome in Israel .” Orpah heeds Naomi.  Ruth refuses to. She clings to Naomi and cries, “Entreat me not to leave you….Where you go I will go; your people will be my people, your God my God.”   And Ruth, knowing that she’ll meet hostility in Israel , still goes back with Naomi, so dearly does she love her mother-in-law.

Ruth eventually marries an Israelite, Boaz.  They have a son. The son grows up and has a grandson whose name is David.  David becomes Israel ’s greatest king. David is poet, musician, warrior, ruler. David is the man after God’s heart. In Israel David is feted as someone whose glory approaches that of Moses.  David: the man who gathers up in himself so very much of all that the Jewish people have cherished for 200 years.  David is the paradigm of Jewishness.  Except that he isn’t purebred Jew.   His great-grandmother was a Moabite, a Gentile.

David had a son, who had a son, who had a son, for 1000 years; this time the son’s name was Jesus.  After Israel ’s greatest king came a still greater king.  On the one hand, Matthew upholds the virginal conception of Jesus. On the other hand, Matthew lists these “iffy” people as our Lord’s ancestors.  It is this one, already “numbered among the transgressors”, who is the Son of God and Saviour of the world.

 

IV: — What are you and I to learn from all of this? How is the story of Ruth “word of God” for us today?

[1] First we have to note that Nehemiah and others were right when they perceived the threat to Israel , but wrong in their response to the threat.  Here’s the dilemma. If God’s people try to preserve themselves by huddling together with their backs to the world; that is, if God’s people try to preserve their identity by refusing to identify with the rest of humankind in its suffering and perplexity and frustration and sin, then they are useless to God and others. They merely ghettoize themselves as they breathe a sigh of relief that at least they still know who they are just because they have kept themselves unspotted from the big, bad world.  At the same time, however, they are of no help to anyone.  This is what Jesus calls hiding one’s light under a bushel basket. The light is still light all right, but because it’s hidden under the basket lest a nasty wind blow it out or someone ridicule it or someone else deny it to be light at all, it doesn’t illumine anyone, most notably those who stand in greatest need of illumination.

On the other hand, if God’s people are so eager to identify with those to whom God sends them that they lose their identity as God’s people, then they too are useless just because they lack distinctiveness. This is what Jesus calls having the salt lose its saltiness.  When the salt loses its saltiness we have the sermon that is no different from the newspaper, the congregation that is no different from the community group, the minister who is no different from Lions Club tail twister, a gospel that aims only at making us feel good, a denomination that is manipulated by the noisiest lobby.

In the first case God’s people retain their identity but forfeit their identification with a needy world.  In the second case identification with human distress is upheld while identity as God’s people is lost.  This is the dilemma. And this dilemma faces every Christian, every congregation, every denomination.

Plainly we need to be able to discern and exemplify Christ’s own righteousness and truth in a world of sin and falsehood.  We can do this only if we avoid embracing the world uncritically; i.e., only if we remember and cherish Christ’s righteousness and truth. At the same time we can exemplify Jesus Christ in our world only if we insist on remaining one with a world of sin and falsehood.

Ezra and Nehemiah had said, “Let’s play it safe. Let’s come down on the side of preserving our identity while ignoring everyone else.” On the other hand the people who had sneered at Moses and had fooled around with the golden calf like the rest of the world; the people who had told Samuel that they wanted a king precisely in order to be like everyone else — they came down on the other side of the issue: they boasted of their identification with the world even as they had long since lost their identity as God’s children.

Jesus Christ is given to the world just because God so loves the world; and the selfsame Jesus tells Pontius Pilate that God’s kingdom doesn’t belong to this world.

The story of Ruth reminds us that the love which Naomi had for an alien who didn’t belong to God’s covenant people moved that alien to join herself to Naomi and say, “Your God, the holy One of Israel, has become the only one I can worship.”  It was Naomi’s persistent kindness to a foreigner when all the while Naomi knew her home to be in Bethlehem (“ Bethlehem ” means “house of bread”); this is what moved Ruth to journey to Bethlehem with Naomi where Ruth could learn for herself why the God of Israel is bread for the hungry when nothing else is.

It’s no different concerning us.  It is as you and I know who we are in Christ; it’s as we cling to our identity in him even as we identify with others that these people will come to embrace Israel ’s greater Son.

 

[2]         The second feature of the book of Ruth that seizes me is this: God’s work moves ahead despite the sin of God’s servants. Ruth, we should note, wasn’t “Miss Goody-Goody Two Shoes.”   She was calculating, manipulative, devious.         We mustn’t sentimentalize her.  She knew she needed a husband. A widow, in those days, was marginalized on all fronts at once.  To be sure, Ruth had been allowed to glean in the field belonging to Boaz as a way of fending off dire poverty.  To glean was to pick up stalks of grain that had fallen out of harvesters’ arms, as well as to cut the grain left standing at the fringe of the field. It was hard work for little food. It would avert starvation, but no more than this.         Ruth wanted more. She wanted a husband. And she snared one, really “snared” him, since she used the shabbiest entrapment to get him.

Now this is where the story of Ruth gets earthy.  Here’s what happened. At the conclusion of the day’s harvesting Boaz was thirsty.  He drank some wine. He drank more wine, and more still. Now he was deep into the “twilight zone.”         In fact he was beyond the twilight zone.  Whereupon, we read in Holy Scripture, “Ruth came softly and uncovered his feet and lay down.”  Now to “uncover one’s feet” in Hebrew idiom means to expose one’s genitals. Ruth exposed Boaz. Next verse in our story: “At midnight Boaz was startled, turned over, and behold a woman lay at his feet.” “Who are you?” Boaz asked, and she replied, “I am Ruth, your maidservant. Spread your skirt over your maidservant.”         Whereupon Boaz flipped his cloak over Ruth and covered himself up as well.

What had happened was this. Ruth had “uncovered the feet of Boaz,” exposed him.  He had drunk too much wine to be aware of this.  When finally he did wake up, he saw that he was exposed, and Ruth as well. Plainly she had exposed herself too; that’s why she had said, “Cover up your maidservant.” But because Boaz had drunk so much wine, he couldn’t remember what had happened; specifically he couldn’t remember whether you-know-what had happened.  He only knew that he had awakened, naked, with a naked woman beside him. It would certainly appear that something had happened.  Little wonder that Boaz insisted, “Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor.”   He thought that the only proper thing left him to do was to marry Ruth. He did.

In other words, Ruth blackmailed Boaz.  She falsified herself and trapped him.

We cannot excuse it. We cannot approve it. And we had better not imitate it. Yet we may and must glory in the fact that God’s work surges ahead despite the most appalling clay feet of his servants.

All God’s servants have feet of clay. Abraham is the prototype of the person of faith in both older and newer testaments.  Yet Abraham lies to save his own skin even as he jeopardizes his wife. Abraham sees men ogling his wife, Sarah. He says to himself, “If I say she’s my wife, they will kill me in order to rape her. But if I say she’s my sister, they will rape her anyway but spare me.”    “She’s my sister,” Abraham shouts, “my sister.”  Abraham did this twice.

David is “a man after God’s heart,” scripture tells us, and he commits adultery with Bathsheba after he has arranged for the murder of her husband.

Paul is sarcastic. Elijah taunts his opponents. All God’s people have feet of clay. We ought to deplore this and repent of it.   But at the same time we ought never to despair on account of it.  So very miraculous is God’s grace that we are going to be used of God anyway. God’s work moves ahead despite the sin of God’s servants, including your sin and mine.

 

[3] I cherish the book of Ruth, finally, in that Ruth calls Boaz her kinsman. The Hebrew word for kinsman is “go’el.”         “Go’el” doesn’t mean kinsman in the modern sense of “next of kin,” the person to be notified when the dump truck runs over my bicycle and me. In Hebrew “go’el” means redeemer.  A kinsman-redeemer-go’el is someone who rescues another person, rescues someone dear to the go’el from real danger.

In the older testament a go’el or redeemer could do many things. He avenged a family member who had been molested. He vindicated a loved one who had been slandered.  He paid off debt and thereby secured the release of someone who had been enslaved because she couldn’t pay her debts.  Redemption, in Israel , always entailed some kind of rescue, release, deliverance.

The description of kinsman-redeemer-go’el came to be applied to God; in fact it came to be one of the most characteristic descriptions of God. Over and over God is spoken of as the One whose love for us moves him ultimately to sacrifice himself for us in order to rescue us, release us and deliver us.

What do we need to be rescued from?   Enticement at the hands of the evil one, our own sin arising from such enticement, and God’s just judgement judging us on account of our sin.

What do we need to be delivered to? We need to be delivered to, handed over to, the freedom and gratitude and obedience of God’s children.

It’s all won for us in Christ, given to us in Christ, the go’el or redeemer, guaranteed for us in Christ — who is himself king eternal above King David, even as Jesus Christ and King David are alike descendants of a Gentile, a Moabite, a devious woman, Ruth.  Even as our blessed Saviour, whose Advent we celebrate today, is descended also from Bathsheba, Tamar and Rahab – wicked sinners like us, and like us grateful beneficiaries of God’s mercy, wrought for us all in God’s only Son, Christ Jesus our Lord.

                                                                                            Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                

November 2005  

 

 

Of Mothers and Sons

1 Samuel 1: 12-20    Galatians 4:4-7    Matthew 1:18-25

 

There are some expressions of human suffering so terrible that the pulpit can mention them only with fear and trembling, in view of the fact that sitting in the pew are those who are suffering the anguish under discussion. One such anguish is childlessness. I have been a pastor now for 32 years, and I have concluded that there is no anguish like the anguish of childlessness.

If it is less than wise for me to discuss this publicly, what I am going to say next is even more foolish, since it may be pilloried as sexist. I think that while it is husband and wife together who are childless, women suffer more, and suffer in a way that is difficult for men to understand. When Hannah was tormented by her childlessness her husband, Elkanah, no doubt heartbroken himself over their infertility, no doubt near-frantic at his wife’s inconsolability, and no doubt clueless as to what to say next; Elkanah finally blurted out, “Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (1 Sam. 1:8) No, he wasn’t more to Hannah than ten children. He was her husband; she was his wife. But she wasn’t anyone’s mother. Wife is categorically different from mother! Elkanah was her husband; he couldn’t be more to her than ten children; he couldn’t even be more to her than one child.

Today, in this Advent season, we are going to look at four childless women — and at four children (sons) whom the world will never forget, as it will never forget their mothers.

I: — The first we shall look at is Sarah. She was to be the foremother of all God’s people. God had promised her and her husband, Abraham, descendants as numberless as the sands on the seashore. Before there can be numberless descendants, however, there has to be one; yet Sarah was childless. It’s difficult to believe in God’s promises, isn’t it, to keep on believing year after year!

Then Sarah was told she would conceive. She laughed. Being told, at her age, that she would conceive was as ludicrous as my being told that I am going to be the next middleweight boxing champion of the world. Laughter befits the ludicrous.

But Sarah did conceive, and gave birth to Isaac, the Hebrew word for “laughter”. Now it was easy to believe in the promises of God.

Or was it? For the day came all too soon when her faith in the promise-keeping God was tested. Her husband was told to offer up their son Isaac as a sacrifice to God; Isaac, their son, their only son.

Their dilemma was this. God had promised numberless descendants within the household of faith, generation after generation. Two things were needed for the fulfilment of the promise concerning the household of faith: people who were descended from Abraham and Sarah, and people of faith who were descended from Abraham and Sarah. If Ab. and S. obeyed God and offered up Isaac, then their faith was intact but their descendants were snuffed out. On the other hand, if they second-guessed God and preserved Isaac, then descendants were guaranteed (biological descendants), but in their second-guessing and disobeying God faith was snuffed out — with the result, of course, that there would be no descendants of faith.

In other words, if they obeyed God in faith, the promise was null and void since there would be no descendant. If, on the other hand, they disobeyed God in unfaith, the promise was null and void since there would be no descendant of faith. Regardless of what they did, the promise was null and void — when all the while they had been called to faith in the promise-keeping God. So what were they to do?

With unspeakable anguish of heart they elected to obey God and trust him to keep his promise to them even though they couldn’t see how God was ever going to keep his promise! Rather than second-guess God and try to sort out for him what he couldn’t seem to sort out for himself, they elected to trust God and trust him to sort out for them what they couldn’t sort out for themselves. And so with breaking hearts they trudged up Mount Moriah, knife in hand, determined to trust God to fulfil his own promise in ways beyond their imagining — only to find that a ram had been provided for the sacrifice.

God has made many promises to us. One is that the powers of death will not prevail against the church. But right now the powers of death seem to be prevailing against the church. So what are we going to do? We can trust God to keep his promise, in ways that we can’t see at this moment; or we can second-guess him. We can continue to hold up the gospel, even though it is steadfast allegiance to the gospel-message that seems to keep contemporary secularites out of the church, or we can develop a new message, a new attraction, new entertainment, new gimmicks — all of which we hope will keep people here even as the gospel has long since gone. So what are we going to do?

Ten times per year I am asked why I won’t approve of raffles or other games of chance for church fundraising. Wouldn’t a raffle bring in truckloads of money? (And everyone knows it takes truckloads of money to maintain any congregation.) Wouldn’t a raffle get us past our chronic financial squeeze and let us concentrate on other matters? Concentrate on what other matters? Certainly not on the gospel, because by the time we got around to the raffle the gospel would have been long given up. What answer would Sarah give to us, even as she wept over Isaac?

A friend of mine, a pastor in Montreal, “locked horns” with his congregation (the conflict ended in his dismissal) over the Sunday morning prayer of confession; confession of sin. They told him they didn’t believe they were sinners; at least they weren’t sinners in the real sense of the term. Furthermore, in an era of declining turn-outs on Sunday morning they needed to attract upwardly mobile young couples. How were they ever going to do this as long as the pastor told “wannabe” social climbers every Sunday that they were sinners? What would Sarah say to all this? We know. She was willing to give up the son she had awaited for decades.

Sarah trusted God to keep the promises he had made, even though she couldn’t see, at this minute, how it was all going to work out. Sarah trusted.

II: — Hannah longed for a child so ardently and prayed so intently and wailed so incoherently before God that her clergyman, Eli, thought she was drunk. “Put away the bottle!”, Eli rebuked her. “I’m not drunk”, Hannah had said, “I’m troubled; I’ve been pouring out my soul before the Lord.”

And then it happened. A child. Samuel. “Samuel” is a Hebrew expression meaning, “His name is God.” What an unusual name to call a child! But before Samuel was born Hannah had consecrated him to God. She didn’t give him up to death as Sarah had done before her; nevertheless in the profoundest sense Hannah gave up her son unconditionally to the service of God. “As long as my son lives”, Hannah had cried, “he is lent to the Lord.” (1 Samuel 1:28)

Samuel became a prophet, one of those uncompromising truth-tellers who made politicians and rulers wince when the truth was made public. Samuel anointed Saul the first king of Israel. Upon witnessing Saul’s disobedience, however, Samuel deposed Saul and anointed David king. Plainly Samuel wasn’t one to waste time.

Samuel grew up in the town of Ramah and lived in Ramah for the rest of his life. “Rama” has a familiar ring these days. Rama is a town near Orillia; Rama is one more site of the provincial government’s protracted disgrace: casino gambling. What do you think Samuel would say if he were to visit the Rama casino? What do you think he would have said (or done) if he had gone to Casino Rama on opening day several summers ago when the parking lot was crammed with milling children, neglected, while their parents (chiefly single moms), were inside squandering the money they keep telling us they don’t have? What would Samuel have done when the public address speakers kept pleading with mothers to go to the parking lot and take charge of their children — all to no avail?

The province of Ontario will sell anyone a return GO-rail ticket (Toronto-Rama return) for only $29.95. Plainly the ticket is heavily subsidized. The government (the tax-payer) subsidizes the poorest people in our society to squander their money on a set-up rigged in favour of returning six billion dollars per year to the provincial governments of Canada. The day the Ontario government introduced state-sponsored casino gambling (Windsor) it eliminated all funding to psychiatric programs for gambling addicts.

What do you think Samuel would have done? King Saul had cozied up to a foreign king who was tormenting God’s people in Israel of old. King Saul had kept the best of this foreign king’s livestock in order to enrich himself even though he had been told he must not profit from the foreign ruler who had brutalized God’s people. Samuel had come upon Saul at that time and had said, “For personal gain you have cozied up to the fellow who tormented your people? You aren’t fit to be king, Saul, and as of today you are deposed.” And then Samuel had slain the foreign king, Agag.

So what would Samuel do in Rama today? We can only guess. But we needn’t guess in one respect. We know for sure that Samuel, distraught at the spiritual declension in his people, would have pleaded with God until the sweat poured off him as it was to pour off Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Samuel would have pleaded with God concerning a government so conscienceless and a people so stupid and a greed so shameless. A heartbroken Samuel would have pleaded until he was hoarse. To be sure, Samuel had deposed Saul and slain Agag; but this wasn’t the sort of thing Samuel did every day. Then what did Samuel do every day? He had a reputation for being a tireless intercessor. He would have interceded with God for his people every day. When he looked out over the broken-down, soft-headed, hard-hearted people of Israel, meandering like sheep without a shepherd and following whoever was making the biggest noise, Samuel cried to the people, “Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you.” (1 Sam. 12:23) A fierce prophet in public, in private Samuel was the intercessor whose tear-runnelled cheeks told everyone what he was doing when no one was around to see him doing it.

III: — Elizabeth and Zechariah had been childless for years. Then they learned they were to have a child: “Yo-chan”, “gift of God”. Their child would be a prophet; not any prophet, but a prophet “in the spirit and power of Elijah”, Luke records.

Elijah wasn’t merely Israel’s greatest prophet; Elijah was the end-time prophet. Elijah was to come back when the Messiah was at the door. Elijah was to prepare the people to meet the Messiah.

Jesus himself insisted that John the Baptist was Elijah all over again. John had been sent to prepare the people for Jesus.

What was the preparation? What is it, since John still prepares people to receive the gift of Christmas?

(i) “You’ve got to make a U-turn in your life”, thundered John, and so we must. And we had better be sincere. If our “repentance”, so-called, is nothing more than a calculation designed to get us “fire insurance”; in other words, if our “repentance” is just one more expression of our endless self-interest; if it is anything other than horror at our sin and anything less than a repudiation of it, John will say to us what he said to the fire-insurance phonies of his day: “You nest of snakes, you slithering creeps; you are revolting. Get serious while there’s time to get serious.”

(ii) The second item in John’s agenda of preparation: “Put your life in order. If you are truly repentant inwardly, your life must display integrity outwardly”. Those whose occupations give them social clout (like police officers and military personnel) must stop brutalizing people; those whose occupations give them access to large sums of money (like accountants and bankers) must stop lining their pockets; those who hoard money and ignore the human suffering around them had better open heart and hand and home. Inward repentance must issue in outward integrity.

(iii) The last aspect of the preparation John urges: “Don’t linger over me; look away from me to my cousin. Don’t stop at listening to me; hear instead my younger relative. He is the one appointed to be your Saviour and Lord in life and in death!”

When John announced he was preparing the way of the Lord many responded. Many more did not. Among the latter was Herodias, Herod’s wife. John looked her in the eye and said, “First you married Phillip, your uncle Phillip, no less. Then you ‘fooled around’ with the man who is currently your husband. Then you had your daughter dance like a stripper in order to inflame a crowd of half-drunk military officers. You, Herodias, are incestuous, adulterous, and a pimp all at once. It’s an abomination to God; you yourself are a disgrace; and the stench of it all looms larger than a mushroom cloud.”

What happened next? Everybody knows what befell John next. Elizabeth had to make that sacrifice required of all the mothers we are probing this morning; she too gave up her son for the sake of the kingdom.

IV: — And then there is Mary. While Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth had become pregnant through an extraordinary intervention of God, there was no suggestion of anything other than ordinary intercourse and ordinary conception. But it was different with Mary, and different with her just because her Son was to be different; Mary’s conception was unique just because her Son was unique. Isaac was a patriarch; Samuel and John were prophets; but Jesus was — and is — the Son of God incarnate. Isaac and Samuel and John pointed away from themselves to God; Jesus pointed to himself as God-with-us.

Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus indicated over and over that to worship him was not idolatry. He persisted in using the formula, “I am” (“I am the door, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, etc.) when he knew all the while that “I am” is the self-designation of God. He agreed with his enemies that only God could forgive sin — and then proceeded to forgive sin himself. He admitted that the law of Moses was divinely authoritative — and then went ahead and announced its definitive meaning. Everyone knew that God alone is judge; whereupon Jesus announced himself to be the judge and insisted that the final criterion for all of us would be our attitude to him.

Mary was unique just because her Son is unique. He — he alone — is the world’s redeemer. He has to be the world’s redeemer just because the world cannot generate its own cure. Every time the world has attempted to generate its own cure (there have been two notable instances of this in the 20th century alone, one in Russia and the other in Germany), it has left the world worse. The cure for a world gone wrong has to be given to the world. History cannot produce the saviour of history; history’s saviour has to be given to it. And if the current talks about “world government” give rise to some kind of international mega-sovereignty, then we shall have to learn all over that humankind’s attempt at self-sovereignty issues in self-annihilation. For precisely this reason Jesus Christ has been given to us — not produced by us — as the world’s sole sovereign and saviour. And if we are ever so foolish as to try to program any form of the superhuman we shall have to see — again — that all such attempts issue in the subhuman. Humankind cannot generate humankind’s redemption. Our redeemer has to be given to us. This is what Mary’s virginal conception is all about.

Mary learned what it was all about the day she was told she would bear Jesus, “Yehoshua”, “God saves”. On the same day she learned that a sword would pierce her heart; a sword would pierce her heart as surely as a spear and nails would pierce her son.

Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth. Each offered up her son. Mary offered up hers too. Mary gathers up in herself all that her sisters knew before her.

Isaac, Samuel, John. The Lord Jesus whose birth we celebrate in this season gathers up in himself all that his brothers knew before him. Yet even as he gathers up them all in himself he is so much more than they. He himself is God’s incursion into human history, and for this reason he himself is the action of God saving us.

Because our Lord Jesus is himself the action of God saving us, he is unique. His mother’s uniqueness testifies to his uniqueness. Rightly, then, did Mary cry, “Henceforth all generations will call me blessed.”

We too are eager to call her blessed, for we too have been blessed in her Son. We have been blessed pre-eminently in the Son’s resurrection from the dead. In that kingdom which his resurrection established the wounded hearts of Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth and Mary have already been healed. In that selfsame kingdom your heart and mine — wounded and broken, savage and self-contradictory, devious and disconsolate — whatever our heart-condition it is to find its cure in him who has been given to us to do for us and in us and with us all that will redound to the praise of his glory and the splendour of his kingdom.

                                                                           Victor Shepherd     

December 2002

 

392 Hark, a Herald Voice stanzas 3&4

390 O Come, O Come stanzas 3&4

391 On Jordan’s bank stanza 2

415 O Come, Let Us Adore Him stanzas 2&5

 

What Do I Want For Our Children?

1 Samuel 3:1-10      Romans 5:1-5

 

I have never looked upon the Sunday School as babysitting. I have never regarded Sunday School as a means of keeping adult worship free from distracting sights and sounds. On the contrary I know that Jesus Christ can surge over and forge himself within the youngest hearts and minds. For this reason I pray for our Sunday School teachers every day. After all, what can be more important than having a youngster awakened to God by God himself as the boy Samuel was three millennia ago? (I Samuel 3:1-10) I long to see our Sunday School children “arrive at real maturity — that measure of development which is meant by`the fullness of Christ’.” (Eph. 4:13 JBP) One aspect of such “real maturity” is to know the love of God. I want our children to have first-hand acquaintance with the God whose nature is love. (I John 4:8) I want our children to find themselves startled and awed and overwhelmed at the love God has for them, for others, for the entire world. I want them to come to know, together with the maturest saint, that the tidal waves of love that wash over them repeatedly are but a ripple in the seas of love that will remain inexhaustible eternally. Through our Sunday School I want our children to know — and keep on knowing — the love for them that streams from the heart of him whose love is undiminishing and undeflectible.

I: — First of all I want our children to know that God so loved the world; so loved the world that he gave himself for it in his Son; gave himself without hesitation, without calculation, without qualification — just gave himself — gave himself up, for us all. (John 3:16)

To know that God loves the world is to know that God loves those who don’t love him; don’t love him at all; hate him, in fact. Everywhere in the writings of the apostle John “the world” consists of the sum total of men and women who are hostile to God; and not merely hostile to God individually, but united in a semi-conscious conspiracy to resist him and mock him and repel him. And this is what God loves with unrelenting constancy and consistency. In other words, God loves to death what you and I would long since have given up loving out of frustration and anger, given up loving for reasons that make perfect sense.

The history of humankind is the history of our repudiating that which is our sole good: God. The history of humankind is the history of our preferring our fatal sickness of selfism to him and his healing love for us. Adam and Eve — whose names mean “humankind” and “mother of the living” (respectively) are awash in blessing upon blessing; unalloyed blessing, unconditional blessing, with nothing to mar their blessedness or even put it at risk. What do they do? (What do we all do?) They cast aspersion on the goodness of God and endeavour to prove themselves God’s equal. Yet despite this outrageous effrontery God refuses to quit on humankind, so incomprehensible is his love.

Noah, together with his family, is delivered from the flood, in the old, old story, in order that God might begin anew the fulfilment of his heart’s desire: a holy people who are the faithful covenant- partners of the holy God. And what does Noah do upon his deliverance at the hand of God’s measureless mercy? He gets drunk! The irreverence, the ingratitude, the culpable stupidity of his response is mind-boggling.

Undiscouraged in his quest of a holy people for himself, God liberates his people from degrading slavery, brings them through the Red Sea, and acquaints them with his will (their blessing!) at Sinai. Or at least he tries to acquaint them with his will, tries to press his blessing upon them. But they will have none of it, preferring to caper around a hunk of metal oblivious to their self-induced spiritual infantilism.

The prophet Hosea swears he hears God say of these people of perverse heart, “Lo-ammi, lo-ruchamah!”: “Not my people, not pitied.” Then Hosea knows he has heard God say in even clearer, louder voice, “Ruchamah, ammi!”: “Pitied — loved — and therefore my people still.”

I trust no one here this morning misunderstands the unrelenting intransigence of the human heart, its wilful blindness and deafness, its irrational folly. Remember, when the apostle John speaks of “the world” he means the sum total of unbelieving men and women hardened in their defiance of God and their disobedience to his will for them and their disdain for his gospel. So unimaginably senseless is the depraved heart of humankind that it will even despise the gospel, its one and only cure!

In our age of ascendant secularism we nod knowingly and say that secularized people are indifferent to the gospel. They are indifferent, to be sure, but such indifference is never mere indifference. In the face of a love that pleads and entreats, such indifference is nothing less than defiance. We must never agree with those who cavalierly suggest that secularized people are ignorant of the truth and righteousness of God. They are ignorant, to be sure, but such ignorance is never mere ignorance. Their ignorance of the truth arises from a suppression of the truth; their ignorance of God’s righteousness arises from a repudiation of righteousness. Truth is suppressed until it can no longer be discerned; righteousness is repudiated until it can no longer be recognized. Indifference to and ignorance of a gospel that is wrung out of the Father’s heart and displayed in the Son’s anguish; this is not mere indifference and ignorance. This is nothing less than contempt.

And in the face of it all God stands loving. Nothing can get him to stop. His love cascades ceaselessly; his love also infiltrates undetectably. Both are needed — both the torrent and the infiltration — if the calcified human heart is to be softened and wooed and won. Hearts are softened and wooed and won. The most stunning miracle of all is that people do come to faith and obedience and love of him.

The most stunning miracle that a child in our Sunday School will ever witness is the miracle of her own coming to faith; the most astounding development to amaze any of us, young or old, is the beginning of one’s own heart to beat in time with the heart of God. Nothing less than the love of God — both its “Niagaroid” torrent and its undetectable infiltration — is needed to remove us from the category of “the world”. It is as God loves “the world” that we are released from “the world” as we are made children of God by faith.

I want our Sunday School children to know that love of God which brings them and others to faith.

II: — Even as God’s love for us does this it continues to do something more: it continues to pulsate within us, with the result that we are little by little transformed in the midst of life’s unavoidable pain. Paul begins his first paragraph in Romans 5 (Rom.5:1-5) with the ringing reminder that we are justified by faith; that is, we are set right with God by clinging to the crucified one. Paul ends the paragraph by affirming emphatically that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit; has been poured into us and now fills us up. What happens in the middle of the paragraph between the ringing reminder and the emphatic affirmation? Suffering; suffering is what happens in between.

Because of our righted relationship with God, because God’s love fills us to the brim, our sufferings are never bare sufferings. Our sufferings, undeniably difficult, don’t render us desolate. Our sufferings are now the occasion of our endurance, and endurance of character, and character of hope (hope being our confidence that it all ends in our being bathed in the splendour of God’s glory).

When Paul speaks of endurance he doesn’t mean that we hang on grimly by the skin of our teeth. “Endurance” is a military term borrowed from the Roman army. Soldiers exemplified endurance when (i) they remained steadfast, (ii) they remained steadfast just because their commanding officer had acquainted them with the purpose of the battle and its unavoidable suffering. The soldier could remain steadfast — could endure — just because he knew how crucial the struggle was.

When God’s love floods the heart of those who have been set right with God through faith, suffering produces endurance; i.e., suffering produces steadfastness in those who know why it is necessary to keep up the struggle. Such endurance produces character, maintains the apostle. The Greek word Paul uses for “character” is DOKIME; literally it means refinement. He has in mind the kind of refining that a smelter does. A smelter subjects metallic ore to intense heat and pressure. In this process of intense heat and pressure base elements, worthless elements, are purged away; what’s left is a precious metal that is both valuable and attractive. Refining is a proving process that results in what is proved being approved. We who are set right with God through faith and flooded now with God’s love; we know the ultimate outcome of our suffering, endurance and refining; the ultimate outcome is “hope” — being bathed in the splendour of God’s glory.

Before I leave this point I want to make sure we understand something crucial. When Paul speaks of God’s love flooding us he is speaking of experience: immediate, visceral, palpable experience. He is not speaking of an idea, the idea of God’s love. We always tend to reduce concrete spiritual realities to mere ideas: we unconsciously reduce God’s love to the idea of God’s love. Odd, isn’t it, but we never do this with our suffering; we never reduce pain to the idea of pain. We can’t reduce pain to the idea of pain just because our pain is too real! After all, what is more immediate, less deniable, than pain? Paul’s point is this: in Christians what is more immediate, less deniable, than God’s love? God’s love flooding us is as immediate, visceral, palpable as our pain is piercing us. As God’s love surges over our pain, suffering yields endurance, endurance character, and character the confidence that one day it will all be taken up in the splendour of God’s glory.

I want our Sunday School children to know this when they are 30 years old or 45 or 60 years old.

III: — Lastly, Paul prays that the hearts of the Christians in Thessalonica will be directed into God’s love (2 Thess. 3:5 NIV); farther into God’s love, deeper into God’s love. Is this possible? Are we not at this moment either “in” God’s love or not “in” his love? To be sure, either the love of God is the sphere, the atmosphere, the environment in which our lives unfold, says the apostle John, or else “the world” is the sphere, the atmosphere, the environment in which our lives unfold. Of course! Either we are united to Christ or we are not; either we are “in the right” with God through faith in his Son or we are “in the wrong”. Nevertheless, even as believers are “in” the love of God, we can always move farther into God’s love, go deeper into it. We can, we should, and Paul prays that we shall.

In 1964 I came to know that Maureen loved me. She loved me then. She loves me now. To say that she loved me in 1964 and loves me in 1996 is not to say that nothing has happened in 32 years. Each year has found me moving deeper — and deeper still — into her love. Just when I think she loves me so much she couldn’t love me more, I discover that there are reservoirs of love in her that I never guessed and before which I can only marvel — and love her yet more myself.

Several months ago I did something that did not cover me in glory. In fact I was ashamed. It haunted me. I said nothing. Maureen knew something was wrong but didn’t guess what. Finally I told her. Now I know Maureen well. (Remember, we have loved each other since 1964.) Because I know her well, and because of my shameful misadventure, I expected her to react in any combination of the following: she would be hurt, she would be angry, she would think ill of me. Contrary to everything I expected from the woman I already knew so well she said only, “It took a lot of courage for you to tell me what you have.” It was obvious to me that as well as I knew her, knew her love for me, I didn’t know her and her love as thoroughly as I thought I did. More to the point, as deeply as I had lived in her love for years, that moment found me moving into her love yet again, deeper into a love that was plainly greater than anything I had known to date.

So it is with our life in God. As much of his love as we have known to date; as deeply in his love as we are at this moment, it is still the apostle’s prayer that our hearts be directed into, farther into, God’s love for us. So vast is God’s love for us that we can only plunge deeper into it, and deeper still, until we are astounded at it, then lost in it, thence to find ourselves, with Charles Wesley, “lost in wonder, love and praise.”

I don’t expect our Sunday School children to grasp now all that I have said in this sermon. I merely want the door to be opened for them, the seeds to be sown, the truth declared, the child’s first steps encouraged. Then when they are older and they are acquainted with the intransigence of “the world” plus the anguish of their own suffering and above all the fathomless depths of God; when they are older they will newly apprehend every day the love wherewith God loves them, loves an unbelieving world, and loves his own people yet deeper — always deeper — into himself.

                                                                   Victor A. Shepherd     

September 1996

Sunday School Teachers’ Dedication, 1996

 

Once in Royal David’s City

1st Samuel 16:6-13               Luke 2:8-11

 

“Once in Royal David’s City”: it’s one of my favourite Christmas carols.  Every time I sing it I recall the heart-warming and heartbreaking complexity of David’s life. David: born to be king. Jesus, David’s Son: born to be the king.

I: — Some people might say that the title “king” was all that David and Jesus had in common.
David, after all, was a military hero; Jesus never once threw a spear.

David had a lethal streak in him.  When he suspected that people were plotting against him, he assassinated them first. No one, however, found such a streak in Jesus.

David played power politics, and played power politics with consummate skill.  Jesus never had the chance, and wouldn’t have played political games in any case since his kingdom, he told Pilate, didn’t originate in this world.

Then what did David and Jesus have in common? They both had simple, uncomplicated rural backgrounds.         They were both country fellows, brought up far from the intrigues of the big city. David was a shepherd-boy. Jesus grew up in the home of a self-employed handyman, in Nazareth , a one-horse town light years from the sophistication of Jerusalem , the big apple.

In addition, both David and Jesus were what I call “earth creatures.” They put on their trousers one leg at a time, and didn’t pretend anything else. Their humanness, down-to-earth and earthy at the same time, was always up front.         They lived life exuberantly, affirmed life ardently, celebrated life boisterously, and everywhere relished a good time.

Jesus, we know, spent more than a little time partying. In fact he was accused of overdoing it. “A glutton and a drunkard” his enemies hissed at him.  Not only that; Jesus partied with the “wrong” people, the folk who sat loose to religious convention and moral custom.  When uncomprehending people asked Jesus why his disciples didn’t fast in principle, why his disciples didn’t mope around with sour faces and sunken cheeks, Jesus replied, “The bridegroom’s here.         My followers are at a wedding reception, not a wake.  Furthermore, Mr. or Ms. Questioner, why aren’t you in here partying with us instead of holding yourself aloof and forfeiting our good time?”

David was like this.  When the Philistines, who had captured the Ark of the Covenant, had finally been routed and the Ark of the Covenant returned to Jerusalem , David rejoiced. The Ark of the Covenant symbolized God’s never-failing presence with his people, Israel . So exuberant was David that he began to dance. He danced with such ardour, such utter self-forgetfulness, that his kilt flew up and he accidentally exposed himself.  The servant girls tittered at the preposterous spectacle of their king cavorting like a university student in a victory parade following the football team’s triumph.

Michal, David’s wife, was angry and embarrassed and disgusted – especially disgusted – all at once.  Michal, it must be remembered, was the daughter of King Saul.  She was a blue-blood, born to the aristocracy.  She always knew her husband to be low-born, but had married him anyway on account of his talent. Now he was behaving like a fourteen-karat oaf. She felt he had behaved un-aristocratically.

David had, and he couldn’t have cared less. “I was dancing before the Lord”, he tried to explain to his acid-tongued wife; “It was before the Lord that I danced.”   Years later Jesus would turn on his detractors, “When the king and his kingdom are here, are my friends and followers supposed to be sad sacks?”

David and Jesus had ever so much in common.  Both were winsome. Both attracted followers. Both drew to them those who would follow them anywhere.

 

II: — Blind Bartimaeus knew this. Bartimaeus had learned that Jesus was in the crowd.  “Jesus, Son of David”, Bartimaeus had called out.  A few days later, in the last week of his earthly life, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a flea-bitten donkey, and the crowds had called out, “Hosanna to the Son of David.

Son of David.  In what respect was Jesus the son of David?  Spelled with a lower-case “s”, “son of” is a Hebrew expression that means “of the same nature as”.  When people hailed Jesus as “son of David” they were saying that he mirrored David in several respects.  “Son of David” spelled with an upper-case “S” means “messiah”. Jesus is David’s son in both respects, both little “s” and capital “S”.  Jesus is David’s clone in many respects; and as David’s clone in the profoundest respects he is the long-promised messiah.

Bartimaeus knew this.  So did the crowds who hailed our Lord on Palm Sunday.  What did all such people expect from Jesus?  What are we expecting from him now?

 

[1] People then and now expect deliverance. The name “Jesus” is the English translation of the Greek “Iesous”, which Greek word translates the Hebrew “Yehoshua.”   “Yehoshua” means deliverer, saviour.  We all want deliverance. We all need it.

David had been no armchair dreamer.  David had done something. After his death there had intensified in Israel a longing deeper than the child’s longing for Christmas Day, a longing for the day when a clone of David would appear, and more than merely a clone. For David’s greater Son would deliver Israel from any and all who afflicted it. In the course of delivering Israel , David’s Son would bring righteousness and prosperity and contentment, everything the Hebrew word “shalom” gathers up, everything the bible means by “peace”.  All of us want, more than we want anything else, righteousness in the sense of right-relatedness everywhere in life; we all want prosperity not in the sense of riches but in the sense of richness; we all want the contentment born of God’s blessing.

In my own life I can find grounds to praise God for deliverance. If no one else is aware of what those grounds are, that’s all right, since there are aspects of the personal history of all of us that we do well not to advertise. At the same time, I’m aware that the Deliverer or Saviour hasn’t finished his work within me, and therefore like Bartimaeus of old I continue to cry out for the Son of David.

My heart aches for people who are habituated to anything distressing, whether chemical substance or character defect or psychological preoccupation or injury-fuelled resentment – anything. My heart is one with those who shout, “Don’t hand us a pamphlet or tell us to read a book or ask us to take a course; just tell us where there’s deliverance.” However much some of us relish intellectual subtleties, deep-seated habituations don’t yield to them. Where thinking is concerned we relish subtlety; where habituation is concerned we crave plain, simple release.

The Son of David has been appointed the deliverer of everyone. There is no addiction to which he isn’t equal.         If the community that he forms around him (i.e., the church) loses sight of this truth or simply loses confidence in him, parachurch groups quickly proliferate around the church.  These parachurch groups always feature a program as simple as it is effective. And the members of these groups can always point to people who have been delivered. These groups are a frequently-needed reminder that deliverance is the principal reason the church is in business.

We mustn’t think that only the substance abuser is habituated, like the booze-crazed or the cocaine sniffer or heroin injector.   Scripture speaks of subtle habituations, subtler to be sure yet every bit as deadly, from which many more of us need to be delivered: envy (what has a firmer grip on us than envy, and what is deadlier for us and others?), enmity, backbiting, gossip, slander, mean-spiritedness, stinginess, chronically negative thinking.  Just to contemplate the list (albeit partial) that scripture brings forward makes us realize that we don’t need religious fine-tuning or psychological finessing.  We need nothing less than deliverance.  In coming to church today we’ve come to the right place, for the Son of David has been given to us for just this purpose.

 

[2]         When Bartimaeus and the crowd around him; when you and I and so many more hail Jesus as Son of David we are expecting something in addition: we long to see justice done. Despite the brief but disastrous episode concerning Bathsheba and David’s shocking treatment of her husband Uriah (David, you will recall, when infatuated with a woman who happened to be another man’s wife, and when tempted to take her displayed the culpable stupidity that we all display when temptation turns reason into rationalization; David arranged to have Uriah murdered so that he could have Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife); despite his indefensible collapse David implemented and enforced justice in Israel in a way that Israel hadn’t known before and wasn’t to know after. The poor were protected (always the first responsibility of an Israelite king). The widow, the orphan, the resident alien – in other words, the most vulnerable people, the marginalized, any who were at risk because utterly defenceless – all these people had a resolute defender in King David.

On the other hand, those who fleeced the widow or exploited the poor or grew rich by grinding someone else into the ground – these people learned that this king couldn’t be bribed, wouldn’t be compromised, and remained formidable at all times.

We all long to see justice done.  The cry for justice that goes up from the dispossessed of the world is still a cry inspired largely by David and the Son of David.  Who has been at the forefront of the protests against injustice in Africa, in Latin America, in South Korea ? Christians.  What is the one institution that that all tyrants attempt to suppress? The church.  Who were the people who startled us Canadians several years ago with the near-hopeless struggle of so many fellow-Canadians?   The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.  Who established Mississauga ’s food bank? (It’s the model of food banks throughout Canada , and it distributes food every year whose market value is $12 million.)  Children of David, children of the Son of David.

Everyone is aware that while segments of the church led the campaign for the abolition of slavery, other segments of the church campaigned to retain slavery.  In other words, the church didn’t speak with one voice on this matter. Still, the gospel that the church cherishes transcends the church and therefore can always correct the church. And the church’s gospel has certainly inspired the cry for justice.  To speak of the gospel is always to speak of him whose gospel it is, Jesus Christ. Christians can’t consistently embrace Jesus Christ and deny justice to their fellows.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred in Nazi Germany for his opposition to Hitler, pleaded for justice and stood with those deprived of it.  For this reason there is now a plaque attached to the tree in Flossenburg from which he was hanged.  The plaque doesn’t read, “In memory of one who dedicated himself to social justice.” It reads more simply yet more accurately, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a witness to Jesus Christ among his brethren.”

King David was renowned for the justice he enacted. We who cling to his greater Son are ever looking to Jesus Christ for that justice which we must now do ourselves.

3]         There’s one more reason why we, like the ordinary people in Jerusalem before us, have hailed Jesus as Son of David.  We know that David was an ordinary person from an ordinary family in an ordinary town – and was wonderfully used of God.  We are ordinary too. We aren’t ashamed of our ordinariness, because we have learned by now, I trust, that people who don’t own their ordinariness are highly dangerous. (More on this in another sermon.) Ordinary as we are, and unashamed of it as well, we too want to be used of God.  We don’t pretend we’re outstanding and don’t even aspire to be outstanding. But neither do we want to live and die without being used of God.  We know we can be, and are going to be, just because God has always used the most ordinary humans – like David of old, like the Son of David.

Moses – he was the child of a despised minority.  Moses had a speech impediment as well: he stuttered.  He remains the most formative figure in Israel to this day.

   Rahab – was a Canaanite woman who hid Joshua’s spies in her home and afforded them hospitality. Rahab was a prostitute. Rahab is written up in the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews.

          Amos – “I don’t belong to that clique of religious professionals who forge careers for themselves by saying what people and the politicos want to hear”, Amos thundered.  “I’m just a cowboy.” Amos was a prophet whose searing word can still penetrate the hardest heart.

   David – a shepherd boy who found Saul’s armour cumbersome and went out to face Goliath with his slingshot. His own people had said to David, “Don’t be foolhardy: Goliath is too big for you to hit.” “If he’s that big”, David had replied, “then he’s too big for me to miss. Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?”

   Jesus – so very ordinary that people smirked, “He can’t be much; nothing significant ever comes out of Nazareth .” Yet used of God as no one else can be just because he alone is Emmanuel, God-with-us.

I’m aware of two features of us that we often think will preclude us from being used of God.  One is our psychological quirkiness; the other is our sin.  David had both. So have all Christian leaders, not least of whom was the leader of the 18th Century Awakening and whose stamp is found everywhere on the English-speaking church and society since him: John Wesley.  Wesley could communicate with the lowest-born even as elsewhere he often appeared peacock-proud. Sin?  Quirkiness? Wesley, hugely deficient in self-perception, was often laughably unwise and sometimes dangerously unwise, especially in his relations with women.  Yet who has been more tellingly used of God?  The truth is, all God’s servants are quirky and clay-footed.

We long to be used of God ourselves.  As spiritual descendants of David and his Son we know we’re going to be.

 

To speak of David and the Son of David, as we have this morning, is to suggest that only one generation separated the two men.  In fact David and Jesus are separated in time by 1000 years.

David and Bathsheba had a child, their first. A son.   They had great hopes for the child.  But the child died in infancy, breaking their hearts.

One thousand years later a child was born who fulfilled their hopes in ways beyond their wildest dreams.         This child wasn’t merely a great king, not even the best king.  This king is King of kings just because he is the Son of God.  Having been raised from the dead, the can never die.  Alive, he greets us this morning, and therefore we hail him with undiluted, unreserved joy.

And it’s all because of what happened once in Bethlehem , once in Royal David’s City.

 

                                                                                              Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Advent 05

Another Look At A Child’s Favourite: The Story of David and Goliath

1 Samuel 17:1-58 

Many adults tell me they don’t like the story of David and Goliath. They say that the story is too violent, too bloody, too indelicate for sensitive children. (I have noticed, however, that those who object continue to read fairy tales to children, which tales are never delicate.) The story of David and Goliath is violent; so very violent, in fact, that one feature of the story never appeared in the flannelgraph lesson when I was a little fellow in Sunday School. While the flannelgraph lesson always depicted David slinging his stone at Goliath as the giant fell on his face, it never depicted what happened next: David ran up to Goliath, pulled out the giant’s sword, and cut off his head. It was only when the Philistines saw David brandishing Goliath’s head that they fled. It wasn’t merely that Goliath was defeated definitively; the Philistines were made to behold their leader defeated.

Yet for every adult put off by the story there are a hundred children who relish it. Children delight in the thrill of an exciting adventure; they are enthraled by the story of a slender teenager trouncing an enemy giant; they “light up” when they learn of the courage and strength and skill of the shepherd boy who deals with marauding bear, then marauding lion, then marauding giant as the story crescendos to a climax.

Myself, I’m fifty-three years old, fifty-three going on thirteen. I love the story, however indelicate the fastidious may find it.

 

I: — The story begins, “Now the Philistines gathered their armies for battle.” The simple beginning tells us that Israel, the people of God, are immersed in conflict yet again. In fact they’re always immersed in conflict. Of course they are: conflict riddles life. The only way to avoid conflict is to retire from life; or at least retire from facing the injustices that riddle life, the falsehoods, the betrayals, the duplicity, the victimizations. If, however, there is any truth in us, any integrity; if there is any courage in our heart, any fire in our belly, then we can’t retire from the injustices and falsehoods and victimizations that riddle life, and therefore we can’t avoid conflict.

When John Wesley was a sleepy clergyman concerned only with churchly niceties he knew no conflict at all. When, however, at age thirty-five, he felt his “heart strangely warmed”, knew that God’s mercy possessed a sinner like him, knew that the gospel was now etched so very deeply into him; from this point on he was immersed in conflict every day: conflict with church-authorities, conflict with civic authorities, conflict with magistrates and mobs and even fellow-ministers. What had he done to provoke this? He had upheld the biblical insistence on holiness, “holiness of heart and life” as he put it. Wesley knew that by God’s grace all who cling to Jesus Christ are transformed within and thereafter spend themselves to transform the society without. This fosters conflict? Yes. There are many who don’t want individuals transformed within, since such transformation rebukes their own spiritual inertia and innermost corruption; there are many who don’t want society transformed without, since they profit from the society the way it is. Despite the conflict that dogged Wesley for the next fifty years, he never backed away from it.

To insist that such conflict is inevitable is not to say that we are pugnacious and forever looking for a fight. Nor is it to say that we have a chip on our shoulder; nor to say that we are paranoid. It is, however, to step ahead soberly, circumspectly, wisely — yet boldly too — aware at all times that conflict is inescapable.

I have long been interested in the plight of the chronically mentally ill. Therefore I was appalled only two months ago to learn of a development concerning a Parkdale boarding house that accommodated schizophrenic people. Everyone was told that the home was being closed temporarily for alterations. The residents, now dislocated, were sent to assorted small towns in southern Ontario, where immediately they were disoriented themselves, noticed by others, made to know they were unwelcome, and told they had better “check out” even though they had no means of getting out and nowhere to go. They were immediately deemed to be a public nuisance and a drain on the resources of the small towns. Hostility greeted them at every turn. Needless to say, the ill people themselves were frightened and anxious. The boarding house owner had lied unscrupulously in order to get rid of the schizophrenic tenants instantly. (Making alterations gives an owner the right to evict tenants instantly.) As the story unfolded, there were no alterations undertaken, the residents were never coming back, the small towns would be months (if ever) developing resources to look after such people — and all of this because the boarding house owner had learned quietly of a real estate “scheme”, a “flip” of some sort, that would enable her to make windfall gains immediately. No illegality had been committed. But neither had the right ever been done.

Now imagine someone who is outraged at all of this deciding to do something about it, or at least to try to do something about it. Can you imagine the conflict? With city authorities, with Queen’s Park politicians and civil servants, with angry residents in the now-burdened small towns, with hospitals that would see the same sick people again and again but without room to admit them. Can you imagine the size of the conflict generated around only a handful of people who represent only 1% of the population? (Yes, only 1% of the population is schizophrenic.) As soon as we attempt to do the right, conflict is inescapable.

Goliath didn’t represent only himself; he represented the entire Philistine forces when he shouted, “I defy the ranks of Israel this day!” Those who array themselves against the gospel, against the truth the gospel embodies, against the justice the gospel enjoins; all such people “defy the ranks” of the people of God. Of course there’s an extraordinarily noisy spokesperson here or there, but the noisy spokesperson is merely the mouthpiece for hordes just like him.

 

II: — What did David do in the face of the Philistine raving? How did he respond? David turned to his fellow-Israelites, all of whom were shaking in terror, and said matter-of-factly, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God? Who is this jerk, anyway?” Goliath was massive; everyone knew that. Goliath was as mighty as he was massive. Before him the Israelites quaked just because he was so huge. “He’s too big to hit!”, they despaired before David. “If Goliath is that big”, replied the shepherd boy, “then he’s too big to miss!” Everything about Goliath that immobilized the ranks of Israel merely motivated David.

David tried on Saul’s armour. It was too cumbersome, and David laid it aside. “It’s not `me'”, said David, “I’m not Saul. I have to be myself.” Whereupon David went forth ridiculously underequipped, others thought, even as David knew he was sufficiently equipped just because his equipment befitted him. He had to be himself.

“Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God? Why do you Israelites cower like whipped dogs in front of this overgrown oaf?” David’s boldness wasn’t born of arrogance; it was born of confidence in the presence and power and providence of God. David knew that God’s people have nothing to fear really, nothing to fear realistically before the forces of those who oppose Truth.

Thirty-five years ago this month I went off to university. I was going to study philosophy. My minister shook his head sadly; not only did he fear for my spiritual life, he assumed that I had as good as succumbed already to the atheism of the philosophy department. He asked me why I was going out of my way to have my faith strangled at the unholy hands of philosophers. My older cousin had gone to university ahead of me and had studied medicine. Medicine was deemed a “safe” discipline for Christian students; after all, in the study of medicine there wasn’t the head-on assault on faith that there was deemed to be in philosophy. It was suggested that I should study medicine too. I spent five glorious years in intense study of philosophy. Do I strike you as someone whose faith philosophy has strangled?

My friend Fr. Edward Jackman studied philosophy too (albeit several years ahead of me since he is older than I.) Jackman is the brother of the former Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, Hal Jackman. The Jackman family are old Ontario Methodists, and therefore United Church people since 1925 (with one exception, Edward, who is a Roman Catholic priest of the Dominican Order.) Jackman took several philosophy courses from my friend and former teacher, Emil Fackenheim. Jackman tells me that Fackenheim brought him to see that the profoundest philosophical questions point to God. Please note: we do not survive and thrive among threatening giants by fleeing the giants; we survive and thrive among giants by facing them.

Where David and his people spoke of “giants” the apostles and their hearers were to speak of “principalities and powers.” The principalities and powers are the “isms” and ideologies and institutions and images that distort the truth and twist individuals, groups and nations. The principalities and powers are whatever cosmic forces there might be, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial. The principalities and powers are anything and everything that misshapes hearts and minds so that individuals and groups become the contradiction of what they were created to be. The apostles attest everywhere that Jesus Christ has conquered the principalities and powers. In his death and resurrection he has defused them, deprived them of their capacity to define us ultimately and misshape us eternally. In his letter to the church in Colosse, Paul says not only that Christ defeated the powers; he says that having defeated them Christ displayed them as defeated. Not only was our Lord victorious over them; in his resurrection he flaunted his victory.(Col. 2:15) Now you understand why David not only defeated Goliath but displayed the head of the giant. While God’s people are most certainly freed and vindicated in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, God’s people must also be seen to be freed and vindicated.

By anticipation David lived in the realism of Christ’s victory and of that victory flourished; by recollection you and I live in the realism of the selfsame victory. But live there we do, as surely as did the shepherd boy of old.

 

III: — A minute ago we saw that David couldn’t fight with Saul’s armour; nevertheless, David had to fight. Of course David would have preferred peace over conflict; he knew, however, that peace is won eventually not as giants are denied but as giants are dealt with. Therefore David had to fight.

Yet even as David fights he declares, “The Lord saves not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord’s.”(1 Sam. 17:47) Since the battle is the Lord’s, the Lord alone supplies victory. Knowing this, declaring this, David nonetheless goes forward himself to face Goliath. Human weapons do not win the Lord’s battles; still, human weapons are the only weapons humans can wield. Then wield them we must even as we know that the battle is the Lord’s.

Fourteen hundred years after David had defeated Goliath, Augustine wrote, “Without God, we cannot; without us, he will not.” Both men were expressing in their own way the truth that Jesus Christ had impressed upon his disciples on the eve of his victorious death: “Apart from me you can do nothing.”(John 15:5) When Jesus insisted to his followers, “Apart from me you can do nothing” he never meant that you and I should therefore do nothing! On the contrary, in one and the same pronouncement he tells us both that apart from him we can do nothing and that our “doing” should always be bearing fruit and glorifying God. He tells us both that apart from him we can do nothing and that we must never be idle or useless. The battle is the Lord’s, even as David himself must contend.

God’s people have always known this. William Wilberforce gave fourteen years of his life in tireless efforts to end the slave trade. He suffered dreadful abuse for his efforts, but he never quit. He spent fourteen relentless years before he saw slave-trading abolished. But what about those slaves whose lot wasn’t improved by the abolition of slave-trading just because they were slaves already? Already they were the degraded possession of slave-owners. They weren’t going to traded, but neither were they going to be freed. Whereupon Wilberforce spent the next twenty-five years of his life in order to see slave-owning abolished. Thirty-nine years of his life? His entire adult life! But he never quit. Just because Wilberforce knew the battle to be the Lord’s he knew too that he himself couldn’t shirk the battle.

Wilberforce saw the outcome of the battle. Others do not see it, yet are certain that those who follow them will see it. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were faithful ministers of the gospel and leaders of the English Reformation during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor (also known as “Bloody Mary”.) To no one’s surprise Queen Mary had them executed. At the site of the execution, as the wood that was to burn them at the stake was ignited, Latimer, the older man, said to young Ridley, “Master Ridley, …we shall light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” The gospel-light that Latimer and Ridley radiated has never been put out in England. The two men contended valiantly in that battle which is always the Lord’s.

 

IV: — The last point in the sermon today takes us from 1 Samuel 17 (this entire chapter has to do with David and Goliath) to the first verse of 1 Samuel 18. We are told that “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved David as his own soul.” In the wake of David’s courageous contention with the Philistine giant David was graced with a soul-friend, Jonathan. David was given a friend so intimate, so caring, so helpful, so exquisitely vibrant that the intimacy and intensity of the friendship were beyond words. Because the God who added such a soul-mate to David’s forthrightness is the same God who watches over his people now, any of us will be accorded no less.

I should like to say a great deal about this, but the sermon-hour is spent. An exploration of soul-mate sensitiveness will have await another sermon on another day. For now it is enough to remember that Jesus Christ has defeated the principalities and powers; not only defeated them, but displayed them as defeated.

One thousand years before the advent of Jesus, David foresaw it all, did what he knew he must in the fiercest conflicts, and was content to know that the battle, and therefore the victory, is everywhere and always the Lord’s.

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd
September 1997

Of the King with Clay Feet and Huge Heart

     2nd Samuel 6:12-23   

1st Samuel 24:1-12                Mark 10:46 -52

 

I: — He was a poet, a musician, a lover, a military genius.   He was also a shrewd administrator and a formidable dispenser of justice. He was generous, kind, merciful, a loyal friend. Above all he was a man of God.

DAVID was his name. Men envied him. Women swooned over him. Enemies dreaded him. All of these responses befitted him, for there were gifts in him worth envying, a virility that could make any woman gasp, and a determination that only fools trifled with.

David had a faith in God that could move mountains.   He also possessed immense human affection.  And he had feet of clay. He sinned as ardently as he worshipped, and as a result of his sin his life fell apart; domestic disaster overtook him, and his son even sought to kill him.

A hero in Israel , David was adulated at a civic reception, one day, and an aristocratic princess, Michal, daughter of King Saul, fell for him.  Later she despised him. Of course she despised him. She came from the royal family, while he came from rural people devoid of social sophistication and cocktail party smoothness.  Later still — in fact last of all — he died a broken man, everything around him in ruins.

Nevertheless David’s people remembered the glory that had been his, and because his, theirs as well.  So it was one thousand years later that shepherds were told they would find the saviour of the world in the city of David . So it was that a blind beggar cried repeatedly to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me.”

Not only can his people, Israel , not forget David to this day. I can never forget him either.

II: — Who was David? He was a red-haired shepherd boy, born in Bethlehem , the youngest of eight brothers. When only an adolescent he found favour in the eyes of King Saul.   As David gained fame, however, Saul became jealous; soon his jealousy curdled to hatred. Saul was plainly manic-depressive, paranoid as well.  Paranoid? Certainly.         “All of you have conspired against me”, Saul thundered one day, “All of you.” Saul was deranged. In his derangement he tried to spear David.  David fled from the royal court and hid himself in a cave, twenty kilometres from Bethlehem . An outlaw now, he was joined by four hundred other men who had had to flee the psychotic king and who were as desperate as David himself.   “Everyone who was in distress …   in debt … or bitter of soul” is how the bible describes the band that gathered around David.

The four hundred men had wives and children with them.  They had to eat. Money and food were gathered from the sheepfarmers whom David’s men protected against the Philistines. In addition, the men plundered any raider foolhardy enough to take them on.

Then Saul died. David was no longer an outlaw. Much happened overnight. His fame increased dramatically. He was royal ruler, military general, civil service administrator, chief justice — all at the same time. He seemed invincible. Nonetheless, his life unravelled. Amnon, David’s son, raped and then discarded Tamar, a half-sister.         Whereupon Absalom, another son, killed his brother Amnon for the foul deed. After this Absalom came to think himself quite important, a vigilante hero (at least in his own eyes). Following much scheming and manipulating Absalom proclaimed himself king to the cheers of his own crowd of sycophants.

David had to flee for his life, flee from his own son.  In what I regard as the saddest picture in all of scripture, David fled across the river Jordan and staggered up the Mount of Olives , weeping, a broken-hearted, broken-down king.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Jordan , David’s friends pursued Absalom.  Absalom tried to escape only to hang himself accidentally.  Distraught, David lamented his murderous son’s death in a lament we shall never forget: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom my son, my son.” And there David died.

III: — David moves me as often as I think of him.

(i) He moves me, in the first place, on account of his immense affection and his intense loyalty. He moves me inasmuch as today we live, by contrast, in an era of cavalier human encounters and superficial relationships and dessicated affection.   Whole-soulled affection poured upon people dear to us whom we love as our own soul and to whom we shall remain loyal though the earth shake? Not likely.  No generation has used the expression “meaningful relationship” as frequently as our generation, and no generation has meant so little by it.

I watch people change relationships (so-called) the way I change socks. I have people come to me who complain that they lack friends.  I recall the quiet word of my long-dead dad, “If you want to have friends, you have to be a friend.” When I probe the friendless person’s understanding of friendship, invariably I find that the friendless person has no appreciation that the claim of a friendship is as strong as the friendship itself.  Put the other way, a friendship is only as strong as the sacrifice we are willing to make for it, the humiliation we are willing to undergo for it, the sheer inconvenience of it.

Inconvenience? Sure.  The Saturday morning we begin to paint the garage our friend phones us, upset. He wants us to go over to his home immediately, so upset is he.  But we’ve waited five months to paint the garage; it’s rained every Saturday since the weather was warm enough to paint, and we have to leave town tomorrow night on a business trip.   Then do we drop everything (this means having to clean the brush with paint on it even though we’ve only dipped it in the paint-can and haven’t yet painted so much as one stroke) and call on him? Or do we “explain” why we can’t see him, however upset he is, because we simply must paint today? If the latter, we are refusing the claim of the friendship and forfeiting a friend — if ever friend we were.

My friends have embarrassed me in public; and I know I’ve done as much to them. My friends have unloaded their emotional burden on me precisely when I’ve been so emotionally burdened myself I didn’t feel I could withstand it; but I know too I’ve done as much to them.   My friends have pestered me and pestered me again; but no more than I’ve pestered them. A friendship is only as strong as our friend’s claim on us.  The “selfist” people of our narcissistic age assume that a friendship consists of someone else gratifying them endlessly; selfist narcissists never understand that having a friend means we’re willing to be drained, and in fact are drained more than once.

Those who can’t forge so much as a friendship are never going to establish a long-term, stable union.  No wonder they dabble in human superficiality and flit from one shallow encounter to another.

And then I think of young David and his friendship with Jonathan.  “David loved Jonathan as his own soul”, we are told.  And Jonathan felt the same way about David.  Ardent affection; unshakable loyalty; inexhaustible self-giving.  Risking disgrace and expulsion at the hands of his father, King Saul, Jonathan saved David’s life by tipping off David when Saul was in a murderous mood. When Jonathan died prematurely David cried, “I am distressed for you, my brother, Jonathan…your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

David’s magnanimity he poured out not only on his best friend but even on his worst enemy, Saul. During his outlaw days David was resting in the far end of a cave when Saul came in to relieve himself. Saul removed his coat and laid it aside.   While Saul was preoccupied with his toilet details David cut off part of the hem. As Saul left the cave David called after him, “Why do you listen to people who say I’m bent on harming you? See what I have here; your coat-tail. I could have sliced you up as readily.” With tear-choked voice Saul called back, “Is that you, David? You are more righteous than I; for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil.”

In our era of frippery and frivolity David’s fathomless affection and undeflectable faithfulness loom huge.         To be such a friend, to have such a friend means that we are bound to at least one other person in a bond marked by tenderness and toughness, sensitivity and frankness, comfort and honesty, gentleness and truthfulness. Such a friendship perdures, even thrives, in those times when our friend is moody, interferes with long-made plans, even irks us because he seems to be trading on the friendship. What is such a friendship worth when we are fragile and must be handled delicately, when we are wrong and must be corrected, when we are offensive and must be confronted, when we are insensitive and must be rebuked, when we are bleeding and must be bound up?

I have such friends. I know how David and Jonathan felt about each other.  My heart beats with David’s.

(ii) David moves me, in the second place — sobers me, in fact, even startles me — every time I recall his treachery.         He frightens me as often as I recall his self-delusion as he stumbled into his shame.

Can the man whose huge-hearted magnanimity spared Saul be the same man whose reptilian lust slew Uriah, a loyal supporter who wanted only to help David? “Ur-i-ah” is a compressed Hebrew word meaning “The Lord is my light”.  And the light that Uriah was David extinguished for the shabbiest reason imaginable: he wanted Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.  What shocks me most about this incident isn’t that David behaved badly on this occasion (although his behaviour was reprehensible) but rather the self-delusion, the rationalization, the unconscious but nonetheless self-willed blindness that left him unable to see what anyone else could see in an instant.  I am dismayed when I contemplate the incremental insensitivity to sin that inured him against the God whose voice he heard undeniably on other occasions and relished hearing.

David frightens me. Like him, I believe in original sin. Like him, I believe that there’s an innermost, down-deepest warp – utterly perverse warp – to my heart and my mind and my will.  I can’t pretend that where David was vulnerable I’m impervious. I’m aware that David’s erudition concerning theology didn’t inoculate him against that disaster which ruined his earthly future and tore his family apart.

For this reason I have no difficulty understanding the Supreme Court judge who is found taking bribes, or the supermarket cashier with the sweetest smile who is caught pilfering money from the till, or the sincerest Sunday School teacher whom the newspaper describes as incestuous, or the physician whose fatigue and isolation are met by a caring patient and whose disgrace becomes notorious thereafter.  I have no difficulty understanding this.  What scares me is that it can happen nevertheless to anyone whose understanding of it all is adequate. Plainly, more than understanding is needed.

David was brought to his senses when the prophet Nathan confronted him, confronted him by means of a parable that exposed David as sleazy. Who holds the mirror up to you? To me? My wife does, my friends do, my colleagues do, even my enemies do.  (I have thanked God for my enemies a thousand times over, since my enemies have often told me the truth about myself — albeit from the worst of motives — when others have left me self-deluded from the best of motives.)

 

Now please don’t think that this part of the sermon has spiralled down into gloom and doom, unrelieved negativity. You see, the glory of David’s story is this.  So great is God’s mercy, so marvellous his patience, so inscrutable his providence (to quote John Calvin), so persistent is God’s purpose, that not even David’s sin disqualifies him from being used of God most wonderfully. Not even David’s treachery, his blindness, his betrayal; none of it disqualifies him as a servant of God.  Glorious as David’s pardon is, more glorious still is that incomprehensible surge of God’s grace whereby God’s work moves ahead even through the most clay-footed.

And therefore I find myself encouraged for myself and encouraged for you and encouraged for the church of Christ throughout the world. Without thinking for one minute that I can trade on God’s pardon and patience and persistence, I yet know that our sin disqualifies none of us as useful servants of God. God’s work will triumph; triumph in spite of us, to be sure, yet triumph through us nonetheless.

(iii) Lastly, David moves me with his sheer, simple delight in God.  On the one hand David trembled — as he should have — before the awesome lordliness of God; on the other hand, David loved God and delighted in God with the childlikeness of the youngster for whom freshness and  simplicity and exuberance and merriment are natural.

When the Ark of the Covenant (the ark signified God’s presence) was wrested from the Philistines who had dishonoured it and was brought back to Jerusalem , David “danced before the Lord with all his might” (says the text).         David never did anything by halves.  Then of course he danced with unselfconscious abandon.  (As a matter of fact his kilt flew up and he inadvertently exposed himself.) The day the Ark of the Covenant was returned to Jerusalem may well have been the most important day in David’s life.  What else, then, but ecstasy and exuberance and enthusiasm?

But not so with Michal, the wife who had blue blood in her veins and vinegar everywhere else. Not so with Michal, who was ashamed of her husband’s boisterous boyishness. She regarded David as an exhibitionistic oaf whom she had had the misfortune to marry. She saw her husband behaving in conformity with the breeding he had inherited; namely, a socially inferior lout who would never know how to behave like a king.  After all, David’s celebratory cavorting had caused the servant girls to snicker at the spectacle of the king (no less) behaving like a football fan feeling no pain in the victory parade following a Superbowl win. Michal despised him for it. Of course she did. Those who are deaf always despise those who dance, don’t they? “It was before the Lord I was dancing”, David insisted, dumbfounded, thinking somehow that if he told his sourpuss-wife often enough she’d get the point.         Michal would never get the point: those who are deaf despise those who dance. “It was before the Lord.” Before the Lord? Michal had never known David’s God; she knew nothing of the heights and depths of David’s immersion in God.         Her heart was as frigid as David’s was inflamed.

When I was only a child I came upon a line that I didn’t comprehend fully, yet understood enough at the time so that the line has never left me. The line came from an old Scottish clergyman of the last century: “You show me someone who has never purchased a gift he can’t afford for someone he loves and I’ll show you someone who isn’t fit for the kingdom of God .” But I understand it now. David had always understood.

David was the poet and the musician of Israel . He knew that poetry and music are the heart’s outpouring of an immersion in God so deep that prose is insipid compared to that poetry which itself is finally inadequate. If David’s outpouring strikes us as exaggerated — or worse, much ado about nothing — then we can only wait for and wait on the God who moved David to exclaim, “Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fullness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.” We shall have to wait for and wait on him who came among us one thousand years after David and said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full.” We shall have to wait for and wait on him until we cry with Paul, “He loved me and gave himself — for me.”

David knew. And because he did, I find him to be a reflection of what goes on in my own heart, even if my experience of God is slender compared to his and my articulation of it feeble.

IV: — David was Israel ’s greatest king: colourful, gifted, passionate, an outrageous sinner and yet the tenderest child of God.

Someone greater than David came among us, came one millennium later. To this one a blind beggar called out, “Son of David, have mercy on me”.  And in his mercy Jesus Christ our Lord freed Bartimaeus to see and believe and follow.

Then may you and I ever cry out, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” For in crying out to the Son of David who is also the Son of God we shall find ourselves seeing, believing, hearing our Lord, and together with all who hear, dancing too, as we joyfully await that day when the old king and you and I alike fall on our faces in adoration of him who was born in a stable in the city of David, and who is our blessed Saviour for ever and ever.

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd      

July 2009

 

How Are We to Understand Lingering Illness and Premature Death In A Child?

2nd Samuel 12:16-23                 Mark 5:1-43

 

[1]           I’ve always found conducting the funerals of children extraordinarily difficult. I manage to get through the service, albeit shakily, and then I stagger home and fall on my wife.

What is worse than the death of a child?  For years I said that the greatest burden I’ve seen in people is the burden of childlessness. People will do anything to have a child. Yet if they can’t have a child, can’t adopt a child, I’ve noticed that husband and wife don’t thereafter divorce. But when a child dies the parents divorce 70% of the time.         In other words, the death of a child strains marriages beyond the breaking point more often than not.  Then perhaps there is something worse than childlessness; namely, the death of a child. When David’s child died (the child he had had with Bathsheba), his servants were afraid to tell him lest the heartbroken king kill himself.

 

[2]         Everyone is upset at the death of a child.  Everyone feels the death of a child to be especially tragic.   We feel that the child has been cheated.  We don’t feel this way about the elderly.  When Maureen and I lived in rural New Brunswick we called one evening on Mr. and Mrs. Henry Palmer.  Henry Palmer was dying. He was 98 years old.         As he lay dying in the bedroom Mrs. Palmer sat in her rocking chair, that winter evening, close to the fire in the wood stove, rocking pensively, saying little. Maureen, assuming Mrs. Palmer to be upset, began to commiserate with her.         Mrs. Palmer listened to Maureen for a while and then interjected, without interrupting her rocking, “Henry’s had a good life.”   By our standards he’d had a difficult life: he’d had to spend a month at backbreaking labour every year just to cut enough firewood for the winter, among other things.   Still, by Mrs. Palmer’s standards, Henry had had a good life.  Where children are concerned, however, our standards or anybody else’s standards mean nothing: we feel the child has scarcely had any life.

 

[3]         Lingering illness in a child; untimely death in a child; these are manifestations of evil. Evil is evil, and must never thought to be anything else.   We must never pretend that evil is “good in disguise.”   “Good in disguise” is still good; evil can never be good.   We must never say that evil is good on the way, or at least the potential for good. Of itself evil is never the potential for anything except more evil.

My aunt’s grandson (my cousin’s son) died at age seven.  The little boy was born a normal child and developed normally until age two when he was diagnosed with a neurological disease.   His condition deteriorated thereafter.         His facial appearance changed — became grotesque, in fact; his mobility decreased; and his intellectual capacity decreased.  When I spoke with my aunt at the funeral parlour I said to her, “There’s no explanation for this.”   (I didn’t mean there was no neurological explanation; of course there was a neurological explanation.)   I meant, rather, “Given what you and I know of God, there’s no explanation for this.”  My aunt told me later it was the most comforting thing anyone had said to her at the funeral parlour, for virtually everyone who spoke with her put forth an “explanation”; such as, “Maybe God wanted to teach the parents something.” What were the parents supposed to be taught by watching their son suffer and stiffen and stupefy for five years? “Maybe God was sparing the little boy something worse later in his life.”   It would be difficult to imagine anything worse.  These aren’t explanations; these are insults.   As long as God is love, unimpeded love, there isn’t going to be an explanation for this.

We must always be careful and think 25 times before we conclude we’ve found the meaning (or even a meaning) to such a development. Think of the one and one-half million children who perished during the holocaust. Their parents (four and one-half million of them) were first gassed to death, whereupon their remains were burnt.  The children, on the other hand, were never gassed; they were thrown live into the incinerators. If anyone claims to be aware of the meaning of this event I shall say, among other things, “Meaning for whom? for the barbequed children? for their parents? for their survivors? for their executioners? for the shallow pseudo-philosophers who think their question is worth the breath they spend to utter it?” What meaning could there ever be to such an event?

We can bring the same question to bear on any one child who is dying at this moment in the Hospital for Sick Children.

 

[4]         In light of what I’ve just said I have to tell you how unhappy I’ve been with Harold Kushner’s bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People.  I’m disappointed in the book for several reasons.  In the first place there’s virtually no discussion of God’s love in Kushner’s discussion of God.  In view of the fact that God is love, that God’s nature is to love, the book is woefully deficient right here. In the second place, because God’s love isn’t discussed, the rest of the book is skewed. Kushner writes, “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us.   [I’ve no problem with this.]   They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. [No problem here either.] We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them.” I object to this statement. We redeem them by imposing meaning on them? Any meaning that is imposed can only be arbitrary. An arbitrary meaning, something imposed, is just another form of “make-believe”, and no less “make-believe” for being adult “make-believe.”  My cousin and his wife whose seven-year old son died of neurological disease; what meaning were they supposed to impose on the event? And why impose that meaning rather than another?  And how would the imposition of such arbitrary meaning redeem the tragedy?

Harold Kushner’s book is yet another attempt at theodicy.  Theodicy is the justification of God’s ways with humankind, the justification of God’s ways in the face of human suffering.  All attempts at theodicy lefthandedly put God on trial, so to speak, and then develop arguments that acquit God, allowing us to believe in him after all, allowing us to believe that he really is kind and good despite so much that appears to contradict this.  All theodicies assume that we know what should happen in the world; as long as there continues to happen what shouldn’t, God (we think) is on trial; we have to develop arguments and marshall evidence that will acquit him if we are to go on believing in him.

 

[5]         All of which brings me to my next point; namely, our assumption that the questions we think to be obvious and obviously correct are the right questions.  The question, for instance, “If God is all-good, he must want to rectify the dreadful state of affairs so often found in people’s lives; if God is all-powerful, he must be able to rectify such a state of affairs. Since such a state seems not to be rectified, then either God isn’t all-good or he isn’t all-powerful, is he?” Next we set about trying to remove the suspicion that surrounds either God’s goodness or his might. We think our question to be the right question, even the only question.  But in fact the question we’ve just posed didn’t loom large until the 18th century, specifically the 18th century Enlightenment.   The question we’ve just posed was raised by Enlightenment thinkers who weren’t even Christians.  Eighteenth century Enlightenment atheists raised the question, and Christians took it over in that they thought it to be a profound question. But this question didn’t loom large in the Middle Ages where physical suffering, at least, was worse than it is today. This question wasn’t pre-eminent in the ancient world; neither was it front-and-centre in the biblical era.   The pre-eminent question in the biblical era wasn’t “Why?”, because those people already knew why: the entire creation is molested by the evil one. The pre-eminent question in the biblical era was “How long?   How long before God terminates this state of affairs?         What’s taking him so long?”

Think for a minute of the biblical era; think of John the Baptist. John and Jesus were cousins. Not only were they related by blood, they were related by vocation.   John began his public ministry ahead of Jesus.  John’s ministry ended abruptly when a wicked woman, angry at his denunciation of her sexual irregularities, had him slain.  What did Jesus do when he learned of John’s death and the circumstances of John’s death? Did Jesus say, “We need a theodicy. We need a justification of the ways of God.  We need an explanation of how John’s terrible death could occur in a world ruled by a God whose love is mighty.  And if no explanation is forthcoming, then perhaps we can’t believe in God.” — did Jesus say this?   Jesus said no such thing. When John’s head was severed Jesus didn’t cry to heaven, “You expect me to trust you as my Father; but how can I believe you’re my Father, for what Father allows his child to be beheaded?   In view of what happened to cousin John, I can’t be expected to think that I’m dear to you.” Jesus said no such thing. When he was informed of the grisly death of John, Jesus said, “It’s time I got to work.” Whereupon he began his public ministry, and began it knowing that what had befallen John would befall him too, and did it all with his trust in his Father unimpaired.

My point is this: that question which we suppose to be a perennial question, “How can we continue to believe in a mighty, loving God when terrible things keep happening in our world?” — wasn’t the most pressing question in the biblical era or the ancient church or the mediaeval church. It was shouted only in the 18th century Enlightenment, and was shouted by atheists. Having heard the atheists’ question, the church took it over thinking it to be the soul of profundity.

Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles, had 19 children. Ten of them survived. As the other nine died (eight of them in infancy), Susannah’s heart broke.   Never think that she didn’t care; never think that her heart wasn’t as torn as anyone’s heart would be torn today.  Read her diary the day after a domestic helper accidentally smothered Susannah’s three-week old baby.  Infant death was as grievous to parents then as it is now.  What was different, however, is this: even as Susannah pleaded with God for her babes while they died in her arms she never concluded that God wasn’t to be trusted or loved or obeyed or simply clung to; she never concluded that as a result of her heartbreak God could only be denounced and abandoned.

Until the 18th century Enlightenment there was no expectation of living in a world other than a world riddled with accident, misfortune, sickness, disease, unrelievable suffering, untimely death.  There was no expectation of anything else.  It was recognized that the world, in its fallen state, is shot through with unfairness, injustice, inevitable inequities, unforeseeable tragedies. When John the Baptist was executed Jesus didn’t say, “If honouring God’s will entails that then I need a different Father.”   Instead Jesus said, “I’ve got work to do and I’d better get started.” Susannah Wesley didn’t say, “If I bear children only to have half of them succumb to pneumonia and diphtheria, I should stop having them.”  Instead she had twice as many.   If today our expectation is so very different on account of the Enlightenment, then what did the Enlightenment cause us to expect?

 

[6]         The Enlightenment brought us to expect that humankind can control, control entirely, the world and everything about it.   The Enlightenment brought us to expect that we are or can be in control of every last aspect of our existence.   Specifically, the Enlightenment brought us to expect that the practice of medicine would smooth out our lives.   And with the new expectation of physicians there arose as well a new agenda for physicians. Whereas physicians had always been expected to care for patients, now physicians were expected to cure patients. Until the Enlightenment physicians were expected to care: they were to alleviate pain wherever they could, they were expected to ease the patient in every way possible, and above all they were expected to ease the patient through death, which death everyone knew to be unavoidable in any case. But cure? No one expected physicians to cure, at least to cure very much.   Nowadays physicians are expected to cure everything.  I’m convinced that people unconsciously expect physicians to cure them of their mortality. When physicians can’t cure people of their vulnerability to death, blame for such failure is unconsciously transferred from medicine to God.

A minute ago I said that we creatures of modernity assume (arrogantly) that the questions we ask are the questions that people have asked in every era; our questions are perennial questions, and our answers are the only answers.  It’s not so. If people today are asked how they’d prefer to die, they nearly always say, “Quickly. I want to die quickly. I’d like to slip away quietly in my sleep.” During the Middle Ages, however, no one wanted to die quickly; people dreaded sudden death. Why?   Sudden death gave them insufficient time to make adequate spiritual preparation for death. What we regard as human expectations as old as humankind are actually very recent. What’s more, these recent expectations weren’t fostered as we reflected on the nature and purpose and way of God; they were fostered by atheists who, at the time of the Enlightenment, came to think that there was nothing humankind couldn’t control.

 

[7]         Let’s come back to the situation of the young person afflicted with a lingering illness and about to die all too young.  Why are we so very upset at this?   I think we’re upset in that we feel the young person to have been cheated. The 85-year old who dies has had a life, a complete life (or at least what we regard as complete.) The eight-year old, we feel, hasn’t; she’s been cheated.   The elderly person’s life can be told by means of a story; the young person, on the other hand, has virtually no story to be told.   I am 63 years old, and if I die tonight others will gather up my life in a story and tell the story.  Hearers will identify me, the real “me”, with my story.  But let’s be honest: they will regard “me” and my story as identical in that my story is fit to be told; my story is positive; my story is rich (supposedly.) No one would hesitate to tell my story.   But if my story were one that couldn’t be told; if my story were bleak or disgraceful or incomprehensible, others would like to think that the real “me” was somehow better, somehow grander, than my shabby story.

It isn’t only the eight-year old child with leukaemia whose story seems to be sad and sorry and miserable.         There are many, many adults whose stories are longer, to be sure, but no better. One Sunday, several years ago, a man wearing a clerical collar sat in the gallery of my church in Mississauga , accompanied by a lawyer-friend of mine.         The man with the collar was an Anglican clergyman.  He was also a plastic surgeon with a practice in one of the wealthiest areas of Toronto . He was at worship, that Sunday, as he awaited trial. He and his estranged wife had had an altercation, in the course of which his wife was struck, the result of which was that her skull was fractured. Several weeks after the service the attended in Mississauga the fellow was convicted and sent to jail.  Upon his release from jail the College of Physicians and Surgeons restored his licence, thus permitting him to do plastic surgery again. The Anglican Church, however, didn’t reinstate him as a clergyman.   A year later the man committed suicide.  What’s his story? Is it a grand story? Is it a story anyone would envy? Or is it a story better left untold?

Maureen and I were asleep on a Friday evening when the phone rang at midnight . The caller was a man I’ve looked out for for 20 years.  He’s paranoid schizophrenic.  I’ve followed him around to restaurants, hospitals, jails, and numerous shabby “digs.” Last autumn he was in Vancouver and got into a “discussion” (as he tells his story) with a motel clerk.  The clerk phoned the police, and Eric spent the next three months in a provincial hospital. A week or two before Christmas I took him to Swiss Chalet for lunch.  We had been seated for only a few seconds when he leapt out of his seat and shouted, “It’s bugged.  It’s bugged. There’s a tape-recorder under my seat.” I took the shaken waitress aside, told her my friend was deranged, promised her I’d see that no harm befell her, and asked her to find us seats in an area that was free of tape-recorders.   A few months after this incident Eric phoned me again.  In the afternoon he’d gone to a barber shop, only to have the barber “butcher” his hair. And why had the barber “butchered” his hair? Because the barber too is part of the conspiracy that is putting foreign substances in Eric’s drinking water and causing his urine to stink.  Eric had come home; his sister had burnt the supper-meal toast; Eric had decompensated and smashed the toaster.  His sister had fled the house; the police had been called; Eric had refused to open the door to them – and was now in a great deal more trouble. Eric was phoning me at midnight. He wasn’t angry and he wasn’t violent: he was frightened, terribly frightened. He feared he was going to be sent back to a provincial hospital.  Eric is 65 years old. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic when he was a 20-year old university student. Eric has suffered atrociously since then. He hasn’t had one torment-free day in 45years.         What’s Eric’s story? Do you want to hear all the details? Would anyone want his story (all of it) told at his funeral?         Tell me: are Eric and Eric’s story identical?

The truth is, none of us is identical with our story.  Our story isn’t big enough, comprehensive enough, grand enough.  None of us has a story (whether tellable or untellable) that does justice to who we are truly in ourselves because of who we are truly before God. Our story is small and feeble and miserable and frustrated.  Often our story, so far from reflecting who we truly are, contradicts who we truly are. Our story has to be taken up into a much bigger story.

Then what’s the bigger story, grander story, for Eric?   It’s the story of a man who once lived in a cemetery. (Mark 5:1-20) He was violent, anti-social, and an inveterate “streaker.”   One day Jesus came upon him and asked, “What’s your name?”  “My name?”, the fellow replied, “I’ve got lots of names.   I’m your local nut-case; so why not call me ‘Peanut, Pistachio and Pecan’, ‘P-cubed’ for short.”   Some time later the townspeople saw the same man seated, clothed and in his right mind. By God’s grace that gospel-story has been appointed to be Eric’s story, Eric’s true story.  That story is the final story into which Eric’s story is taken up and in which Eric’s story is transfigured.

And the eight-year old who has just died of leukaemia?   Her story too is bigger, grander than most people know.         A distraught man cried to Jesus, “My daughter is sick unto death. Won’t you come with me?” Our Lord is delayed by a needy woman who is distressed herself.   While he’s delayed, the daughter dies.  Now all the relatives are beside themselves.  Jesus declares, “The little girl isn’t dead; she’s asleep.” The relatives scorn him. Plainly she’s dead; anyone can see she’s dead.   But you see, in the presence of Jesus Christ (only in the presence of him who is himself resurrection and life, only in his presence but assuredly in his presence) death is but sleep.  The girl is awakened shortly — as the eight-year old has been appointed to be awakened. This is the story into which the leukaemia patient’s story is taken up and in which it is transfigured.

 

[8]         If you ask me why such things as leukaemia and mental illness happen I shall not attempt an answer.   When tragedy befell John the Baptist Jesus didn’t say, “I can’t figure out why these things happen; therefore I can’t trust my Father.” Jesus knew that in a fallen world such things happen and will continue to happen until God’s patience, finally exhausted, ends the era of the fall and with it forecloses the day of grace. Jesus didn’t explain John’s wretched death; Jesus responded to the news of his cousin’s death by launching his public ministry.

Let me conclude by recalling Aaron, my cousin’s little boy who was diagnosed with a neurological disease at age two and who declined hideously for the next five years. Our Lord offers no explanation. (What help would an explanation provide?)   Our Lord, rather, whose risen life is grander even than his life from Bethlehem to Golgotha ; his risen life is that larger, grander story in which Aaron’s story is transfigured.  Furthermore, our Lord is the occasion of a response: the response of Aaron’s friends and relatives and neighbours and congregation.  The response we make to all such developments is an expression of our caring. (Not an expression of our curing; ultimately I can’t cure you, you can’t cure me, and medical practice can’t cure any of us, ultimately.)   Such a response will be caring enough until that day when we see our Lord face-to-face, the sight of whose face will transfigure our face, for the sight of his face will be enough to wipe away every tear from every eye.

 

                                                                                                        Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                            

 May 2007

Of Enemies, Violence, Sacrifice and Life’s Crosses

2nd Samuel 23:13-17               James 4:1-10               John 2:13-22

 

I: —  For years I have arrived at church on Remembrance Day Sunday with my heart in my mouth. For years I have wondered what this service says to people of recent German ancestry. Have we implied, however unintentionally, that German people are the ogres of the world? that they are people of impenetrable hardness and incorrigible cruelty? To be sure, we at Tyndale University College & Seminary; we know better; we are orthodox, or at least orthodox enough to say we agree with the prophet Jeremiah that the heart of everyone — without exception — “is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, beyond understanding.” (Jer. 17:9) But even as we say we agree with the prophet do we quietly qualify the statement so as to suggest that the hearts of one nation, one people in particular are extraordinarily deceitful, uniquely corrupt and thoroughly un-understandable?

 

The century just concluded, the twentieth century, has found Germany our enemy and France our ally in two major wars.  But it hasn’t always been like this.  The century before last found the situation reversed: France was the enemy and Germany the ally. Following the Battle of Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington defeated the French forces, Wellington remarked, “Never have I come so close to losing.”   Wellington would have lost for sure had British troops not been supported by German forces. In other words, labels like “enemy” and “ally” change in a twinkling.

Think of the United States . We Canadians have been allies of the U.S.A. for decades, as have the British. But the British and the Americans haven’t always been allies; there were slaughters in 1776 and 1812. The Citadel, that massive stone fortress in Quebec City , was constructed in the late 1800s to protect you and me from the Americans. As soon as the American civil war ended Canadians were nervous lest the victorious Union army, led by General Ulysses S. Grant, decide it might as well turn north and make a clean sweep. From 1900 on the British and American navies vied with each other for superiority just in case the two countries went to war.  In the year 1900 there was a celebration for Queen Victoria , and 2,500 British warships were on display for it in British waters.   (Not included, of course, were British warships patrolling the high seas. And all of this in a country the size of a postage stamp.)         The U.S.A. was determined to develop a navy that could conquer the Royal Navy.  And in fact the U.S.A. had on file in Washington as late as 1932 plans for war against Great Britain .

Speaking of the Americans, when Rene Levesque became premier of Quebec in 1976 he began talking about claiming sovereignty over the St. Lawrence Seaway; he talked about reducing exports of hydroelectric power to the United States ; he talked about cozying up to Castro in Cuba . The Americans didn’t say anything about this; they did something. They immediately stationed one entire division (10,000 men) of light infantry opposite Kingston in upstate New York , so that these 10,000 soldiers could move quickly to Ottawa and Montreal in case Quebec refused to respect American interests.  At the same time the CIA, America ’s intelligence force, quietly slipped hundreds of French-speaking operatives into the province of Quebec . America wasn’t our ally in the 19th century; it was in the 20th century; I hope it will remain our ally in the 21st.

The expression “concentration camp” has been especially ugly in the past one hundred years. Who invented the concentration camp? The British developed concentration camps in their war against the Dutch in South Africa . The Dutch suffered more fatalities in the camps, we should note (principally through disease), than they suffered through enemy fire.

Jeremiah is correct. The corruption of the human heart is universal.

Nonetheless, while all hearts are corrupt, there do occur in history extraordinary concentrations of evil that are to be resisted at any cost. We cannot use our common sinnership as an excuse for not resisting the appearance of a particular concentration of evil. Naziism was such a concentration.

 

II: — It goes without saying that to approve armed resistance to an evil like Naziism is to approve violence. Those people who say they are opposed to violence in principle, opposed to violence of any kind, for any reason, must therefore approve non-resistance (at least non-armed resistance) to Naziism. Those people are therefore pacifists.

The tradition of Christian pacifism is long and noble.   Many pacifists have suffered terribly for their conviction.      There is much about them that appeals to me.  I too want to be a pacifist.  I am a pacifist by conviction (almost) – i.e., until I see once again a photograph or film footage of little children, four to twelve years old, tightly huddled on a railway station platform in eastern Europe or Holland or France. Their parents are frantic. The children are waiting for a freight train — waterless, toiletless, near-airless — that will take them to an extermination site.  In a few days these children will not be gassed and their remains incinerated (the fate of their parents); in a few days these children will be burnt alive. At this point my pacifism evaporates.

Please don’t think that because I can’t approve of pacifism in principle I therefore approve of violence in principle.  I don’t approve of wanton violence, gratuitous violence, violence for the sake of violence. To approve of violence in principle is to approve the sort of Nazi depredation we rightly deem reprehensible.

At the same time, we should be honest and admit that violence is another word for coercive power, and everyone exercises coercive power in some form every day. If everyone exercises coercive power, then everyone is violent.

When I speak of coercive power I mean that we impose our will on someone else who is unwilling. To impose our will on the unwilling is to coerce them; to coerce them is to violate them.

When the police officer arrests the criminal suspect at gunpoint the police officer is imposing her will on someone who is unwilling. She is coercing the suspect. The police officer with a revolver in her hand exercises the same coercive power as the bank robber with a revolver in his hand.  The bank robber is coercing the bank teller; the police officer is coercing the suspect. But both are coercing. Both are imposing their will upon the unwilling.

When the judge sends the convicted person to prison he is imposing society’s will upon the unwilling.         Violence has been done. Imprisonment remains a horrible form of violence, however necessary.

On this Remembrance Day we are glad to recall Canada ’s fine reputation for international peacekeeping.  Too few people notice, however, that all peacekeeping forces are armed. In other words, peace is maintained only through threatened violence.

When the parent says to her child, “No, you aren’t going to the overnight party. I don’t want to hear any more about it.  One more word from you and you won’t go anywhere this weekend”; when the parent says this she is coercing the child.  It’s impossible to pretend anything else.

When the dangerously deranged person is sedated and whisked off to the provincial hospital he isn’t asked if he’d like to go.         He is strong-armed off to the hospital.  The school principal about to suspend the pupil for striking a teacher doesn’t first ask the pupil and her parents if they agree with the suspension. What if the pupil and her parents are unwilling with respect to the suspension?   Too bad. Their will is going to be violated (as it should be).

Someone like Gandhi is often held up as a model of non-violence.  I don’t think for a minute that Gandhi believed in non-violence in principle. Gandhi used non-violence as a technique whenever he thought it would be effective; he disregarded non-violence whenever he thought it wouldn’t.  If Gandhi had frontally opposed British military forces in India , he and his followers would have been decimated.  Therefore he didn’t oppose British military force with whatever military force he could muster. Instead he deployed non-violence as a technique (always assuming, of course, the British tradition of justice, and always assuming that British military might — i.e., violence — would protect him and his followers in their protest against the British.) Gandhi used non-violence against the British in order to establish (with the help of the British) the oppressive power (violence) of the Indian state.

 

We can’t pretend that our Lord was less than violent the day he cleaned out the big church in Jerusalem . John tells us that Jesus made a whip out of leather cords. How long did it take him to gather up the cords?   How long did it then take him to braid the whip?   Plainly, our Lord’s violence was premeditated.  He didn’t lose his temper in a flash; he didn’t lose his temper at all. He planned what he was going to do; his violence was premeditated, deliberate.

This story is rooted firmly in the gospel tradition.  Every written gospel mentions it.  John puts it at the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, thereby having it set the tone for his public ministry.  Matthew, Mark and Luke put it at the end of his public ministry (just prior to the cross), thereby making it the climax of his public ministry.

In any case every gospel-writer understands the incident to be crucial. Jesus was not a devotee of non-violence. This shouldn’t surprise us. There is no one who is utterly non-violent.  Even the pacifist punishes her misbehaving child; and punishment of any kind is coercion, the imposition of someone’s will upon the unwilling, and therefore a form of violence.

 

III: — Then wisdom is needed, much wisdom, if we are to forego the illusion that all violence is avoidable and forego as well the wickedness that any violence is acceptable.

Think of our Lord once again.  He doesn’t hesitate to act violently when he is exposed to injustice and exploitation. He arrives at the temple (which he loves) only to find devout worshippers being “fleeced”. They are defenceless people. The animal they have brought to the service (or purchased locally for the service) must be blemish-free. The temple authorities, in league with the sellers, pronounce the animals unsuitable. The authorities tell the worshippers the only blemish-free animals are those that the sellers inside the temple are selling.  It so happens that these animals cost fifteen times the market price.

The worshippers were financially poor – and were swindled unconscionably. They were devout — and their devotion was exploited shamelessly.  When Jesus saw defenceless people being duped and exploited; when he saw poor people rendered poorer still, he became violent on their behalf.

Yet when Jesus is victimized himself, he doesn’t become violent on his own behalf.   Concerning himself he exercises not violence but self-renunciation. When his victimizers are nailing him to the wood he will only intercede for them, “Father, forgive them; they don’t even know what they are doing.”

Self-renunciation is sacrifice.  To renounce oneself is to give oneself up, to sacrifice oneself.   To renounce oneself is to absorb violence, and in absorbing it, to learn that there is a cross at the heart of life.  Christians believe that the crosses everywhere in life are to be picked up and shouldered willingly, gladly, even cheerfully.

Several years ago a well-known leader in the British Methodist Church , Rev. Scott Lidgett, objected to the attention and adulation accorded a very popular preacher and able psychologist, Dr. Leslie Weatherhead.   On one occasion when his heart was twisted pretzel-like Scott Lidgett said publicly of Weatherhead, “We are not interested in stars that scintillate but do not illumine.”  It was a vicious remark. What did Weatherhead do? He absorbed it. When I say he absorbed it I don’t mean that he gritted his teeth and fought down the urge to retaliate. I mean he never let the remark impair his relationship with Lidgett; he never let the remark curdle his spirit. The remark was simply absorbed and therein neutralized.   But we should never underestimate the sacrifice involved in such renunciation.

A year or two ago my mother was reading the newspaper obituary column when she came upon the name of one of her former office-colleagues. My mother told me (again) about her late colleague.  The woman and her husband had had a child born with spina bifida.  The child had to be turned every hour throughout the night.  The woman and her husband took turns getting up in the night, hour-on, hour-off, to turn their son.  They did this for thirty years.         Having had her sleep interrupted several times during the night, every night, the woman would come to work in the morning and cheerfully set about the day’s tasks, never once complaining about her lot or suggesting that she and her husband were hard done-by.  What kind of self-renunciation is involved here?   There is a cross at the heart of life.

A man in one of my former congregations was at worship every Sunday, diligent in his responsibilities on the official board, and enthusiastic at the weekly bible study my wife and I held in the manse.   He and his wife had married in their mid-twenties.   Shortly after they married, his wife began behaving oddly, and soon was diagnosed schizophrenic. After that she had good days, bad days, and terrible days.  On her worst days she abused her husband in every way.  When this fellow was having an especially difficult time he would visit me and talk with me. At the end of every conversation he would tell me he was feeling better and could go on caring for his wife (in every sense of “care for”).   “I made a promise on our wedding day”, he told me often; “I made a promise to her and I’m going to keep it.”   It costs nothing to make a promise, but it costs everything to keep a promise. Some promises kept entail enormous sacrifice, nothing less than a cross.

Our Lord made a promise too.   (The bible calls it a covenant.)  Our Lord made a promise to all humankind.         His promise kept meant self-renunciation for him, self-renunciation so extreme as to end in a dereliction at the hands of his Father, a forsakenness, an abandonment, whose horror is incomprehensible to you and me.

The truth is, self-renunciation worthy of the name, anywhere in life, is never less than a cross. We should never pretend anything else.

 

IV: — Today is Remembrance Day. It is not a day in which we gloat over the superiority of some nations while despising the inferiority of others.  Neither is it a day when we boast of violence in principle.

But it is a day when we understand soberly that violence and non-violence are not the simple alternatives that we may have been taught. Violence is the exercise of coercion, and coercion is a household commodity: everybody exercises some form of coercion every day, even must exercise some form of it. The question we must ponder today is, “What kind of coercion (violence) are we to exercise? When?   Where? Why?   How?”

On Remembrance Day we remember the sacrifices made on our behalf in a violence, perpetrated and suffered, that is simply indescribable.  We also recall the example of our Lord in the violence he chose to exercise and the violence he chose to absorb.  We who are his people must come to the same understanding and make the same self-renunciation. For there is a cross at the heart of life, and therefore a cross everywhere in life. And such a cross God has promised to honour in such a manner that it will redound to his praise even as it eases the distress of us his creatures.

 

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd       

Remembrance Day 2008                     
Tyndale University College & Seminary

Felix Mendelssohn

1 Kings 18:20 -39

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
1809-1847

Unlike so many composers, superbly gifted people who are unhappy, miserable, depressed, neurotic, sometimes out-and-out psychotic, Mendelssohn was happy. He was cheerful and contented and enthusiastic throughout his entire life, brief as it was. His name — “Felix”, Latin for “happy” — couldn’t have suited him more.

His father’s given name was “Abraham”, and his grandfather’s, “Moses”. Mendelssohn was Jewish. His grandfather, Moses, was an able philosopher much esteemed in academic circles in Germany in spite of the virulent anti-semitism of Frederick the Great. His father, Abraham, used to say, “Formerly I was known as the son of my father; now, as the father of my son.”

Felix himself was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1809. Three years later his mother, Leah Salomon, and his father became members of the Lutheran Church and had their son baptized Christian, adding the name “Bartholdy” in hope of lessening the social penalties of being Jewish.

Felix showed musical promise very early in his life. His mother, a cultured woman (she read English, French, Latin and Greek) was his first piano teacher. She recognized his prodigious talent and next year sent him to Paris for training. He emerged as a “boy-wonder” pianist when he was nine and as a composer at ten. At age eleven he was taken to visit Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, then seventy-two years old. Immediately the older man recognized the child as his intellectual and creative equal.

At seventeen Mendelssohn composed the overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which composition was deemed thereafter to be as fine a piece of music as he would ever write. Also at seventeen he conducted Bach’s St.Matthew’s Passion. The performance was hailed as one of the glories of German music-making. In the midst of the adulation heaped on him around this event Mendelssohn commented, “And to think that it should be…a Jew who gave back to the people the greatest Christian work.”

By this time Mendelssohn was dazzling music-lovers as a composer, pianist, violinist, violist, and conductor. (Less widely known were his gifts as painter and poet.) When only twenty he stunned English audiences on the first of his ten trips to England. He loved to travel, and since he regarded the sea as the finest of nature’s beauties, a trip to Scotland’s Hebrides inspired the masterpiece, Fingal’s Cave.

Mendelssohn knew he was extraordinarily talented, yet he never flaunted it, always preferring in genuine humility to elevate and encourage those around him. On one occasion, when he was to be the pianist in a piano-cello-violin trio, his music, the music for the piano-part, was missing. Now he didn’t need his music, being able to play his part out of his head. But not wishing to embarrass the cellist and the violinist who needed their music, he placed any music he could find upside down on the piano (so as not to distract him) and then had a friend turn the pages throughout the performance.

A prodigy as a conductor too, Mendelssohn found himself music-master of Dusseldorf and leader of the city’s symphony orchestra. Here he began his first oratorio, St.Paul. Plainly a genius, he was promoted to the world-famous music-position in Leipzig, where he was introduced to Chopin, Schumann, and Schumann’s future wife, Clara (herself a superb pianist).

In 1837 (by now he was twenty-eight) he married Cecile Jeanrenaud, a painter and the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman in Frankfurt. Together Felix and Cecile had five children.

Mendelssohn penned two hundred musical compositions, his violin concerto being acknowledged one of the best. He is regarded as the consummate nineteenth century writer of oratorios. Notwithstanding his German identity, his music is performed more in England to this day than in any other nation.

In 1847, at the age of thirty-eight, he fell ill and died. One year earlier he had written an oratorio specifically for an English audience: Elijah. The inspiration for the oratorio was the Hebrew figure of old, Israel’s greatest prophet.

 

Elijah

Unlike Mendelssohn, Elijah looms up at us out of nowhere. We know nothing about his parents, his upbringing, his inner or outer life apart from his vocation as prophet.

But what a prophet! The God of fire ignited him again and again. Wherever we come upon Elijah he is aflame. Polish? Subtlety? Social niceties? Soft speech? He was as far from all this as anyone could be. If we can’t understand why he is always and everywhere afire, he can’t understand why we appear not to be lit.

King Ahab, the wickedest king in Israel’s troubled history, decided it would be politically correct and personally advantageous to have his cake and eat it too. Why not mix together Baal, the pagan deity, and Yahweh, the holy one of Israel? Why not have the self-indulgence that Baal permits his people and the security that Yahweh promises his people? Why not the fornication that Baal laughs about and the forgiveness that Yahweh weeps to bestow? Haven’t popular preachers always retained their popularity by telling hearers that we can all have the “goodies” of the world together with the gospel of God?

In a blazing rage Elijah thundered, “No! The holy one of Israel will shortly expose Baal for the inconsequential puff of smoke that he is. And as for you, Ahab, you are finished. Dogfood, in fact; the scavenger canines that forage in the city streets will lick your blood.” And so they did.

Jewish people always knew that Elijah, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, would come back. He would come back at the end-time when the kingdom of God was breaking in on the world; he would come back when what all Israel called the “Age to Come” was dawning as it superimposed itself on what Israel called the “Present Evil Age.”

When our Lord Jesus Christ began his public ministry his detractors taunted him saying, “You can’t be the Messiah; everyone knows that before the Messiah comes, Elijah must return. And Elijah hasn’t been seen for eight hundred years!” “Yes, he has!”, Jesus retorted. “Elijah did come back, recently. And you made fun of him. You called him names: John the `dunker’, `dipper’, `ducker’, `soaker’. But make no mistake: Elijah is here. And therefore his word is still operative.”

 

Paul

Yet another Israelite pointed to our Lord. Whereas Elijah pointed ahead to him, the apostle Paul pointed at him. Paul was unshakably convinced that Jesus Christ is alive, present to our world, present in it, the contemporary who can never become antiquated or obsolete.

Paul came from a sophisticated, well-to-do Jewish family on the north Mediterranean. Unlike Jesus, who grew up in a one-chariot town, Paul grew up in a centre of learning and commerce and culture. He knew Hebrew and Aramaic and Latin and Greek.

Paul’s vocation owes everything to that never-to-be-forgotten encounter on the Damascus road, where the risen Lord knocked him down with the kind of violence that was so foreign to Paul (but so natural to Elijah). Thereafter Paul could no more have denied the intimacy and immediacy and intensity of his life with his Lord than he could have denied that he was alive and breathing. It’s no wonder that he said simply and unselfconsciously to the congregation in Philippi, “Christ means `life’ for me.” The Christ who was indeed `life’ for him was always the crucified Messiah. Unlike so many modern church people who look upon the cross as something that Jesus endured for a few hours on Friday and left behind forever on Sunday, Paul knew that his Lord was raised, to be sure, yet raised as crucified. He knew that the risen one was raised with the marks of his suffering still upon him. He knew that Christ’s resurrection doesn’t mean that Jesus of Nazareth has been elevated beyond suffering and vulnerability and misunderstanding and treachery; he knew instead that Christ’s resurrection means that Jesus of Nazareth has been rendered victorious, triumphant, effective, in the midst of suffering and vulnerability and misunderstanding and treachery. The modern hymnwriter who penned the line, “Rich wounds yet visible above“, captured it perfectly.

Paul knew that only a crucified Messiah could get close enough to fragile people like you and me to help us; and he knew that only a crucified Messiah whose raised and therefore rendered triumphant would be able to help us.

For years the apostle had wanted to get to Rome, the nerve-centre of the empire. Then he had wanted to push beyond Rome into Spain, announcing the gospel where it had never been heard before. He got to Rome but not to Spain. While he was in Rome, under house-arrest, emperor Nero decided to make scapegoats of Christians and blame them for a fire that had devastated a sizeable part of the city. Along with Peter, his fellow-apostle, he died in the savagery Nero unleashed. All his death did was permit him to know what he had anticipated for years: the Christ who was his everything to him in life was richer still in death.

                                                                       Victor Shepherd

March 1996

The Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth

1st Kings 19:9-18                     Acts 14:8-23                           John9:1-5

 

I: — Sloth: the word has a dreadful sound to it.   Sloth suggests laziness, stupefied laziness, time-wasting, talent-wasting laziness.  No wonder our Christian foreparents labelled sloth a deadly sin.

“Just a minute”, someone objects; “if sloth is a deadly sin, are you telling us that workaholism is a lively grace? Are you telling us that while obsessive-compulsive illnesses are just that – illnesses, obsessive-compulsive work is a singular instance of health?”   I am saying no such thing. There’s nothing in any obsessive-compulsive mental disorder that any of us needs or wants. In other words, we are no more eager to commend workaholism than we are to commend any instance of illness.

The workaholic doesn’t merely work hard; doesn’t merely work every waking minute; he’s driven to work all the time. As soon as he stops working, however briefly, he feels guilty, anxious, useless, distressed. Weekends, holidays, evenings; all are given over to compulsive work.   Never mind that his children are crying for him.  Never mind that his wife has given up expecting to kiss him.   Never mind that his health is breaking down.  He has a neurotic obsession.  There’s nothing in any manifestation of illness that healthy people want to emulate.

As a matter of fact, all of us need what I call “vacant time”. Vacant time isn’t the same as wasted time.  Vacant time is necessary. Vacant time is something like vacant space, such as a vacant lot.  A vacant lot isn’t a useless lot.         There are few things more useful, more needed, than a vacant lot.  A vacant lot gives youngsters a place to play.         It prevents a residential area from becoming too congested.  It provides visual relief in the midst of brown-brick sameness.

In the same way, vacant time gives us time to play. It decongests our lives. It provides relief from frenzy. Several years ago I learned that I simply had to have vacant time.  Previously I had felt guilty about vacant time. To be sure, I knew I couldn’t read Sixteenth Century Latin all the time.  I knew I couldn’t hammer out sermons all the time.         And so I decided to afford myself relief; that is, when I wasn’t working diligently I was determined to use my non-working time fruitfully. And so in my “down” time I decided I’d become thoroughly acquainted with Canadian literature, perhaps even acquiring expertise in it.  Soon, I discovered, reading Canadian literature wasn’t a leisure activity that refreshed me; instead it was one more effort where I was driven to excel amidst anxiety and weariness.         Soon I was forced to admit that vacant time had to be vacant.  I needed time where I wasn’t doing anything important or useful – unless you count my health and the freshness I need for work important and useful. As I re-read the gospels I was startled at how necessary Jesus deemed his vacant time to be; how unwilling he was to surrender it; how frequently he went away “to a solitary place”, we are told, away from the press of crowds and frustration at disciples and the misunderstanding his family foisted on him. We are never going to call our Lord’s vacant time sloth.

 

II: — Then what is sloth, and why did our Christian foreparents regard it as spiritually lethal? Sloth is the persistent state of being “tuned out”; of being unengaged; of relishing indifference. Sloth is the state of remaining uninvolved, uncommitted, uncaring.  Sloth is the state of being a spectator in life, even wilfully absent from life. There are many reasons for such sloth.

[a] One is the selfish desire to keep ourselves for ourselves, the “selfist” desire to keep our own life uncomplicated and unperturbed by ignoring people whose lives appear more difficult than ours, even endangered.

Several years ago I was purchasing candy in a variety store in Mississauga when an 18-year old “tough” began harassing the Egyptian storekeeper. The 18-year old had obviously been in the store before since the storekeeper recognized him instantly and became increasingly upset, almost hysterical: “You getta outta my store right now”, over and over.  The fellow refused to leave the store.  The storekeeper became near-frantic.

There was a customer in the store besides me, a big man who could have assisted the storekeeper in a moment.         But as soon as this big man saw trouble brewing he slipped out the door and disappeared, leaving the distraught, middle-aged storekeeper to handle this teenaged tough, with only a skinny preacher to help him. I had a word with the hooligan, and he left. Whereupon the storekeeper fell all over me in gratitude.

The man who sneaked out of the store exemplified sloth. He didn’t care if the storekeeper were robbed or beaten up or terrorized.  He wanted only to “avoid trouble”, as he would have put it.  In truth, he wanted to keep himself for himself.   He was willing to jeopardize a defenceless man whose predicament was obviously difficult and danger-ridden.

Think of the vocabulary we hear every day.   “Don’t get involved. Go with the flow. See where the wind’s blowing. Add up the room.” All of which means, “Stand for nothing. Stand up for nothing. Stand up with no one. Protect yourself by abandoning everyone except yourself.”   This is sloth.

[b] Another reason for this deadly sin is self-pampering. Self-pampering is evident in many areas of life today, and typically evident (to me, at least) in education. Certainly we don’t want education to be unrelieved misery for children.  Nevertheless, we harm children by giving them the impression that school is supposed to be fun all the time.  If they are faced with something that isn’t fun, they don’t have to do it. They fail an assignment? In some school-jurisdictions, the teacher is faulted if a student fails.  One of my friends, a supply-teacher in the high schools, emailed me this week, telling me that where he was supplying, students could pay two dollars and be marked “present” while they absented themselves from the school premises and cavorted downtown.  For two dollars they wouldn’t be marked truant, didn’t have to do any work, and could indulge themselves however they wished.  Isn’t education supposed to be preparation for life?   Don’t people flounder and founder in life if they lack discipline and diligence and persistence?

My psychiatrist-friend tells me that people complain to him that life has cheated them, because they aren’t having a good time 24 hours per day without interruption.   He tells me that advertising has fostered utterly unrealistic expectations in people. Advertising has led people to believe that life is, or can be, or at least is meant to be, something like an endless beach holiday in the Bahamas : uninterrupted pleasure, no demands, no setbacks, no grief, everyone dancing and skipping in the company of “winners” with gorgeous bodies and fashionable clothes, no frustration or anxiety or pain.  The problem, my psychiatrist-friend tells me, is that no one’s life is like this, and no one’s is ever going to be, even though too many people have been led to believe that what’s advertised is normal.         To expect all this is to want sloth.

The banality of many TV shows intensifies self-pampering. Husband and wife (or husband and someone else’s wife) jointly answer a trite question. Their answer qualifies them for the wheel of fortune.  The wheel spins, clicking dramatically as it slows down.  The last click is heard as the wheel stops at the first letter of their name. They have just won a motorized golf cart and a self-propelled leaf-rake.  People who have been saturated in such shallowness aren’t going to immerse themselves in life, especially in someone else’s life, with its tides and turbulence, its summons to stand up, stand for, and stand with. Self-pampering fosters sloth.
[c] There’s a third reason for sloth, a profoundly different reason.  This time the reason isn’t shallow self-indulgence.         This time the reason is despair; heartbreaking, mind-numbing, immobilizing despair. Sometimes we sweat blood for something we hold to be true, right, good.  For this we have made greater sacrifices than anyone will ever guess. We have given our utmost. And then we have watched it all dribble away to nothing, apparently.  We have seen it all evaporate, it would seem. Our attitude never was “I couldn’t care less”.  On the contrary our attitude was “I cared so much – and what difference did it make? I don’t have it in me to care any longer.”

Elijah, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, contended bravely with Jezebel , Israel ’s wicked and venomous queen. He got nowhere with her, he felt. He knew that she was going to skewer him first chance.  Elijah sat down and spluttered “Lord, take away my life”.   Then he stumbled into a cave where he could detach himself from the turbulence and treachery around him.  He wanted to “tune out”, detach himself, isolate himself – for ever.

Sloth born of despair isn’t like sloth born of pampered self-indulgence.  Sloth born of despair has a history: someone has been wounded; the spear-wound is either haemorrhaging still or it has become infected or both. Wounded and weakened now, she’s become too jaded to endure any more grief or frustration or pain. She has decided to “opt out”.

Sloth born of despair isn’t contemptible.  Its victims don’t merit scorn.  They do merit concern, however, because sloth is sloth regardless of its genesis; sloth is deadly however much we think we can excuse the sloth born of despair. Sloth is lethal in that detachment from life is lethal regardless of the reason for the detachment.

 

III: — Having probed several reasons for sloth, we must yet grasp precisely why our foreparents called it sin, deadly sin.

[a] It’s deadly, obviously, because it’s a breeding ground for trivia.  People who detach themselves from life with all of life’s tides and turbulence; people who want no part of challenge and struggle; these people invariably have large tracts of time on their hands.  What do they do with vast stretches of unfilled time?   They fill them up with trivia.         They watch TV by the hour. They sleep. They become self-absorbed. Their self-absorption can appear harmless (they have huge stamp collections); it can appear eccentric (they become experts in the history of dental floss); it can be silly; it can be dangerous (since ever-greater thrills are needed to stave off the boredom of the under-occupied).         In any case the self-absorption is selfist, even when it appears virtuous. (What else can be said of the 50-year old woman who spends three hours per day shaping her body? We won’t say “She has a remarkable body.” We won’t say it because the truth is, her remarkable body has been gained at the price of shrivelled heart and mind and spirit.)         Where sloth abounds, time fills up with trivia as surely as motionless water fills up with algae.

But is this deadly sin? Yes.  Time, after all, is the theatre of God’s incursion into human history and human affairs. Time is the theatre of God’s incursion into any one person’s heart.   Time, therefore, is also the theatre of our spiritual discernment and the theatre of our obedience to God.

[b] Sloth is deadly, in the second place, in that it withers human relationships.  To step aside from life is necessarily to step aside from people.  It’s to step aside from people to whom our help can mean the world; it’s to step aside from people who can mean the world to us.  How many times in scripture are we told that the person we help renders us “Christ” to that person, as it were, while the person whom we allow to help us renders her the mirror-image of Christ to         us?

Of course other people are inconvenient.  Then was Jean Paul Sartre correct when he wrote “Hell is other people”? Other people can be hellish; they can as readily be heavenly.  Their arms embracing us, our arms embracing them, can as readily be those “everlasting arms” that are always and everywhere “underneath” us, even as the everlasting arms of God are most readily recognized in the arms of his human servants.

If we detach ourselves from life we attempt to be entirely self-sufficient. No one can be, of course; but the desire for self-sufficiency and the attempt at it means that are trying to live in an ever-shrinking universe. Sloth is deadly just because it deadens.

[c] Sloth is deadly, in the third place, in that it’s so very subtle. It’s like a hot cedar tub. Hot tubs can be enjoyable, even helpful — if we need a hassle-free “time-out”. But there’s something wrong with the person who wants a “time-out” that goes on and on and on. Everyone knows what can happen in a hot tub.  We luxuriate in the water. After a while it starts to feel cool (even though the water temperature hasn’t changed.) We make the water a little warmer. The process is repeated, several times over.  Next morning the newspaper carries our obituary, and readers are told that our heart stopped beating.  Sloth is just like this.

 

IV: — Enough about the deadliness of sloth. Let’s look now at life and liveliness. The key to life and liveliness in this context, as in any context, is faith.  Greater faith; resolute faith; resilient faith.  Elijah went to the cave to “get away from it all”, overwhelmed as he was at the spiritual declension of his people and the isolation it had brought to him. The cave provided him needed respite, the hassle-free “time-out”.   Had he stayed in the cave, however, he would have succumbed to sloth; had he stayed in the cave he would have gone under in the hot cedar tub. But God wouldn’t leave him in the cave. However overwhelmed Elijah might be at the clamour of his people, bent as they were on their shallow self-absorption; however deafened he might be at their superficial noisiness, he could yet hear the much quieter sound of “the still, small voice” of God.  And this voice asked him, “Elijah, what are doing there?   What are you doing in the cave?”  Rather lamely Elijah replied, “I’m here because I’m licked.   I’m here because I’m tired of standing up for You all by myself.”

“What do you mean, all by yourself?” retorted God; “there are 7000 who haven’t bowed the knee to Baal or kissed him.” Elijah, heartened once more, left the cave.  To be sure, he was thankful for the rest he’d had.  Yet in view of the fact that he had 7000 allies, it would have been be silly, fruitless and inexcusable to remain in the cave.

Jesus calls men and women to be disciples.  They respond with an initial surge of enthusiasm.  Then the onerous aspect of discipleship’s collision with a hostile world, added to the normal wear-and-tear of life, gets them down. Easter morning finds Peter speaking for the rest: “What’s the point of it all?   We did our best and it all boiled dry.         Let’s go back to fishing.”   Peter and his friends have plainly gone to the cave.  Whereupon the risen Lord appears before them and pulls them out of the cave as he enlarges their faith and lends them resilience.  Once more they step ahead in the task he has given them.

As enlarged faith and greater faithfulness overturn our sloth we are going to find ourselves viewed as odd.  A society bent on ease and drowsiness and self-gratification can’t understand why anyone would ever step out in a commitment that doesn’t promote ease and drowsiness and self-gratification.  Still, we who are Christ’s people march to the beat of a different drummer.

In the city of Lystra Paul was treated roughly. He didn’t take refuge in sloth, however, mumbling that he’d never return, never put himself out again for ungrateful people.  Instead he said quietly to the Christians at Lystra, “It is through many tribulations that we enter the kingdom of God .”

 

There are two aspects to the resolute faith and resilient faith that overcome sloth. One is vision.   With the eye of faith we have to see the importance of the work to which God has summoned us.  If few others can see it, too bad; we have to see it. We have to see what is right and righteous and why.

The second aspect to our resilience is courage. Courage is distinguished from foolhardiness by one thing: the importance of what we are doing. The person who walks through fire as a stunt in order to impress onlookers is a fool, while the person who enters a burning house to rescued trapped children we reward for his courage. Any person who came to the assistance of the beleaguered Egyptian storekeeper – would that person have been foolhardy or courageous?   Is assisting a defenceless storekeeper something that God deems important?

When we are called to take the stand that will always be unpopular; when we are summoned to make the sacrifice for the person who will never thank us; when we are called to do what’s right in an environment that rewards two-faced palm-greasers – in all these situations others are going to tell us we’re foolhardy.  We, however, are going to be sustained by our vision of what’s right, as well as by a courage that rises in proportion to our vision.  Vision and courage will reinforce each other.  The temptation of sloth will recede.

There are always people we must care for, even as there is evil we must resist, truth we must uphold, and a Lord whom we must obey. He, after all, has promised never to fail us or forsake us.

 

                                                                                            Rev. Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      March 2006

 

Do Seed Time and Harvest Never Cease ? or Five Myths That Slander God

2 Kings 6:25-3        1 Genesis 8:22   2 Corinthians 9:6-15   John 6:27-35

In the course of a food shortage in Hong Kong, decades ago, a British executive of the Bank of Hong found a British soldier staring at him.  The bank executive had come upon a half-rotten orange in the gutter and was about to eat it when the soldier hollered that the food was crawling with maggots and would certainly make him ill.  The man became hysterical, shrieking and crying.  Can’t you imagine the spectacle: a man in grey-striped formal trousers, black vest and suit jacket, bowler hat and umbrella — plainly someone from the highest echelon of Britain’s highest class – this man blubbering hysterically because he wasn’t allowed to eat his vermin-ridden garbage?

   Hunger doesn’t merely make the tummy ache.  Hunger doesn’t merely produce diseases and deformities born of protein or vitamin deficiencies.  Hunger also bewitches the mind.  Hungry people start thinking about doing, and actually do, what they would otherwise never imagine themselves doing.  Hunger exposes civilisation as no more than skin deep.  When an airliner crashed in the Andes Mountains in South America several years ago it was learned that the survivors had survived by eating the remains of fellow-passengers who had already died.  Immediately the tabloids featured headlines on cannibalism, while more thoughtful magazines probed ethical issues raised by this turn of affairs.  Hunger bewitches.

   Reflect for a minute on a story from the life of the prophet Elisha.  Syria’s army besieged the Israelite people, and these people were soon hungry.  And hungrier.  Desperate.  So desperately hungry that 80 shekels of silver (80 shekels would normally buy you 40 roasting rams or 90 bushels of grain); so desperately hungry that people were now paying 80 shekels for the head of a dead donkey.  A dead donkey’s head?  Hungry people will eat anything.  If you had only 5 shekels you could purchase half a pint of bird-droppings.  (There’s food in bird-droppings, you know; if you poke around in bird-droppings you’ll eventually find a few seeds.)   If you had no shekels what did you do?  Two Israelite women knew what to do.  “Let’s make a deal”, one said to the other; “today we’ll boil your infant son and eat him; tomorrow we’ll do the same with my son.”  One mother boiled her son and shared him with her friend.  Next day the second woman said she couldn’t.  The king was called in to settle the matter.  The king exploded and swore he would kill the prophet Elisha.

   Kill Elisha?  What did the prophet have to do with this horrible turn of events?  Nothing at all.  Then why go after him?  Hunger makes even rulers irrational, doesn’t it?  Hunger twists people’s minds until a pretzel looks like a straightedge.

   Hunger is terrible.  How terrible Jeremiah knew when he wrote, his mind reeling, “The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children….” (Lamentations 4:10)

I: — Today is thanksgiving Sunday.  Today we customarily thank God for food.  The people in our world who don’t have food, millions upon millions of them; for what do they thank God?  After all, God has promised to supply food.  He who is our creator would be a mocker if he created us only to turn his back on us.  (Human beings who turn their back on their children are sent to jail, aren’t they?)  God maintains that he’s not only creator; he’s also provider and sustainer.  Now I believe that he is.  But then, I’m not hungry.

   Still, I am persuaded that God is as good as his word.  He does provide for us creatures whom he’s fashioned in his own image.  He does keep the promise he makes: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest…shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)  I’m persuaded it’s entirely correct to thank God for food, and thank him as often as we eat it.  In the words of a common Eucharist liturgy, God does care for all that he makes.

   And yet even with God caring as much as he can care, a great many people are hungry.  Scores of thousands starve to death every day.  Far more are permanently damaged in mind and body on account of their hunger.

   On the one hand, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about food since God feeds his people as surely as God feeds the birds of the air.  On the other hand, the apostle Paul tells believers that not even famine can separate them from God’s love vouchsafed to them in Christ Jesus their Lord.  Clearly Paul knows that God feeds (as promised) yet famine occurs, and famine kills.  Famine kills even as God continues to feed.  Famine kills even as God’s love remains uncontradicted.

   Yet every day someone tells me that the fact of widespread hunger throughout the world does contradict God’s love.  Then where are we with respect to God? Where is God with respect to us?

II: — It’s plain to me that God has been slandered; perhaps slandered unknowingly (in other words, the people who have faulted him in the face of the world’s hunger have done so thinking they were telling the truth about him), but slandered none the less.  “He doesn’t care”, they have said, or “He doesn’t care enough.”  Today I wish to vindicate God’s name.  I wish to show that the appalling hunger in the world at this moment can’t be blamed on a deficient supply of food.  In clearing God’s name of the calumny that attends it I’m going to explode several myths.

MYTH #1  People are hungry because food is scarce.  In truth, food isn’t scarce.  There’s enough food in the world at this moment to feed adequately every man, woman and child.  Think of grain-production alone.  There’s enough grain grown right now to provide everyone with sufficient protein and with 3000 calories per day.  (Most of us need only 2300 per day.)  The 3000 grain-calories per person per day produced right now doesn’t include many other foods that aren’t grains, foods like beans, root crops, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and grass-fed meat.

  What’s more, sufficient food is produced right now even in those countries where millions are hungry.  Even in its worst years of famine, for instance, India has produced so much food as to be a net exporter of food.  (India has been a net exporter of food every year since 1870.)   In India, while millions go hungry, soldiers patrol the government’s six million tons of stockpiled food — which food, of course, now nourishes rats.  In Mexico, where at least 80% of the children in rural areas are undernourished, livestock destined for export are fed more grain than Mexico’s entire rural population.  There’s no shortage of food.

MYTH #2 — Hunger in any one country is the result of overpopulation in that country.  If this were the case, we should expect the worst hunger in those countries where there are the most people per food-producing acre.  But it’s not so.  India has only half the population density per cultivated acre that China has.  Yet the Chinese eat while millions in India do not.  China has eliminated visible hunger in the last 50 years.

  There’s dreadful hunger in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Yet these countries have scant population per cultivated acre.  In Africa, south of the Sahel, where some of the worst hunger continues, there are fewer people per cultivated acre than there are in the USA or in Russia; there are six to eight times fewer people in Africa south of the Sahel per cultivated acre than there are in China.

   Please note that I’ve spoken of “cultivated acre.”  We must be sure to understand that less than 50% of the world’s land that could grow food is now growing food.  (It’s plain to everyone, by even this point in the sermon, that the real barriers to alleviating hunger aren’t physical but rather political and economic.)

MYTH #3 — In order to eliminate hunger our top priority must be to grow more food.  Already you’re aware that the world is awash in food right now.  The real problems concerning feeding hungry people lie elsewhere.  For instance, land-ownership is concentrated in too few hands.  A recent United Nations survey of 83 countries disclosed that 3% of the world’s landlords control 80% of the land.  In most countries only 5% to 20% of all food-producers have access to institutionalised credit, such as banks.  The rest, the other 80% to 95%, have to get their credit from virtual loan sharks who charge up to 200% on farm loans.

   What’s more, new agricultural technology benefits only those who already possess land and credit.  It’s been documented irrefutably that strategies which simply aim at having more food produced have dreadful consequences.  Here’s what happens.  New agricultural technology (for instance, hybrid seeds that produce bigger crops from less fertiliser) attracts investors whose primary interest is investment, not food-production; i.e., new agricultural technology attracts investors who see agriculture simply as a good investment.  Moneylenders, city-based speculators and foreign corporations rush to get in on the good investment.  The new money swells the demand for land.  The price of land skyrockets.  Tenants and sharecroppers are then squeezed off the land.  These folk can’t feed themselves and now go hungry.  What about the crops that the new technology has made possible and that speculators now produce in record quantities?  These crops are luxury items (carnations, for instance, to adorn dining room tables); these luxury items are purchased by consumers in the western world and the northern hemisphere.  In other words, new agricultural technology reduces food production.

   We’ve all heard of the Green Revolution, a breakthrough in agricultural technology that promised to generate oceans of foodstuffs for the world’s hungry.  The Green Revolution was born in northwest Mexico.  Overnight the average farm size jumped from 200 acres to more than 2000.  And overnight three-quarters of the rural workforce was squeezed off the land — now with nothing to eat.  The Green Revolution found rural people hungrier than ever.

   Any attempt at remedying hunger simply through greater agricultural sophistication renders people hungrier than ever.

MYTH # 4 — The increase in population (and therefore the need for greater food production) requires the use of chemicals that are environmentally dangerous.  In fact very little pesticide or fungicide or insecticide is spread on farmland.  I know, when we hear of the tonnage of these assorted “‘cides” it sounds colossal.  For instance, the USA alone spreads 1.2 billion pounds of pesticide every year.  One-third of this, however, is used on golf courses, lawns and public parks.  Very little farmland is treated with these chemical substances.  In fact, in the USA only 5% of cropland and pastureland is treated with insecticides; only 15% with weedkillers; only one-half of 1% with fungicides.  Over half of all the insecticide used in the USA isn’t used on food crops at all.  (Most of it is used on cotton, and even then, most of the land that grows cotton isn’t treated.)

    Greater demand for food doesn’t issue in overwhelming chemical pollution.

MYTH #5 — In order to help the hungry we should improve our foreign aid programs.  The truth is, increased foreign aid will do very little to alleviate hunger.  The question we must always ask concerning foreign aid is this: when the government of a western nation sends financial aid to a hungry country, into whose hands does the money find its way?  The money falls into the hands of that tiny number of people who exercise social and political control.  This tiny number benefits; few others do.  In Guatemala, for instance, virtually all the money sent as foreign aid merely enriches still more the handful of largest landholders.

   

What happens overseas is much like what I’ve seen in Canada.  When I was a pastor in New Brunswick and lived closer to corruption than I do in Ontario, the federal government of Canada launched its “LIP” programme.  (“L.I.P.”: local initiative project.)  Ottawa was handing out millions to small communities in order to help the poorest people in them survive.  My village received an LIP grant.  The grant amounted to thousands of dollars ($200,000 in today’s money.)  In my village four men worked five days per week for twenty weeks, building a small vault in the local cemetery.  The vault was so small it would hold only two caskets.  These four men laid one concrete block per day each.  (Think of it: four men each laying one concrete block per day for twenty weeks.)  Who were the men who pocketed the money?  Were they the poorest in the village whom the programme was meant to help?  Of course not.  Poor people aren’t “connected”; poor people don’t have access to the levers of influence and favours.  But well-to-do people have such access.  In my village it was the sons of the richest, those with connections, who siphoned off the government “goodies.”

   Next year our village received another LIP grant, this time to put a washroom (worth $75,000 in today’s money) in a small building that was used four hours per week.  Same story.  Third year, third grant.  But not one needy person was ever hired for any of these projects.

   Increased foreign aid won’t feed hungry people.  But it will build highways and bridges, thereby making land a better investment.  Land that is now a better investment attracts investment speculators who then use the land for purposes unrelated to food production.

   Historically, it was different in England and America.  In England political changes ended the landholding arrangement of feudalism and gave people access to land, at the same time that additional political changes gave common people protection against the powerful, the wealthy and the state.  In the USA a constitution (it had to be secured by force of arms) guaranteed the people freedom from the oppressions that had ground down common people in Europe for centuries, which oppressions America would fend off at any cost.  The oppressions fended off in the English and American revolutions are the oppressions we see in developing countries today.  Political change, not foreign aid, is what feeds people in the long run.

With respect to the short run I want to say a word here about mission support from the local church.  It’s important.  When the late Dr. Allen Knight, an agricultural missionary who spent years in what was then Angola, spoke to my congregation in Mississauga about the “Seeds for Africa” programme, the congregation supported him without hesitation.  We knew we could trust him.  The money we gave for seeds purchased seeds; money given for well-drilling actually drilled wells.  People were fed.  When my friend Dr. Peter Webster was performing surgery in Africa and schooling villages in preventive medicine, any monies he received from friends and congregations were used for their designated purpose, used for that purpose only, and used immediately.  We must never diminish our support for trustworthy Christian workers who are doing front-line work among needy people.

Have you heard enough this morning to convince you that God doesn’t merit the slander that is customarily heaped on him?  God is defamed repeatedly on the grounds that he doesn’t keep the promises he makes; he doesn’t care for all that he has made; day and night and seedtime occur without interruption to be sure, but the harvest doesn’t — say those who tell us that God lies.

   I trust you are persuaded that the presence among us of hungry people, together with the bodily and mental distortions that hunger produces, can’t be blamed on God.  He is as good as his word; he does care for all that he has made.  And for this reason he is to be praised.

III: — God is to be praised even more, for not only has he provided bread, he’s provided the bread of life.  No one lives by bread alone.  Without bread we humans disappear; without the bread of life we humans remain fixed — fixed in what?  Fixed in our perverse rebellion against God, fixed in our deadly defiance of him, fixed in our frustration and futility, which frustration and futility we can either rage against or surrender to but in any case can’t remedy.  Still, the Creator of us all doesn’t give up on us.

   Because God won’t give up on us he’s forever pressing the bread of life into our hands.  The bread of life isn’t made anew each day, but it’s offered anew each day.  “I am the bread of life”, says Jesus, “whoever comes to me will never hunger again.” (John 6:35)  The bread of life became available to us when provision was made for us in the cross.  Now it’s offered afresh as often as our Lord steals upon anyone anywhere and says, “Why don’t you stop running past my outstretched arms?”

   No one lives without bread; no one lives most profoundly by bread alone.  Only the bread of life can restore men and women made in the image of God to the favour of God.  Only the bread of life can relieve us of the consequences of our rebellion against God by releasing us from the rebellion itself.  Only the bread of life can reconcile us where we are estranged, thaw us where we are frozen and sensitise us where we are unresponsive.

   In his 2nd letter to the congregation in Corinth Paul is glad to acknowledge that God provides seed and bread.  Unquestionably he’s grateful for seed and bread.  Yet his ecstatic exclamation, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” plainly pertains to him and only to him who is the bread of life, Christ Jesus our Lord.  Then the bread of life we must seize or seize afresh today.

   

The church has only one mission: to offer Jesus Christ to any and all, near and far.  For in offering him, the one through whom and for whom all things have been made (John 1:3,10), we shall remind detractors that God has kept his promise to provide seedtime and harvest; and in offering him, the bread of life, we shall recall rebels to their rightful ruler, to their Father, as it turns out, from whom they henceforth receive eternal life

.Victor Shepherd   October 2014

 

 

How are we to Understand the Book of Job?

Job1:13-19; 2:7-9; 3:1; 19:23 -27         Hebrews 2:6-9

 

I: — Suffering is unavoidable. We are fragile creatures with fragile bodies and fragile minds. Assaults hammer us from without; disease undermines us from within. As we fragile creatures move through life we start to feel like lookouts on a ship that is feeling its way through water that’s been mined: our eyes are skinned for anything lurking just beneath the surface that might damage us. Careful as we lookouts are, however, sooner or later our ship strikes a mine. The explosion rocks us; the devastation pains us. In life suffering, some suffering at least, is unavoidable for all of us.

Not only is suffering unavoidable; it’s also unacceptable. We don’t regard it as a polite visitor, or even as a nuisance visitor. We regard suffering as a brutal intruder. It’s simply unacceptable.

Not only is suffering unavoidable and unacceptable; it’s also un-understandable. To be sure, some suffering is understandable. If we play with fire anywhere in life we are going to get burned. (There’s no problem understanding this.) At another dimension in life, if we race motorcycles or climb mountains we know we are courting unusual suffering and sooner or later will have it. The person who is pained in pursuing these activities isn’t perplexed. She knows why she’s in pain. She doesn’t fall into depression or despair; doesn’t feel that life has suddenly become capricious or chaotic or malicious.

Once we’re plunged into incomprehensible suffering, protracted suffering, however; once our pain has moved far beyond the warning that’s needed to have us seek medical assistance; once our pain has ballooned into something huge and inexplicable; when our pain fills the horizon of our life and we can think of little else; at this point it becomes un-understandable.

And when we are stuck with suffering that is at one and the same time unavoidable, unacceptable and un-understandable our pain threatens to eclipse our faith in God and his goodness

 

II [1]: Whenever we ponder protracted pain and its seeming capacity to eclipse our faith in our Father, Job comes to mind: both the man and the book about the man. The book is cast in the form of a historical novel, a novel with many features of a “once upon a time” story. “Once upon a time there lived a perfectly charming fellow named Job.” Job is said to be blameless, upright, God-fearing. He avoids evil of any sort. He has seven sons and three daughters, thousands of sheep and oxen, camels and asses, as well as many servants. Plainly he’s richer than the Reichmann brothers. His family-life is perfectly harmonious. His seven sons, each as wealthy as an Arab oil-producer, take turns hosting magnificent banquets to which they always remember to invite their sisters. In addition Job is pious: he offers sacrifices in the temple frequently. Not surprisingly our anonymous author tells us that Job is “the greatest of all the people of the earth.”

One day Satan has an office appointment with God. Satan suggests that anyone can be pious and upright in the midst of affluence like Job’s; anyone can trust God when the sun is shining. “But I’ll wager,” Satan says to God; “I’ll wager that if Job were stripped of his good fortune he would turn on you and curse you to your face.” “It’s a bet,” replies God; you have my permission to test Job.”

The testing begins. In no time Job’s servants are killed. His animals are slain. A hurricane collapses his house, crushing his sons and daughters. Job tears his clothing. (This is a Hebrew sign of distress.) He shaves his head. (This is a Hebrew sign of mourning.) He summons up his courage and resigns himself to what has befallen him. “Why should I have expected anything else? Naked I came from my mother’s womb; naked I shall return. The Lord gives and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” He’s resigned to his situation and says so. Alas, he has spoken too soon, for now his entire body breaks out in repugnant sores. At his point Job says nothing.

[2] Job has three friends. They hear of his misfortune and come to comfort him. When they see him; when they see first-hand the disasters that have overtaken him and the misery visited upon him, they tear their clothing and weep like children. For seven days and seven nights they sit with Job, saying nothing, our text tells us, since they see that his suffering is very great.

When Job’s three friends visited him and wept with him and said nothing: it was the best comfort they could have brought him. There are few stresses harder to endure than the stress of someone who means well (who, after all, doesn’t mean well?) yet who clearly doesn’t apprehend our pain. Because he means well we can’t write him off or dismiss him; we even feel bad about asking him to leave, since he cares enough to inconvenience himself and visit us. Still, his presence only frustrates us all the more just because he doesn’t apprehend our pain. If he says “I know exactly how you are feeling” our frustration boils. But then, how can we stay angry at someone who means well? At the same time, how are we ever going to be comforted by someone who doesn’t perceive our pain? We are isolated in it, and our isolation only magnifies our suffering.

Job’s friends are better than this. They don’t run off at the mouth, spouting well-meaning but alienating non-assurances that they know how much he is suffering. Instead they’re distressed themselves. Their silent apprehension of Job’s pain is the only comfort they can render for now. At the same time, their silent apprehension is the only comfort Job can receive for now. This point shouldn’t be lost on you and me this morning.

[3] Job’s pain intensifies even more. As his suffering mounts not even the comfort of his friends can stay his outburst: Job curses the day he was born. He wonders why he’s being kept alive when death would bring him release. Finally Job simply wishes that he were dead.

In Hebrew thought a wish for death isn’t merely a sign of weariness or hopelessness or intolerable pain or even raging bitterness. In Hebrew thought a wish for death is the sign of raging bitterness against God. As soon as Job’s three friends hear him long for death they give up their human wisdom (silence) for an inhumane foolishness (talk.) “Don’t say that,” they tell him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just said? Bitterness against God is blasphemous. Do you want God to punish you for uttering such a thing?” By this time Job is in such torment he can’t imagine any punishment that could increase his pain in any way. When Job’s friends appear horrified at his blasphemy, they assume (if they’re thinking at all) that their horror will startle him and bring him to his senses; they assume that their reaction is helpful. In fact they aren’t helping him at all. If they’d possessed a modicum of sensitivity and wisdom they would have ignored his outburst, generated as it was by his torment.

Haven’t God’s greatest servants cried out, at some point, as Job did, “I wish I were dead”? Moses did. So did Jeremiah and Elijah too. At some point all these men felt that God had let them down so very badly that they couldn’t help railing at him. The psalms are full of this. “Why do you let me down when most I need you? Why do you hide your face when most I need to be held up?” (Ps. 10)

Is there anything wrong with this? Isn’t there admirable honesty and transparency here? I have heard this cry myself in situations of terrible heartbreak. I heard it for the first time when I was ten years old. A house caught fire on our street in Toronto , and the family of six perished in it. No one got out. One little fellow who burned to death (or at least suffocated) was a boy my age who had been born with hydrocephalus. Today a shunt would be place in his head and the fluid drained out of his brain. But fifty years ago anyone with “water on the brain” found his head swelling and swelling and his mental ability deteriorating. He was incapacitated and his family’s life was thereafter oriented around a child whose ailment was chronic: no relief for the parents. Let’s not say that the fatal fire was relief for them and for him. On this occasion I heard bitterness against God boil over, and I heard others warn, “Don’t say that; don’t add blasphemy to tragedy. We have to believe that God is good and just.”

Do we? Who has to? The person whose anguish (even if it’s anguish born of witnessing a tragedy) has torn this bitter railing against God out of him; he doesn’t have to for the simple reason that he can’t. Let all who are driven to say what they are driven to say; let them say it, for they stand in good company: Moses, Jeremiah, Elijah.

As long as Job’s friends are silent (except for their weeping) they comfort him. But as soon as they open their mouths and begin to yammer they inflate his torment. One garrulous friend decides to dabble amateurishly in theology. He claims it’s common knowledge that people get what they deserve in life. If Job is in great pain now then he must have deserved it. If Job would only look back over his life he would soon see why God has laid this torment on him.

This is a terrible thing to say to a sufferer. To hint it, even breathe it, is to compound suffering with guilt. And suffering compounded with guilt is suffering intensified. Even to hint that someone’s pain is God-sent is sheer cruelty. Then the cruelty is magnified in that to suffering and guilt there’s been added confusion as well. After all, what kind of God would visit torture on anyone, and particularly visit torture on his most faithful servants? In the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry a tower fell on a construction crew and killed eighteen men. Jesus insisted that these men had not been singled out as deserving something dreadful. It was an accident. On another occasion the disciples came upon a man who had been blind since birth. They put the question to Jesus, “Who sinned: this man or his parents? One or the other must have done something heinous for someone to be born in this condition.” Jesus insisted that neither the man nor his parents was being punished. It was a congenital misfortune. Let’s not compound pain with guilt and then compound it yet more with confusion by suggesting that calamity is God-sent punishment. We mustn’t even breathe it.

Job reaches the climax of his suffering as he comes to feel utterly God-forsaken. Deserted. Abandoned. Given up. Haven’t we all been there ourselves? Hasn’t there been an occasion in our life, an occasion of overwhelming need or pain or desperation, when we hammered on the door of heaven and were left feeling no one was at home? When this experience comes to us, what it adds to human suffering is indescribable. Yet when such experience overtakes us we stand in good company, for our Lord himself, tormented to the point of distraction, was driven to cry, “Why have you forsaken me?”

[5] Yet our Lord was brought through his experience of God-forsakenness into the light and joy of his resurrection. Anticipating Christ’s victory by a thousand years, Job is allowed to see a glimmer of light in the midst of his black and bleak experience of God-forsakenness. The glimmer he sees constrains him to cry, “I know that my redeemer lives. One day he will stand upon the earth…in my flesh I shall see God.” What Job is allowed to glimpse is nothing less than that day when THE REDEEMER of the whole world of suffering will stand upon the earth. And because this redeemer, Jesus Christ, has stood upon the earth, those whose suffering drives them to exclaim they are God-forsaken shall one day see God.

I believe this with all my heart: one day we shall see God. But until the day comes when we see God face-to-face we need help now. While the promise of our future restoration is glorious, it remains future, and we need help now. And we have such help. The author of Hebrews insists that just because Jesus Christ has passed through his test of suffering, he is able to help those who are meeting their test now. His test, of course, was Gethsemane and Calvary . He passed through it in that his Father’s faithfulness brought him through it. Because our Lord has been through what we are now going through, Hebrews speaks of his as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” He is the trail-blazer who pioneers our faith-venture ahead of us. He is also the goal or destination of our faith, the bright light that beckons us and whose illumination lights up our pathway through the suffering we can’t avoid.

Remember, because Jesus Christ our Redeemer has stood on our earth we shall indubitably see God. But until that day comes we must count on the help of him who can effectively help us in our test of suffering just because he has passed through that test himself. He didn’t immerse himself in our pain only to get bogged down in its quicksand halfway through. He wasn’t left to founder in it, thereby becoming useless to himself and to us. He was brought through, and is now our effective companion, just because his victory guarantees our emergence from the dark night of pain.

 

III: — The book of Job concludes in a way that many people find unsatisfactory. After Job has lost everything – wealth, livestock, children and health – it’s all made up to him 200%. Now he’s wealthier than ever. It’s a fairy tale ending, isn’t it: first the prince is unjustly impoverished, then the prince is made richer than ever.

If we find the conclusion unsatisfactory we aren’t alone. Our Jewish friends, in the wake of the Holocaust, find it utterly unsatisfying, and for one reason: our Jewish friends who lost everything in the Holocaust – their goods, their children, their lives – nothing was made up to them.

I have long felt that for the proper conclusion to Job’s story we need to look to two other biblical writers. First, the psalmist: he tells us that humankind is the highest point of God’s creation, and that God has subjected everything in the universe to us, to our control. To be sure, much of the universe is in subjection to us. Advances in science, for instance, illustrate the fact nature is increasingly subject to us, to our control. But do we see everything subjected to us? Everything? Incurable disease? Hideous birth-defects? Protracted derangement? Disfiguring death? Surely there’s much that isn’t subject to us and therefore much that we don’t see subject to us.

Our second writer, the writer of Hebrews, agrees. We do not yet see everything subject to us. However, we do see Jesus. And seeing him victorious, we are guaranteed that everything now afflicting us will one day be subjected to us for ever.

William Sangster was an outstanding English Methodist clergyman who died horribly of a rare neurological disease. Years before his own death, however, when he was but a boy, he had a sister, the youngest child in a family of boys. She had been born deformed.   She lived only until age nine. In the last seven years of her life she underwent surgery fourteen times. Five gaping wounds yawned in her head, and at the last she was hidden away. Explanations? Anyone who proffers an explanation we should ignore. There is no explanation. Years later Sangster did say that the sheer inexplicability of his sister’s ailment in a world created and sustained by God found a parallel in a summer camp experience he had about the same time. As a boy Sangster ran out of canteen money at camp. He sent a postcard to his father asking for some more. No answer came back. His camp mates chided him, “Perhaps your father has forgotten you’re here.” (Ridiculous suggestion.) “Perhaps he’s too busy to bother with you.” (Equally ridiculous.)   “Perhaps your father simply doesn’t care.” (The youngster knew better than this.) “Then what’s the explanation?” his chums insisted. “I don’t know,” replied Sangster; “I simply don’t know. I’ll have to wait until I get home, and my father will tell me himself.”

We do not yet see everything subject to us. But we do see Jesus. In his company we are going to arrive home. And concerning that suffering which is now but a bleak, black mystery for which we have no explanation; concerning this we shall ask our Father and he will tell us himself.

Until that day dawns, however, we, like Job, continue to rejoice that our redeemer lives. And because our redeemer has stood upon the earth, we shall indeed see God.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                       

February 2005

 

God the Builder

Job 38:1-18

 

I: — “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?   Tell me, if you have understanding.” (Job 38:4)         It sounds harsh, dreadfully harsh.  Job has suffered extraordinarily: loss of goods, loss of livestock, loss of health. His loss of sons and daughters, however, can’t be mentioned in the same breath; the loss of Job’s children is qualitatively different. It’s little wonder that Job’s wife shouts at him “Curse God and die.”   Their predicament has become so wretched that to curse God, thereby antagonizing God (one would expect), can’t make it any worse.   Why not curse God, even if it reduces their frustration ever so slightly?

But Job won’t curse God, even though he appears to be about to die anyway. Job’s friends sit with him day after day. They comfort him. They comfort him, that is, until they open their mouths.  “Maybe you haven’t been as upright a fellow as you seem to be” they suggest. “Maybe you’ve harboured secret sin; secret, that is, to us but not to God, and now you’re only getting what you deserve.”   No doubt Job’s friends mean well.  They think they’re helpful.         But in fact they don’t help.   Job replies to his friends, one after the other, several times over. Finally he and they have nothing more to say to each other.

Then God speaks. “Job, you and your friends have proffered many explanations as to why your life has unfolded as it has. But do you and they know what you’re talking about?   Were you around when I, the Lord God, fashioned the universe?  Are you aware of the expanse of the universe? (38:24) Do you know how to get “to the place whence light is distributed?”  Job has to admit that he wasn’t on hand when the world was created. He has to admit that he doesn’t know the whence and whither of light.   (But of course you and I know how important the physics of light is, even if Job knows nothing about the properties of light.)   “Do you have any understanding (continues God) of how the universe is put together, and why or how it unfolds? You don’t even understand why or how it’s a universe and not a jumbled, chaotic mass in which no person could live, let alone ask questions.”

God’s questions to Job sound harsh.  After all, when anyone has been assaulted as Job has and is now staggering like a beaten boxer, asking such a person anything sounds cruel. “You, Job; you weren’t even conceived when the universe was fashioned.”

It sounds harsh, and if God’s questions in Job 38 were all God had to say to any sufferer, we could never say with Paul that God is the “the father of all mercies, who comforts us in all our afflictions.” (2nd Cor.1:3-4) A fuller answer to Job will have to await the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

To be sure, Job eventually says in the light of God’s protracted interrogation, “I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted….Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” Under the pressure of God’s questioning Job has been driven to admit that the creation is vaster, more complex, less penetrable than he had thought heretofore.  God alone is the builder, and only the builder understands definitively what the builder has built.

Where humans are concerned, however, what we can’t understand we can nonetheless marvel at.

 

II: — The creation is marvellous, and we honour God by marvelling at it.

Think of the navigational instinct of birds.  Myself, I have the poorest sense of direction.  Following a road map is almost an insuperable challenge to me when road maps are supposed to render a sense of direction unnecessary.         So poor is my sense of direction that I have difficulty recognizing streetscape or landscape that I saw only five hours earlier.  Yet the homing pigeon can always get home.

The best navigators are sea birds.  Best of all is the shearwater.   One of them, taken from its nest and transported 3,200 miles away, returned to its nest 12.5 days later.  In other words, the bird had flown, on average, 10.5 miles per hour, 24 hours per day, 12.5 days, and had found its way to the nest from which it had been taken.

Bees aren’t birds, but bees are top-notch navigators as well.  In order to orient themselves bees need to see only the tiniest bit of blue sky. You see, light from blue sky is polarized. (Polarized light has different properties in different directions, whereas the light that shines through cloud cover isn’t polarized.)   As long as bees have access to polarized light from the smallest patch of blue sky they will never lose their way.

Speaking of losing our way: for centuries sailors navigated by means of the North Star, or Polaris, to give it its proper name.  Polaris, visible any clear night, is seen if we look out past the leading edge of the Big Dipper. Polaris, or the North Star, twinkles cutely for us.  Cutely? Polaris is 2,400 times bigger and hotter than our sun.  Our sun is a star too, and as stars go, it isn’t much of a star. It looms large before us just because it’s very close to us.  Light from “our” star, the sun, reaches the earth in eight minutes and nineteen seconds. Light from the North Star, Polaris, reaches the earth in 420 years.  When next we look at the North Star we should understand that the twinkling we see is light that left Polaris 420 years ago.

The North Star, of course, like our sun, is part of what we call “our” galaxy. How many stars are there in our galaxy? – 200 billion.  How far away is our galaxy? – 100,000 light years away.  But of course our galaxy isn’t the only galaxy.  Galaxies tend to occur in clusters, and our galaxy, with its 200 billion stars, is part of a cluster of 11,000 galaxies.  How vast is the universe? The Hubble telescope has turned up galaxies that are 11 billion light years away.

And then there’s the light we can’t see, what astronomers call a “black hole.” At one point I thought a black hole in interstellar space was a giant nothing, a giant vacuum, and was called a black hole just because there was nothing there to be seen. Not so. A black hole is invisible in that the light that a star gives out is bent, bent by gravity. (Albert Einstein proved that gravity bends light.) The force of gravity is so very immense, and the light is bent so very thoroughly, that the light is bent back on itself and never escapes the gravitational pull of – of what? The light never escapes the gravitational pull of an interstellar mass equal to one billion suns.

Speaking of dense matter; the densest matter is that of a neutron star. One thimbleful of this matter weighs as much as the earth’s total human population.

Nuclear explosions are dreadful – in both senses of ‘dreadful.’ We dread a nuclear explosion akin to that of Hiroshima or Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of people were vaporised in an instant.  Any nuclear explosion is dreadful as well in the classical sense of the word; namely, awesome. We’re awed before it. As powerful as the nuclear explosions were that devastated Japanese cities, they were firecrackers compared to the nuclear explosions that occur naturally. A minute ago I spoke of stars that are vastly bigger than our sun.   Then I spoke of galaxies where even one galaxy consists of hundreds of billions of stars. Now imagine a nuclear explosion, a ‘supernova’ it’s called, a nuclear explosion in a star; imagine a nuclear explosion that not only wipes out that one star (vastly bigger than the earth), but wipes out as well an entire galaxy. It happens in nature all the time.

“Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know,” says Job concerning the creation.

 

III: — We should spend a few minutes probing the doctrine of creation.  God has fashioned the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing. This is important. If God had fashioned the universe out of something, out of raw material of some kind, then this raw material would have pre-existed our universe.  Where would this ‘stuff’ have originated? – from a rival deity, obviously. Just as obviously, the ‘stuff’ out of which God created the universe would be a limitation on God; what he could do in fashioning the universe would be limited by the characteristics of the raw material.

To say that God has created ex nihilo is to say that there is no pre-existing matter that limits God in any way. It’s also to say that there’s no rival deity to thwart God.  And to say this, be it noted, is to say that the God who is sole creator is also the sole Lord of his creation.  The creator has a claim, an incontestable claim, on his creation and on every aspect of it. Do we doubt this? Then we should read more carefully those scripture passages that the church too often seems to read past; namely, the passages that speak of God as Destroyer. He who creates from nothing has the right and the capacity to reduce to nothing.  To say anything else is to deny that God is exclusive lord of his own creation.

It’s here that unbelievers become resentful, I’ve found.  For years I was puzzled as to why unbelievers became hostile over the doctrine of creation. After all, the universe is the same universe whether it came forth from the creator’s will or appeared we-know-not-how.  Even when a doctrine of creation fully compatible with scientific research was advanced, the hostility didn’t decrease.  Then it occurred to me: the reason the doctrine of creation provokes hostility has to do with the creator’s lordship of the creation. If the universe actually was created (ex nihilo), then the creator has a legitimate claim on the obedience of the creature. If the creator has a claim on humankind’s obedience, the creator also has the right to punish human disobedience. And of course the creator has the right to become the destroyer – as scripture reminds us several times over.  This is what unbelievers object to, I have found, in the doctrine of creation. They resent any encroachment upon their supposed autonomy.  They resent any denial of their independence.  They object to being told that they are not their own lord, are accountable to another, and one day will have to appear before the creator who as sole lord is therefore sole judge as well.  All of this underlies their hostility to any notion of creation.

IV: — How is such hostility dispelled? It’s dispelled only as they come to know God.  And they come to know God not in the first instance as creator; they come to know God in the first instance as redeemer.  To be sure, the creation has to exist before it can be redeemed; therefore creation precedes redemption.  But the knowledge of God the redeemer precedes the knowledge of God the creator.

Let me say it again: temporally, creation precedes redemption; cognitively, knowledge of the redeemer precedes knowledge of the creator. In other words, our awareness that God is creator is a consequence of our having become by faith the beneficiary of God’s saving mercy.  Israel knew God as creator only as a result of its having been redeemed by God at Red Sea and Sinai. Israel knew God as the maker of sun, the moon and the heavens only because Israel had first become intimately acquainted with God through its merciful deliverance at Red Sea and Sinai. You and I know God to be creator only because we’ve been admitted to intimacy with Jesus Christ our Redeemer, through whose Sonship we’ve become, by grace, sons and daughters of the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Let me repeat. As sinners we have no saving knowledge of God.  But when the Holy Spirit brings Christ to us and us to Christ; when the Holy Spirit moves us to embrace that Saviour who has already embraced us in the cross, we are bound to Jesus Christ in faith.  Knowing the Redeemer, we know the Triune God who has sent the Son for our sakes. For this reason it’s only as we become beneficiaries of God’s redemption that we know that God’s creation isn’t God.

Does anyone think the creation to be God?  Yes. Apart from our knowledge of God we’re sunk in idolatry.         Idolatry is nothing more and nothing less than confusing creator and creation. Only by the grace of God (our salvation) do we know that the creation isn’t God.

The apostle Paul makes this point, albeit left-handedly, when he reminds the Christians in Corinth , “The foundation is laid already; no one can lay another, for it is Jesus Christ himself.” (1st Cor. 3:11 JB Phillips) Jesus Christ the redeemer is the foundation; the foundation of our discipleship and our churchmanship and our understanding of the world, to be sure.  But this is because Jesus Christ is no less the foundation of our knowledge of God.  To put it in terms of tonight’s sermon, the builder can be known to be builder only as the builder is first known to be the building’s fixer.

For this reason where Jesus Christ the fixer isn’t known in faith, pantheism and panentheism are rampant.

Pantheism maintains that God is the essence of all that is.  Pantheism insists that the world and everything in it is divine at bottom.

Panentheism maintains that God is of the essence or in the essence of all that is. Panentheism insists that God is an aspect of the world and everything in it.

According to both pantheism and panentheism, we should note, idolatry is impossible, since to worship the world is to worship the deity whose essence is found in the world.

According to both pantheism and panentheism, sin and evil are impossible. Since there’s nothing whose essence isn’t God, sin and evil have been eliminated by definition. Anything humans choose to do is right and good by definition.  Anything humans choose to think is sound by definition.  Anything humans choose to believe is true by definition.  Is it any wonder that the New Age Movement, with its pantheism or panentheism, is the darling of the suburbanite ‘yuppie’?  Whatever you feel is right. Whatever you believe is right. Whatever you do is divine. There is not and there never can be any criticism or contradiction of what we want for ourselves. Our self-indulgence can’t be faulted.  Our entitlement can’t be checked.  Our pleasure-principle can’t be qualified.  You may differ from me concerning what brings you pleasure, but your self-pleasuring isn’t superior to mine and mine isn’t superior to yours. To put it in terms of tonight’s sermon, according to pan(en)theism, the builder has been collapsed into the building – except that, strictly speaking, there never was a builder and the world never was built.

This monstrously self-inflated delusion is deflated only as the sword of the Word of God pierces it.  The foundation is laid already; no one can lay another.  The foundation of our knowledge of God, knowledge of the world, knowledge of ourselves – the foundation of our apprehension of truth anywhere in life is the one and only redeemer, Jesus Christ.  As we seize him in faith our thinking is corrected and we understand – now – that the world isn’t God; knowledge of the world isn’t knowledge of the divine. And apart from him ‘knowledge of ourselves’ (so-called) is so abysmally short of the truth that we don’t know ourselves profoundly or what constitutes the human good.

 

V: — Since apart from Jesus Christ everything the world deems substantial in fact is shaky, what is firm and solid in light of Jesus Christ?   The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews states forthrightly “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” (Heb. 12:28) This is crucial. The Psalmist (82:5) maintains that the wicked are perpetrating wickedness unchecked.   “They have neither knowledge nor understanding”, the Psalmist tells us. The wicked lack knowledge; specifically, knowledge of God, knowledge of God’s righteousness, knowledge of God’s justice and God’s judgement.  They also lack understanding; that is, they grope like a disoriented person trying to feel her way through a dark cellar she’s never been in before cluttered with items she’s never seen before, without one scintilla of light to help her.

The psalmist tells us this, however, not to quicken our pity for the poor, benighted person groping in the dark; he tells us this in order to inform us of what the perpetrators of wickedness, whose ignorance of God and blind groping only worsens wickedness, give rise to; namely, the shaking of the foundations.  “All the foundations of the earth are shaken,” the psalmist cries out. We must note the use of the plural: foundations. What’s more, all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

Didn’t we say two minutes ago that the foundation (singular) had already been laid, Christ Jesus, risen from the dead? And didn’t we rejoice that just because the foundation has been laid and cannot be removed, we have received a kingdom that cannot be shaken? Then why does the psalmist speak of the foundations of the earth being shaken?

The foundations of the earth are those ‘pillars’ on which we suppose the earth to be resting, by which we suppose it to be supported, and because of which we can assume the order of human existence to be inviolable. When the foundations of the earth are shaken, however, what we always regarded as inviolable is seen not to be such, while order appears to give way to disarray.

As a matter of fact the foundations of the world are being shaken. The shift from modernity to post-modernity is one instance of the shake-up.  The shift from publicly owned decency (even on the part of those who make no profession of faith) to something resembling society-wide character disorder is another. In an environment where any and all shame is said to be psychologically deleterious (psychology now being the measure of everything), any instance of shame is deemed to be an exemplification of “shame-bound.” To be shame-bound is deemed deplorable, and therefore all shame should be denied – which denial, of course, gives birth to shamelessness.  Is shamelessness an improvement?   Isn’t thoroughgoing shamelessness the mark of the psychopath?  It used to be the mark of the psychopath.  Now it’s advanced as a mark of the sophisticate.  The foundations of the earth are being shaken all the time.

A horrific instance of this has to be the experience of Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor and spokesperson for post-holocaust Jewry.  Wiesel was only a teenager when he was stacked in a fetid, waterless, toiletless box car and conveyed to Auschwitz . I’m not going to describe the nightmarish occurrences in Auschwitz , but I will urge you to read Wiesel’s book Night, the book in which he testifies to apocalyptic horrors.   A terrible shaking of the foundations of the earth occurred the day an S.S. guard noticed the young Wiesel observing carefully the monstrosities unfolding around him, taking it all in, having it stamp itself upon his mind and heart. The S.S. guard shouted contemptuously at him, “I know what you’re doing, young man. You’re mentally making note of all this, committing it to memory.         And you want to remember it so that you will be a witness to what occurred here. Let me tell you two things: one, you aren’t going to survive this camp; two, even if you were to survive, what you have seen here is so surreally horrible that no one would believe your testimony.  No one would believe you just because no one would ever want to admit that human beings could act as we S.S. men have acted.  No one would believe the horrors you attested just because no one would ever want to admit that what was actual here is possible anywhere, that is, that everyone is capable of bottomless cruelty.” The psalmist is correct: all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

While all the foundations ofthe earth can be shaken, there is a kingdom that cannot be shaken. In this regard I tell my students repeatedly that just because Christ’s Easter victory can never be overturned, the kingdom he brings with him in his resurrection from the dead is never at risk.

For many reasons my students have difficulty grasping this truth, one reason being the word of the master himself – when he teaches his followers to pray “Thy kingdom come.”   If the kingdom hasn’t come yet it would seem that we haven’t received a kingdom that can never be shaken.  Of course we’re mandated to pray for the coming of the kingdom, my students tell me, not least because there’s pathetically little evidence of any kingdom that has come.

By way of reply I remind my students that Jesus Christ is king, right now. He who is the messiah of Israel can’t fail to be king. Any ambiguity surrounding him and his rule has been dispelled in his resurrection from the dead. Christ’s resurrection declares him king. Since there can’t be a king without a kingdom, Christ’s resurrection also announces the presence of the kingdom.  The kingdom of God is the creation of God healed.  The kingdom of God is the presence of shalom.  Since our Lord has effected this in his resurrection and ascension, when we pray “Thy kingdom come” we are actually praying for the coming manifestation of that kingdom which is already here.  Let’s be sure to understand that if the unshakeable kingdom isn’t here then Jesus Christ isn’t now king; if the kingdom isn’t here then Jesus Christ is no different from John the Baptist, no different from Moses and the prophets.  But he is different. He, and he alone is messiah-king. His resurrection has effected a kingdom that his ascension guarantees.

Much in our Lord’s earthly ministry was a prolepsis of the kingdom that our Lord’s resurrection has effected.         Think of the temptation story.  Jesus resists the blandishments of the tempter in the course of protracted testing. When Mark writes up the episode he draws our attention to a feature that we frequently read past. Mark says at the conclusion of the temptation narrative, “And he (Jesus) was with the wild beasts.” (Mark 1:13 ) The point is that the wild beasts didn’t devour him. Ever since the Fall (Genesis 3) lethal enmity between humans and beasts has characterized this present evil age.  When Jesus resists Satan consistently, the Fall is overturned.  Confirmation that it’s been overturned is provided in the fact that lethal enmity has been dispelled: the kingdom is here.

Later in his earthly ministry our Lord stills the storm on the sea of Galilee. The raging storm, lethal in its own way, is also sign of a creation warped by evil to the point of de-creating towards chaos.  Not to be overlooked, of course, is the fact that Mark’s gospel was written when Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome was lethally driving them towards apostasy, out-and-out denial of their Lord. The same Lord who stilled the storm in his earthly ministry is now, in his risen, ascended existence, stilling the panic that will otherwise overtake his people and warp their adoring confession of him into cringing denial.

We have received a kingdom that cannot be shaken.  We have received it; we never built it. God the builder has built it. This being the case, there are several truths we must be sure to own.

One, the kingdom is here, present, in our midst.

Two, this kingdom can never be overturned, dissolved, dispelled or destroyed.

Three, this kingdom is at present discernible through the eyes of faith. Faith sees what unbelief fails to see.

Four, because this kingdom cannot be shaken, to pray for its coming is to pray for the coming of its manifestation, to pray for the day when not only faith will perceive it but every eye will have to behold it and every knee will have to bow before it.  Not everyone will love the day of the kingdom’s manifestation and not everyone will love the king; but everyone will have to acknowledge king and kingdom alike.

There’s one more feature, fifth feature, we must note: while Christ’s kingdom is real, operative now, the         present evil age is never denied.  Christ’s kingdom and its contradiction overlap for the time being. While Christ’s kingdom is in our midst, the virulence of this present evil age renders Christ’s kingdom disputable. What then, do we see? What do we see as determinative? Do we see chiefly the present evil age, or do we see chiefly a kingdom that cannot be shaken?

Think of the story of the Gadarene demoniac.  The man says his name is ‘legion’; he’s afflicted by so many principalities and powers that he doesn’t know who he is.  At the conclusion of the master’s ministry he is found “seated, clothed, and in his right mind.”  To be seated, in biblical symbolism, is to be in a position of authority; for the first time in his life the man is in control of himself, properly the subject of his own existence.  To be clothed, in biblical symbolism, is to belong.  The man belongs to his community, his family, the household of God. To be right-minded, biblically, means to be sane – yes, but more than this; it means that this man’s thinking is now conformed to that kingdom whose citizen he’s most recently become.

At this point I ask my students, “When next you observe the psychotic person on a downtown street corner; when next you find a schizophrenic person in your church, what do you see?  Do you see one more deranged man shouting curses at the RCMP for not protecting him against the cosmic rays that Asian agents are loosing everywhere? Or do you see someone whom the kingdom will one day find manifestly seated, clothed and in his right mind?

When I hold the hymnbook in front of me at eye-level I can focus on the hymnbook, seeing the printed page clearly, able to read every word. Doing this keeps the book in focus and the people beyond the book slightly fuzzy, imprecise.  Or I can focus on the people in the congregation, seeing them clearly, able even to pick out my friends who have come along tonight in hope of being edified. Doing this keeps the people in focus and the printed page slightly fuzzy, imprecise. With respect to the kingdom of God, we can focus on the kingdom in our midst, with this present evil age accorded the fuzziness it deserves, or we can focus (idolatrously, I should add) on this present evil age and render the kingdom of God fuzzy, imprecise. What do we see? Which looms before us with greater clarity? Which grips us more compellingly? A more pointed way of putting the question is this: at bottom, have we abandoned ourselves to the truth and reality of the kingdom that cannot be shaken, or do we merely say we believe in it while our heart has secretly (or not so secretly) been captured by this present evil age?

The kingdom of God is in our midst. In light of the overall tenor of scripture concerning the victory of Jesus and his vindication through resurrection and ascension we should recall his dispute with detractors in Luke 17.   These latter folk ask Jesus when the kingdom is coming.  He replies, “The kingdom of God isn’t coming with signs to be observed.  Look! The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” In their midst to be sure, and yet they didn’t recognize it, couldn’t rejoice in it. This should sober us at the same time that it forces several considerations upon us.

First: since the kingdom is in our midst, we don’t build the kingdom. God alone is builder. We don’t advance the kingdom. We don’t extend the kingdom. (When the offering is received at worship, let it not be said that the offering is to be used for building, advancing or extending the kingdom.  You and I can no more do this than we can create the universe ex nihilo.)

Secondly: since the kingdom is here, we can either allow it to be overlooked and remain overlooked (our Lord’s detractors, after all, never saw it), or we can lend it visibility.  We can’t build it. (And isn’t it grand that we can’t? If we could build the kingdom, we’d also be able to wreck it.)   We are charged with rendering the kingdom visible, a city set on a hill.

Thirdly, this kingdom or city (the kingdom of God and the New Jerusalem are one and the same), is splendid.         It’s splendid just because it’s bathed in the splendour of God himself. When John the seer speaks of the New Jerusalem “let down from heaven” – let down just because you and I can’t build it – he says that its wall is “built of Jasper.” (Rev. 21:18) Jasper was the most radiant, dazzling substance known to the ancient world.  The kingdom of God, the creation healed, the New Jerusalem that replaces the old Jerusalem which kills the prophets and crucifies the Messiah, which in turn was supposed to reverse a prior city, the Tower of Babel, but in fact did not because it could not; the kingdom of God, the creation healed, the New Jerusalem is splendid, radiant with God’s splendour. On the day that the manifestation of this kingdom comes upon us the whole world will see it luminous with the luminosity of him who always was the light of the world.

 

VI: — In light of all that’s been said tonight about God the builder and what he has built, there remains only one serious, sobering matter to consider: the urgency of entering this kingdom, the urgency of living in it, living from it, living for it. We must enter the kingdom of God , Jesus tells us repeatedly. We don’t ooze into it; we don’t wake up one day and find ourselves in it willy-nilly. There must be a conscious, deliberate decision, re-affirmed every day of our lives, that we are henceforth going to cling to the king and identify ourselves with his kingdom.

For this reason God the builder urges us, according to the apostle Peter, to “come to him, to that living stone…and like living stones be built ourselves into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (1st Peter 2:4-5)

The kingdom can’t be shaken.  Humans can be shaken, however, and should be.  We need to be shaken, shaken up lest we miss the kingdom, lest we forfeit it, lest we live and die in the ghastly illusion that neither king nor kingdom was ever in our midst.   “Come to him (Christ the king), to that living stone, and like living stones be built yourselves into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.” The presence of the unshakeable kingdom never renders evangelism superfluous; it always renders evangelism necessary.

“Come to him, that living stone, and like living stones be built yourselves into a spiritual house.”    The opposite of a living stone is a dead stone.   Dead? In Ephesians 2 Paul speaks of humankind as “dead in trespasses and sins.”   He insists that only God can make us alive.  Peter insists that only God the builder can turn dead stones into living stones, and God the builder does this as we abandon ourselves to him who is and ever will be the living stone.

 

Conclusion: — “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”  I said at the beginning of the sermon that God’s question to Job sounds harsh. Actually it isn’t. Ultimately its force is this:

“Don’t make yourself the measure of how the universe ought to unfold.

Don’t make yourself the measure of me, God.

I am the builder.

I have built the creation ex nihilo, therein establishing my claim over all creatures great and small, since neither the creation nor any part of it is God.

I have laid the foundation, Christ Jesus: Son, Saviour. Messiah, Lord.

This foundation remains impregnable even when all the foundations of the earth are shaken through the wickedness of those who lack both knowledge and understanding.

This foundation is the king whose kingdom cannot be shaken.

And now you must come to him, Christ the king, the living stone, and as living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house.

For I who am the builder am also the destroyer.”

Come to him, the living stone, the world’s sole saviour, and your only hope.

 

Victor Shepherd
August 2007

(preached at Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, July 2007)

What Is Man? or Does Theology Matter?

Psalm 8; 144:3-4      Job 25:4-6

 

Many people are impatient with theology. They regard theology as utterly abstract and uselessly otherworldly. Theology, they assume, has to do with dotting i’s and crossing t’s. But help people? give hope to people? even save people? Since when did i’s and t’s save anyone?

But in fact theology isn’t utterly abstract and uselessly otherworldly. Theology is the discipline of reflecting upon the truth of the living God. And God is neither abstract nor otherworldly. God is concrete. God is the reality with which all of us collide and wrestle and which we sometimes deny; and God remains that reality which none of us can ever escape.

Make no mistake. When a theology of nature, for instance, is dismissed nature becomes a giant garbage pail slowly gathering up lethal chemicals.

When a theology of history is ignored we give up the struggle to lend visibility to the kingdom of God and instead make our peace with the kingdom of evil even as it savages us.

What about a theology of humankind? What are man and woman? Who are we, anyway? Are we merely two-legged featherless creatures whose toys and tools are a bit more sophisticated than those of a monkey? Are we simply the cold-blooded killers the man from eastern Europe told me we are after he himself had been victimized by both nazis and communists? Or are we simply angelic creatures of superior rationality? C.S. Lewis has pointed out that when people believe they are only animals they behave like animals. And yet paradoxically when they believe they are near-angelic their behaviour becomes near demonic. Theology — our reflection upon the truth of God — matters. Whether explicit or implicit it governs how we view ourselves, what we do to other people, and whether there is hope for any of us.

The important theological question, “What is man?”, is asked several times in the Hebrew bible. Today we are going to probe several of the answers given this question.

 

I: — “What is man that you, God, are mindful of him and care for him?” Answer: “I have made him little less than God, and have crowned him with glory and honour.” All men and women are the pinnacle of God’s creation, higher than anything else God has made, only slightly lower than God himself and crowned (the fact that we are crowned means that everyone is meant for the royal family; before God there are no commoners) crowned with a glory and an honour which no one else can snatch from us and which we cannot even forfeit ourselves. This is what we are.

It’s important that we understand we are created with a dignity we can neither lose accidentally nor fritter away foolishly nor give up disgustingly nor be robbed of helplessly. To be sure, we can always behave in such a way as to contradict this dignity, and other people can treat us so as to deny it, but by God’s ordination it is ours, and is ours forever.

Think of the situations where our society implicitly recognizes humankind’s ineradicable glory/honour/dignity and explicitly pays dearly to uphold it: the convict, for instance. One person in a penitentiary costs us (i.e., taxpayers) $55,000 per year. When a new jail is built the cost is $285,000 per cell.

From time-to-time my wife has a child in her class who is severely challenged, whether physically or emotionally. A teacher’s aide is provided (taxpayer’s expense) who assists the child with getting around, getting to the toilet, getting winter clothes on and off; or else the teacher’s aide attempts to defuse explosions hidden away in the child’s psyche, and then attempts to console the child and others whenever defusing doesn’t work and there is emotional shrapnel spewing in all directions.

What does our society spend on the aged, the infirm (who may be young), the deranged, the new-born with the birth-defect? What do we spend on people who are socially unproductive and will never come close to paying their own way? And why do we spend it? Because despite the explicit secularism of our society there is an implicit theology at work: any human being is created only less than God, and is crowned with glory and honour.

We must not think that everyone knows innately what the psalmist tells us. Conviction of the glory and honour of humankind is not innate; conviction of this truth is fostered by the gospel. Where a society isn’t illumined by the indirect lighting of the gospel, or is no longer illumined by the indirect lighting of the gospel, people are regarded as tools to be used while useful and discarded when not. Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and historian, asks, “Do you have difficulty imagining what becomes of people in a society which is no longer controlled, even unconsciously, by the indirect illumination of the gospel? Ask me”, says Solzhenitsyn, “ask me. I have lived in such a society myself!”

In the war between China and Japan just prior to World War II it was learned that the Japanese estimated how long it would take a wounded soldier to recover and return to combat, and then decided whether or not the wounded soldier would be given medical treatment. If his injuries were such that he would be unavailable for several months — as was the case with a broken femur — he was shot in the head by his own people.

How different it was in a society illumined by the gospel for centuries. When I was a young teenager I was fascinated with accounts of the Battle of Britain. One aspect of it, however, didn’t fascinate me as much as it amazed me. Injured enemy fliers who had been shot down in the course of bombing defenceless civilians were themselves given the very best medical treatment available in Britain. If the flier had glass fragments in his eye and he needed the world’s best ophthalmologist, he got the world’s best ophthalmologist, even if there was a lineup of British citizens who needed medical treatment but whose condition was less urgent. This, I thought as a 14-year old, was the height of irrationality. It is the height of irrationality — unless even our worst enemy is someone who cannot forfeit the glory and honour and dignity in which he or she was created.

Theology matters. Imagine a society where such truth and reflection upon such truth disappear completely.

 

II: — What is man? woman? “Man is like a breath”, says the psalmist in his second answer, “man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.” In other words, we are short-lived creatures for whom life passes speedily; in addition, we are vulnerable creatures for whom life unfolds perilously.

Our days are like a passing shadow. Once we see this we can react in two quite different ways. One way is the way of fatalism and indifference. “Since life passes so very quickly, what is the point of doing anything? of exerting ourselves anywhere? Why not sit back and let the passing shadow pass?”

The other way is the way of biblical faith. Just because life is but a breath and our days a passing shadow, every moment has eternal significance. Every moment is an opportunity for mirroring the truth of God. Every moment is unique, pregnant, unrepeatable. Every moment can be a window opening on the God who sends rain on just and unjust alike. What occurs in any moment can have consequences beyond anything we might imagine.

Several times I have said from this pulpit that the day came for me when I realized that I could control almost nothing; could influence a great deal, to be sure, but control almost nothing. I used to think this was so because of my social situation. But someone like the Chief Executive Officer of a major corporation, the grand boss, someone whose social situation wasn’t mine; he could control eversomuch! Then one day I learned that a CEO in Canada lasts 3.5 years (on average), whereupon he is fired. What does he control then? What did he control earlier? Not even enough to keep himself from being fired! And the hightest political authorities? How much can the prime minister control? If the American government raises interest rates tomorrow there will be huge consequences for every dimension of Canadian life. And the prime minister will have no control whatever over the move made by our American friends or over the consequences of it for Canadians.

Because my life is a breath and my days a passing shadow I have to realize that I have only a few breaths in which to be. I don’t have to do something dramatic or eye-catching. I have to be. It’s my “be-ing” that will prove to be my greatest influence.

In the midst of “passing shadows” I often feel I am endlessly jostled by semi-anonymous people. The woman from the Ontario Housing Development who needs a few dollars because her child is sick and what the sick child needs is just enough to put the family finances below the line this month.

The schizophrenic fellow who wants to talk to me not because he has urgent information to convey but because he’s lonely and can’t understand why people weary of and walk away from his pillar-to-post ramblings.

I start to feel that all of this is crowding out the really important work I am supposed to be about.

Then I recall the master himself on his way to the house of Jairus who was the president of the synagogue. Jesus is going to the man’s house because the man’s daughter is sick unto death. As Jesus walks resolutely through the crowds an unnamed woman reaches out and touches him. Doesn’t she know he’s hurrying to make a housecall before a young girl dies? She doesn’t know this. How could she? But surely she can see how busy he is. “Hold it!”, says Jesus to impatient disciples accompanying him, “someone has touched me. Some one person has reached out to me. Let’s stop here and deal with this.”

Then I remember the people who have delayed in order to be kind to me. I’m not talking now about the people who have assisted me dramatically on the two occasions I was injured on the street and needed an ambulance to get to the hospital. I’m talking about the unnamed people who have gladly inconvenienced themselves in order to help me, therein mirroring our Lord himself.

The clerk at the Lufthansa counter in Frankfurt, Germany when my pick-up didn’t show up and the Frankfurt telephone directory had defeated me and I couldn’t find the village of Arnoldshain in the Frankfurt directory inasmuch as I had been given the wrong spelling of “Arnoldshain”.

The “bag lady” who welcomed me to her table in the doughnut shop when I was an undercover journalist in Parkdale. Sure she was deranged. But who ever said you had to be sane in order to be helpful? This 25-year old woman was unafraid, and assumed that I, grubby as I was, was another needy person as needy as she.

Wherever I have been in life I have found no shortage of people who were kind to me. (I didn’t say “everyone”: I have met my share of curdled spirits. I said “no shortage”, a sufficient number of kind people.) They have intuited, even if they never thought about it consciously, that because life is but a breath and our days a passing shadow, the only time we have to exemplify God’s truth and mercy and faithfulness is now. This moment is unique and is fraught with eternal significance.

 

III: — “What is man?” The book of Job gives a third answer: “A maggot, a worm.” Wait a minute! I thought we were little less than God, crowned with glory and honour! And now a maggot, a worm? Actually, it is no putdown, no belittlement of us. To understand what is said we must first hear the question it answers. “How can anyone be innocent? (NEB) or clean? (RSV). Can anyone be righteous or pure in God’s sight? (NIV) Maggot! Worm!” It’s the writer’s way of reminding us that we sinners are defiled before God.

I am the last person to belittle what the psychologists tell us about the importance of positive self-image and and self-confidence and ego-strength. The person whose self-confidence has eroded utterly or who has never had any is a truly pathetic creature. Then what are we to make of “Maggot, Worm!”, especially when we all know that maggots frequent rottenness and worms frequent excrement? Is scripture simply fostering a negative self-image, destroying what little self-confidence we have, and ruining the ego-strength we’ve struggled for years to build up?

Not at all. When scripture pronounces us “Maggot, worm!”, it is reminding us that sin defiles; we are defiled before a holy God. Defilement is always loathsome. We are loathsome to God. Our sin revulses him. Specifically sin’s defilement deprives us of our access to God; sin’s defilement disqualifies our acceptance with God.

Yet the marvel of God’s grace is that as loathsome as our sin renders us to him, he has made provision for us in the cross of that Son who identifies himself with the loathsome. The paradox of grace is that the more loathsome we are to God the more he longs for us. The glory of the gospel is that while we can (and do) sin our way into God’s mercy, we can’t sin our way out of his mercy.

“Maggot, worm!” So far from being a putdown, an ego-crusher, it’s the most positive thing that can be said of humankind. It’s positive in the first place because it’s the truth about us, and no falsehood, however sweet-sounding, is ultimately helpful or positive. It’s positive in the second place in that such a pronouncement is riddled with hope: sinners can be salvaged and restored.

Years ago I came to see that the most positive thing to be said about human beings is that we are sinners. The alternatives are unrelievably negative. If instead we say that humankind’s root problem is that we are uninformed, we make ourselves the ready victims of the propagandists. If instead we say that we are socially maladjusted, we welcome the cruelty of social engineering. If instead we think our root problem to be our material deprivation, we embrace a statist economy, and statist economies, we have seen repeatedly in our century, are humanly horrific. It’s supremely positive to say we are sinners: there’s hope for us.

To be sure, it’s the creature crowned with glory and honour that is also the sinner whom the Hebrew writer pronounces “Maggot, worm!” Yet it’s we maggots who are destined to have our inalienable glory and honour displayed in full splendour.

 

IV: — Then what are we finally? Are we a combination of the three descriptions we have heard today? If so, are we all three equally? Does one predominate? Which one?

Our questions are answered as we leave off guessing about ourselves and look to Jesus Christ. In him we are created for fellowship with the One who has crowned us with glory and honour. In him we are created for fellowship with the One in whom our dignity and worth are guaranteed forever. In him we are created for fellowship with the One before whom any Christ-like deed is rendered eternally significant. In him we are created for fellowship with the One in whom our sin is pardoned even as a new heart begins to throb within us. We are created for a fellowship in which our glorious humanity is restored, even made resplendent.

Some people have affirmed this and are stepping forward in it. Others have not yet affirmed it, but rather scorn it and thrust it away. Yet the invitation and summons remain. And therefore you and I are to look upon every human creature as invited to this fellowship and appointed to be a beneficiary of it. What the future of humankind is, at least in the western world, according to Solzhenitsyn, depends on whether the Christian Church can reassert convincingly the truth of God concerning his creation.

Theology matters.

 

                                                                    Victor Shepherd
March 1998            

                       

Of Conflicts, Contending, And A Crown

Psalm 13

 

When I was a youngster I began reading the psalms simply because I had been told it would do me good to read them. I had been told that the psalms were the prayerbook of the bible, it was important that I learn to pray rightly, praying rightly would do much to render me godly, and therefore any one who aspired to godliness would steep himself in the psalms. I believed then that what I had been told was true. I believe it now. I read the psalms every day.

When I first read the psalms, however, I was disturbed: the psalmist spoke of his enemies so very often that I wondered if the fellow weren’t paranoid. What’s more, he called down God’s wrath on his enemies so often that I wondered if he weren’t vindictive. I didn’t think I was going to be rendered godly by taking to heart someone who seemed both paranoid and vindictive, and so I left off reading the psalms. I returned to them only when I was acquainted with two facts which I must impress upon you this morning. One, everywhere in the Hebrew bible where God’s judgement is invoked upon our enemies it is recognized that our enemies are ours only because they are first God’s enemies. In other words, our true enemies are not those who irk us or dislike us; the true enemies of God’s people are the enemies of God himself. They are first of all enemies of God’s truth, God’s purpose, God’s way, God’s faithfulness, patience and steadfast love. Two, everywhere in the Hebrew bible where God’s judgement is invoked upon enemies, what underlies the invocation isn’t mean-spirited vindictiveness, but rather a plea for God to vindicate his own name; a plea for God to act so as to clear his own name of the slander which God’s enemies have heaped upon it.

As soon as I had these two facts straight the psalms (and indeed the older testament as a whole) came alive for me as never before. I read it with renewed enthusiasm and relish and profit. I continue to aspire to godliness. If you are authentic in your Christian profession then you aspire to it too. Then it behooves all of us to return to the psalms again and again that they might be imprinted upon us indelibly. Today we are going to look at psalm 13.

I: — “How long, O Lord?”, the psalmist asks four times over in two verses. “How long do I have to wait? How long before you act? How long must pain and sorrow torment me?” What is the psalmist’s problem, anyway? Why is he so upset? “How long shall my enemies be exalted over me?” His problem is that his enemies, arrogant, puffed-up swaggerers, are gloating over him. They are snickering at him, bragging of the humiliation they have forced upon him, smirking at the anguish they have thrust upon him. Not only have they made him suffer, they have enjoyed making him suffer, and they are proud of it.

Remember, however, that the psalmist’s enemies are his enemies only because they are first God’s enemies. The psalmist is most upset not because he has been visited with contempt, but because God has. The psalmist’s upset merely reflects the distress which afflicts the heart of God.

Nonetheless, the psalmist himself is in pain; his enemies, while certainly God’s first, are still the psalmist’s. In fact, so upset is he that he cries, “How long?”, three more times. “How long am I to be stuck with this ache in my gut? How long will you, O Lord, hide your face from me? How long are you going to forget me?”

One reason I love the psalms is that I know the predicament of every Christian to be reflected in them. To be a Christian is to be surrounded with the enemies of our Lord himself. To be a Christian is to be immersed in conflict.

One of the saccharine myths which the church, ignorant of scripture, has foisted on Jesus, is the myth that wherever he went people became agreeable. I regularly receive denominational literature which tells me (incorrectly) that because Jesus is the reconciler, his word and deed invariably reconcile people. No! Jesus is the reconciler, and therefore his word and deed reconcile repentant sinners to God. Our Lord does not reconcile the unrepentant; his word and deed harden the unrepentant, harden them in their enmity to God. Our Lord does not, he cannot, reconcile sin and righteousness, depravity and godliness, the evil one and the Holy One of Israel. These are not reconciled; they can’t be.

Before our Lord reconciles anyone to God he is the agitator who overturns everything. He is born in Bethlehem, a nondescript suburb of Jerusalem, and King Herod slays every male infant he can find. He begins his public ministry by submitting to baptism at the hands of his cousin John, and John is executed. (This fact alone should make Joan Adams and me nervous about baptizing anyone!) He preaches in Capernaum and the people want to throw him over a cliff. He travels to Jerusalem and the ecclesiastical bureaucracy plots his demise. Finally he is betrayed by someone belonging to the most intimate circle of his followers. All of this I read in scripture. Yet the most recent document our denomination has published on scripture maintains that everywhere Jesus goes everyone becomes agreeable. In John’s gospel, several times over, after Jesus has spoken or acted, we are told, “The people were divided”. Before Jesus reconciles he fosters division, for he must first expose the enemies of God. Someone with no previous scriptural familiarity would see this upon first reading. The why can’t the church? Because a saccharine myth has obscured the truth of God.

The psalmist knows that to come to a knowledge of the truth and to be added to the people of God is to find God’s enemies our enemies. In short, to love God is to be immersed in conflict.

Several weeks ago I was asked to speak to a grade 7/8 class in an elementary school of the Toronto Board of Education. In the classroom there was a large poster (3 feet by 2 feet) immediately beside the blackboard. When students looked at the blackboard they couldn’t help seeing the poster. The poster had to do with health matters. In huge letters it urged students, “B.Y.O.C.” — and underneath the translation, “Bring Your Own Condom”. Let us make no mistake. In any communication there is, of course, the explicit message; in addition there are scores of implicit messages. Explicitly the poster merely said, “Bring Your Own Condom”. Implicitly, however, the poster poured out scores of messages concerning sexual activity, and its relation (non-relation) to human intimacy. (It is quite plain that those who approved the poster for the grade 7 classroom see no connection at all between sexual activity and human intimacy.) Another of the many implicit messages is that promiscuity is just fine; it’s only disease that’s bad. The scores of implicit messages which the poster sends out; every last one of them contradicts what Christians believe about human intimacy and the manner in which sexual activity subserves it. The gospel informs us that marriage, the fusion of husband and wife, is like a tree graft: each component of the graft grows into the other so as to form a union which is finally indescribable. Moreover, as this union develops and matures and bears fruit, the intensified union itself is the fruit which results from the tree-graft. All of this is denied by the implicit messages emanating from the poster.

I asked the teacher if the classroom where I was to speak were the regular classroom of the grade 7s and 8s or merely a classroom where my address was to be heard. She told me it was the regular classroom of the 7s and 8s. In the same instant I realized how bizarre my question was, for if it weren’t the regular classroom of the 7s and 8s it would have to be the regular classroom of a lower grade!

Now the teacher or parent who objects to the poster is going to be plunged into conflict instantly. Not to object, however, is to submerge one’s convictions. To object, on the other hand, will bring down the accusation of prudery, narrowness, naiveness, even the accusation of being quarrelsome and prickly. Nonsense. To object does not mean that we are argumentative or quarrelsome; it doesn’t mean that we are ornery and obnoxious and hard-to-get-along-with. To object, from a Christian perspective, means that we will not deny our Lord; we will not say of our only Saviour and hope, “I don’t know him now and never have”. To object, from a social perspective, means that we will not allow or encourage a tail to wag the dog. To object, from an educational perspective, means that we have identified some aspects of the offerings of the Toronto Board of Education to be delusive and dangerous. But let me say something important once more: to object would not mean that we were petty, petulant, or prickly. It would not mean that we were going out of our way stir up trouble. But it would most certainly plunge us into conflict.

Think of PATHWAY COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENTS, our affordable housing organization. (Marion Hartley, Gordon Hird and I are officers of it.) Last year, when we applied for a building permit (having already complied with all municipal regulations), we were besieged by neighbours who went on the warpath in an attempt at having us denied a building permit. Several of us went to an ugly meeting at Mississauga City Hall which lasted six hours. At that meeting the people whom we were trying to house, people who have the misfortune of not earning as much money as the neighbours on the warpath; these people were visited with slander and contempt. The median household income in our building (and of course a household can have — frequently does have — more than one wage-earner); the median household income is $21654 per year. As if it weren’t struggle enough to raise a family on $21600 per year, the strugglers have to be visited with slander and contempt. And so we met for six hours of nasty conflict. Should we have avoided the conflict? Ask the 35-year old blind student from Erindale College who, together with his seeing-eye dog, lives in Forest Ridge now, no longer having to sit on the bus for fours per day as he had to before. Should we have avoided the conflict? Ask the women who were originally among the nasty neighbours decrying the project and who found themselves desperate for housing eight months later when their husbands left them (and their children) for Miss Twitchy-Bottom at the office. While you are at it you should ask God himself, for in the person of his Son he has known what it is to be without accommodation. Not to have objected would not have meant that we are possessed of the virtue of agreeableness; it would have meant that we are polluted with the sin of cowardice.

I am president of The Peel Mental Health Housing Coalition and chairman of its board of directors. This organization attempts to procure housing for people who are chronically mentally ill. The Peel District Health Council has commissioned the Mental Health Housing Coalition to oversee the delivery of adequate housing for all mentally ill persons in the region of Peel. One aspect of the Housing Coalition’s mandate is dealing with community resistance. In view of the resistance which appeared last year concerning housing for the disadvantaged, can you imagine the resistance which will boil up concerning housing for the deranged? It is inconceivable that I “duck” it, for to avoid the conflict would only be to betray defenceless people, defenceless people whom God does not betray.

Most United Church people have been told from age three that Jesus is nice, and therefore all good Christian people should be nice too. When the theological betrayals first came upon our denomination a few years ago (theological betrayals, we should note, with consequences far beyond theology) our people quickly saw that to stand up for what they knew in their head and heart to be right would entail conflict. But Christians, they thought mistakenly, are conciliators, not contenders. And so across the country they largely capitulated, and one more tail — an unrighteous tail — was allowed to wag the dog. The terrible mistake by which they were victimized, the critical hinge on which everything turns in this pseudo-Christian view, is just this: Jesus isn’t nice. Our Lord is many things, but he is not nice!

The psalmist is not surrounded by enemies because he himself has gone out of his way to antagonize people, nor because he has a prickly, belligerent personality. He is surrounded by enemies inasmuch as God has drawn him into God’s own way and wisdom and truth, and once drawn into God’s life, he finds that God has enemies without number who are now his enemies too. The psalmist has learned that to remain faithful to the Holy One who cannot be deflected from his own righteousness is to be plunged into ceaseless conflict.

It’s easy to understand this with our head. But understanding it with our head makes it no easier for our heart to endure. For God’s enemies, now become ours, gloat; they taunt, they strut, they ridicule, they misrepresent, they disdain, they lie. Before long we are crying with the psalmist, “How long is this going to last? How long am I going to be in pain? How long are you going to hide your face from me? It seems that you have forgotten me!” What happens next?

II: — We do what the psalmist did. He prayed. I don’t mean that he folded his hands and said prettily, “Dear saccharine One, help me to be saccharine too!”. When I say he prayed I mean he shouted at God, “Consider me! Answer me! Aid me! But don’t leave me stumbling around punch-drunk! Don’t leave me in the dark so that my enemies taunt me all the more, ‘Not only is he a fool, he is a God-forsaken fool!'”

“Consider me! Answer me! Do something!” These are not dainty requests; these are imperatives. But isn’t it more than a little inappropriate, even more than a little dangerous, to be addressing God this way? No! Everywhere in scripture to pray is to wrestle with God, strive with God. Jacob wrestling through the night; so intense is his struggle, so concrete, so real, that he thinks he is wrestling with another human being. In the morning, exhausted, he learns he has been struggling with God. So intense was his struggle that he will hobble the rest of his life; as a sign of this, his name will be changed for the rest of his life, from Jacob (“deceiver”) to Israel (“he who struggles with God”). Hannah pleading with God so ardently, so intently, so unselfconsciously, that she is unaware of anything else, anyone else. She appears to be intoxicated. Eli, a priest, says to her, “Woman, you are drunk. Put the cork back in the bottle”. Hannah replies, “I am not drunk. I am a woman sorely troubled. I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord”.

Our Israelite foreparents no more thought prayer should be pretty than they thought Jesus to be nice. Think of our Lord in Gethsemane. The English text tells us that Jesus “knelt” in the garden. Ever after we have seen pictures of Jesus kneeling beside a flat-topped rock, hands folded serenely. The Greek text, however, uses a verb-tense that tells us Jesus fell to his knees, got up, fell down again, over and over, like someone beside himself. Paul tells the Christians in Ephesus that when he prays for them he says, “I bow my knees”. He doesn’t mean that he kneels down to pray (Jews always stand up to pray); he means that his knees give out, so intense is his intercession.

One of the words the New Testament uses to describe prayer is AGONIZESTHAI. (Obviously the English word, “agonize”, is a derivative.) AGONIZESTHAI means to contend with the utmost exertion, to strive without letup, to wrestle without reserve. This is what it is to pray.

And this is what we do when conflict abounds and enemies gloat. We cry to God, “Consider me! Answer me! Aid me! But don’t fall asleep on me or I will sleep the sleep of death while my enemies rejoice over me. For then they will think they have triumphed over you!”

III: — There remains one matter to be probed: how do people find it in them to cry to God like this? How do people find it in them to contend with enemies and keep on contending? The psalmist tells us: “I have trusted in God’s steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in God’s salvation. I will sing to him, for he has dealt bountifully with me”.

All of this the psalmist puts at the end of psalm 13 by way of explaining how he can contend with enemies and cry to God day after day. While he puts it at the end of psalm 13, logically it comes at the beginning. It comes first inasmuch as it is the ground of everything the psalmist does.

I want to tell you today that God has dealt bountifully with me. After all, I am a sinner who merits nothing from God, nothing, that is, apart from condemnation. Yet in his Son God has made provision for me and by his Spirit he has made that provision mine. If this afternoon the most hideous thing befalls me it will still be the case that God has dealt bountifully with me. Of his incomprehensible mercy he has quickened in me that faith by which I am bound to him eternally. Then how could I ever say, regardless of what befalls me, that he has dealt miserably with me? How could I ever say that I have been shortchanged? People are shortchanged — anywhere in life — when they don’t get what they feel they are entitled to. But such is God’s steadfast love for me that he has poured out on me everything I don’t deserve (that salvation in which I rejoice) while sparing me everything that I do. Then how could I ever capitulate in those conflicts which are his first? Since he has dealt so bountifully with me as to save me, I owe him everything. Owing him everything, I owe him that faithfulness which but dimly reflects his faithfulness to me.

As surely as God has dealt bountifully with us he will continue to deal bountifully with us. Therefore we shall continue to trust in his steadfast love and rejoice in his salvation. Which is to say, we know that as often as our enemies harass us and we are driven to cry to God, he will hear us when we shout, “How long?” More than this, God will hasten the day when, in the words of psalm 110, God makes his enemies his footstool. On that day his enemies will vanish for ever, and therefore ours as well. Having trusted in his steadfast love, and rejoicing in his salvation, we shall glorify him for ever and ever.

The apostle James tells us that to remain faithful in the midst of conflict is to be honoured with that crown which God has promised to all who love him.

 

                                                                        Victor A. Shepherd

June, 1992

 

 

A People After God’s Heart

PSALM 15

An Exposition

 

The psalms were recited in private devotion in Israelite homes, in public worship in the sanctuary, and on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In any of these contexts they were part of a liturgy where the worshipper(s) asked a question and the priest (or head of the household), speaking for God, declared the answer.

E.g., Worshipper: “O Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tent?”

Priest: “He who walks blamelessly.”

 

Verse 1 — TENT: — brings two matters to mind

formal worship (emphasised by “thy holy hill”)

The tent was the goatskin “tabernacle” that housed such items of worship as the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments while Israel travelled through the wilderness. The Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) structured the obedience of the Israelite people especially in adverse or awkward circumstances like the wilderness or, centuries later, the exile. (Finding ourselves in any of the many “wildernesses” that settle upon us is never an excuse for our disobedience, even though we like to tell ourselves that it is.)

According to Exodus 29:42 worshippers gathered in the “tent of meeting” where a year-old lamb was offered up morning and evening.

The psalm begins by asking who of the motley crowd of former slaves will be allowed in the tent of worship, the tent being the visible symbol of God’s presence.

simple family life (emphasised by “dwell”)

The psalms frequently mingle these two ideas, as here the psalmist speaks of the believer as an eager family member “coming home”. (e.g., Ps. 23:6 — “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”)

At the same time, since God is holy and we are defiled, we may not presume upon “coming home.” Since “evil may not dwell with Thee” (Ps. 5:4), the question, “Who shall sojourn?”, is entirely appropriate. Not anyone at all may dwell with God, but rather those whom the psalmist describes in the balances of psalm 15.

Once more the psalmist asks the same question: Who will be “at home” on God’s “holy hill”?

“Holy hill” = “Mount Zion” = “City of David”: — an area of old Jerusalem that David proclaimed as the site of worship. (Note how already, in two lines only, the psalm gathers up motifs from Israel’s wilderness wanderings prior to David’s reign and from the fixity of that reign: the “holy hill” was as fixed as the “tent” was mobile. God’s people are both forever “on the move” and forever “at home” with him. Life under him is always a venture; we can’t “hunker down” and “turtle” ourselves. At the same time we need seek no other home. God accompanies us in and even leads us into assorted wildernesses in life even as he “establishes” us so that we “dwell” with him. In this context we should recall our Lord’s use of “dwell”, as in John 15:4, where we “abide” in him and he in us. Menein, the common Greek word for “dwell” or “abide”, literally means to stay in one place. We are “fixed” in Christ even as he forever sends out and accompanies us on the “way.”

 

 

A DESCRIPTION OF GOD’S PEOPLE

Verse 2 — OUR CHARACTER: SOUND

We are to “walk blamelessly.”

“Walk” is the commonest biblical metaphor for discipleship, obedience.

We are to walk “blamelessly (Hebrew: tamin) not faultlessly or flawlessly. There is no injunction here to become perfectionistic neurotics. In this regard we should recall Christ’s command in Matthew 5:48, where his people are enjoined to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. The context is the following: Just as God sends rain on the just and unjust alike, without discrimination and regardless of merit, in the same way Christ’s people are to be generous with others, without discrimination and regardless of merit. In other words to walk “blamelessly” is to aspire after consistency. (The shape of the believer’s life is what “sanctification” denotes, and John Calvin (who engendered the Protestant Reformation outside German-speaking lands) reminds us that “Sanctification consists more in aspiration than in achievement.”)

There are three meanings to tamin:

sound: i.e., not hollow or merely apparent or phoney or unreliable. God’s claim upon us, together with our response, renders us people of substance.

whole: we grasp God’s claim in its totality, its comprehensiveness, as it pertains to every aspect of our existence.

wholehearted: we are enthused about our discipleship. In the words of Jesus, having put our hand to the plough we don’t look back, don’t even want to look back. Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that they are not merely to be givers, but cheerful givers.

We are to do what is “right”.

“Right” pertains to “righteous(ness)”, a two-fold meaning in scripture:

right(ed) relationship to God, born of faith

right conduct arising from this righted relationship, born of obedience.

Scripture nowhere suggests we are to pursue or have the right to pursue happiness or self-fulfilment. These are by-products of the one right and duty we have: to glorify God. “None but the holy are finally happy.” (the tireless reiteration of John Wesley — who found it in the Puritans)

 

Verse 2b-3 — OUR SPEECH: RESTRAINED

The Hebrew word for “slander” has the force of deliberately sniffing and snooping to ferret out what will then be spread around.

See Leviticus 19:16: — “You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people”

1 Timothy 5:13: — younger widows should remarry and forestall “coffee-klatsch” gossiping.

While modernity undervalues sins of the tongue, it should be remembered that the Decalogue views slander as seriously as it views murder and adultery. James 3 reminds us that the tongue is set on fire from hell and in turn sets on fire “the whole cycle of nature.” Jesus insists that on the day of judgement we shall be judged for every careless word that we’ve spoken. Matt. 12:37)

See Ephesians 4:29: speech is to “fit the occasion” and “impart grace to those who hear.”

Colossians 4:6: speech is to be “gracious” and “seasoned with salt.” (Everywhere in scripture salt is a sign of the covenant. In other words, our speech is to attest the promises whereby God has pledged himself to us and we have pledged ourselves to him.

We are to “speak truth from the heart”; i.e., speak so as to be transparent, edifying and appropriate. To “take up a reproach” is (i) to muckrake, (ii) to make casual slurs that aren’t slanderous, strictly speaking, since they aren’t untrue, but are unnecessary and deleterious.

 

Verse 4 — OUR ALLEGIANCE: UNMISTAKABLE

“in whose eyes a reprobate (=sinner) is despised.” God’s people must loathe sin. Then why doesn’t the psalmist say, “in whose eyes sin is despised”? — because sin as such doesn’t exist: sin has no existence apart from sinners. Only sinners can be “despised”. While we commonly say that Christians are to hate sin but love sinners, our saying this is illogical: we can’t “hate sin”; we can only hate sinners. God hates sinners and loves them at the same time. However, his love transcends his hate; “mercy triumphs over judgement.” (James 2:13) His love outstrips his hate.

When the psalmist writes “in whose eyes a reprobate is despised” he’s not suggesting that we fancy ourselves self-righteously superior, but rather that our loyalty is evident: we don’t secretly admire or covet what is despicable.

“who honours those who fear the Lord.” One sign of our faith is that we esteem others who fear God. “Fear of God” includes trust, love, obedience, awe, and plain, simple fear. “Fear of God” sums up the whole of biblical faith. (Martin Buber) When the women beheld the empty tomb on Easter morning, they were possessed of “fear and great joy.” When the disciples found themselves amidst the storm now stilled, they were “filled with awe”, says the RSV English text; the Greek text says more simply, “They feared a great fear.” In scripture we either fear God and nothing else, or we don’t fear God and therefore fear everything else. See Isaiah 8:12-13: “Do not fear what they fear [i.e., others]; But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy, and him you shall fear.” The believer’s fear of God grounds the command, “You shall not be afraid of the face of man.” (Deut. 1:7)

 

 

Verse 4C-5 — OUR DEALINGS: HONOURABLE

[1] we “swear to our own hurt”; i.e., we keep our word even if it costs us to keep it. (Paul — “Am I like a worldly man, ready to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at once?” 2Cor. 1:17) We swear to our own hurt, rather than to another’s, unlike Herod concerning John the Baptist, when Herod swore to give his daughter anything she asked for and she, prompted by her mother (angry at John’s denunciation of her sin) urged the daughter to ask for John’s head.

[2] We don’t “put out our money at interest.” Scripture doesn’t forbid “renting out” one’s money. (See Christ’s parable of the talents, Matt. 25, where he faults the man who stuck his money in the ground instead of “putting it out at interest.”) Scripture recognises that the lender has a right to share in the profit that the borrower makes with the lender’s money. At the time of the Reformation it was recognised that interest is rent paid on money, and everyone admits the legitimacy of renting others’ goods.

 

However, scripture forbids charging interest on money borrowed for life’s necessities. We are never to exploit financially someone else’s destitution.

[3] We don’t “take a bribe against the innocent.” We can’t be paid off to subvert justice.

 

 Verse 5c — OUR PLACE: ASSURED

We shall “never be moved.” In the psalms the profoundest threat of insecurity is often expressed by “moved.” To be “moveable” is to be vulnerable, defenceless, finally insecure. We counter the threat of insecurity not by siding with the strong but by steadfastly trusting God. (“Because the Lord is at my right hand I shall not be moved.” Ps. 16:8)

The force of the last line of Psalm 15 is, “such a person shall not be ‘moved’, ever.” Instead we shall be preserved eternally by God, for God, with God.

 

Victor Shepherd
October, 1999

Fullness of Joy . . . Pleasures for Evermore

Psalm 16

 

The English poet Charles Swinburne insisted that the icy breath of Jesus has put a chill on the world. He insisted that Christ “puts a damper” on life; that our Lord is like a soggy, foul-smelling blanket that deprives people of brightness, joy, laughter; deprives people not only of effervescent mood but even of the pleasures of the senses. Wherever Jesus Christ is spoken of, mildew is about to blight the human spirit.

Swinburne isn’t the only person to have thought this. We’ve all heard our Lord’s name hissed derisively as someone, thinking herself sophisticated, sneered at “that creeping Jesus.” Apparently there is thought to be something creepy about him: oily, cold, grey, a killjoy both uninvited and uninviting, better left alone. And of course anyone who deems Jesus to be this deems us, his followers, to be no better.

Think about the similar associations surrounding the word “Puritan.” “Puritan” is a great word in the English vocabulary, as far as I’m concerned, just because the Puritans made a great contribution to the public good everywhere in the English-speaking world. The Puritans, more than any other group, were responsible for expanding if not providing virtually all the democratic institutions we enjoy, as well as for preserving the intellectual riches we cherish. Always remember that when the Royal Academy of Science was formed in the 17th century, nearly all its charter members — leading scientists of the day — were Puritan clergy. And always remember that when the Puritans were ascendant in Britain and in North America their rate of literacy was vastly higher than that of their detractors (especially among Puritan women). And never forget that when the Jewish people had been expelled from Britain in the 13th century it was the Puritans who welcomed then back and allowed them synagogue, school and cemetery. The Puritans were sober and serious, of course, yet also life-embracing, sport-loving, and sex-affirming. Still, for reasons I can’t fathom, the word “Puritan” is said to call to mind someone who fears that somebody, somewhere, might be having fun.

It appears that many people are held off the Christian life by their suspicion that intimate acquaintance with Jesus Christ entails joylessness. For years C.S. Lewis thought this. A brilliant scholar trained in philosophy and English literature, Lewis feared that immersion in God would corrode the intellectual and cultural glories he had come to relish.

I’m convinced that many people fear the same fear. While their life might not be exactly rollicking at this moment, in fact while it may be much less joyful than they’d like, they fear that to become serious about the gospel and him whose gospel it is would evaporate whatever joy, however little, they have right now.

How different is the psalmist’s conviction born of his experience: “In God’s presence there is fullness of joy; in God’s right hand are pleasures for evermore.” Before we go any farther we must be sure to understand the Hebrew idiom. God’s presence, for the Hebrew mind, is God’s face. “In God’s presence” means “as we behold God’s face inasmuch as we’ve turned to face him and glow ourselves as his smile bathes us. “Fullness of joy” is a Hebrew way of saying “wholly satisfying.” God’s presence, God’s face, leaves us so thoroughly satisfied as to find us looking nowhere else for a supplement. “In God’s right hand” (note “in”, not “at”; “in” God’s right hand); God’s right hand is very different from his left hand. God’s left hand is the hand of judgement; his right hand, the hand with which he dispenses blessing, riches, delights, priceless treasure, even incomprehensible ecstasy. And who is the person who finds God’s face wholly satisfying and his right hand quick to release blessing of endless variety upon us? The psalmist tells us it’s the person who cries to God, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you”, the person who exults, “I keep the Lord always before me.” (Ps. 16:2,8) In God’s presence there are pleasures that can’t be counted, can’t be duplicated, can’t be found anywhere else in anyone else.

Does it strike you as exaggerated and therefore unrealistic? I think it’s entirely realistic just because it deals with the ultimately real, God.

I: — Let’s begin with the simple joy of life in God. In his most famous parable, that of the lost son, Jesus describes a fellow who sashays into an unsatisfying, unfruitful existence, humiliating even and degrading, because in his ingratitude and folly he can’t stand his father and can’t stand living with him. Thinking life will be more joyful without his father, he leaves him, only to discover that there was vastly more joy in his father’s home and his father’s presence. He “comes to his senses”, goes home, and is welcomed without hesitation, reservation or qualification. The last line in the story is, “And they began to make merry.”

Jesus speaks of a shepherd who finds one lost sheep (never mind that he already had ninety-nine), and goes home rejoicing. Concerning anyone who makes life’s biggest “U-turn” (the bible calls it repentance) and tastes the delights of living in the father’s house, Jesus says, “There is joy in heaven.” Yes, there is joy in heaven. And in the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry there was also joy on earth. Over and over throughout the written gospels we find Jesus partying. He’s forever eating and drinking in celebration of the lost found, the alienated reconciled, the guilty pardoned, the least elevated to honour, the lonely cherished and embraced. So what if he’s faulted for it. The only people who fault him for it are those who are blind to the Kingdom and therefore can’t see the point of the party. Those who can, however, party with the Master as often as they have opportunity.

Augustine wrote, “We are made for God. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him.” Since we are made for him then of course it’s only in him that we shall be profoundly contented and shall know a joy, a delight, available nowhere else. In his presence we are going to be satisfied, and in his right hand we are going to find blessings without number.

Our society, however, can’t see it. Our society has no difficulty recognizing the distress of a fish out of water. The fish gasps, twitches, convulses. As soon as it’s put back into the water it swims away without hint of distress. Our society gets the point where fish are concerned, but doesn’t get the point where humans are concerned; namely, God’s presence, his “face”, is the sphere, the environment for which we were made and apart from which we are always going to be distressed.

Ever since Canadian Confederation (1867) each generation of Canadians has been twice as wealthy (on average) as the preceding generation. I am twice as wealthy as my parents, four times as wealthy as my grandparents, and so on. In other words, people today have unprecedented disposable income. What do they spend it on? They spend it on pleasures, all manner of pleasures, hoping that one of the assorted pleasures they try will issue in that joy too deep to be described that everyone craves, or hoping that all their assorted pleasures together will yield this. But they fail to understand something crucial: to pursue pleasure is always to be deprived of it. To look for it is always to overlook it. To set out to get it is to think that joy is “gettable”, something, some thing that can be acquired, when all the while joy is to be found in God alone and isn’t detachable from him. Joy characterizes God’s own inner life: he profoundly delights in himself. As we are admitted, through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, to the inner life of God we are admitted to the joy wherewith he rejoices internally, eternally. Joy, then, is found in intimacy with a person; it is never “gotten” as if it were a thing detachable from a person.

Since it is only as we hunger for the person of God that we find his joy overtaking us, the profoundest joy that we crave always comes upon us as surprise. C.S. Lewis, mentioned earlier in the sermon, was an able philosophical thinker. In fact it was his rigorous philosophical thought that moved him from strident atheism to the threshold of intellectually robust faith. Yet when Lewis came to write his autobiography its title wasn’t “How Philosophy Helped Men Believe” but rather “Surprised by Joy.”

II: — Once we come to know that God himself is the wellspring of joy we find ourselves free to rejoice in the joys of God’s creation. Once again, however, we must understand that God wants us to enjoy his creation without confusing it with him, its Creator. We are to rejoice in creaturely joys without making them a substitute for God himself and his joy. The psalmist, in Psalm 16, understands this when he writes, “Those who choose another god, another deity, multiply their sorrows.” It is only as we “choose” him who truly is God that we are then free to enjoy most profoundly the blessings of his good creation.

[1] Think about marriage. God intends marriage to be a union so intimate that the hearts of two people interpenetrate each other in such a way that one person’s life henceforth includes the other person. Marriage, in other words, God intends to be the most intimate and the most profound of human relationships. (And it’s for this reason, by the way, that marriage everywhere in scripture is the commonest metaphor for our life in God.)

But of course God’s intention for marriage is to be realized in God; his intention is honoured most profoundly when we understand that marriage is a triangle: not the illicit triangle of the soap opera, but a triangle whose apex is God and whose base is husband and wife. Husband and wife move toward each other as both of them are oriented to the apex. Husband and wife see each other most truly not by staring at each other but rather by looking to their Lord and seeing their mate in him.

Where this doesn’t occur husband and wife see each other by staring at each other. Now they live in a universe of two people, and they quickly learn it’s a small universe. They have effectively made an idol of each other (they have “chosen another deity”, in the words of Psalm 16), and they will shortly learn that all idols have clay feet. They expect now that their marriage-partner is going to provide what no human being should be asked to provide. No one human being can provide that satisfaction which God alone intends us to find in him. To expect one’s partner to do this is to burden the marriage intolerably.

A young husband says of his wife, “She is simply divine.” Two years later he sighs, “Well, I suppose she’s only human.” Later still, “I feel I can’t live without her yet I can’t seem to live with her.” Finally, “We have discovered that we are incompatible.”

His wife isn’t divine, never was, never will be. Certainly she is meant to satisfy him humanly in the most intimate human relationship ordained by God; but she was never meant to satisfy him with that joy which can only be a surprise just because it’s a by-product of our immersion in God himself.

To expect our marriage partner to do what only God can do is to choose another deity and therein multiply our sorrows. Yet in the right hand of God there are pleasures beyond telling just because in his presence, beneath his smile, there is a satisfaction that is finally both undeniable and indescribable.

[2] Think about recreation. God has created us with bodies. There is no human being who doesn’t have a body. Our body isn’t something we drag around grudgingly but rather something we should positively delight in. People who rediscover their bodily nature delight in it. Look at the proliferation of health clubs, squash courts, swimming pools and gymnasia.

I relish bodily existence as much as anyone. Because I was a boxer please don’t regard me as a troglodyte who enjoyed pain, either inflicting pain or having it inflicted. What I relished about boxing was the training: I never had to be cajoled into the gymnasium. Today no one has to browbeat me to get on my bicycle. I think I am as body-affirming as anyone.

At the same time, there is in our society a cult of the body, a deification of the body and particularly of body image. To make an idol of body image is to choose another deity and therein to multiply sorrow, if only the ever-increasing sorrow and frustration of watching one’s body shape change irretrievably with age.

And then there are those who attribute vast metaphysical significance to bodily activity. Yoga ceases to be exercise only and instead becomes the key that unlocks the universe or at least allows someone to intuit the innermost realities of the universe. Six months later she sadly concludes that while yoga fosters flexibility and reduces tension, it doesn’t satisfy humankind’s nameless longing, nameless discontent, nameless weariness.

A few months ago a Vancouver magazine asked me if it could reproduce my article on Martin Niemoeller, the Lutheran pastor who defied Hitler and was imprisoned from 1937 to 1945, and was released by American forces only three days before his scheduled execution at the hands of the S.S. I permitted the magazine to reproduce my article, with the result that I now receive the magazine. There is much in it that I support. There is much, however, that wants to coddle this aspect of our embodiedness and that aspect of it, all with a view to spiritual transformation. One source of such transformation is balneotherapy, balneotherapy being the human transformation that arises from bathing in salts, steam, seaweed, or infrared saunas. Another source of transformation arising from attention to the body is sound therapy, touch therapy, vitamin therapy, herbal consultation, electromagnetism, enemas. I am not saying that all of these ways of attending to the body are pointless. I am saying, however, that they reflect an obsession with the body that aims at furnishing the joy God intends us to find in our embodiedness but will never furnish just because they seek it from the wrong source.

Why don’t we look instead to our Maker, admit he has seen fit to create us embodied, thank him for the manner of our existence, and delight in it? This will find us enjoying many of the pleasures in his right hand whereas making an idol of the body (choosing another deity) will find us pursuing what always escapes us.

[3] Lastly let’s consider the delight we find in culture: art, music, poetry, drama, fiction. You are as fond of all this as I. The level of cultural appreciation is very high in this congregation, and for this I am glad, since God ordains us to receive everything from his hand with thanksgiving. There is nothing in his creation that we are to scorn.

Let me say unambiguously that I have profited immensely and continue to profit from my exposure to fiction, poetry, biography, music, fine art, the theatre, dance, history. I scorn none of it, as I’m sure you scorn none of it. But of course along with the riches of God’s creation that we’d never think of scorning, God insists that we not scorn him. And he ordains that we not scorn him just because he is God and is to be acknowledged for who he is; in addition he knows that while cultural riches are rich indeed, they will never give us what he alone can. If ever we think they can, then we lose twice over: we “lose” inasmuch as we have disregarded the One who is our life, our good, our ultimate blessing. We “lose” a second time in that our unrealistic expectations leave us expecting from culture what it can’t deliver, with the result that we forego what it can.

The fact that culture can’t substitute for him who is our Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer is brought home most forcefully to us when we feel that a wall has collapsed on us, when we inquire of the physician concerning a loved one and he merely shakes his head, when any of life’s endless abysses opens up at our feet and we can scarcely believe — but also cannot not believe — that it’s happening to us. At this moment we don’t play our favourite soprano trilling La Boheme or read our favourite novel. John Henry Cardinal Newman, himself a master of English prose, remarked, “There has been a great deal of nonsense talked about the consolation of literature.”

Heinrich Heine, the great German poet, had a sophisticated appreciation of sculpture. Following a tragedy in his family he took a trip, hoping to distract himself, and found himself before the beautiful form of the Venus de Milo. Gazing at it he cried, “It’s beautiful, but it has no arms.” At such times we must rather cling to the truth that has sustained God’s people for three millennia: “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” (Deut. 33:27)

Because God is good he has given us all things richly to enjoy. “Everything created by God is good,” says the apostle Paul, “and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” (1st Tim. 4:4) Yet our great God and Saviour forever remains the good, and it is to him that we must cling at all times and in all circumstances.

Charles Swinburne, the English poet was wrong. Jesus Christ isn’t a wet blanket who stifles life’s joys. On the contrary, to encounter our Lord is to know the God in whose presence there is fullness of joy and in whose right are pleasures for evermore. It’s no wonder Paul exults, “Because you are Christ’s, everything is yours as well.” (1st Cor. 3:23)

 

                                                                                           Victor Shepherd   

June 2002

 

 

Glory, Grace, Gratitude

Psalm 29:9

 

“…and in God’s temple all cry ‘Glory!'” (Ps. 29:9)

I was only eight years old when Elizabeth II was crowned. My family didn’t own a television set, and so I was sent to a neighbour’s to watch the coronation. Some parts of the service (such as the archbishop’s droning) didn’t excite me. But there was one part that did: the appearance and stately movement of Elizabeth herself. While I didn’t have, as an eight year old, the vocabulary I have now to describe the event, I can none the less recall so very clearly the impression that Elizabeth made on me. She exuded substance; there was a gravity about her, a weightiness, a force, an authority — substance. Her appearance reflected all of this, for her appearance radiated splendour, magnificence, stateliness, honour. The authority and substance that she was herself; the splendour and honour that she radiated: these together elicited from her subjects obeisance, homage, respect, even awe. The event of Elizabeth’s coming forth as sovereign was simply glorious.

The sovereign God is eversomuch more glorious. The Hebrew word for glory is kabod. Kabod means literally “weightiness” or “substance.” There is in God a weightiness, a density, a solidity, an opacity — substance — as there is nowhere else. Because God is all this, his appearance, his splendour, is weighty too. His splendour is awesome; his appearance is startling. He surges over men and women and weighs on them until they are breathless even as his splendour startles them speechless. As speech begins to return to them they can only stammer at first, then blurt as they grope for words, then speak normally as they recover from their visitation of glory.

God’s glory is God’s presence apprehended. But God’s presence is the presence of him who is more solid than anything we can imagine. God’s presence is the presence of an ever-so-dense substance whose authority is unarguable. Such a presence apprehended has to leave us awed. We can only fall on our face and render him obeisance, homage, honour, the only response the glory-visited will ever render.

 

I: — Moses cries to God, “Show me your glory!”(Ex. 33:7-23) God replies, “I will make all my goodness pass before you; I will proclaim my name before you.” Actually the two assertions are but one, for God’s name is his nature, and God’s nature is his goodness. “I will make all my goodness pass before you”; “I will proclaim my name before you”: these are one and the same, spoken twice as promise and guarantee of the one glory of God soon to be apprehended. Moses has to go to a cleft in the rock and have the rock prop him up on both sides. For in the moment that God’s glory passes by, Moses’s knees will flop like a rag doll’s; he’ll stagger like a man terribly drunk; he’ll fold up like a boxer who has taken a terrific punch to the solar plexus. Moses goes to the cleft of the rock, supported on either side as the glory of God surges over him. Is it an experience just for the sake of an experience? Is it pointless sensationalism? Is it merely the equivalent of a hallucinogenic trip? Never. In the wake of God’s glory, his presence apprehended, God renews his promise to an ungrateful and wayward Israel; God renders Moses his spokesperson; through Moses God insists that Israel is to make no compromise with paganism; any suggestion of idolatry should find the people horrified; every vestige of adoration given anywhere but to him is to be shunned. For God’s glory, unmistakable, is also undeniable.

Five hundred years later the people of Israel, having ignored Moses as much as they heeded him, are in exile. Jerusalem, their prized city, is in ruins. Having failed to repudiate idolatry in any form at any time, they are now stuck in Babylon, living among people who are nothing but idolatrous all the time. (Let me assure you, parenthetically, of a truth that courses through scripture: God unfailingly punishes sin by means of more sin. The worst consequence of sin is always more sin — by God’s ordination.) The people are crushed on account of their undeniable guilt, and despairing on account of their unrelieved bleakness. Then God’s glory overtakes Ezekiel. Ezekiel falls on his face. God says to him, “Stand up, and I will speak with you.”(Ez. 1:28) Says God, “I am sending you to an impudent and stubborn people. Still, you must speak to them the word that I give you. And whether they hear or refuse to hear, they will know that there has been a prophet among them.”(Ez. 2:4) Ezekiel speaks the word he’s been given. It cuts like a knife. Like a knife? Like a scalpel, for this word performs surgery, a heart transplant, to be exact. Those who hear and heed the prophet’s word will have their old heart of stone — hard, lifeless, inert — removed; they’ll be given a new heart of flesh, a heart that pulsates with the rhythm of God’s own heart.

Seven hundred years later still (1200 years after Moses) some shepherds are guarding sheep on a hillside when the glory of God prostrates them. Once again the unspeakable weight of God, apprehended in his splendour, has overwhelmed men who couldn’t find a rock-cleft to prop them up. They think themselves undone when they are told, “To you, sinners, a Saviour is born this day; a great joy for all people everywhere.” And in that moment it seemed that the heavens shouted, “Glory to God in the highest, and shalom among men on earth.”(Luke 2:11)

No doubt someone here today wants to complain that I’ve spoken only of episodic incursions of God’s glory visited among a handful of individuals in unusual circumstances. But where are we twentieth century types? After all, we are ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. So where are we in all this? We are precisely where the apostle John was when he exclaimed, “The Word of God became flesh and camped among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, the glory of Father and Son alike.”(John 1:14) We — you and I — have beheld his glory, or at least we should have!

 

II: — We who have beheld God’s glory in the lingering of Jesus Christ among us; who are we? We are creatures of God, to be sure; we are beloved of God, unquestionably. Still, as God’s glory engulfs us we are exposed as inglorious ourselves. God’s glory is substance; this substance exposes our unsubstantiality, our froth and frivolity, triflers and trivializers that we are. God’s glory is splendour; his splendour shows up our sordidness. God’s glory is weightiness; his denseness highlights our hollowness. God’s glory is his presence; his presence renders conspicuous our absence. Absence? Of course. Compared to the concreteness of God’s person, we are non-persons, nonentities who spout nonsense and stupidly think it to be profound.

Since God is holy and we are defiled; since God’s holiness cannot withstand even a hint of defilement, our reaction can only be that of Isaiah in the temple the day he “saw the Lord high and lifted up”, the day God’s splendour filled the temple. Isaiah could only cry, “Woe is me, for I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”(Is. 6:1-8)

Peter and his friends have fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus steals upon them and tells them to go deeper; they must forget about splashing about in the shallows and go deeper. Peter tells Jesus he thinks the whole exercise is pointless, but out of sheer obedience, rote obedience, he’ll do what he’s told. Upon seeing the huge catch of fish Peter falls to his knees and begs Jesus to leave, crying, “Go away, for I am a sinful man.”(Luke 5:8)

John is at worship, one Sunday morning, when the Lord he longs to apprehend (isn’t this why all of us are at worship this morning?) gloriously appears before him. When John has recovered and is able to write, albeit shakily, he scribbles, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead.”(Rev. 1:17)

We must notice that Isaiah, in his aweful moment, didn’t try to excuse himself or excuse his people or negotiate with God. Instead of “Don’t be touchy now, we can work something out together”, Isaiah croaked, “I’m finished.” And the result? He wasn’t finished; he was purified with the living coal from the altar; his sin was forgiven, and he was commissioned God’s messenger to his people.

We must notice that Peter, in his aweful moment, didn’t say to Jesus, “So I was wrong about how deep to fish; I’ve been wrong before; let’s not sweat it.” Instead he pleaded with Jesus to leave, lest Christ’s presence intensify his shame. And the result? Peter is told that he will henceforth “catch” men and women for the kingdom; he will become the spokesperson for the twelve; and he will be recognized as the leader of all Christ’s people in Jerusalem.

We must notice that John, in his aweful moment, didn’t say, “At last the church service started to liven up!” Instead he could only wait until his strength returned. And the result? He penned that book — Revelation — which rings with the victory of Jesus Christ on every page.

The point I am making in all this is surely obvious: when God’s glory surges over us, when his glory meets our sin, his glory always takes the form of grace. Grace is God’s love and mercy declaring guilty people pardoned. Grace is God’s love and mercy setting crumbled people back on their feet. Grace is God’s love and mercy restoring humiliated people to dignity. Grace is God’s love and mercy granting dead people life.

None of this should surprise us. After all, Paul reminds the Christians in Rome that it was God’s glory that raised Jesus from the dead and restored him to life.(Rom. 6:4) Then why not us? And in fact Paul reminds the Christians in Corinth that God’s glory is changing them day-by-day into the likeness of Christ himself.(2 Cor. 3:18) God’s grace is God’s glory meeting our sin. And God’s glory, having brought our Lord to life, is enlivening us day-by-day as we are vivified according to our Lord’s likeness.

 

III: — Since this is indubitably the case, there is only one response that graced people like us, glorified people like us, can make. Our one response is gratitude. Our gratitude will take many forms: public worship, private devotion, secret resolve in the face of secret temptation, open support for the openly exploited, anonymous assistance on behalf of the defenceless, angry denunciation of the indefensible. Whatever form our gratitude takes, it will always be the gratitude of our heart poured out upon our Lord for grace that saved us as God’s glory met our sin.

Other people don’t understand any of this? So what! Their incomprehension is their problem. They misunderstand everything we do and misjudge our motive for doing it? ‘Twas ever thus, as we see from the story of the woman who poured her perfume on the feet of Jesus, blubbered on them and wiped feet and tears with her hair.(Luke 7:36-52) The man in whose house Jesus was a guest assumed that because this woman had a reputation as negative as it was notorious, she was up to no good. Why, anyone could see the eroticism in her seductive act! Let that man with shriveled heart and constipated affection; let him assume whatever he wants. Jesus knew that the woman couldn’t find words for a gratitude so great that greater alone was the grace that had quickened it.

For years now I have been moved as often as I have read the Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563. The Heidelberg Catechism is the “crown jewel” of the shorter Reformation writings. I have referred to it in sermons so often that many of you can recite question and answer #1. Q#1: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” A#1: “My only comfort, in life and in death, is that I belong, body and soul, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.” (There’s more to A#1, but we’ve said enough for now.) What about Q&A#2? Q#2: “How many things do you need to know in order that you may live and die in this comfort and blessing?” A#2: “Three things I need to know. First, how great my sin and misery is. Second, how I am redeemed from all my sin and misery. Third, how I am to be grateful to God for such redemption.” Our apprehension of God’s glory acquainted us with our sin and misery. Our apprehension of God’s glory, now dwelling among us in Jesus Christ his Son, acquainted us with our redemption. Our apprehension of God’s glory, that which raised our Lord from the dead, is similarly at work in us changing us into his likeness; this has acquainted us with the fittingness of gratitude. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude; it’s all gratitude; the whole of the Christian life is gratitude. And in fact the Heidelberg Catechism gathers up the whole of the Christian life (Questions and Answers 86 through 129) under the heading, Gratitude. Question #86 begins the section on discipleship, and Answer #86 tells us that “with our whole life…we are to show ourselves thankful to God for his goodness.”

The people who inhaled the Heidelberg Catechism and exhaled it with every breath; they exhaled it as well with their last breath. It was written in 1563. A few years earlier the emperor, Charles V, had trampled on the Reformation and its people in eastern Germany. Those who lived in western Germany, Heidelberg, knew what was coming. Nine years later, in 1572, the St.Bartholomew’s Day massacre would explode, as 30,000 French citizens of gospel conviction were put to the sword (among them Admiral de Coligny, the highest-ranking officer in the French navy.) They died repeating to themselves, “My only comfort in life and in death…. And what do I need to know to die in this comfort and blessing? I need to know, finally, how I am to be grateful to God for my redemption. Gratitude means I shall die before I ever deny my Lord.”

What does gratitude mean for you and me today? It means eversomuch everywhere in life. In view of the special service today (Stewardship Sunday) we have to understand that it means something specific in one area of life; it means something specific with respect to our money. Our stewardship of our money has to express the truth that “with our whole life we…show ourselves thankful to God for his goodness to us.”

Can money express our whole life? How does money express something crucial about our whole life? We have to understand what God does characteristically. Characteristically God frees. From the day of Red Sea and Sinai to the day of cross and resurrection to the coming day of the kingdom’s public manifestation, God has been about one thing: freeing us. He frees us from every bondage that bespeaks our bondage to sin. Then how free are we? Our freedom with respect to money illustrates more than we think about how free we are (or aren’t) anywhere in life.

Think for a minute about the immense power money has. We all know that money talks, and we don’t hesitate to say that it talks. Money also makes people fall silent. If money both talks and silences then money is exceedingly powerful. And so it is, for we know that money bribes, money coerces, money renders the most loyal people treacherous, money renders the strongest-willed suggestible, money punishes, money perverts, money seduces. So powerful is money that there’s nothing money can’t do. Then does it have us in its might grasp? Are we Christians tyrannized by it too? We like to say we are free with respect to money, but nobody believes us. Nobody believes us for one reason: the only freedom there is with respect to money is the freedom to give it away. All other talk about freedom with respect to money is the rationalizing of the self-deluded, for the only freedom with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.

God’s glory is God’s presence apprehended. To be acquainted with his glory is to have had his glory slay us and resurrect us, condemn us and pardon us, discard us and conscript us, kill us and comfort us. To be acquainted with his glory is to know that we are being changed into the likeness of Jesus Christ as we are freed day-by-day from bondages known and unknown. Freed? Are we really being freed? Everywhere in life? Even with respect to our money? How do we know? Who would ever believe us? The answer to the last six questions is declared by one truth: the only freedom we have with respect to money is the freedom to give it away.

For a long time now I have known that we aren’t going to give it away until we are genuinely freed, and we aren’t going to be freed until we are constrained to cry with the psalmist, “And in God’s temple — in church, Sunday-by-Sunday in church — all cry, ‘Glory!

 

                                                                         Victor Shepherd    

October 1997

 

My Times are in Your Hands

Psalm 31:15        1st Timothy 1:16         John 11:25

 

I enjoy few spectacles more than I enjoy a circus.    The last item in any circus happens to be my favourite; namely, the trapeze. Even if some of the items in the circus program are slightly “corny”, I can endure them because I know that the trapeze display will make everything worthwhile.

There are two kinds of trapeze performers, catchers and flyers.   The catcher hangs by his legs from a trapeze bar, and he swings back and forth on a trapeze swing that has a short arc.   The flyer (flyers are always smaller than catchers, and for this reason flyers are frequently women); she swings back and forth on trapeze swing with a huge arc. The moment in the trapeze display I look for is that breathless instant when the flyer has left her swing and hangs motionless in mid-air for a split second as the catcher meets her outstretched hands and swings her to the platform with him.

If the trapeze display is even more dramatic, the flyer leaves her swing and somersaults several times up into the air.   As she descends, still tumbling over and over, she reaches out her hands at the last instant and finds the hands of the catcher.  It thrills me.

I’m thrilled even if the catcher misses the flyer and the flyer falls. I’m thrilled but not horrified, since I know the flyer will fall into the net, bounce up onto her feet unharmed and wave to the crowd while the crowd applauds.

Much of life is like a trapeze event.  There are moments when we appear to be suspended in the middle of nowhere, hoping somehow to be caught.   There are situations too where we are tumbling, tumbling over and over, and can only hope that arms of some sort are going to be waiting for us.

But of course there’s also much about life that isn’t like a trapeze event. For one, life isn’t entertainment. For another, there’s no net underneath us.

 

Many people feel that life, day in and day out, is like that moment when the trapeze performer is suspended between what she’s left behind and what she’s hoping to find in front of her.  We often feel that life is a matter of being suspended between past and future. And since life isn’t entertainment but rather is for real, being suspended between past and future isn’t always pleasant, let alone exhilarating.  Sometimes it’s threatening.  We feel that the past is riddled with painful regrets, resentments, injuries, sins; and we fear that the future might hold more of the same. And the present? We feel that the present could precipitate us at any moment into a plunge we’d prefer not to think about.

The psalmist knows how we feel.  Yet as often as apprehension rises in him he moves beyond his apprehension to a knowledge yet more profound: he knows that his times – whether past, future, or present – his times are in God’s hand.   “My times are in your hand”, he writes.  For him, past and future and present are in God’s hand just because he, the psalmist, is in God’s hand.  Because God’s grip on him is stronger than his grip on God, he knows that his times are in God’s hand.

What about our times?

 

I: — Let’s look first at the past. We should understand that the past isn’t past; that is, the past isn’t merely past. The past, even the distant past, continues to reach forward into the present.  In other words, so far from dead, the past is alive.

[a] Think, for instance, of how past sins still haunt us.  (I know what you want to tell me right now: the text of our sermon reads “My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.” While we have many enemies and persecutors, I remain convinced that we are frequently our own worst enemy and frequently our own worst persecutor.)  Perhaps we carved someone up with our tongue or betrayed someone for personal advantage or allowed someone we could have defended to be humiliated. A relationship was destroyed or at least damaged.

Perhaps we committed what others might call an indiscretion but which we more honestly name for what it was, sin, and its consequences have lingered from that day to this.  What we sowed we are still reaping; the aftermath reaches forward to us now, and it haunts us.

Some people advise us, “Just forget about it all.”   But we don’t simply forget what every day finds us thinking about in undistracted moments. To the end of his life the apostle Paul never forgot, couldn’t forget, that he had been a persecutor. His persecution had been extreme enough to engineer the deaths of several Christians. Yet when he writes to Timothy, a much younger man beginning his ministry, Paul says tersely yet profoundly, “I received mercy.”   “I can’t pretend I didn’t do what I did, and I can’t pretend the consequences weren’t and aren’t what everyone knows them to be, but I received mercy.”

Paul knows that the facts of the past can’t be changed.  Yet he knows with equal certainty that much about the past can be changed. The effectual mercy that Jesus Christ wraps around his people prevents the past from crippling us. Mercy means that the self-accusation with which we torture ourselves concerning the past; this self-accusation has been rendered inoperative.   Mercy means that the toxicity of what can’t be changed; its toxicity has been changed as we soak ourselves in the mercy that God writes upon our hearts thanks to the sacrifice of his Son.

There’s much about my past that I don’t want to forget.  I fear that if I forget what I do well to remember, then the sin that overtook me in the past will overtake me again, and I don’t want to offend my Lord and disgrace myself once more.  Then I do well not to forget.  But I want with all my heart not to be tormented by what I dare not forget; I want not to collapse and crumble in self-accusation and self-condemnation. To be sure, I want soberly and sincerely always to be aware of how treacherous my heart is now inasmuch as I’ve never forgotten how treacherous my heart was then; at the same time, however, I don’t want to be poisoned by all of this or immobilized by it.  What I really want is this: I want to keep my past in view lest I cavalierly think I’m beyond stumbling, even as I want to move beyond my past lest I become its prisoner.

I’m persuaded that this is precisely how Paul regarded himself when he wrote Timothy simply yet profoundly, “I received mercy.”

We aren’t pretending for a minute that mercy is indulgence.  Mercy isn’t permission to re-offend.  Mercy rather is life-bringing force of Christ’s resurrection reaching back into our past to assure us that our sin has been pardoned.         Mercy is the life-bringing force of Christ’s resurrection doing something with our past so as to defuse the deadliness it will otherwise push into our present.

One aspect of the life-bringing force of Christ’s resurrection is what we have learned. If through our sin and its aftermath we learned something crucial, then a miracle has occurred. If we learned as little, seemingly, as how powerfully yet unconsciously temptation imports its own rationalization, we’ve learned a huge lesson, one that will never find us saying again, “How could she have done it?” Aware now of how powerfully yet unconsciously temptation imports its own rationalization, we know exactly how she could have done it: we did it ourselves.

If through our blunder we finally lost our self-righteousness and our cocksure superiority, then a miracle has occurred – which is to say, nothing less than resurrection has occurred.

 

[b] Not our sin this time but our regrets, specifically our regrets arising from decisions and choices for which we can’t be blamed (sin has nothing to do with them) but which have turned out to be the wrong decisions or choices – what about such regrets?   The truth is, every day we have to make decisions, and occasionally we have to make huge decisions when we don’t have nearly as much information as we need, or we’re not acquainted with all the factors involved, or we can’t anticipate all the implications of choosing this or that – even as we know we have to make a decision.

It was when I studied under Dr. James Wilkes, a psychiatrist (now retired), in my last year of seminary that I learned how pervasive this matter is in life. Wilkes mentioned over and over in class that we are finite, frail fragile people with limited information and limited resources and limited perspective; and in the midst of this we find ourselves forced to make decisions that are going to be hugely significant – we know this – even as in all our limitations we can’t predict the outcomes.

Let me repeat: this time we’re not talking about sin for which we’re responsible; we’re talking about human limitation for which we aren’t responsible. Still, while we can’t be faulted for the decision we made, in some respects we’re stuck with the decision we made.

We had opportunity to sign on with a different employer.  Either we did or we didn’t, and the implications have been huge. We had opportunity to spend an inheritance in this way or in that, and we see made a choice we now wish we hadn’t.

What does it mean here to say that our times are in God’s hand?   We are not speaking now of God’s mercy (that is, forgiveness); we are speaking now of God’s providence.  To speak of God’s providence is to acknowledge, gladly and gratefully, that no “wrong” decision is ultimately wrong. To speak of God’s providence is to own the comfort he intends us to have in that his hands are never tied. Regardless of what the outcome has been of decisions we’ve made; regardless of the fact that twenty years later we see that we should have chosen option “B” instead of option “C”; regardless of what it has all spelled for us, it never finds God handcuffed.  There is no situation in our lives where he is handcuffed.  To speak of God’s providence, then, is to comfort ourselves in a glorious truth: there is nothing in the way our lives have unfolded which God can’t use for our blessing or the blessing of others.  There is no development that strikes us as a “lemon” from which God can’t make lemonade of some sort, for someone’s edification.

While we can never undo the decisions we made, and while we can never alter the outcome of those decisions, there remains much that can be changed. Self-cursing regret can be changed. Bitter self-denunciation can be changed. Futile remorse can be changed. It’s all changed as the God who is never handcuffed makes something glorious for us or others out of what strikes us as merely negative.  The power of Christ’s resurrection means that there’s no occurrence, however deadly, before which God is helpless.  He who raised his Son from the dead isn’t going to be handcuffed by a decision that I see twenty years later I shouldn’t have made even though at the time I was doing my best with the information I had.

As surely as God’s mercy is adequate for our sin, his providence is adequate for our finitude.

 

[c] What about resentments arising from the past, resentment that arises inasmuch as we’ve been victimized?         Injuries done to us often grate on us more than our own sins or mistakes just because we feel so very powerless about them.  We can’t even lessen the hurt by saying, “At least I have no one to blame but myself.” All we can do is fume as we recall how powerless we were when someone clobbered us. The wound smarts to this day.

It’s easy to find ourselves thinking about this accidentally, and soon find ourselves thinking about it deliberately.  As we continue to think about it we’re flooded with such resentment that we feel ourselves about to explode.  Soon we’re looking for a chance to even the score, and if the chance never comes, the resentment intensifies.

Yet to be stuck here is to be left dying a thousand painful deaths. One such death is too many; a thousand are pointless.  Therefore when this deadly, deadening situation has occurred once, we must start thinking about resurrection; specifically we must think about the resurrection of the crucified.

When we think of the crucified we must think first of what Jesus told us himself: “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord.” He means that the sacrifice he makes is a sacrifice he makes. He’s not a doormat. He’s not a sucker. He’s not a laughable punching bag. He lays his life down. No one takes it from him – even though his slayers think they are taking it from him.

Then there’s only one thing to do. When we find ourselves clobbered, we aren’t going to fume about the powerlessness amidst which we were victimized. When we find ourselves clobbered, we are going to make our wound a sacrifice we offer to God.  We are going to deny that someone has taken something from us; instead we are going to offer it up to God.

There’s another way we can approach this matter.  Our Lord’s assassins torment and spear him.  They think they are masters of the situation.  But as soon as Jesus says “I lay down my life”, he absorbs it all. Since the last event in this scenario is his absorbing it all in himself, who is finally master of it all? He is. Indisputably he is.

Then this is how you and I must deal with wounds from our past that will otherwise fester within us until the pus of resentment renders us ugly to others and tormented in ourselves.  We are going to offer up as sacrifice to God the injury that someone else did us and in which she thought we were powerless and for which she preens himself as our master.  We are going to absorb it, defuse our resentment, and therein ensure that our assailant has mastered no one.

 

II: — Enough about the past; let’s move on to the future. How often have you heard it said, “We don’t know the future, and it’s good that we don’t, for if we knew what the future held we couldn’t stand it”? People say this because they fear that the future will be similar to the past, perhaps worse. They say this because they fear that having survived the past (however bad it was), the future might be so much worse that they won’t survive it.

They are right in one respect: the future is going to resemble the past. At least the future will resemble the past in that the future will bring accident, folly, misfortune, injury.

But this is no reason to dread the future.  We must remember that the future will also contain Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, ever working light and life and love in us, ever pressing his mercy upon us in the face of our sin, ever enfolding us in his providence amidst our limitation, ever defusing our resentment as he helps us turn wound into sacrifice and thereby victimization into victory. This is what the future holds for us.

Some people speak of the future as the “great unknown”.   To be sure, we don’t know the specific details of the future.   (Ten years from now will I be living in Mississauga , Midland or among the “great cloud of witnesses” who were granted their release ahead of me?) We don’t know the specific details, but neither are they ultimately important. Jesus Christ is ultimately important, and he is our future. One way of understanding the future (the most helpful way, I’m convinced) is to see the future as the time in which Christ comes to us in the midst of what we aren’t able to foresee.  The future isn’t what hasn’t happened yet.   The future is Christ coming to us in the midst of what we can’t anticipate.

A week ago (Christmas) we praised God for the gift of his Son, Christ Jesus our Lord. We thanked God that at last the long-promised One came among us.  But even as he lives among us he’s not bound by us.  He is Lord of time. For this reason he who is among us is simultaneously out in front of us, ahead of us. Because he’s always out in front of us he’s always coming toward us with his promise to bring life and light and love amidst all that we can’t foresee. While there’s much we can’t foresee, we can foresee him.  And to foresee him is to anticipate the future not with misgiving or even dread, but rather to move toward the future confidently just because we know that as we move toward the future, he is already moving toward us.

 

III: — All of which brings us to the present.  I’m not going to say much about the present, because I don’t think there’s much to be said. I don’t think there’s much to be said about the present in that I don’t think there’s much to the present.  The present is simply the borderline between the past and the future. The present is simply that line, finer than a hair, in our travelling from past to future.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that I think there’s little to the present when we are told that shallow people, superficial people, live only for the present. We all understand what’s meant. Shallow people do live exclusively for the present inasmuch as they are determined to deny their past and determined to ignore the future.  Christ’s people, however, have no interest in either denying the past or ignoring the future. We belong to him who is Lord of time, Lord of past and future.

Still, something can be said about the present.  Paul announces, “Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.” In other words, right now is the hour to receive God’s favour.   Today is the day to look for and thank God for his mercy that bleaches our sin, his providence that cancels our regret, and his truth that shrivels our resentment. Today is the day to own afresh that what we call the future is the risen One coming to us and holding us in a grip that will never abandon us, abandon us to what we haven’t been able to foresee.   “Now is the acceptable time.”

 

Now is the acceptable time just because all our times – past, future, present – are in God’s hand.

 

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           January 2006

 

Of Jerusalem, The City of God, The Church

Psalm 48

 

[1] “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. If you, Jerusalem, are not more precious to me than my highest joy, let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.” Does anyone feel as strongly about the city of Mississauga as the psalmist felt about Jerusalem?

Actually, the psalmist doesn’t feel so very strongly about Jerusalem just because he happens to like this one city as other people tell us they love London or Paris or New York. The psalmist loves Jerusalem inasmuch as he believes it to be the city of God. “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God“, he exclaims in Psalm 48.

So — Jerusalem is the city of God for the psalmist, gathering together as it does the people of God. For two thousand years Christians have treasured the book of Psalms; for two thousand years Christians have interpreted references to Jerusalem or Zion as references to the church. Then here is a question we cannot avoid putting to ourselves today: do we feel as strongly about the church as the psalmist felt about Jerusalem, Zion? The unnamed author of the book of Hebrews cries, “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” (Heb. 12:28) To be sure, the kingdom of God cannot be shaken. But what about the church? Can it be shaken? Has it been shaken? Is it so “all shook up” that we can say of it what is said of a boxer who is out on his feet, “He doesn’t have a leg underneath him”?

 [2] Before we answer the question too quickly we must be sure to understand something crucial. The word “Jerusalem” is the anglicized version of HYER SHALOM — city of peace, city of salvation. In English the word “peace” means little more than “the absence of conflict”; but in Hebrew “shalom” means the harmony and wholeness of the creation as it came forth from God’s hand, unmarred by wickedness, sin, evil. But right now the creation is dreadfully marred; grotesquely disfigured, in fact. Salvation, then, is the whole creation (including human beings) wholly healed. Shalom is therefore the kingdom of God. HYER SHALOM, Jerusalem, is the city where the salvation of God, the kingdom of God, is to appear, appear unmistakably, appear uniquely.

At the same time there is another side to Jerusalem. Jesus tells us that Jerusalem is the city which slays the prophets. And so it does. The city that is supposed to be the one spot on a ravaged earth where the salvation of God appears turns out to be the one spot where the messengers of God are most thoroughly abused. (Tell me: are God’s messengers ever abused in the church , even though the church is where God’s salvation is known, celebrated, and commended — supposedly?) More than merely abuse the prophets, Jerusalem is the city that crucifies Israel’s Messiah, crucifies the Son of God — and is glad to do so!

My question again: do you feel as positive about the church as the psalmist felt in Psalm 137 when he said, “If I forget Jerusalem I deserve to lose my right arm”? Do you feel as positive about the church as the psalmist felt in Psalm 48, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God”?

We must not think that the psalmist is naive. He is not looking at Jerusalem through rose-coloured glasses. No sooner does he exult in Jerusalem (verse 1) than he adds (verse 2) “Mount Zion, in the far north”. “Far north”, in Hebrew, means “in the future, in the eschaton; the Jerusalem that is to come, the new Jerusalem, let down from heaven” (as the book of Revelation speaks of it). The psalmist knows that the earthly Jerusalem is both a testimony to God’s salvation and a disgraceful stinkhole: both. There is enough truth in the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem possible; there is enough falsehood in the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem necessary.

 

 [3] You and I do not view the church through rose-coloured glasses. We know about the Renaissance popes: wealthy, promiscuous, corrupt, cunning to an extent that would have delighted Machiavelli. We know about the church in early 16th century Scotland: it owned half the nation’s property. We know about the New England zealots who hanged women as witches. We know about the 19th century American Methodist bishops who not only dismissed Methodist forefather John Wesley’s outrage at slavery but even became slaveowners themselves. We know about the churches that refused to welcome black people at worship — even barred them from worship — long after professional sports had integrated both players and the paying public.

 [4] We do not view the church through rose-coloured spectacles. Neither does the psalmist. The psalmist has only the most realistic appraisal of Jerusalem. There is enough truth to the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem possible, and enough falsehood to the earthly Jerusalem to make the new Jerusalem necessary. But make no mistake: there is truth, salvation, shalom in the earthly Jerusalem! The word of God and the truth of God and the might of God are here! For this reason, the psalmist tells us, the kings of the nations flee Jerusalem in panic whenever they approach it. The kings of the nations begin by assuming that Jerusalem is nothing; a puff, mere froth, entirely dismissable. Once they have meddled with Jerusalem, however, they flee in panic.

I am always sobered when I ponder how the nations’ rulers react to the church. The church appears to be a pushover; yet when the rulers of the nations begin to push, they find it unyielding. More than unyielding, they find it a threat to them.

When Hitler came to power there were 18,000 Protestant pastors in Germany. The call was sounded to form the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church insisted that Hitler was not be heard or heeded. It declared, “Jesus Christ is the one word of God that we must obey in life and in death. We deny that the church can have a fuehrer apart from Jesus Christ…”. When the call was sounded 6,000 pastors joined up. What did the other 12,000 have for a backbone? Jello? Karl Barth, whom the Gestapo quickly removed from his university position in the course of a Saturday morning lecture; Barth had a different perspective on it. “Six thousand?”, said Barth, that’s far too many! One-third of the clergy can’t have perception enough to know what’s going on and courage enough to be of any help. There are plainly far too many whom we can’t count on. We’ve got to get the numbers down!” He didn’t have long to wait. After one month the 6,000 had shrunk to 4,000; another month, to 2,000 — and so on, until that critical core was reached, that earthly Jerusalem that would make the new Jerusalem believable.

Why was Hitler unrelenting in his persecution of so small a number? Because Hitler knew that testimony to Jesus Christ is like yeast. It appears insignificant itself, yet it spreads everywhere and affects everything, leaving nothing untouched. Its influence is so pervasive as to be uncontrollable and undeniable. The psalmist, grateful for Jerusalem and confident of the new Jerusalem; the psalmist declares, “As we have heard, so we have seen in the city…which God establishes for ever.” “As we have heard, so we have seen”; it’s the language of testimony! Testimony is like yeast: uncontrollable and undeniable. Hitler knew this much.

When John Wesley found himself afire with the gospel in the midst of a church where neither clergy nor people appeared “lit” he did not bemoan the spiritual inertia on all sides and conclude that the situation was hopeless. Instead he announced, “Give me a dozen people who fear no one but God and hate nothing but sin…; just give me a dozen.” What he didn’t know — but soon learned — was that the dozen (and more) already existed. (Of course. When Elijah thought that he stood alone, God reminded him that there were 7,000 in Israel who had not bowed their knee to Baal.) (I Kings 19:18)

 [5] My confidence in God’s promise-keeping faithfulness is undiminished. What he has promised he will do. There isn’t so much as a dust-speck of doubt in me. And when our Lord tells us that he will build his church on his people’s public acknowledgement of him as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God (Matt. 16:18); when he tells us that not even the powers of death, not even attacks from the spiritual underworld, will crumble it; when our Lord promises this I believe him. As long as Jesus Christ himself is held up in the truth of his gospel his community will thrive; ultimately his community will triumph gloriously, however silly or sinful the antics of pseudo-disciples who claim to be avant-garde but in fact are dangerous and laughable in equal measure.

Wesley again. In the early days of Methodism Wesley’s people were accused of two things: fanaticism and immorality. “We aren’t fanatics”, Wesley replied, “for however exuberant we might appear, we do not elevate ourselves above scripture, the mark of fanaticism. In the second place”, he continued, “we are not immoral people, even though there are some ‘bad apples’ among us whose ill-repute has been ascribed to us.” In a development which was nothing less than heartbreaking, one of the worst of the ‘bad apple’ situations concerned Wesley’s sister and brother-in-law. The sister was Martha; the brother-in-law, an Anglican clergyman of apparent Methodist fervour, Westley Hall. Martha and her husband had ten children, nine of whom died in infancy. As child succeeded child Martha became worn out. She needed help in the home; a live-in housekeeper, Betty Greenaway, was hired to assist her. Meanwhile, Westley Hall had become a notorious philanderer. Needless to say, in no time he had impregnated the family’s housekeeper. By the time word of this reached John Wesley, Westley Hall had absented himself from wife Martha for an extended period. Wesley could hardly believe that his brother-in-law had behaved so scandalously and humiliated his sister so shamefully. Wesley went to visit his sister; once with her, he had no trouble believing any of it. It was all as bad as reported, and worse.

Subsequently Westley Hall deserted his wife Martha, leaving her in the village where she had buried nine children, leaving her with inadequate finances. All of this was public knowledge. The anti-Methodist newspapers gleefully publicized the deplorable details. One newspaper article intoned, “On Friday morning [The Reverend Westley Hall] set out for London, having first stripped his wife…of all her childbed linen (he even stole his wife’s sheets!), and whatever he could convert into money, leaving her in the deepest distress.” What did Martha do in her distress? She forgave her husband; when he sashayed home three months later she took him back. One day Martha slipped out of the house to meet brother John in a downtown rendezvous, John having travelled once more to visit her in order to support her in her anguish. While she was downtown her husband, incorrigible yet, locked her out of the house. Then he left her again, and once again she took him back. He left again. By now the housekeeper, Betty Greenaway, was ready to deliver. A physician was not called, since in class-stratified England a physician was not to be brought into such outrageous scandal. Instead a midwife was procured. By now Martha’s bank balance was only six pounds. She paid five pounds for the midwife, and then spent her remaining pound on a coach ticket for her villainous husband who had informed her he wanted to leave London and return to her. In no time he had deserted her again, this time with a woman whom he took to Barbados. For the rest of her life Martha had to be supported by her two brothers, John and Charles.

The point to the lengthy story is this. For decades Westley Hall was a disgrace to Methodism. For decades mockers and detractors snickered and pointed to him every time Wesley’s catholic evangelicalism was mentioned. Those who opposed the Methodist work had a field-day writing up pamphlets and tracts and newspaper articles which gloated over the disgrace of one of Methodism’s best-known figures, The Reverend Westley Hall, philanderer “extraordinaire”. Nevertheless; NEVERTHELESS — God honoured and owned and used and magnified and crowned the Methodist work in a way and to an extent that we can scarcely comprehend today!

Jesus Christ has promised that where he is lifted up in the truth of his gospel nothing will crumble his community; nothing — not the powers of death, not notorious scandal protracted for decades, not the theological treachery and the spiritual inertia of those who style themselves church leaders and spokespersons. We forget that the word “Methodist” was originally a term of contempt; the word became even more contemptible after Wesley himself was ignited and thousands with him. But what is human abasement compared to the exaltation of God? What is momentary humiliation compared to God’s eternal vindication? Every time I read of the brothers-in-law, John Wesley and Westley Hall, I take heart afresh, knowing that the gospel will always authenticate itself and vindicate the faithful, especially in the face of every kind of fakery, forgery and phoniness.

The psalmist writes, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God”. God is greatly to be praised in HYER SHALOM, the city of salvation. Jerusalem is the city of salvation, even as the phonies within it render it the city of destruction. Nevertheless, the psalmist knows that the ‘bad apples’, however bad, cannot overturn the promise of God! For this reason I am undiscouraged concerning the church. The promise of God concerning his people perdures; the promise of God concerning Christ’s community is operative now; and soon the promise of God is going to be verified publicly.

 [6] The psalmist is not at all naive about Jerusalem. Jerusalem is Jerusalem, the city of salvation and the city of destruction; both. Yet because God keeps the promises he makes these two truths are not weighted equally. The city of salvation always outweighs the city of destruction; always. For this reason the psalmist tells his readers, “Walk around Zion; circle it; count its towers; take note of its ramparts; go through its citadels.” In other words, before you despair over the corruption of Jerusalem stroll through the city and take note of just how glorious the city is with its splendid towers and ramparts and citadels; take note of its grandeur and its splendour.

This is exactly how I feel about the church: its assorted riches are glorious. I am everlastingly grateful for mediaeval monks in their candle-flickering cells who kept learning alive during the darkness of the dark ages. I should never want to be without Roman Catholics who will at least recognize the humanness of the almost-born in the face of the world’s heartless dismissal. Who would want to be without the Anglican Prayerbook in view of the fact that Thomas Cranmer’s genius is now the common property of every denomination’s liturgy? The Calvinists remind us that God is irreducibly GOD, uncompromisingly holy, unfadingly majestic. Whenever I think of the Lutherans my heart is flooded with the treasures of dear old Martin himself. One of his nuggets: “Do you want to know the cure for anxiety? Stop looking at yourself and living in yourself. Instead live out of yourself by living in someone else. Live in Christ by faith; live in your neighbour through love. Then you will never find yourself fretting over your fribbles.” The Eastern Orthodox Church is an anvil that has outworn every hammer pounding upon it for centuries. Stencilled on every eucharistic wafer that its people use in their communion service are the words, “Jesus Christ conquers”. (Ask Alexander Solzhenitsyn what a communion service means according to the Eastern Orthodox rite.) And then there are the Baptists. What distinguishes the Baptists is not their doctrine of baptism (as so many people incorrectly think). What distinguishes the Baptists is their understanding of the church (to which their view of baptism merely points). The Baptists insist on the separation of church and state. They know there can be no compromise between Christ and Caesar. They know that a state church, an established church, is a contradiction in terms. The church is not, must not think itself to be, should never be perceived to be the religious arm of the nation or the government or a political party; neither must the church ever be the religious booster of an ideology or an “ism” or a lobby — for the church’s Lord, so far from supporting the principalities and powers, has defeated them and exposed them for the wretched pretenders that they are.

What about the renewal groups within The United Church of Canada? Together we do not constitute a denomination. But certainly we constitute what our foreparents called an ecclesiola in ecclesia; we constitute a concentrated yeast tablet in a church which appears to be unleavened.

Even so, we cannot accurately say we are a yeast tablet in a church which is unleavened. After all, the renewal movements represent a majority within the denomination. In other words, The UCC is plainly far more leavened than we commonly think. Then perhaps the most accurate thing to say is that we are a concentrated yeast table whose vocation it is to leaven even more a denomination that is already leavened to a greater extent than denominational spokespersons and bureaucrats will admit!

We should walk around Jerusalem frequently. The architecture of the city of God is magnificent. It is endlessly varied, limitlessly grand, boundlessly inspiring.

It is Jerusalem, the city of God, the church, that God so loves that he will perfect it; by his grace he will render it “Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.” What is this but the picturesque anticipation of the apostle Paul’s picturesque conviction that God, by his grace, will render the church that bride of Christ that is “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish”? (Eph. 5:27)

Believing this without reservation, I refuse to be discouraged. I cannot count the number of people who have sidled up to me and remarked patronizingly, “Why don’t you give up, Shepherd. You and your renewal ‘types’ might as well quit. You have no chance of changing anything.” My cheerful reply is always twofold. “Friend, in the first place I stand where I stand not in order to change the denomination, but in order to make sure that it doesn’t change me. In the second place when I see the Berlin wall crumbled and the once-mighty USSR fragmented, I know that before the inscrutable providence of God any self-confident monolith may be only hours from crumbling and fragmenting.” But of course God’s work of disassembly is only for the sake of bringing forth that bride “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.”

 [7] Isn’t this where the sermon should end? The psalmist began Psalm 48 by speaking of the city of the great King, the church. Throughout the psalm he said much about the church. Finally he urged us to contemplate the church’s catholicity and the church’s magnificence. Since the psalm appears to be concluded, the sermon should be concluded.

Except that the psalm isn’t concluded. For even as he exults in the splendours of the church the psalmist finds himself overwhelmed by the holy one of Israel himself, by the living God who cannot be reduced to or confused with anything, however glorious, not even that church which he has promised to bring to himself without spot or wrinkle or blemish. “Walk around Jerusalem; note her glories”, says the psalmist, “that you may tell the next generation that THIS IS GOD, our God for ever and ever.”

Just as John the Dipper pointed away from himself to him whose shoes he wasn’t worthy to untie, so the church ever points away from itself to him who is the church’s — and the world’s — unique Lord, Judge and Saviour. As you and I and all God’s people point to him, in company with brother John before us, we shall resoundingly tell the next generation that this is God, our God, and he will be their guide as he has been ours, for ever and ever.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do
far more abundantly than all that we ask or think,
to him be glory IN THE CHURCH AND IN CHRIST JESUS
to all generations, for ever and ever. (Eph.3:20)

Amen

                                                         Victor A. Shepherd         

May, 1994

You asked for a Sermon Concerning Our Guilt

Psalm 51:1-14          Romans 5:1-5          Mark 3:1-6

 

Why doesn’t the church accentuate the positive?   Why do we persist in the “miserable” prayer of confession every Sunday morning? Since guilt is burdensome, why don’t we stop using the word and rid ourselves as well of everything associated with it?   We don’t do this for many reasons, not the least of which is this: a person with no sense of guilt is to be pitied.  More to the point, a person with no sense of guilt is to be dreaded. A person with no sense of guilt is a psychopath, utterly conscienceless.  Psychopaths are aware that certain behaviours are followed by the severest social sanctions: if you rob a bank, you go to jail.  Psychopaths, however, have no sense of wrong.         They think a jail sentence for bank robbery to be social arbitrariness, nothing more. Psychopaths can never be trusted. They are housed in a maximum-security institution in Penetanguishene.  The person with no capacity for guilt is the person who has to be locked up and never let out. At the same time, all of us are aware that the burden of guilt can be so very burdensome as to be crushing.

 

I: — The sermon is only a minute old, and already I’ve used the word “guilt” several times. When I use the word am I referring to a state or a feeling? Most people have a feeling in mind whenever they hear the word “guilt”.   The judge in criminal court, however, has only a state in mind.  When a judge declares the accused to be guilty before the law, the judge is describing the offender’s state, the offender’s condition. The judge doesn’t know how the offender feels, and may not care.  Undoubtedly a judge pronounces to be guilty many offenders who don’t feel guilty at all. Still, we all agree it’s appropriate for someone who has done wrong to feel guilty. It’s appropriate for state and feeling to match up. When people who are guilty also feel guilty, their guilt (feeling) is called “real guilt.”  When people who haven’t done wrong feel guilty none the less, their guilt (feeling) is called “imaginary.”

Suppose I feel guilty when (according to most people) there’s no guilty state. I eat a piece of chocolate cake (one piece) when I’m convinced I need to lose ten pounds. Most people would see my guilt-feeling as purely imaginary, trivial even.  Calling it trivial, however, does nothing to reduce the feeling.  The feeling of imaginary guilt can be so very intense as to be immobilising.

Imaginary guilt is said to arise largely from taboos we absorbed during our childhood, or from taboos acquired from our social environment, our colleagues, our friends, our parents (chiefly our parents.) We move into adult life with our childhood taboo-system firmly in place (and no less firmly in place for having been acquired semiconsciously, even unconsciously.)   We move further into adult life with our society’s taboo-system in place, always aware that there are social penalties for violating social taboos. Many people are embarrassed to admit what they feel guilty about, I’ve found, because the taboo appears, from a rational standpoint, to be trivial.         As trivial and arbitrary as they tell themselves it is, their guilt-feeling remains. Not only does it remain, it frequently goes ever so deep and is ever so destructive.

“I’ve got the solution”, someone insists, “the guilt associated with parental upbringing and social convention is always and everywhere imaginary. Since it’s all imaginary, let’s do our best to forget it and focus on the guilt that’s real.” Such a “solution”, however, is no solution at all.
Anthropologists tell us, for instance, that all societies have a taboo concerning incest.  Does the fact of the taboo mean that all guilt concerning incest is imaginary, imaginary only? As for my parental upbringing, my parents taught me that murder is wrong; dishonesty of any sort, theft, slander, lying – all are wrong.  Does the fact that my parents taught me these are wrong trivialise the guilt associated with murder and theft?

At the same time, as we mature we all recognise that there’s imaginary guilt around many parental edicts that we have come to disregard. Concerning these parental edicts we now merely smile and wonder why we were so long shedding the guilt associated with them, so pointless is it.  The question still has to be asked and answered, however, as to how we come to sort out real and imaginary guilt.  On what basis do we distinguish them?

Distinguishing them isn’t as easy as we might first think, since both kinds are pervasively intertwined in us.         Because untangling the two kinds is more difficult than expected, we are prone to pursue the “quick fix” of labelling our guilt as all imaginary or all real.  I begin by telling myself that my guilt is all imaginary.   The amateurish “pop” psychology ready-to-hand in our society aids and abets this. Besides, labelling my guilt as all imaginary makes it easier to live with until I can dump it. But before long I am driven to admit to myself, “It’s not working.”  After a while I know, deep down, that I’m making excuses for myself where there are no excuses; I’m letting myself off much too easily; and I’m letting myself off where I let no one else off.

Then perhaps my guilt is all real.  I deserve to feel as bad as I feel. I know I’m a defective person, defective on many fronts; and if ever I appear in danger of forgetting this, there’s no shortage of people to remind me.  Plainly I am as bad as I feel.”  After a while, however, I find I can’t live here.  My responsibility for my guilt is more than I can endure.  The burden is so very burdensome as to be overwhelming.  In order to ease my burden I tell myself I’m being much too hard on myself. Back goes the pendulum toward imaginary guilt.  Back and forth I swing. First I think I’m tormenting myself unrealistically; then I think I’m excusing myself irresponsibly. Finally I shout that regardless of how often I change the labels on my guilt-feelings I don’t feel any less guilty and I’m still confused as to whether I should feel guilty.

The pattern I’ve just described repeats itself again and again in life. Someone isn’t the business success that his cousin is.  He feels guilty about this, since he can’t provide the standard of living for his family that his cousin can, and feels worse when his wife keeps reminding him of this. A week later he tells himself that he needn’t feel guilty; after all, he never had the opportunities and “breaks” that his cousin had.  Soon, however, he tells himself that he’s making excuses for himself and should “own up” to his failure.  Now he tells himself he’s never been a business success because he’s simply not as smart as his cousin, nor as creative, nor as adventuresome. Two weeks later, however, he can’t live with such severity concerning himself; he tells himself his cousin “got ahead” just because his cousin isn’t always honest. Back and forth he swings. He’s no further ahead in his self-understanding; and his guilt-feelings, whether real or imaginary, are no less intense.

I have found that most unmarried people feel guilty for being unmarried. First the single woman tells herself that her guilt is entirely imaginary.  It’s not her fault that no one’s ever asked her to marry, is it?   Then she begins to wonder, moves on to doubting herself, and finally accuses herself: why wouldn’t it be her fault that no one has ever asked her to marry?  A variant of this theme is the person guilt-ridden at being single again. After all, marital failures don’t happen spontaneously; they have to be someone’s fault. In all such cases people oscillate when they try to sort out the extent to which they are blameworthy for developments in their lives.  When they are easy on themselves, they come to suspect themselves of being too easy, unrealistically easy.  When they are hard on themselves, they soon can’t live with their own severity. Back and forth they go, their guilt-feelings fixed fast, even becoming more intense.

The real guilt/imaginary guilt teeter-totter is complicated by the fact that imaginary guilt is often a smokescreen behind which real guilt hides. As long as I can preoccupy myself with imaginary guilt I won’t have to come to terms with what is giving rise to my real guilt, all of which means I won’t have to set my house in order.

Think of this situation. My wife and I are asked to a neighbour’s for coffee and dessert.  I sashay over in my house-painting trousers and my leaf-raking shoes. When we arrive at the neighbour’s home I find everyone better dressed.  I feel terrible about my social faux pas, guilty as can be. Then I tell myself that my guilt is imaginary.         After all, how was I to know how others would be dressed?   And wasn’t it the host’s responsibility to tell me?   The host is the guilty one here.  Any guilt-feeling I might have is purely imaginary.

But is it? Actually, my imaginary guilt disguises real guilt.  You see, I don’t like this particular neighbour.  He never cleans up after his dog.  I went to his home in my shabby clothes because I couldn’t care less about him and his silly coffee party.  Consciously I couldn’t care less; unconsciously I’d even like to embarrass him. As far as I’m concerned that man is a 14-karat jerk.  What’s more, just before my wife and I left our house we had a “tiff”, a “spat”, and as usual I lost.  I lose nearly all such tiffs and I’m tired of losing.  I know, she told me not to wear my house-painting trousers, but defying my wife was the only way I could re-assert myself in the face of my most recent domestic defeat. I thought I was inwardly saving face (my face) by letting her know I can’t be suppressed. (Hence the shabby clothes.) It turns out I was losing face (again), losing face publicly, angering her still more and causing my neighbour to think that I am a 14-karat jerk.

Much imaginary guilt is a smokescreen that hides real guilt.

 

II: — Perhaps you are thinking that our guilt-situation is so very complex, complicated even, that we shall never find our way out of the maze.  Yet we shall. We find our way out as the gospel brings us out.  Jesus Christ brings us out as he comes upon us and seizes us and soaks us in his unique truth and mercy and wisdom.

In the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry his opponents hounded him, waiting to catch him infringing this custom or that code or yet another taboo. When they finally caught him – healing a man on the Sabbath or allowing his disciples to eat without ritually dipping their hands or befriending those the society loves to hate – they jumped on him saying, “You’ve broken the rules. You’ve infringed the code.” Our Lord’s opponents think that real guilt arises when the code is violated or the custom infringed. His followers, on the other hand, know that real guilt arises inasmuch as we are guilty persons before God. While sin is something I do, it isn’t primordially something I do; it isn’t fundamentally, originally, something I do. At bottom sin is something I am. (Psalm 51) The sin that I do is but the excrescence of the sin that I am.  In the presence of Jesus Christ Peter doesn’t exclaim, “Oh, my gosh. I’ve done the wrong thing.” Rather he cries, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.”

Opponents of Jesus compare themselves against a list of rules and note that they break 50% of them. If ever they begin to feel guilty about this they console themselves with the fact that they break only 50%; this means they keep 50%, and the man down the street manages only 40%. Disciples of Jesus, on the other hand, recognize with Peter that the code-mentality is entirely beside the point.  Followers of Jesus know that their proximity to him discloses not something they’ve done wrong here or there; their proximity to him discloses them, discloses themselves in their person, to be in the wrong before God. “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” The apostle Paul adds, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”   The characteristic human deficit, which deficit is as deep in us as blood poisoning, is that we don’t mirror God’s glory.  We were created for this, and it is meant to characterize us.  It doesn’t now.   All of us? All of us equally?   All of us lack such glory equally despite the unequal attainments we undeniably display? All of us lack God’s glory, which glory is the human good, despite the different degrees of virtue which more moral and less moral people exemplify?   Yes. We all fall short of God’s glory equally.

The spiritual predicament of humankind (in other words, the predicament plain and simple) isn’t that we do this or that wrong; our predicament is that we are in the wrong before God. The first impact the gospel makes upon us is to disclose our spiritual condition.

 

The second impact of the gospel, the second consequence of our Lord’s presence and power, is that he puts in the right before God all who welcome him.  To cling to him is find ourselves put in the right before God, to be given new status, new standing. “Justification” is a word that many Protestants throw around but few understand.         To be justified, biblically, isn’t to be excused.   (Sinners can never be excused.)  To be justified is to be put in the right before God, to be given new standing with him. To be justified is to be given the same standing before God as the standing of that Son with whom the Father is ever pleased.  Faith clings to the Son with whom the Father is pleased.

At the time of the Sixteenth Century Reformation John Calvin spoke of justification as “the chief hinge on which religion turns.”   He was right. Justification is indeed the chief hinge on which faith turns.  Justification opens the door to peace with God and peace within ourselves. Justification opens the door to release from anxiety and freedom to venture.  Justification is the chief hinge on which everything turns. It swings open the door of prisons that have held people fast for years and lets them step out into the sunlight of life.

Martin Luther lit up every time he thought about justification.  Reading scripture with exquisitely fine attention to the logic of the text Luther spoke of justification as a breathtaking exchange.  Jesus Christ exchanges all that is his for all that is mine.  As sinner I am sunk in guilt, shame, curse, death; as the righteous one Jesus Christ throbs with glory, blessing, light and life.  Justification means that he, of his incomprehensible mercy takes on my guilt, shame, curse and death even as he clothes me in his glory, blessing, light and life. Clothed now in all that he is, I exult in that new identity which is mine for life and will be mine as well on the day of judgement.

Two hundred years after Luther, Valentius Loescher, a Lutheran theologian, wrote, Iustificatio est articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae (1718).   “Justification is the article by which the church stands and falls.” Articulus: “article”? Actually the Latin word articulus means not only “article” or “hinge”; it also means “moment” or “point”, as well as “crisis.”   Justification by faith, the glorious exchange that occurs as Jesus Christ relieves me of all that’s mine and bestows upon me all that’s his: this is the moment, the point, the critical issue where the church stands or falls. It’s the moment, the point, the critical issue that separates church from fake church.

Scripture makes plain that justification is pardon or forgiveness: all these words mean the same.  To be justified is to be pardoned is to be forgiven.  When we speak of forgiveness, however, we must be careful that we aren’t misled by a line in the Apostles’ Creed.  The creed states, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”   Strictly speaking, sin is never forgiven simply because sin doesn’t exist apart from sinners.   Sinners are forgiven. I myself am forgiven. For this reason Paul exults, “Being justified by faith we ourselves have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:1) “There is now no condemnation for those persons who are in Christ Jesus.” (Rom. 8:1)

The second impact of the gospel is that we who are in the wrong before God are put in the right with him as we cling to the One who has promised to hold us so as never to let us go.

 

The third impact of the gospel is that forgiveness provides sanctuary, provides protection against inner and outer assault, provides safe living space in which we can come, in our own way and in our own time, to understand what guilt is real and what imaginary.  Justification provides the security within which we can come to terms, however long it takes, with where we should feel guilty and where we shouldn’t. It provides an anxiety-free zone that allows us the time and space and freedom to come to terms with our upbringing, social convention, our growing awareness of God’s truth, our new-found self-perception.  It provides an anxiety-free zone in which we can reflect on what we’ve been taught, what we’ve learned ourselves, where our parents meant well but hindered us none the less, where we absorbed opinions that we thought to be the soul of truth but which we now see to be anything but. Forgiveness or justification gives us breathing space, and this breathing space allows us to revisit ever so much about us, reassess it, and revise whatever has to be revised. Forgiveness or justification allows us to do this, even requires us to do this, without putting us back on that teeter-totter that always oscillates between irresponsible self-excusing and unendurable self-accusing.

 

“Why doesn’t the church accentuate the positive?”   What we have heard about guilt this morning in church is more positive than anything we are ever going to hear about guilt anywhere else.

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                               

November 2006

 

Of Our Aloneness and God’s Love

Psalm 62

 

I: — How “alone” are you? How “alone” do you feel? As alone as the psalmist? “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”         “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. He only is my rock, my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly moved.”

William Stringfellow, the American Anglican lawyer whose grasp of theology (he was self-taught) was as precise as grasp of the law (he was taught at Harvard Law School); Stringfellow, like any Harvard Law graduate, was offered elegance and luxury yet preferred to open a store-front law practice in Harlem among the dispossessed of that slum.         Why did he do this? Why not leave that kind of law practice to less talented lawyers who couldn’t maintain a practice among “choosier” and more affluent clients in any case? Stringfellow said it was on account of his vocation; while he was a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics he had learned the difference between career and vocation.

Stringfellow’s isolation in his vocation, however intense, was considerably less than his isolation in church and society.  For instance, he campaigned ardently in the 1960s to have women ordained in the Anglican church of the USA , the campaign coming to a climax in Washington Cathedral where a disdainful bishop treated him like a non-entity.  A year or two later the FBI arrested him for harbouring Father Daniel Berrigan, a high-profile protester against the Viet Nam war. Stringfellow’s former law partner told me, when Maureen and I were last in New York City, that Stringfellow was devastated at the prospect of going to prison, in view of what happens to small, slightly-built men in prison.  In one of his fourteen books Stringfellow spoke of what it is to be alone, so very alone, that (as he put it) “God is the only witness to your existence”.

Have you ever felt yourself so alone that God is the only witness to your existence? The psalmist had. “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”   He doesn’t say it once in Psalm 62; he says it (or something like it) five times in the first eight verses!   He couldn’t imagine himself more alone.

Why do we feel alone?   Chiefly, I think, because we are not understood.   However firmly we may know who we are, none of us can articulate it adequately. However resilient our self-identity, we cannot communicate this truth to others.  The result is that people are left having to “read” us and then guess who we are.

To be sure, other people can read something about us.  They can read virtually everything that is only skin-deep in us, everything that is on the surface. They can also read much that is below the surface, those quirks and character-traits about us that we think no one else sees but that in fact we are displaying all the time.  Yet even as we smile at how much more about us people can read than we used to think, we still feel they can’t read us at all in our innermost, deepest core. Our innermost core they don’t penetrate to, don’t see, don’t know.  And therefore there is a part of us, the most significant part, the unique part, that they don’t meet and therefore cannot affirm.

Not only do we feel alone inasmuch as our profoundest “self” isn’t recognized, we feel alone in addition inasmuch as we know there is something about us that arouses antipathy in others.  I don’t mean that there is a nastiness in us or similar character-flaw that arouses antipathy in others.  I mean that whatever there is about us that stands out, however much we may try not to stand out; this attracts hostility.  The psalmist cries to himself yet has his detractors in mind, “How long will you set upon a man to shatter him…?   [You] plan to thrust him down from his eminence.”

Any person possessed of unusual ability, however slightly unusual; any person possessed of even a smidgen of excellence by that fact becomes eminent. The peculiar combination of excellence and eminence irks, really irks, those who are less excellent and less eminent.  The less eminent turn mean.

You don’t have to be possessed of excellence in terms of achievement. You merely have to be slightly prominent. You earn more money than most people? In no time you are hearing that you are stuck-up or self-important.  You are better educated than most?   In no time you are hearing of character-flaws you never knew yourself to have. Your job or your income or your ancestry or anything at all renders you socially more prominent than most? In no time you are hearing that you may be invited to all the major social functions, but you still speak with an accent; and besides, your daughter had to get married, didn’t she?   When such a word reaches you — as it always does — you feel terribly alone once more.

What it was that made the psalmist eminent I do not know.  Perhaps it was simply that he appeared to be the spiritual giant that he was in fact, and appeared such amidst the spiritual pygmies all around him. Or perhaps it was that he could write poetry the world will never be without, while they didn’t have a line of poetry in them.  In any case the psalmist knew that to be eminent in any respect for any reason arouses envy in others.  The envious turn nasty instantly.  The psalmist knows the icy isolation that envy visits on those who are even slightly distinguished.         He felt himself to be a leaning wall, a tottering fence, whom the less-distinguished envious would simply love to push over.   He cries out in his aloneness, “They take pleasure in falsehood. They bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse.”   Then he cries to himself, for the umpteenth time, “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”

 

II: — Where do we turn when we are engulfed by our aloneness?   We naturally look to other men and women.  But which others? The others to whom we look are either “those of low estate”, in the words of the psalmist, or “those of high estate.”

The most pointed attempt at finding recognition and affirmation and alleviation of aloneness through “those of low estate” has to have been the role of the proletariat in the communist revolution.  Once capitalism had been abolished, the Marxists said, extraordinary virtue would appear in the “lumpen proletariat”, the huge mass of those of low estate.  The surge of virtue newly appearing in the these “lower classes” (so-called) would overcome every last distress in the human situation, including the aloneness that is more-or-less everyone’s predicament as well as the aloneness that nasty capitalists force on working class people.

What happened? The “triumph” of the proletariat gave rise to a savagery, misery, bleakness the 20th century had not yet seen.  Who are more alone, more isolated, more lonely than those in Marxist lands who cannot trust their neighbours at all?  When I have been driven to say with the psalmist, “For God alone my soul waits in silence”, I have never thought that what I needed most profoundly was part or all of the Saturday night crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens .

Then what about those of high estate?  The psalmist says they are a delusion.  He means that it is unrealistic to expect the rich and the socially prominent to overcome our aloneness.  Hobnobbing with those of high estate may make us feel less isolated for a minute. (Isn’t it pleasant to be able to say we had lunch with the mayor and supper with the president of General Motors?)   But it’s only for a moment. When sober reflection comes upon us again we know that having spent an afternoon with Jean Chretien or Wayne Gretzky or Margaret Atwood — however “heady” at the time — doesn’t profoundly remedy the aloneness we find so piercing. Name-dropping is surely one of the more pathetic attempts at gaining recognition, overcoming aloneness, through hanging around with the famous, the illustrious, the prestigious, the stars of athletics or academia or politics or entertainment. We don’t have access to the most glittering stars?   But at least we were at a New Year’s Eve party with the director of the board of education and he said to us….

The psalmist says there is another way we may try to overcome our aloneness: money. “If only I had my cousin’s income, my cousin would have to stop treating me like a non-event.” (Would she?) “If I only my net worth were large I should then be recognized by those whose net worth is comparable.” (Don’t bet on it. And besides, what would this accomplish, since those who have greater net worth are every bit as lonely themselves?)   The psalmist tells us we shouldn’t even bother with this. “If riches increase, set not your heart on them.”   We shouldn’t waste a minute thinking that money — whether gained legally or illegally — will do it for us.

Then how is our bone-chilling, heart-icing aloneness overcome?   Those of low estate can’t do it for us; neither can those of high estate; neither can an increase in riches, since something as impersonal as money will never remedy an ache that is profoundly personal.  Then what can?

 

IV: — More profoundly, who can? The psalmist tells us himself.

Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that

power belongs to God; and that to thee, O Lord,

belongs steadfast love.

“Once God has spoken; twice have I heard….”    It’s a semitism, a Hebrew way of speaking: “Once…twice.” The psalmist means, “Every time I hear God speaking, it echoes in my heart as well. I hear God speak, and I also hear the echo. God’s utterance is so telling, so penetrating, that I seem to hear it twice as often as he utters it — and he never stops uttering it!   Since God speaks his truth all the time, his truth is constantly dinned into me.” To hear God speak, and then to hear the echo as well, is to be inundated.  The psalmist began his sober psalm by crying, “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.”   Now he knows that he is saved by saturation, for he is saturated with God’s steadfast love for him.

Steadfast love. The two English words regularly translate one Hebrew word, HESED.  HESED is the word the Hebrew bible uses constantly in connection with God’s covenant. God’s covenant is his promise, his pledge that he who is mercy will ever show mercy. Our sin can certainly activate his mercy, but our sin can never terminate his mercy.  He will never forsake us because disgusted at us; he will never fail us because handcuffed before us.  God’s covenant is his pledge, his promise, that our fitful obedience to him will never diminish his faithfulness to us.  To say that steadfast love is the substance of God’s covenant is to say that our disgrace will not curdle his grace.  Angry as he may become at us, and anguished as well, he will not abandon us.

We must note how the psalmist reminds us that steadfast love and power alike belong to God. Power devoid of love would be destructive tyranny; steadfast love devoid of power would be weak and ineffective.  But God’s power is always and only the power of steadfast love, while his steadfast love is always and everywhere effective.

One year ago, a few days after Christmas, I went through a very difficult period of three or four weeks.  My difficulty, I think, had to do with the accumulation of several things: delayed reaction to the stresses that had fallen on me the previous spring, the fatigue that every minister knows around Christmas, exhaustion from teaching my semester-long course in historical theology, publisher’s deadlines for the book, So Great A Cloud of Witnesses, as well as the worst ‘flu I had had in a long time overtaking me on New Year’s Eve. In addition there were one or two other matters whose details you will have to leave with me.  I became depressed and anxious in a way that mystified me in that my depression and anxiety seemed vastly greater than any of the factors that supposedly gave rise to them, even if all these factors came together at once. I was spiralling down, knew I was spiralling down, and couldn’t do anything to halt the plunge.  Maureen loved me as ardently as she had since I was 19.  But there was nothing she could do.  Helpless and perplexed in equal measure, she couldn’t do anything except wait. I was still going down. Because I had upset her now, I was guilt-ridden as well as depressed and anxious. Just when I felt the pit of despair opening up before me and felt myself unable to avoid falling into it; just when I felt so bad I couldn’t imagine feeling worse; just then, one Thursday evening at 7:30 while I was standing in the dining room, staring at the floor, I was engulfed in a tidal wave of God’s love. It wasn’t that I “realized” that God loved me; it wasn’t even that I “realized” this afresh.  “Realized” is much too cerebral, much too ideational, much too abstract. I didn’t realize anything. I was flooded. I knew felt myself immersed in a love so pure and substantial that it was almost ask if my distress had been swallowed up in a giant batch of pure white dough (except that the dough, so far from threatening me with suffocation, promised me life.) I was bathed in the love of him who is love as tangibly as I was bathed in a tub of warm water later that night.  Don’t reduce it to, “Oh, Victor finally had his thinking clarified about the nature of God.”         Victor’s thinking about God’s nature had been clear for decades.  It was simply the very thing that the psalmist speaks of in Psalm 62: power and steadfast love alike belong to God.  For this reason God’s steadfast love was, for me at that moment, nothing less than a power-surge. As I stood in the dining room of my home, startled at “the presence”, a presence that was power and love in equal measure, the despair began to evaporate and the pit close up and the guilt, depression and anxiety recede. I didn’t recover instantly, but I knew that I was going to recover; I knew that recovery was underway. It took several weeks for me to come back.  One thing brought me back: an oceanic love, as steadfast as it was effective.

I trust you haven’t regarded my story as spiritual exhibitionism.  I share it with you for two reasons.  One, perhaps my story will help a fellow-sufferer.  Two, I agree with the psalmist when he tells us that to be visited with God’s visitation is to be charged with bearing witness.  The psalmist addresses the congregation and cries, “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart [all of you] before him; God is a refuge for us.”   When he began his psalm the psalmist felt isolated: “For God alone my soul waits in silence.”   Now he is eager to speak to fellow-worshippers at church!   “Trust in him, O people.”    And he supplies the word of personal testimony; “God is a refuge for us.” He can tell the congregation, “God is a refuge for us, you and me both”, inasmuch as he has first found God to be a refuge for him.

 

V: — I want to conclude with a word about what I call the miracle of providence. As we are so alone that our soul waits for God in silence; as we not only wait for him but also wait upon him; as we do this he rewards our waiting upon him by bringing to us another human being who has also been waiting for God in silence. The result is that neither we nor that other silent waiter-upon-God ever waits alone in silence in quite the same way again.  Someone has been brought into our orbit; we have been brought into his or her orbit; not any person at all, not a chatty well-wisher, but a fellow-sufferer who has also been a fellow-waiter-upon-God-in-silence; this person is brought to us, then another, and perhaps yet another.  There is forged a fellowship of those who have found steadfast love to be powerful, found power to be the strength of steadfast love — and who have found each other through the miracle of providence.         They will never be alone in quite the same way again.

 

Just because our Lord Jesus Christ was God-forsaken in Gethsemane for our sake, no human being is ever God-forsaken now.  For this reason we can lend our voice to the psalmist’s, “Trust in him at all times, O people, pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.”

God is a refuge, even as he introduces us to others who, by his providence, embody that selfsame refuge for us.

 

                                                                                               Victor A. Shepherd                                                                                                               

January 1995

 

A Study in the Pathology of Envy

PSALM 73

 

I: — Every winter people injure themselves — some seriously and a few fatally — through slipping on ice. They are most likely to slip when they don’t see the ice and are unable to safeguard themselves in any way. The ice has been covered over by the thinnest layer of snow or by a discarded newspaper. Before they know it their feet are gone from underneath them, and they lie immobile, wondering if the pain in the elbow or shoulder or wrist betokens a broken bone. If they have struck the back of their head they may be beyond wondering anything, at least for a while. Having one’s feet slip unexpectedly is no small matter.

What happens with our feet around ice happens to our self, our total person, around life. We slip and fall; fall dangerously, fall painfully, even fall catastrophically. Having slipped we have to ascertain how much damage has been done to us and how long recovery will take.

The psalmist tells us he came within an eyelash of having his feet slip catastrophically — when? when envy invaded his heart.   “My steps had well nigh slipped.  For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

Envy is a sin which threatens us all and of which we are all ashamed. Nobody boasts of being envious. People do boast of their sin, to be sure, but not the sin of envy.  Some people (chiefly males) boast of their lust.  They think that advertising their lasciviousness exalts them as a red-blooded “stud”. Some people boast of their hair-trigger temper.         They think that advertising their rage exalts them as a no-nonsense type that doesn’t take any “guff” from anyone, someone to be feared. But no one boasts of her envy. Envy is always sly. Envy is always disguised. Envy is always denied outwardly, however much it consumes us inwardly.

Envy is subtle, isn’t it.  Have you ever noticed the extent to which envy is disguised as social justice? For years I have noticed that what is put forward as concern for the poor is frequently envy of the rich. What is put forward as the attempt at lifting up many is secretly the attempt at pulling down a few.

Needless to say, not even pulling down a few satisfies our envy, simply because envy can never be satisfied; the more envy is fed the more its satisfaction recedes.

Why are people envious? We envy inasmuch as we assume that anything anyone else has we too must have. Likely we never even wanted the thing that someone else has until we noticed that he has it.  Suddenly the fact that he has it and we don’t have it is intolerable.

We are envious for another reason.  We refuse to admit that there are people who genuinely have greater talent or intelligence or skill than we have.  We think that to acknowledge someone else as more talented or intelligent or able is to declare ourselves failures (when of course it is to declare no such thing).

While none of us needs any encouragement to envy we are incited nonetheless on all sides. Think of the advertising that is beamed into us every day.  So much advertising aims at fostering in us a desire for what someone else has. Did she not have it, or did we not know that she has it, we shouldn’t want it for ourselves. (I am not speaking here of genuine human need but rather of artificially induced want.) We are pressured from all directions to want what we don’t need, and pressured to want it simply because someone else has it.   The pressure is effective in that the pressure presses upon us the message that unless we have it too we shall remain sunk in inferiority. What we want we soon expect. When expectation is not fulfilled want is riddled with anger and resentment; want, anger and resentment blended together appear as envy.

For this reason the most tragic aspect of envy is the poison it injects into friendships. Envy swells in us concerning those people whom we consider equals.  No one of our social class envies Queen Elizabeth, even though she is the richest woman in the world.  Instead we envy our friend, our dear, dear friend, whose job pays him $15,000 per year more than we earn.  Suddenly he appears less dear. In fact he now displays character-defects which either he didn’t display before or we didn’t see before. Actually, of course, it is not the case that he has recently come to display them or we have come to see them.  It is the case that we have recently come to imagine them; imagine them and even project them. All the while we remain unaware of what is going on in our own head and heart.         For what is going on is this: as soon as we imagine character-defects in our friend it is plain that his good fortune has left us feeling belittled.  He never intended to belittle us; and in fact his $15,000 per year hasn’t belittled us. Nonetheless we are certain now that he is belittling us, as certain as we are that the sun rises in the east. Feeling ourselves belittled we stupidly think — yet nonetheless wickedly think — that we can restore ourselves to our proper size, our proper largeness, only by diminishing him.  Envy is always bent on leveling.  End of friendship.

Yet as surely as our envy poisons our friendship envy poisons us ourselves.   Since envy renders us forever uncontented it renders us unable to rejoice.  Envy renders us dejected. More to the point, since our envy of someone else who has what we lack causes us to think ourselves losers, envy finds us languishing in self-rejection. Worse yet, since envy renders us sour, the more other people try to love us out of our envy the more we curdle their every effort.

“My feet had almost stumbled”, cries the psalmist, “I nearly fractured both legs, plus spine and skull; I nearly rendered myself immobile and insane when I became envious of the prosperous, for I looked upon the prosperous as arrogant and wicked.” It may be that the prosperous are arrogant — at least some of them.  It may be that the prosperous are wicked — at least some of them. It may also be that the prosperous are no more arrogant or wicked than anyone else.  At this point the psalmist’s envy has rendered him ridiculous.  For the prosperous people, the psalmist says, “have no pangs”. The prosperous have no pangs? They don’t suffer? They aren’t as finite, frail and fragile as the non-prosperous?  Ridiculous. To be sure we like to think that the prosperous “have it made”.  We like to think that because they “have it made” nothing about them can ever be unmade.  They can never suffer misfortune of any kind.  Because they are protected against financial loss we assume they are impervious to human loss. Their lives are devoid of difficulty, every bit as trouble-free as we foolishly imagine them to be. “Always at ease”, the psalmist says of them, “they increase in riches.” They may be increasing in riches. But are they “always at ease”?  Think of the Kennedy family of U.S.A. fame. Corrupt?   The old man, Joseph Kennedy, made millions handling liquor during the era of prohibition. Was the family wicked? The extramarital affairs which sons John and Robert had, not to mention their simultaneous affair with Marilyn Monroe, scarcely describe them as virtuous. Then has the family had no pangs? Has the family been always at ease? Two sons assassinated, Ted Kennedy’s wife an alcoholic, a grandson who is a drug-abuser, another family-member charged with rape.

And even if, in another case, there is no moral failure attached to someone who is prosperous, it still isn’t true that the prosperous are pang-free. John Robarts, lawyer, former premier of Ontario, suffered a stroke which left him partially paralyzed, and in his despair he shot himself.

Envy blinds us. Insofar as we envy someone else we blind ourselves to that person’s suffering.  We assume that whatever it is about him that is enviable has rendered him invulnerable, pain-free, impervious to suffering, 100% affliction-proof. But of course the prosperity of the prosperous cannot protect them against the human condition.

Envy poisons; envy embitters; envy blinds.  It does even more; it renders us self-pitying, self-righteous snivellers. “All in vain have I kept my heart clean”, the psalmist whines in his envy, “I have kept my heart clean and I received nothing for it!”   The truth is, he hasn’t kept his heart clean.  He may have kept his hands clean; i.e., he hasn’t done anything wrong. But his heart? How can he pretend to have kept it clean when he envies those whose prosperity (he says) has filled them with despicable character-defects?  Insofar as he envies them he is plainly willing to become a despicable character himself as long as he gets rich at the same time.  He hasn’t kept his heart clean!         But he has rendered himself a self-pitying, self-righteous whiner.

It is little wonder that no one boasts of envy.  Who would brag that he has turned himself into a poisonous, embittered, blind, self-righteous whiner?  Not even the psalmist is going to boast.

 

II: — What happens to him next? In a rare moment of rationality and self-perception he realizes how grotesquely he has disfigured himself.  In the same rare moment of rationality and self-perception he realizes too how shabby he appears to his fellow-believers, his congregation. “I should be untrue to the generation of thy children”, he cries to God.  The New English Bible puts it most succinctly: “Had I let myself talk on in this fashion I should have betrayed the family of God”. Plainly, the light is dawning; finally the light is dawning.

But still he needs more than the dawn; he needs broad daylight in order to get himself straightened around.         Broad daylight floods him when he goes to church.  “I went into the sanctuary of God”, he tells us.  He worshipped. To worship is to adore someone infinitely greater than we.  To worship, therefore, is to have our sights raised above ourselves. To worship is to be oriented away from ourselves.  Just because we are as envy-prone as we are, as self-preoccupied as we are, we need to be re-oriented again and again, at least every seven days (the bare minimum).

Few spectacles delight me more than air-shows.  Aerobatics entrance me. The formation-flying of the Snow Birds or the Blue Angels is good, but I prefer the solo performances of the smaller, propeller-powered aircraft.  These small planes perform far tighter manoeuvres, and perform them much closer to the ground. Recently I saw an aerobatics display on television which included much film-footage of the pilot. The pilot had been photographed by a camera positioned at the front of the cockpit. As the plane rolled and twisted and flipped upside down (many of these manoeuvres were quite violent) I noticed that the pilot was looking for the ground every two seconds. The pilot was constantly re-orienting himself. Because his manoeuvres were so extreme and so sudden, he could easily lose his bearings; and because he was so close to the ground, he had no margin of error. He re-oriented himself — “Where’s the ground?” — at least every two seconds; otherwise he would crash.

In the course of everything that comes upon us, including that insane envy which all of us know but will not admit, we too roll and twist and flip upside down. The only way we can keep from crashing — “My feet had almost stumbled, my steps had well nigh slipped” — is to re-orient ourselves constantly. And we re-orient ourselves constantly by looking for that groundedness which is God.  To re-acquaint ourselves with that groundedness which is God is to avoid the crash. Worship is essential for this; if not every two seconds then at least once every week.

As the psalmist goes to church, as he worships, he gets his bearings once more. As he gets his bearings once more that rare moment of rationality and self-perception which got him to church and got him his bearings asserts itself and extends itself and gradually dispels the envy and the spinoffs of envy which had so recently laid hold of him.         As all of this is dispelled, as he returns to his right mind, he can scarcely believe how absurd he had become and how seriously he had warped himself. “I was stupid and ignorant”, he cries to God, “I was like a beast toward thee.” “Not only was I asinine”, he tells us frankly, “I was even outrageously insensitive to God; and for the longest time I couldn’t even see it!” As his envy evaporates his self-perception returns.  He knows he has been on the edge of catastrophe himself; he has come within an eyelash of betraying his fellow-believers, and he has affronted God.

 

How thorough the psalmist’s re-orientation is is given by his exclamation, “Whom have I in heaven but thee?         And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides thee.”  Martin Luther’s translation is priceless: “As long as I have thee, I wish for nothing else in heaven or on earth.”  As the psalmist’s life sinks more deeply into God’s life; as God’s life sinks more deeply into the psalmist’s, the vastness of God floods the psalmist again and dilutes his envy until it vanishes without trace. “As long as I have thee, I wish for nothing else in heaven or on earth.”

Someone might wish to say that the cure for envy is to want less.  Of course to want less is to do away with envy.         But to say this is as unhelpful as to say that the cure for sickness is to be without disease. The critical question, however, is, “How do we come to be without disease?” How do we come to want less? By repeating one hundred times per day, “I resolve to want less!”? Repeating this one hundred times per day will only remind us of all that we don’t have and leave us wanting more! We cease wanting more by forgetting the “more” that we don’t have. And we forget it as we become preoccupied with him who himself is “more”; so much more, in fact, that to be possessed of him is to see the world’s trifles as just that: trifles which feed our acquisitiveness and vanity but never satisfy them.

“God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever”, says the psalmist at the end of his 73rd tract.  One thousand years later another son of Israel, born in the city of Tarsus and soon to die in the city of Rome, wrote, “For me to live is Christ; and to die can only mean more of him, for ever”.

Psalm 73 is a study in the pathology of envy, as well as a declaration of deliverance from the fatal condition.         While we have allowed the psalmist to tell us much today, however, we are going to let someone else have the last word.         The writer of the book of Proverbs says, “Contentment is a feast without end.” (Prov. 15:15 Jewish Publication Society)

 

                                                                                                    Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                     

November 2002

 

On Numbering Our Days and Getting a Heart of Wisdom

Psalm 90*,  Genesis 33:27,  Romans 2:4,  Hebrews 6:5,  2 Corinthians 6:10,  1 Corinthians 15:58

 

I: — “I’ll take you upriver for salmon fishing in the new year”, said the church elder to me in my first congregation, “if we are spared to see the spring.” Whenever this man spoke of his plans he always added something like this. He had been a lumberjack, had seen mishaps and accidents and tragedies without number, and knew perfectly well that life is always uncertain; life can never be domesticated; life is always riddled with the unforeseen and the unforeseeable; life can take a right-angled veer at any moment, even as it can end without warning.

My generation of affluent suburbanites, however, has virtually no appreciation of this. We do not admit that life is riddled with risks and accidents and surprise. There are many reasons why my generation does not. In the first place my generation has grown up with the least physical danger and the best health-care the world has seen. The lumberjack may have been crushed by a log, but the white collar office worker is merely going to sustain a paper-cut. If the paper-cut infects, one visit to the family physician will fix it. In addition, no younger or middleaged person is going to die of pneumonia today; and whereas our foreparents died of something as treatable as appendicitis, today the inflamed appendix is removed.

In the second place our society removes (out of sight, out of mind) everyone who is not a paragon of health. As a result we don’t have so much as to look at anyone who is infirm in body or mind. The paralyzed go to Lambert Lodge, the deranged to the provincial hospital, the senile go to the nursing home. What’s left in our midst are all those whom accident and misfortune, even old age have left unmolested. Whereas our foreparents greeted friends of the deceased in the family living room, we leave it all to the undertaker who manages never to pronounce the words “dead” or “death”. No wonder my generation of affluent suburbanites regards life as endlessly rosy: as rosy as it is endless.

In the third place as affluent people we unconsciously assume that we can purchase anything we need. If I need (or merely want) a two-week holiday in Hawaii, I can have it. I may have to forego leather seats on my new car in order to get to Hawaii; but still, what I need or want I can get somehow.

Because there is so much that we can control today (unlike our foreparents) we assume there is nothing that we cannot control.

At least this is what we assume until — until “it” happens. Then we react as if something utterly alien, utterly ununderstandable has descended upon us and upon us alone.

I regularly go along to the funeral home to meet with a family whose 93 year old granny has died. More often than you think someone fumes, “Why did granny have to die? She was in good health!” Yes she was. The assumption here is that if granny had been in poor health then her death would have been all right. But granny was in good health, and had been downtown shopping only yesterday. It’s not fair, I am told next, not fair at all that granny died when she was in good health — even though she was 93. Is life ever ours?

We assume today that the ease we enjoy, fostered by our affluence, is an ease we have a right to. If it ever appears that our ease might evaporate, then we scramble and scheme to make sure that our “right” stays right. When it finally must be admitted that our scrambling and scheming cannot guarantee the ease which we think is ours by right, we wail that we have been victimized. Life isn’t what it is supposed to be: obstacle-free, accident-free, risk-free, anticipatable to the last detail, and of course endless.

Before the rise of modern medicine waves of disease plucked off people of all ages in a kind of chilling lottery: smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria — and further back, plague. Then we came to feel that all of this was behind humankind forever, the lottery having been put out of commission. It seemed, according to some people, that advances in public health had even advanced the human condition: we modern folk were advanced specimens of humanity. Then came AIDS. Suddenly no sensible person could believe that the human condition had advanced at all. In fact humankind can’t even complain of being victimized blindly by a bacterium (as was the case with tuberculosis); instead we must admit that the new affliction is self-inflicted. When I overhear people talking about AIDS their agitation and anger border on panic: they know that the disease is humanly self-bestowed, and they are afraid that their fellow human beings are going to bestow it on them.

And yet there is something deeper still in us. Deeper than our apprehension that danger lurks in life is the feeling of rootlessness that we cannot get rid of. In our innermost depths we are afraid not that this misfortune or that calamity might overtake us; in our innermost depths we feel that we are transients in life. We feel that however vast the cosmos there is no corner of it we can honestly call “home”. Deep down we know that we have no fixed address. It’s not that we fear something; rather there is nothing we can seize or do or make which will let us feel that our home is here. Myself, I am convinced that our society’s preoccupation with TV, mindless amusement, sport (any distraction will do) is one more way of trying not to come to terms with the human condition.

 

II: — The psalmist is wiser than this. In stead of trying to deny the human condition (fragility, vulnerability, transitoriness), only to have the denial break down anyway, he recognizes it and owns it. Life is fleeting; our plans do fragment; we can’t fashion something permanent and impregnable in which we can then take refuge. The psalmist owns all of this, and is able to own it, just because he looks to God eternal. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations; from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” “Before the mountains were brought forth, or even you had formed the earth and world, you are God.” The human condition doesn’t find its resolution in any creaturely entity (the earth and the world); it doesn’t find its resolution even in something which appears as old and stable and immoveable as the mountains. The human condition finds its resolution in God and only in God. We cannot alter the human condition, despite our efforts to do so and our self-deception at having done so. We can only look to him who has made us for himself and therefore is himself our only dwelling place.

I am moved every time I ponder the last public address of Moses. He has endured unspeakable frustration for decades in the wilderness. His people bickered, complained, fought, fell into superstition, and railed against him as they unravelled throughout the nerve-wracking sojourn in the wilderness. Now the promised land is in sight. To be sure, the promised land is God’s gift; it is meant for their blessing. But of course, like modern affluent suburbanites, they confuse the gift with the giver himself; they think that enjoyment of the gift is a substitute for intimacy with the giver. Moses tells them on the eve of his death that not only is their ultimate dwelling place not the wilderness (they were never tempted to think this); it isn’t even the promised land (they are tempted to think this). “The eternal God is your dwelling place”, says Moses, “and underneath are the everlasting arms”.

To say that God is eternal is to say that God is qualitatively different from his creation and any aspect of it. If God were merely quantitatively different then he would merely live longer than we do. We might think that if we want to live a long time ourselves we should get on board with him. But of course it is not the case that God lives longer. God is not subject to time at all. God is eternal. Herein is our blessing, for merely adding years to the life of any of us or all of us will not alter the human condition. To be sure, over the span of 180 million years carbon and sulphur, nitrogen and hydrogen will form oil. But 180 million years will do nothing for the human condition. In God, however, we have what no time-extension will ever give us. In him we have that dwelling place which we need and crave, in view of the human condition, but which we can articulate only feebly and give to ourselves not at all.

 

III: — Because what we need most urgently and crave most profoundly is found only in God, God urge us to “turn back”. “Turn back, you mortals”. It’s a summons to repent. The summons to repent is reinforced by the psalmist’s awareness that God himself “turns us back to dust”. God does not let us forget, ultimately, that we are finite, fragile creatures. We came from dust, and to dust we shall return. We are not superhuman; we are not gods; we are not immortal; we are “frail creatures of dust”, as the hymnwriter reminds us.

How fragile are we? How transitory are we? How quickly do we pass off the scene? Three times over the psalmist tell us. We are like a leaf floating on a stream; in thirty seconds the leaf has passed downstream out of sight. We are like a dream; as soon as the sleeper awakes and gets on with the day, the dream is forgotten. We are like grass; lush and green in the morning, but after one day’s heat brown and withered by nightfall. The psalmist doesn’t keep on reminding us of our short span on earth to depress us. He wants only to render us realistic about ourselves. We aren’t here for very long, and in whatever time we are here life is uncertain.

Then the psalmist reinforces God’s summons to us to turn back, repent, by reminding us that not only is life short and uncertain, judgement awaits us inasmuch as we are sinners who have provoked God’s anger. “We are consumed by your anger”, he cries to God on behalf of all of us, “we are overwhelmed by your wrath.” To say that we are consumed by God’s anger is to say that nothing about us is exempt. And “overwhelmed”? “Overwhelmed” translates a Hebrew expression with a rich background. The Hebrew word is used of an army which is facing disaster and knows it. Suddenly its strategies, its tactics, its proud record, its confidence: they all mean nothing now. An army facing annihilation has nothing to say and nothing to do.

The same Hebrew word, “overwhelmed”, is used of Joseph’s brothers in Egypt when Joseph discloses himself to them. They had envied him, mistreated him, sold him into slavery in Egypt, lied about him to their father. Then famine came upon them. They staggered off to Egypt knowing they had to wheedle grain out of Pharaoh’s highest-ranking civil servant or they were going to starve to death. They go to Egypt confident that they can smooth-talk their way into food. They are granted a meeting with Pharaoh’s highest-ranking civil servant. Just when they think they have won the day the civil servant quietly says to them, “Do you know who I am? I’m Joseph, your brother, the one you treated shabbily and contemptuously thought you had disposed of forever. You are looking at Joseph, the one you wrote off as dead. What do you say now, fellows?” They don’t say anything. Speechless. The game is over and they know it. “Overwhelmed”.

I trust that you are overwhelmed, as I am. If you and I are overwhelmed today then we are admitting that the time of glib superficiality is over. The time of trifling with the gospel is over. The time (whatever time God’s patience and mercy permit us); the time of hearing and heeding the gospel is upon us. Jesus begins his public ministry with the declaration that in him God’s effective rule has come upon the world. Following this declaration Jesus utters the first imperative of his public ministry: repent. He is only repeating the cry of his Father 1000 years earlier, “Turn back, you mortals”. Turn back in the sense of return to the one who can be your dwelling place just because he alone is this.

Our Lord’s word is reflected faithfully in the witnesses he has gathered around him. Peter says that God delays executing judgement upon us the overwhelmed precisely to make time for us to repent, to return to him from whom all humankind has departed. Paul speaks of the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience. Then he adds, “But don’t trade on God’s kindness and forbearance and patience; don’t presume upon it. Don’t you know it is meant to lead you to repentance?”

No wonder the psalmist asks God to “teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom”. “Teach us to number our days.” It means, “Startle us with the importance of our days, since we have so few and so many of them are already behind us. Grant us to see our days in the light of your eternal truth and purpose and mercy; and grant us henceforth to walk in your light.”

I am aware of how important it is for me to number my days; especially aware every time I bury someone younger than I. I have buried dozens of people who were no older than I. And therefore I am always aware that the sermon you are hearing from me now may be the last one you will ever hear from me. Then I must not waste so much as one of the twenty minutes you allow me to magnify God’s truth and purpose and mercy in order that you may turn, return, to him.

 

IV: — As the psalmist himself turns to God he finds that his heart soars and his heart sings. He exults three times over.

In the first place he finds himself satisfied morning by morning with God’s steadfast love, with the result that he will rejoice and be glad all his days. There is no substitute for one’s own experience of God, is there. Those who have “tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the age to come”, in the words of the author of Hebrews, know with a conviction and an assurance that will never desert them. There is no substitute for our own experience of grace. The psalmist doesn’t say that believers like him are going to be rendered healthy and wealthy. He insists, rather, that every day God’s steadfast love soaks into them so thoroughly that they can taste it. Taste it even in the midst of the rigours of the human condition. Despite the rigours and rejections and dangers of their existence as apostles, Paul speaks of himself and his fellow-apostles as “having nothing, yet possessing everything; poor, yet making many rich; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

In the second place the psalmist, dwelling as he does in that dwelling place which is God, discerns manifestations of God’s own work and glory and power. The early church was aware of two especial manifestations of God’s work and glory and power. One is the raising of Jesus Christ from the dead. The other is the triumph of the gospel as Jesus Christ (whose gospel it is) quickens faith in men and women and enlarges their faith and fosters life-long love and obedience and adoration.

To have numbered our days and to have got a heart of wisdom is to have come to know that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and is therefore set forth for all the world to hear and heed; it is also to find joy in the triumph of the gospel as the life-giving Word of God penetrates even the most affluence-insulated suburbanite and leaves his neighbours perplexed.

In the third place the psalmist knows that God is going to prosper the work of the psalmist’s hands. To number our days is certainly to be aware that we don’t have many days; yet it is also to know that the few we do have will bear kingdom-fruit insofar as we are about the king’s business. While our days are few, the eternal God will render the kingdom-work of our hands eternally fruitful. Paul tells us that we are to abound in the work of the Lord, since in the Lord our work will never be in vain.

Our confidence in it all is rooted in the truth that the eternal God is our dwelling place. The human condition, after all, is unchangeable. Life is short, death is sure, the unforeseeable abounds. To wail about this is futile; to think, titanically, that we can get ourselves beyond this is foolish. We are creatures of dust whom God keeps turning back to dust precisely in order that we might get a heart of wisdom and return to him. For then his steadfast love will find us rejoicing ourselves and praising him all our days.

F I N I S

 

                                                                                            Rev. Dr. Victor A. Shepherd

2 June, 1991

On Being in Church Once More

Psalm 93

 

I: — “Never let anyone tell you about the good old days”, my 80-year old grandfather told me when I was 19, “they weren’t good.”   He knew whereof he spoke. My grandfather worked 40 years in the factory of a major Canadian automobile manufacturer, and worked both before and after the unionization of workers. He often told me what it was like to work in a factory in the days before worker organization. He never once told me of the pittance-wages in those far-off days.   He spoke instead of working conditions, such as the danger of having car engines, each weighing half a ton, passing overhead on conveyor-belts. Occasionally one fell off and crushed the man below working on the line.   A company official would snarl at the horrified men to mind their own business and keep working while the victim was shovelled out of the way, lest the line have to be shut down.  My grandfather spoke of the company’s policy of treating different workers with outrageous arbitrariness so as to keep all employees off-balance, anxious, thoroughly confused and powerless as well.

The “good old days.” I had a grade-8 teacher who fondled pubescent girls in the classroom.   To be sure, the teacher tried to be discreet about it.  He assumed that his stealth was undetected.  But of course we pubescent boys had noticed for a long time what he was up to. We sniggered about it at recess. One day a 13-year old girl in the class, upset at the teacher’s advances and humiliated as well at her public victimization, leapt out of her seat and ran to the principal’s office.  A few minutes later she was back in the room, crushed and in tears; the principal to whom she had fled for refuge had laughed at her story and dismissed her as frivolous.

I don’t think the old days were “good” old days.  Yes, I’m aware that there are 1.2 million abortions each year in the United States . I don’t think, however, that the swelling figure means that the human heart has suddenly taken a turn for the worse, even though I am dismayed at the ceaseless slaughter. I think, rather, that the abortion figures swell on account of medical technology.  In-and-out abortion appointments are now as quick and slick as routine dental appointments. More than two hundred years ago John Wesley was startled at the number of women he found aborting themselves in England, and startled again that so very often the women who did this were those he least expected to find doing it.

Of course parents are anxious when they contemplate the pitfalls that await a teenager whose carelessness or cowardice outstrips her wisdom. Yet when I was younger than a teenager I saw my parents haunted by a pitfall of a different sort: the polio of the 1950s.  People who had fallen prey to polio could readily be seen.  They hobbled among us or wheeled or “crutched” themselves, even as occasionally there was yet another horrible story of an iron lung.

No one is going to make light of AIDS, particularly when we hear of places like the nations of central Africa where children are raised in town after town by grandparents, parents everywhere having died on account of the disease. While we are thinking of disease, we should recall the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919; it killed millions more than World War I had so recently killed.  (The ’flu killed 20 million.)

“The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods have lifted up their pounding”, the psalmist cries in Psalm 93. Everywhere in scripture the flood is a symbol like other large bodies of unpredictable water: oceans, lakes, large rivers.  All of these large bodies of water symbolize heart-stopping threats to humankind. The threats can be natural disasters like earthquakes and epidemics.   The threats can be humanly engineered, like the savagery with which people war against each other.  The threats can be self-induced, as when people flirt with sin only to find that sin’s consequences sear indelibly.  The threats can arise from sources that most people can’t even comprehend, as when huge sums of capital are moved from Tokyo or New York or Hong Kong and chain reactions begin that leave some people fortuitously wealthy and others forever impoverished. The threats can also be the most private, personal matters that no one else will ever know of yet for all that are no less chilling for the person who dreads them, and dreads them for good reason.

I admit that some things are less threatening now than they used to be. Children are much less likely to die prematurely from childhood disease.  Workers are much better protected than they used to be.  At the same time, however, other matters are much more threatening. War now kills far more civilians than combatants.         Environmental disasters are far more lethal than they used to be.  Thanks to electronic wizardry propaganda can be disseminated much more widely and far more tellingly than it could heretofore.  In other words, while different “floods” “pound” in different eras, the psalmist’s cry is never out of date: “The floods have lifted up their voice, O Lord; the floods lift up their pounding.” Our Israelite foreparents in faith were acquainted with the world’s tumult.         The human condition is just that: the human condition.

 

II: — In the midst of it all an Israelite mysteriously gifted with an experience of God more intense than his experience of the world’s tumult; an Israelite mysteriously gifted with a vision of God more intimate than the spectacle of his people’s pain; an Israelite mysteriously gifted with a Spirit-intimacy more immediate than all the immediacies that clamour in him as surely as they clamour in everyone else; in the midst of it all an Israelite who knows he’s been kissed by God cries from his heart, “The Lord reigns; God reigns.”   The psalmist isn’t a human freak; he doesn’t live above the poundings without and the palpitations within that no one else can get above. And since he’s part of the community of God’s people he’s affected as much as anyone else when that community stumbles or sins or bleeds from self-inflicted wounds, or manages to disgrace itself yet again.  Nevertheless it has been vouchsafed to him to stand up and declare, “The Lord reigns! God reigns!” He shouts his declaration just because he’s been seized with a heart-seizure he could never deny and would never want to.  “The Lord reigns; he is robed with majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength.” With his heightened seeing, the psalmist sees God robed, robed splendidly. To be robed, in scripture, is to possess authority.  To be robed in majesty is to have one’s authority made luminous with royal splendour. God looms up before the psalmist as sovereign; not idly sovereign (Queen Elizabeth being a mere figurehead, all power vested in parliament) but actually sovereign; and all of this shot through with splendour.         To be brought before the One who is robed in majesty is to be drawn to his authority on account of its splendour and to submit to the splendour on account of its authority.

And yet the psalmist sees even more.  He sees God “girded with strength.”   To be girded is to have one’s legs unencumbered by one’s cloak. When ancient people “girded their loins” they reached down between their legs, drew up their cloak by the hem and tucked it into their belt.  People “girded” themselves when they were about to flee, fight or work. Because God has promised never to forsake us, he won’t flee from us.  Yet since he is girded he will both fight for us and work for us.  And since he is girded “with strength” he will fight and work for us victoriously.

Now the psalmist exults, “Thy throne is established from of old; thou art from everlasting.” At the same time the psalmist declares that the world is established. How can the world be “established” when the world is precisely what is being pounded relentlessly? How can the world be “established” when chaos threatens the world at every moment? The key to understanding the psalmist is his insistence that God’s throne is established “from of old.” God’s throne is established “from of old” whereas the world is really very recent. Because God’s throne is established “from of old” the relatively recent world can never sink all the way down to chaos.  To say “from of old” is a Hebraic way of saying “from the creation.” However much chaos may appear to threaten, creation can no more be undone, ultimately, than the Creator himself be undone.  The fact that God’s throne is established, and established from of old, will always guarantee that the world is established.  However turbulent the world, however evil successive generations may be, one generation’s evil won’t be piled on another generation’s evil until evil accumulates to the point where the world is nothing but evil. This can’t happen.

At the same time the psalmist is realistic.  While evil won’t accumulate until the world is nothing but evil (and therefore humanly uninhabitable), evil and treachery, turbulence and tumult continue to afflict the world.

In Psalm 93 the psalmist refers repeatedly to the “floods.”   Any large body of riotous water is a biblical symbol for massive threat. Ocean, river, lake, flood: they all refer to threat, threat from any quarter in life, threat that aims at engulfing life.

There are always threats from natural disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics. There are the threats that political leaders engineer: war, discrimination, harassment. There are threats that money-managers pose: how many people helplessly lost their savings when the head of Royal Trust invested hugely in useless vehicles and Royal Trust stock bottomed out?   And of course there are threats of a personal, private nature: crushing disappointment, shocking betrayal, powerlessness in the face of relentless disease and unstoppable death.

Robert Coles, the paediatric psychiatrist at Harvard who continues to wonder why so many clergy are foolishly infatuated with psychiatry while disdaining their clergy-work as spiritual helpers; Coles tells of a medical school classmate, now middle-aged like Coles himself, who found himself a patient in one of Boston’s major hospitals. The MD-patient was incurably ill (and knew himself incurably ill) but not near death at that moment. A hospital chaplain (clergyman) entered his room to see him and began asking him how he “felt” about the diagnosis of his disease, how he “felt” about its prognosis, how he planned to “handle” it all.  The sick physician (he was Roman Catholic) was annoyed at the chaplain’s aping a psychiatrist. He cut off the amateurish questioning by picking up his bedside bible, handing it the chaplain and fuming, “Read to me from it; read to me from anywhere at all.” Startled, the chaplain opened the bible anywhere at all.  Since the book of psalms is in the middle of the bible, any bible opened at random will more likely open at the psalms than anywhere else.  This time it fell open at Psalm 69: “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.” (Ps.69: 1-2)   All of us can be – are – faced with floods of any sort from any quarter at any time.

Yet the psalmist continues to cry in Psalm 93, “Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty.” The psalmist knows that God’s throne is indeed established from of old.

 

III: — My own heart resonates with the psalmist’s. He lived 2500 or even 3000 years before I was born. Yet by the grace of God I am one with him in experience and conviction. Needless to say I’m not alone in this. There is no end of people who have read Psalm 93 only to exclaim, “It’s true! I know it’s true. The Lord reigns, clothed in majesty. His throne, everlasting, is never threatened by floods of any sort; and because he isn’t threatened by floods of any sort, neither am I.”  I have met scores of people whose deep-down conviction is just this. Many of them couldn’t articulate it in the words I’ve used.  But no matter. What counts is being possessed of the truth, regardless of whether the right words or no words are at one’s tongue-tip.  Useless, on the other hand, is being able to finesse religious vocabulary while enjoying nothing of that to which the words point.  The apostle Paul warns young Timothy about those who “hold the form of religion but deny the power of it.” (2. Tim. 3:5)  He reminds the congregation in Corinth that “the kingdom of God consists not in talk but in power.” (1 Cor. 4:20)   Please don’t think that you suffer from any disadvantage in not having my verbal dexterity or my theological vocabulary.  The people whom Paul regards as dangerous to Timothy and dangerous to the Christians in Corinth are precisely those who possess both verbal dexterity and a theological vocabulary. The psalmist didn’t cry out as he did because he was a clever wordsmith; he cried out as he did inasmuch as he had caught a vision of the immensity of God and the grandeur of God and the glory of God and the truth of God.  The psalmist cried out inasmuch as he found himself engulfed in the presence of God. But unless we are to be spectators merely overhearing the psalmist and envying his experience, we must come to be possessed of the same heart-surge ourselves.

How? It’s important for us to understand where the psalmist was when he was engulfed and overwhelmed. He was in the temple, at worship, moving through the same old exercises of the same old service as the same old speaker droned on – when it happened.  What happened?   There was stamped on him as never before what was profoundly beautiful about the place of worship: God’s holiness.  “Holiness is the beauty of your temple.”, he cried to God.

Have you ever asked yourself what is most beautiful about the sanctuary of Schomberg Presbyterian Church?         Some might say the deep-dyed carpet, others the highly polished ash pews, others still the overall harmony of all the features of the sanctuary. All of these are beautiful. Yet the profoundest beauty of this room is God’s holiness.         God’s holiness is God’s own Godness; God is utterly distinct from his creation, and not identified with any part of it or aspect of it. God’s holiness also means that God’s character is without defect or deficiency.  His love is free from sentimentality; his anger is free from ill temper; his judgement is free from arbitrariness; his patience is free from indifference; his sovereignty is free from tyranny.  God’s holiness also means that all the aspects of God’s character just mentioned are gathered up into a unity.  Just as every shade of the spectrum from infrared to ultra-violet is gathered up into what we call “light”, so every dimension of God’s character and God’s transcendence is gathered up into God’s holiness. And this is what seized the psalmist one Sunday at worship.  It happened when he was in church.         Isn’t that reason enough for us all to keep coming to church week by week?

 

IV: — Possessed now of that worship-induced experience of God that is stamped indelibly upon him, the psalmist exclaims, “Your decrees are very sure.”  He means he’s now convinced that God’s truth is unalterable.

We haven’t time this morning to explore what this means for every aspect of God’s truth. Nevertheless there is one aspect of God’s truth we should linger over.   We mentioned it when we heard the psalmist say that God is “girded with strength.” We saw at that time what it meant for God to be girded: he will always fight for us and work for us. At the same time, the apostles insist repeatedly that we, Christ’s people, must be girded ourselves. We too must “gird up our loins”; that is, we too must take up the struggle and the work to which God has appointed us.  Jesus tells us we must have “our loins girded and our lamps burning” (Luke 12:37 ): we must be alert and watchful and ready to do what he summons us to do at the moment of his summons. Peter tells us we are to “gird up our minds (1 Peter 1:13 ); there is an intellectual rigour, a tough-mindedness, that must accompany the conviction and experience of the heart.         Paul tells us we are to “gird our loins with truth” (Eph.6:14); whatever we do in the name of Jesus Christ and for his sake must always be done in truth and transparency and sincerity, never in duplicity or deception or phoniness.

How important is it to come to church and keep coming in expectation of the psalmist’s situation becoming ours?  It’s crucially important, not the least because until the psalmist’s situation becomes ours we shan’t have in our bloodstream the conviction that God reigns, despite the raging of the floods within and without; we shan’t know unarguably that the world is established and can never spiral all the way down to life-choking chaos. And not least, until the psalmist’s situation becomes ours we shan’t know that God is girded with strength, and that because he will always fight and work for us, unwearied work and unstinting struggle are also required of us.

On the eve of his greatest struggle and greatest work, for us, our Lord Jesus Christ girded himself with a towel, we are told. (John 13:4) It was a sign of his humility. Our humility is to reflect his – including that humility which found him at worship, in church on the Sabbath, says Luke, “as his custom was.” (Luke 4:16)   Our Lord knew that God’s holiness is the church sanctuary’s profoundest beauty. What seized the psalmist seized our Lord ever so much more intently.  May it seize you and me alike as we are at worship, in church today, and every Sunday too.
                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                      

September 2005

 

The Righteous Will Never Be Moved

Psalm 112:6

 

I: — There is no rigidity like the rigidity of the self-righteous.   There is no closed-mindedness like the closed-mindedness of the holier-than-most. There is no inflexibility like the inflexibility of those who are right, obviously right, always right. Is this the sort of thing the psalmist was talking about when he wrote, “The righteous will never be moved”?   We know that rigid, intransigent, closed-minded people have always claimed such texts for themselves when eager to trumpet their rigidity as virtuous.

Only a few years ago when the obscenity of apartheid was still operative in South Africa , a baby was found abandoned in a South African city.   Much consternation arose over whether the baby was black, coloured, Asian or white. The consternation arose inasmuch as whether the child were black, coloured, Asian or white would determine forever where the child could live, what schools it could attend, what its social and financial prospects were, and of course, whom it could marry.  The white racists who upheld Apartheid were utterly inflexible.  They were right; they were righteous; and their rigidity was virtuous. (Apartheid, we need scarcely add, didn’t disappear because the self-righteous repented; it disappeared through its own top-heaviness, the impossibility of maintaining it in the face of world opinion and international economics and other such external pressures.)

We might as well add that the rigidity born of self-righteousness is commonly viewed (at least by those who cling to it) as strength, whereas in fact such rigidity is weakness related to fear, unmanageable fear.

 

II: — When the psalmist writes, “The righteous will never be moved”, he has in mind something entirely different from the rigidity of the self-righteous and the fearful. He has in mind, rather, the simple truth that the assaults upon life from without and the irruptions of life from within will never crumble or fragment God’s people. To be sure, developments can always jar and jerk God’s people, can always wound them and pain them. Still, such developments won’t ultimately pulverise them before God, annihilate them before God, turn them into nobodies lost to themselves and scattered before him. The psalmist’s word here is a word of promise,God’s promise: his people won’t be blown away before him.  It’s also a word of defiance, our defiance: we aren’t going to look upon ourselves as hapless, helpless victims whose run-over remains are all that’s left of what used to be that “self” whom we knew and cherished before we were “clobbered” as we had never been “clobbered” before.  The psalmist’s pronouncement is promise on God’s part and defiance on ours.

Both God’s promise and our defiance are much needed in life, because ever so much befalls us from without and rises up from within, ever so much that appears to fragment us and frequently disorients us.  In the course of my life I’ve been hospitalised several times in hospitals from the very large to the very small.  The smallest had only 19 beds and therefore a small nursing staff. It also happened to be where I was hospitalised longest (35 days) and therefore where I came to know the nursing staff best. The nurses from all three shifts used to come into my room on medical business, to be sure, but then linger frequently to speak with me on non-medical matters.  I was startled at the jolts these people had endured.  One nurse, whose husband had been burned to death in a house fire, was phoned at the nursing station each evening by her son who was fleeing the police. Her son was wanted for child molesting. Sitting beside her, overhearing half the telephone conversation, was another nurse whose husband was a police officer searching for the fellow.  A third nurse, born and raised in Germany , told me she had been in Berlin at the end of the war when Russian troops arrived in the city.  The Russian soldiers, she said in her awkwardly accented English, had “rapped” all the German young women they could get their hands on, “rapping” her as well. In addition she had had to watch her father tortured, her father being made to stand in waist-deep, ice-cold water for hours on end.  Just after I was transferred to a Toronto hospital another nurse’s husband was killed in an industrial explosion. All this in the nursing staff of a 19-bed hospital.

These women knew I was badly injured; yet they also knew I was preparing for the ministry. Setting aside professional protocol for the moment they would speak to me and then pause, with a look in their eyes that meant, “What can you say to us from your perspective and out of your resources? Have we been blown apart and are too numb to know it?  Do the secret or not-so-secret shards of our life mean we are in fact as maimed as we appear, that our future under God is as bleak as our past at the hands of the world?”  I trust I was wise enough to speak only briefly, and with whatever sensitivity I could muster at age 23.  Centuries earlier a wiser person than I had said, “The righteous will never be moved.”

I have found that the most telling aspect of life’s blows isn’t the pain; it’s the disorientation, the confusion that accompanies the pain. Disorientation and confusion are much more difficult to endure than pain.  What’s more, just as we all have a different pain threshold, so we all have a different disorientation threshold.  And therefore it’s cruel to say of someone, “What befell her shouldn’t have knocked her askew.  After all, I sustained a greater blow myself and I didn’t become unglued.” It’s always cruel to suggest that someone who doesn’t match us in some respect, in any respect, is therefore weak or silly or (worst of all) an inferior Christian.

Pronounced disorientation is often found where pain is only slight. And in artificial circumstances (such as the midway at the Canadian National Exhibition) disorientation can occur where there’s no pain at all.  At some point you must have put down your money and walked into one of those CNE adventures where the floor is tilted, the ceiling is tilted, and the walls don’t meet either the floor or the ceiling at right-angles. The room isn’t even moving, yet in a few seconds your tummy is upset and you are disoriented. If it weren’t for the posted signs indicating the way out, after a few minutes you wouldn’t be able to find your way out.  Situations occur in life where the trusted shapes and configurations in life (the “right” angles) can’t be found and nothing seems to fit and tummies are queasy and disorientation is undeniable. The situations that do this to people may appear quite modest to those of us who aren’t afflicted at this moment.  Still, it’s utterly unhelpful – and worse than unhelpful – to say to someone caught up in such a development, “Compared to the ‘clobbering’ some people endure you have merely been caressed.”

As often as I remind myself that however much we can anticipate developments in our head we can never anticipate them in our heart; however much we can reason about a development not yet upon us we can’t know how we are going to react; however often I remind myself of this I nonetheless find myself trying to imagine, for instance, what it’s like to be unemployed. What’s it like to find one’s family in financial jeopardy? to have huge tracts of time on one’s hands? to have so little to do as not even to distract oneself from the anxiety that nibbles and gnaws relentlessly? to live in a society that measures self-worth by achievement only to have nothing, in the area of gainful employment, to achieve?  What’s it like to be embarrassed every day, as when someone trying to be helpful cheerfully says, “Why don’t you and your wife come to Stratford with us for the evening?”, and you have to mumble, with head hung low, “We don’t have money for Shakespeare”?

Up to this point the upsets mentioned today are those that befall us. Every bit as jarring, perhaps even more distressing, are those we bring upon ourselves.  To take a “spill” born of sin is still a “spill”, as jarring and wounding as any accidental disruption.  Self-disgust arising from it is all the more nauseating as we admit that there’s no excuse for the “spill.”  Disorientation arising from it is all the more pronounced as we admit that there’s no reason for the “spill.”   No reason? I learned a long time ago never to ask people why they did what they have done, just because they don’t know why.  Kierkegaard, always profound, pithily remarks, “Anyone who claims to understand sin has plainly never experienced it.”

 

III: — Then whether we are violated from without or from within we need to hear again our ancient friend who has been where we are and knows that the righteous are never going to be moved.  We aren’t going to be scattered before God and reduced to nothing in ourselves regardless of how we feel or how we appear.

But who are these righteous who will never be moved?  Not the self-righteous, not those who presume upon a superiority anywhere in life, whether that superiority be real or imagined.  The righteous are simply those who are rooted in Jesus Christ. The righteous are rightly rooted in him in

that he is the right one in whom we are to be rooted. Our Lord was jarred and jolted too, disoriented as well in Gethsemane in a way that you and I can’t fully comprehend. Yet in his resurrection he has been established, set before us as the one in whom the topsy-turvy lives of his people are ultimately settled and secured. Even when the way our life unfolds appears to contradict this; even when we are left feeling that the psalmist’s pronouncement and our Lord’s Easter victory are alike so very remote from us as not to affect us; even here truth remains truth: the righteous, those rightly rooted in the righteous one himself, are never going to be moved.

The apostle Paul tells us of his assorted hardships: shipwrecks, beatings, slander, danger from exposure, hunger and thirst.  It all sounds dreadful, and it was. Yet in his second Corinthian letter he admits that something worse befell him in Asia , something so horrible he can’t describe it and can barely bring himself to mention it. He writes, “In Asia we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. We felt we had received the sentence of death.”   And the result? He tells us that this crushing episode reacquainted him with the fact that his own resources were utterly inadequate and he could only rely “on God who raises the dead.” (2 Cor. 1:8-9)

The question we want to put to the apostle now is, “But when you have been hammered into the ground so as to be crushed, what does it mean to rely on the God who raises the dead?” For the answer to our question we must turn up his letter to the congregation in Colosse, where he writes, “Your life is hid with Christ in God.”   (Col. 3:3) We must be sure to grasp the nuances of his conviction.   To rely on the God who raises the dead is to rely on the God who has raised his Son. In view of the fact that Jesus Christ has been raised and can no longer be victimised by death and by death’s anticipations (sickness, despair, accident, violation, mental collapse); in view of the fact that Jesus Christ has been raised beyond the reach of death and death’s forerunners, our real life, our true life, our inviolable life is hidden in Christ; and because it’s hidden in Christ, it’s known to God inasmuch as God knows his own Son and all who are included in the Son.

Our real life isn’t what we see; our real life isn’t what we’d like to believe about ourselves; our real life isn’t what we are feeling at this moment or at any moment; neither is it what others perceive us to be.  Our real life, rather, is our innermost identity, forged firmly by the grip with which Christ our Lord grips us, maintained inviolably in the strength of his grip on us, and preserved eternally in that all of this is now fixed in the heart of the God who raised his Son, never to abandon him. Who we are most profoundly is hidden in the heart of God; but not merely hidden in the heart of God, for from time-to-time we are permitted to see it for ourselves, and one day it will be displayed for all to see and understand. Our life is hid with Christ in God.

Martin Luther clung to this text as he clung to few others.  In fact it was his favourite.  So very turbulent was his life, so unremittingly was he assailed with misunderstanding, slander, betrayal, attempts on his life, that he clung to the truth that his real life was hid with Christ in God.  When he recovered the biblical truth of justification by faith he was denounced; when he unfolded the logic of the gospel and European Christendom convulsed, he wondered if he had acted rightly in causing such a disruption; when contemporaries like Erasmus, intellectually brilliant but spiritually shallow, laughed at abuses in the church and remained content with laughing, Luther clung to this one text like a lifeline: “Your life is hid with Christ in God.”   When erstwhile supporters deserted him and dark voices within him caused him to doubt himself; when his 14 year old daughter Magdalena died in his arms and 18 month old Elizabeth died in her cradle he could only hang on to his lifeline even if in his distress he could barely croak the words.

During World War II it was noted that pilot trainees rarely became airsick while navigator trainees often did.         The reason was this. The navigator was bent over a map only two feet in front of his face.  As turbulent air bounced the airplane the jostling kept changing the navigator’s perspective on the map and his focus on the map.  Because of a perspective and a focus that changed ceaselessly on account of turbulence, the navigator was dizzy and nauseated in no time.  The pilot, of course, was in the same airplane and buffeted by the same turbulence. But the pilot was always looking out toward the horizon.  Therefore the pilot’s perspective and focus were constant.  The fact that he was looking away from himself and his immediate environment, looking out toward something constant; this stabilised him.

The author of the book of Hebrews urges us to do as much.  We are to have “our eyes fixed on Jesus, the source and goal of our faith.” (Heb. 12:2, J.B. Phillips)   The author of Hebrews urges us to have our eyes fixed on Jesus in the context of the photo-gallery of the great men and women of faith: Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Samson, David.  He exhibits the photo-gallery so that we can look at these giants from time-to-time and find encouragement in them.         But however often we may glance at them, we are not to fix our gaze on them. Since we are rooted in Christ it only makes sense to have “our eyes fixed on Jesus, the source and goal of our faith.”  Since the righteous are rooted in him it only makes sense to have our eyes fixed on him in the midst of life’s explosions and irruptions.

The God who knows his own Son and knows all those included in him; this God Isaiah speaks of as “the rock of our refuge.” (Isaiah 17:10) The righteous are indeed “fastened to the rock which cannot move”; they are “grounded firm and deep in the Saviour’s love”.  This is why the righteous will never be moved.

                                 Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                             

December 2006

 

You Asked For A Sermon On Psalm 119: The Law of God: Sweeter Than Honey

Psalm 119

 

“She’s a legalist, you know, a legalist!” What comes to mind when we hear someone described like this? Most likely we think of someone who is always found with a rulebook of some sort in her hand, which rulebook she peers into in order to handle developments old and new in her life, the rules looming larger for her than any human suffering or human complexity.

“What’s wrong with this?”, someone asks, “If a legalistic approach to life gets her through stresses and strains that would otherwise submerge her; if a legalistic approach helps her cope where she would otherwise collapse, isn’t it preferable to having her break down?” The argument isn’t without point: none of us wants to see someone break down.

“Furthermore”, our questioner continues, “what you call ‘legalism’ has kept many people on the ‘straight and narrow’ morally. Would it be preferable for someone to wander off the straight and narrow into moral swamps and quicksands?” The argument isn’t without point: none of us wants to see someone plunge herself into moral disaster.

Nonetheless, when scripture speaks against legalism scripture is correct: legalism ultimately shrivels our hearts and corrupts our spirits. The gospel repudiates legalism for several reasons. Most importantly, legalism means that our entire life is oriented to an “ism” instead of to Jesus Christ. In other words, if we are legalists we are “ism-ists” where we should be Christians, oriented to our Lord himself. In the second place, legalism is to be repudiated in that while it initially seems helpful to us, it always ends up making us disdainful of others. As soon as we measure our life against a rulebook we invariably come to regard as inferior those who don’t measure up, don’t measure up the way we do, or who even have a rulebook that differs from ours, a rulebook manifestly inferior to ours. In the third place, legalism falls short in that no rulebook covers all the situations and developments that life brings before us. More rules have to be invented to fill the gaps, and then more still, until the humanness of human existence is crushed by the weight of regulation upon regulation.

I: — And yet in all of this we must never confuse legalism with the law of God. Scripture condemns legalism; scripture just as surely upholds the law of God. Legalism is a denial of living faith in Jesus Christ; honouring the law of God is part and parcel of living faith in Jesus Christ.

Our foreparent in faith, the psalmist, doesn’t confuse the two. The psalmist never finds the law of God orienting him away from the heart-throb of God himself. He never finds the law of God rendering him snobbishly disdainful or fatally crushed. On the contrary, the psalmist finds the law of God life-giving; it yields blessing, riches, joy. So far from shrivelling our humanness, the law of God expands our humanness. Listen to him (or her) in Psalm 119: “I will delight in thy statutes…I love thy commandments…My soul is consumed with longing for thy ordinances.” For the psalmist, plainly, the law of God has nothing to do with legalism. Not surprisingly he exclaims (Psalm 19) that the law of God is “sweeter than honey”. Psalm 119 happens to be the longest chapter in the entire bible: 176 verses. It is a sustained paean of praise to God for his law.

The church today urgently needs to recover the conviction that the law of God is sweeter than honey. How are we going to do this? The psalmist himself gives us a clue when he writes, “I will run in the way of thy commandments when Thou enlargest my understanding”, and then writes two verses later, “Give me understanding that I may keep thy law and observe it with my whole heart.” It is only as we profoundly understand the law of God that we are going to find it sweeter than honey, and only as we find it sweeter than honey that we are going to delight in it.

Since we are Christians it is crucial that we understand how the law of God is related to Jesus Christ. To do this we need a brief lesson in theology. In reading through 1st Corinthians (chapt.10) you must have noticed Paul saying that when the Israelites were in the wilderness they were sustained by Christ. Sustained by him? He wasn’t to be born for another 1200 years. Nonetheless, it’s the apostle’s conviction that what Jesus Christ is to God’s people after Christ’s appearance among us he was to God’s people before his appearance among us. The sixteenth century Protestant Reformers, reading Paul closely, underlined this truth. No one underlined it with heavier pencil than John Calvin. Calvin insisted tirelessly that Jesus Christ, the one and only Mediator, in his sin-bearing capacity and also in his disciple-making capacity was present to the Israelites as surely as he is present to you and me. Calvin insisted that Jesus Christ was present to Abraham, Deborah and the psalmist; present to our ancestors in faith under the economy of the Torah. When believing Israelites heard and heeded Torah (what we call the law of God), they were receiving the same Christ, the one Mediator, that Peter, James and John received.

Jesus Christ is given to Israel under the economy of the Torah. The Torah is the revelation of God, including God’s claim upon us. It all adds up to this: the law of God (so dear to the psalmist) is the call of Jesus Christ to us, calling us to be his disciples. He calls us to himself and soaks us in his pardoning mercy; he also seizes us and holds us fast in order that we might learn of him. Discipleship, after all, entails discipline. He disciples us, disciplines us, as he places his yoke upon us, all the while reminding us that his yoke is easy and his burden light. Yoke is a common Hebrew metaphor for obedience to the Torah. Jesus Christ insists that he is the Torah of God. In shouldering his yoke we bind ourselves to him to learn of him and obey him as surely as our Israelite foreparents bound themselves to the Torah; better, as surely as our Israelite foreparents bound themselves to the one who was given them under the economy of the Torah.

In other words, it ought not to surprise us that the psalmist finds delight and joy and satisfaction in the law of God. Isn’t this what we find in Jesus?

To honour the law of God is to become Christ’s disciple. To become his disciple is to have him shape our lives. Now to have Jesus Christ shape our lives (as surely as the law of God shaped the psalmist’s) is to avoid the shapelessness of a blob. A blob is certainly shapeless; it’s also useless and unattractive. Not to take Christ’s yoke upon us is to remain shapeless, a blob.

At the same time, if we happen to have a “flighty” personality then our shapelessness is like a gas. A gas has no shape of itself; it takes on the shape of its container. As soon as you change the shape of the container, the gas takes on a different shape. The same thing happens with people: lacking shape in themselves, they take on the shape of their environment.

Think of the developments which unfold before us every day: pressures, challenges, temptations, opportunities. As these unfold before us some people are inert blobs: they do nothing. Others, the flighty ones, react like gasses: they take on the shape of their environment. But we who belong to Jesus Christ are going to be neither shapeless nor environment-shaped. We are going to be shaped by the master himself. We have taken his yoke upon us. We have found his yoke to ease us, the weight of it no burden at all. As his disciples we know that to love him is to love the shape he gives our lives. To love the shape he gives us is simply to love that law which the psalmist loved 3000 years ago. Loving our Lord, we don’t want to be blobs or gasses. We want only to be those men and women in whose lives the shape of Christ’s life is recognizable just because in us it is being replicated.

The psalmist wrote, “I will run in the way of thy commandments when Thou enlargest my understanding.” Centuries later Jesus called out, “Come quickly and follow me now!” Centuries later still you and I are those whose understanding God has enlarged, even as we are those whom Christ has called to himself. Simply put, we know what the psalmist means when he extols the law of God in the single longest chapter of the entire bible; we know too why the law of God delights him like nothing else. After all, who delights us more than Jesus?

II: — We should look now at the shapely contours we acquire as disciples of Jesus. We could look at such aspects of our shapeliness, such aspects of the law of God, as the Ten Commandments. But this morning I think we should look at some less familiar contours that we are prone to overlook; for instance, our Lord’s oft-repeated command, “Take heart; be of good cheer; take courage!” It is a command, not a suggestion; a command, not a counsel. Many times in the written gospels Jesus says, “Take heart; be of good cheer!” Cheerfulness, courage, the affirmation of life in the midst of relentless deadliness — it’s part of the shape that our Lord wills for all his disciples.

To be sure we are never without eversomuch deadliness: disappointment, loss, grief, shock, and the worst form of deadliness, betrayal. Yet in the midst of it all Jesus says, “I am here; I am resurrection and life; I have triumphed already and will shortly display my triumph. So you take heart!”

Our Lord says this over and over throughout his public ministry. Plainly it’s a major aspect of the shape he intends to impart to his people. It’s a major dimension of the law of God. Jesus says it to a man he has pardoned. Only because we are sinners do we need to be pardoned. But to know ourselves sinners isn’t to wallow; it isn’t to languish; it isn’t perversely to try to make ourselves feel better by first making ourselves feel worse. To know ourselves sinners in the presence of Jesus Christ is to know ourselves pardoned. We honour him as and only as we take heart and rejoice in our pardon.

Our Lord speaks the same word to a desperate woman in a crowd. This woman lacks verbal sophistication and theological subtlety and social acceptability, yet she knows if she can only touch him, simply make contact with him, she will be helped.

Our Lord speaks the same word to a group of frightened disciples who stare at the storm surrounding them until they are near-paralyzed. He doesn’t tell terrified disciples, “It’s nothing.” He doesn’t tell them that things aren’t as bad as they appear. He doesn’t tell them to paste on an imitation cheerfulness in order to appear composed in public. He insists, rather, that because he is resurrection and life, the victorious one, they can take heart, and they must.

Another dimension to the law of God, another contour to the shape that Jesus Christ imparts to his people, is articulated this time by the apostle Paul: “Keep on taking your wife in holiness and honour, not in the passion of lust like the heathen who do not know God.” (When did you last hear a sermon on this text, “Keep on taking your wife in holiness and honour, not in the passion of lust like the heathen who do not know God”?) It isn’t a putdown of libido and vigorous sexual activity in marriage. As a matter of fact when Paul came upon some Christian couples in Corinth (Gentiles, be it noted, who had not yet been to school in Israel) who thought they’d be godlier people if they abstained from intercourse, he told them they were silly, misguided and courting disaster. His one concession to them (in a situation where he didn’t want to make any concession at all) was that they could refrain from intercourse while they prayed together as long as praying together didn’t take more than ten minutes.) When the apostle urges us to continue to take our spouse in holiness and honour he means that Christians are never permitted to regard their spouse as their tool or instrument or possession. Just because my wife is wife and not servant or employee or implement or robot I must continue to cherish her, court her, woo her, esteem her. I am never permitted to take for granted or exploit or presume upon the personhood of the one person who is legally bound to me. We must always keep in mind the Greek Gentile world that forms the context of Paul’s ministry. Even so fine a Greek philosopher as Aristotle had said that a slave (whom Paul regarded as a human being equal with any free person) was no more than a tool that had to be fed, while a woman was a bizarre creature half-way between an animal and a man. Christians are to be known by the way they continue to honour, esteem and cherish their spouse.

Another contour: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” It’s easy to weep with those who weep. Only the most hardened person is so inured to human distress that he would fail to weep with those who are weeping. But to rejoice with those who rejoice is a different matter. When someone suddenly rejoices we know that extraordinary good fortune has overtaken him. His “ship has come in”. A windfall has befallen him. Something unexpected has magnified his elation a hundred times. It’s difficult to rejoice with such a person just because it’s easy to envy him. We never envy the grief-stricken or the ill or the unfortunate, and therefore we find it easy to weep with them. But we are prone to envy the rejoicing, and therefore we find it difficult to rejoice with them. It takes grace to rejoice with those who rejoice. It takes grace to rejoice in their rejoicing. Yet since our Lord’s burden is light, since his yoke is easy, we are never without the grace to do just this.

Three thousand years ago the psalmist exclaimed, “I love thy law”. Of course he did. Not having heard of Jesus Christ, he was yet visited by our Lord under the economy of the Torah, God’s law. It was as fitting for him to love God’s law as it is fitting for you and me to love God’s son, since the son of God, Jesus Christ, is Torah incarnate. Three millennia ago the psalmist knew that the law of God is a yoke that fits well, a burden so light as to be no more burden than wings are a burden to a bird or fins a burden to a fish.

III: — There is one final point we must mention today: our Israelite foreparents in faith insisted that the law of God is the key that unlocks the door to freedom. The psalmist wrote, “I shall walk at liberty, for I have sought thy precepts.” Most people think that the law of God cramps freedom, curtails freedom. They think this, of course, because they think that the law of God has to do with legalism, when in fact the law of God has to do with the most intimate relationship to God himself.

Centuries ago some oafs in a mediaeval village ridiculed a rabbi for his people’s preoccupation with Torah. They likened Torah to a large body of water: cold, murky, unappealing. Whereupon the rabbi told them that Torah is indeed like water: Torah is to the Jew what water is to the fish. It’s the only place the fish can thrive. Does any fish feel better for being out of the water? Does a fish look happier when out of the water? Is a fish profoundly free when it’s “free” of the water? The law of God is the natural habitat of God’s people; it’s where God’s people thrive.

The world at large thinks freedom to be the opportunity of doing anything at all. This isn’t freedom; this is the leading edge of bondage. Freedom, rather, is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord with our true nature. Think of a car engine. A malicious person has put sugar in the car’s fuel tank. Now the engine is clogged, and it won’t run. As the gummy “goo”, the impediment, is removed the engine is freed to run; that is, it is freed to act in accord with its true nature, propel the car. If someone remarks, “But is the engine free to make popcorn?”, the obvious reply is, “Don’t be silly: it isn’t a car engine’s nature to make popcorn. An engine is intended to propel a car. And now it is free to do just that.”

When we come to discuss what it is for human beings to be free the first matter we must be clear on is, “What is our true nature? Since freedom is the removal of any impediment to our acting in accord with our true nature, what is that nature?” What is the impediment? Who removes it?

It is our true nature to be and remain a child of God by faith. The impediment is the arch-sin of unbelief. Jesus Christ removes it as he surges over us in his truth and quickens by his grace that faith within us that we must now exercise ourselves. One aspect of the faith we now exercise is the obedience we owe him. To speak of the obedience we owe him is to speak of the law of God. Is it unfreeing to obey? Is it more freeing to have one’s life overtaken by bondage? Would the fish be better, feel better, appear better if it were “unencumbered” by water?

Ancient rabbis used to say, “When Torah entered the world, freedom entered the world.” Our Hasidic Jewish friends, known for their long black coats and their black hats and their untrimmed earlocks and their women with kerchiefs on their head and their large families; our Hasidic friends dance every Sabbath night in their ecstasy at God’s giving the Torah.

Jesus Christ is Torah incarnate. We his people rejoice at the freedom he has given us to be his people, the freedom to act in accord with our true nature. We know that his claim upon our obedience, so far from being irksome, is lifegiving. If we ever doubt this all we need do is glance at the living death of those who disdain his claim. One sidelong glance and we can’t wait to exclaim once more with the psalmist,

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;

The ordinances of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

More are they to be desired than gold, even much fine gold;

sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.

(Psalm 19)

To know Jesus is to love him; to love him is to find his yoke easy and his burden light. It is to find obedience a privilege. It all adds up to something an ancient believer knew long before any of us were born: the law of God is sweeter than honey.

Victor Shepherd    

November 2002

 

 

 

God Our Keeper

Psalm 121

 

I: —  Mountains are beautiful: majestic, imposing, seemingly immoveable.  Therefore it’s easy to assume we know what the psalmist means when he cries, “I lift up my eyes to the hills.”  Actually, he doesn’t mean what we think he means, since mountains were ambivalent for the Israelite people: majestic and imposing to be sure, yet also a source of danger.  After all, outlaws and cutthroats hid in the mountains and swept down out of the hills to harm travellers.         The mountains themselves were treacherous for travellers, riddled as they were with gorges and precipices and wild animals.  We modern folk like to imagine mountains (indeed, all of nature) as relief from burnout and source of refreshment.  Our Israelite foreparents knew better; they knew that while the mountains seem attractive as a place of refreshment and help, they are also the place of grave threat. In Psalm 11 the psalmist is tempted to “flee like a bird to the mountains”, tempted to “get away from it all”, as we like to say. But the psalmist knows that not even the birds are safe in the mountains: food is exceedingly scarce among rocks, and predators abound.  For this reason as soon as the psalmist looks at the distant hills and asks, “From whence does my help come?” he answers, “My help comes from the Lord, from Yahweh.”   Ultimately help doesn’t come from the mountains, from nature; help, the profoundest help we need, comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth.

 

II: — Nevertheless this lesson isn’t learned quickly.  In an increasingly secularized age help is sought from every quarter except the Lord. Yet the places we look to for help are like the mountains: attractive, beckoning, with much about them that is genuinely good, yet also threatening and ultimately not helpful in the profoundest sense.

[1]         Think of culture. Our society looks to culture for help. There are immense riches here. If I were deprived of Mozart’s genius and Yitzakh Perlman’s violin and Renee Fleming’s voice; if I were deprived of E.J.Pratt’s poetry and Robertson Davies’ prose and the movie, Chariots of Fire (which I have seen eleven times) I should be unquestionably the poorer for it. Culture possesses genuine riches; it lends us a genuine good.

Yet culture, as the mountains were to the Israelite people, is double-edged, ambivalent. Culture transmits values. What values does it transmit? Certainly whatever it is that Chariots of Fire embodies; but also what the movie, Mortal Thoughts, embodies. Mortal Thoughts cost me $12 as well as more than a little disquiet.  Mortal Thoughts is about a woman who cuts her best friend’s husband’s throat with an Exacto knife – blood everywhere.  Sitting beside me in the movie theatre was a 10 year old boy, eyes wide open, taking it all in. How many such spectacles has he seen already, and how many more will he see, each impression cumulatively skewing his innermost control-centre?         What was the youngster unconsciously taking in about what it means to be a human being and how disputes are settled?   As blood-soaked violence sank into his unconscious mind he was less and less likely ever to understand consciously that gratuitous violence is addictive; it creates an appetite for ever more violent spectacles. Culture transmits values. What’s being transmitted?

In any case culture, good or bad, can never penetrate as deeply as the human heart needs to be penetrated; it can’t finally “keep” us in the sense in which the Lord our God is our keeper.

 

[2]         Much the same can be said about the state, about government.  The state, civil government, is God-ordained to restrain criminality, preserve order and ensure the common good.  It must never be belittled. History relentlessly attests what life is like where the common good isn’t ensured. Not surprisingly, many people assume that the state, government, will “keep” them.  But no state, however just, can “keep” any human being in the sense that the Lord our God is our keeper.

And in a fallen creation, of course, the state is always ambivalent, always double-edged. That which is meant for blessing (Romans 13) in fact curses millions (Revelation 13, where the state is the beast from the abyss, the monster that devours the people of God). It would be difficult to convince masses in the world right now that the state is their helper in any sense.

 

[3]         Then there are the rugged individualists, brimful of confidence, who argue that the individual’s psychological resources are sufficient. Make no mistake: the individual’s psychological resources are wonderful.  I marvel at what people have in them: intuition, coping-mechanisms, resilience, creativity.

But also hidden in everyone’s intrapsychic landscape are psychological booby-traps.   All of us have dark recesses in our psyche which startle us when we least expect it just because we never guessed (couldn’t guess) what lurks within us.

The psalmist, then, is correct.  While he is tempted to flee to the mountains and seek help there, he knows that the mountains are both beautiful and dangerous.  And in any case the mountains can’t provide the kind of help he most profoundly needs. As much has to be said of anything else we might think can profoundly help.

 

III: — Our help comes from the Lord. What kind of help? What do we need help with? help for? We aren’t so foolish (I trust) as to assume we are promised divine assistance for our pet projects, or worse, for our ambition, or worse still, for our naked avarice. God isn’t the rocket fuel which powers whatever we think will let us “get ahead”. Then what is the nature of the help we both need and crave?   Our question concerning the nature of the help we need is answered by the psalmist’s repeated use of “keep” and “keeper”. We need to be “kept”;i.e., preserved, safeguarded. At bottom we know we need one thing above all else: we need the identity which God has given us in Christ to be safeguarded, preserved, in the midst of everything which threatens it in life, as well as whatever may threaten it in death. We know we can’t avoid sickness, setback and suffering.  We know that no one is spared these.  What we want, deepest down, is this: what I am in Christ, the real “me”, even the “me” which is so profound that God alone sees and knows it — that this “me” will be safeguarded now so as to be kept forever. Paul tells the believers in Colosse that who they really are, their ultimate identity, is hid with Christ in God.  What we most profoundly need is this: that what is hid with Christ in God will also be kept with Christ in God, safeguarded, preserved, until that day when nothing will be able to assail it, crumble it, evaporate it.

I have long been intrigued by the answers different people give to the question, “Who tells you who you are?”         I think that this question is so very significant inasmuch as the answer to it will determine who we are.  Do my parents tell me who I am?   To some extent, but if they alone do then I have never grown up.  Does my academic achievement or my professional standing or my reputation tell me who I am? These can only give me the most artificial identity.  Do I tell myself who I am? This yields a most confusing identity, since the “I” which tells the “I” which is told is like trying to set a watch to a factory whistle while trying to set the whistle to the watch.  Who tells any of us who we are?   Who tells me who I am? Who makes me who I am? And after whoever, whatever, makes me who I am, who or what is going to “keep” me in the psalmist’s sense of “keep”?

 

IV: — The One who keeps me is the One who has kept Israel . He “made” Israel , that people ordained to live for the praise of his glory and the enlightening of the nations. Having fashioned such a people he has kept them.  When they were threatened with dissolution in Egypt ; when they were discouraged in the wilderness; when prophets were dismayed at the faithlessness of the people, still the holy One of Israel kept them.

The psalmist argues that since God has so manifestly, obviously kept Israel , the people, God can be trusted to keep every person who is individually a member of Israel . Because the God who kept Israel has promised to keep the church, so that not even the powers of death can prevail against it, he will surely keep us who are individually members of it.

From the formation of Israel to the birth of Jesus 1300 years elapsed.  Israel was kept. The day came when Israel was gathered up into the person of Israel ’s greater Son. Was he kept? Seemingly not.  Yet as he was raised from the dead and was made to live forever more he is kept — his people with him, and you and me with his people. He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. There will be no forgetful lapse or careless lapse on God’s part during which something from within me or something from without me might deprive me of my identity before God and my security in him.

 

V: — Against what has God promised to safeguard us, “keep” us? – against the sun and the moon, says the psalmist.         The sun shall not smite us by day nor the moon by night.  We laugh, even snicker, at this.  Who gets sunstroked today? And even if travellers in hot countries might get sunstroked from time to time, who ever got moonstroked?

We laugh too soon. You see, for our Hebrew foreparents the sun symbolized perils on life’s journey which overwhelmed them. To be “sunstroked”, metaphorically, was to be “done in” by developments which were part and parcel of the journey itself.  Don’t we speak today of being “burnt out”?  We too speak metaphorically.  When we come upon someone who is manifestly “burnt out” we don’t rush her to the hospital for a skin graft.  We mean that ordinary, day-to-day developments have become too much for her. Employment is an everyday aspect of life’s journey.  Having a job, having to work, isn’t extraordinary.  Yet work can leave people burnt out.  Parenting is part of life’s journey; there’s nothing unusual about it. Yet in some circumstances parenting would leave anyone beside himself.   (If ever you are tempted to think otherwise, come with me for a day in family court.) Having aged parents isn’t unusual. Still, the stress of dealing with elderly parents can unravel us.  All of these developments are normal, everyday aspects of the journey of life. Yet they can bring us down.

It is plain that when the psalmist insists that we are going to be “kept” he doesn’t mean that we are going to be cushioned.  Any Christian who expects to be cushioned should look more closely at the master himself. Was he cushioned? against anything? He was cushioned against nothing, yet ultimately kept amidst everything, for no development has left him devoid of his identity before his Father. What caused him to sweat so profusely in Gethsemane that the sweat poured off his face like blood from a forehead gash; what caused him to cry out, “Even my Father has abandoned me.” — none of it ultimately dissolved him.  On the contrary all of it was the occasion in which his Father “kept” him, safeguarded him, preserved him, even as he felt it not.

We aren’t cushioned; we are kept.  Our identity before God, our security in God; this is safeguarded regardless of day-to-day developments, however ordinary, that appear to overwhelm us on life’s journey. The sun shall not smite us by day.

Moonstroke is something else.  The ancient world believed that the moon gave off noxious powers, among which were diseases of all kinds.  Disease is rooted in micro-organisms which we can’t see.  Micro-organisms are tiny, yet insidious and dangerous.  Whereas to be “sunstroked” is to fall victim to what overwhelms us frontally, visibly, on our journey, to be “moonstroked” is to be submarined insidiously by what we don’t see, can’t foresee, and against which therefore we aren’t forearmed.

When I was studying in Scotland I preached one Sunday to an Anglican congregation, one of whose families invited the Shepherds home for lunch.  Our host and hostess were both physicians.  They were telling us of a clergyman who was transparent to the gospel, who had had inestimable influence upon them, and who had meant the world to them. At the height of his powers this clergyman had come down with encephalitis, was severely brain-damaged, and now babbled and slobbered and stumbled.  So overcome was my physician-host in recounting his sad tale that he stopped speaking. Feeling awkward at the silence I admitted my medical ignorance and asked him how his friend had come to have encephalitis.  My host turned to me and said slowly and sadly, “How does anyone get it?” He meant, “Isn’t it tragic that we can be contending triumphantly with developments in front of us (sunstroke won’t get us) when unbeknown to us something microscopic yet insidious can submarine us and reduce us, apparently, to a pitiable creature who babbles and slobbers and stumbles.” If my host had lived 3000 years ago he would have said, “My clergyman-friend appears moonstroked.”

Speaking of encephalitis, I was moved more than I can tell at reading the book, Awakenings, by Dr. Oliver Sacks. (I’ve corresponded several times with Oliver Sacks, neurologist, since as a pastor I have to minister to neurologically damaged people.) Dr. Sacks spent much of his working life with patients whose Parkinsonian symptoms were rooted in encephalitis.  Where others saw human wreckage so neurologically wrecked as to be subhuman, Oliver Sacks saw creatures of God whom God “kept” despite the hideous ravages of their disease.  In other words, even the people who gave greatest evidence of being moonstroked ultimately weren’t.

God won’t cushion me against encephalitis.  (He who didn’t cushion his Son against anything isn’t going to cushion me.) But he will keep me — ultimately — against sunstroke and moonstroke alike.  Who I am in Jesus Christ; that “me” which God alone sees; who I really am even though I can only glimpse it from time to time; this is what God will safeguard, keep, regardless of what may seem to have overwhelmed me frontally or submarined me insidiously.

 

 

VI: — If the nature of God’s safeguarding is to preserve us against sunstroke and moonstroke alike, what is the scope of God’s keeping?  The psalmist says that God can be trusted to keep our “going out and our coming in.” “Going out and coming in” is a rich Hebrew expression with three distinct meanings.

[1]         In the first place “going out and coming in” is a Hebrew way of expressing totality or entirety; a Hebrew way of saying everything.  To say that God will keep our going out and our coming in is to say that nothing which befalls us will ever undo God’s keeping.  Nothing will ever handcuff God so as to leave him unable to keep us. He who wasn’t handcuffed by the death of his Son isn’t going to be handcuffed now.

[2]         In the second place “going out and coming in” refers to the important ventures and efforts and undertakings of life.  To have these “kept” is to have our kingdom efforts rendered fruitful. In Psalm 126 the psalmist writes, “He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come in with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” To know that God will keep our going out and our coming in is to know that our worthwhile undertakings in life – into which we have poured ourselves – aren’t going to be fruitless finally.  We may have seen little fruit to date for the energy we have poured out and the sacrifices we have made and the prayers we have pleaded; nonetheless, it all isn’t finally going to dribble away. It’s going to be crowned.

[3]         In the third place “going out and coming in” refers to the early years and the sunset years of life, infancy and old age, when we are helpless. At the beginning of life and at the end we are kept.  The child who dies in infancy, even the still-born child (not to mention the aborted child) is kept inviolate before God, by God.  The most senile person in the nursing home whose senility has left her unrecognizable; this person too is kept inviolate before God as well.

Today my heart rejoices that the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps will keep my going out and my coming in.

From whence does my help come?  Not from the hills, from nature, however majestic nature might be. My help – yours too – comes from the One who kept Israel , kept Israel ’s greater Son, and will keep any one of us unto the day of our Lord’s glorious appearing.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          January 2007

Should the Bible be Censored?

Psalm 139: 19-24

        Psalm 137:7-9            1st Kings 18:36-40               Matthew 5:17-20

 

According to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the collect for the second Sunday in Advent (next week) informs us that concerning the “Holy Scriptures” we are to “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”

Digest the scriptures? Throughout my ministry many people have told me the bible gives them indigestion.         They maintain that much of the bible is unpalatable.  What they find unpalatable, indigestible, is the bloodshed and the carnage. But it isn’t only the bloodshed and the carnage; it’s also the apparent attitude lying behind the bloodshed. Not only does this person disembowel that person; the biblical figures do it with such enthusiasm and even appear to relish doing it.

When my sisters and I were very young my mother used to read us instalments of the Cinderella story.  One evening my sisters broke into tears as they learned of the nastiness of Cinderella’s stepmother.  If the Cinderella story upsets children, should we allow them, never mind encourage them, to read bible stories?

The all-time “wretched verse” that upsets so very many people is that verse in Psalm 137 which is directed against Israel ’s enemies: “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.”  Are we dealing here merely with the barbarism (so-called) of primitive people, or with the conscienceless savagery of the deranged?  In fact we are dealing with neither.  Our Israelite foreparents in faith were not deranged.  Neither were they simply spewing barbarism.

 

I: — Nonetheless, many people remain perplexed, not to say put off.  Take the book of Psalms, for instance.  The psalms were the hymnbook or prayer book of our Israelite ancestors. The psalms have always been the prayerbook of Christians.  The psalms are matchless. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”  “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with singing.”

And then there is what many people regard as the under side.  “The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.”  “Do not I hate them that hate thee, O Lord?  And do not I loathe them that rise up against thee?  I hate them with perfect hatred.  I count them my enemies.” And then the “cruncher” which I have already quoted:  “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones (i.e., of the Edomites) and dashes them against the rock.”

C.S. Lewis speaks of these latter verses as “the refinement of malice”; they express, he says, a hatred which is “festering, gloating, undisguised.” I have long admired Lewis and usually agree with him, but not this time.  I do not think that the verses I have quoted are a refinement of malice; I do not think they embody a festering, gloating, undisguised hatred. Here Lewis is wrong.

You see, the psalmist who wrote, “I hate them with perfect hatred”, also wrote in the next line, “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me.…” Whatever he meant by the so-called black verse he didn’t mean what we modern westerners accuse him of meaning.

Moreover, the bible is perfectly clear that we are not to be hateful toward enemies. The book of Leviticus states unambiguously, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbour, lest you sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.  I AM THE LORD”. Animosity toward one’s fellows isn’t even permitted in Israel , let alone encouraged, let alone divinely sanctioned.  The book of Exodus informs us, “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him.  If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it up.” Even the person who hates me I must help; I must never return hatred for hatred.

Let me say right here that I am upset when I hear people assuming that the newer testament is new inasmuch as it is sweet and condemns nastiness, while the older testament is old inasmuch as it is bitter and condones nastiness. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For this reason I try to refrain from speaking of the “old” testament. In modern English “old” suggests antiquated or obsolete.  That collection of books, Genesis through Malachi, is neither antiquated nor obsolete.   Let’s think instead of the one witness of scripture consisting of an older part and a newer part. The older testament simply does not permit us to visit wanton cruelty upon someone we don’t like, even when we know that that person intends to harm us.

Think of the book of Proverbs.  “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink….”  We must be kind even toward those who are personal enemies.  “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles – lest the Lord see it and be displeased….” Plainly there is to be no gloating over the misfortune of one’s enemies, no elation that someone we don’t like (because he doesn’t like us) finally “got it in the teeth”; no pleasure that someone who has made his bed will now have to lie in it.  Glee that someone at last got his comeuppance may be humanly understandable; nevertheless, the older testament insists that such glee is sin. As Job searches his own heart he insists that he has not rejoiced at the ruin of an enemy.

“Not so fast”, someone objects; “look at the prophet Jeremiah. Doesn’t Jeremiah pray that God will destroy his persecutors twice over?”  Yes he does. But what does Jeremiah mean by this in view of the fact that he prefaces his prayer with these words: “I have not pressed thee (i.e., God) to send evil, nor have I desired the day of disaster, thou knowest”?

We must be sure to note that in the older testament vengeance is forbidden the people of God. God everywhere forbids his people to exact revenge. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”   The text doesn’t mean that we can forget about seeking revenge because God will do it for us. It means rather that we are not to seek revenge inasmuch as we are never objective and will always turn tit-for-tat into a vendetta which worsens every day. It means that what is to befall someone who wounds us is to be left in God’s hands.  Not that God will exact revenge on our behalf and therefore we can leave the matter of retaliation with him; rather, we leave the matter with him so that nasty retaliation won’t occur at all.

What about King David? As a military commander representing his nation David behaved with the undeflectable resolve that General Eisenhower did on D-Day.  But no one has ever suggested that Eisenhower’s military prowess on behalf of the allied nations betokened personal cruelty.  When faced with personal enemies King David acted with uncommon generosity. Saul tried to kill David repeatedly. Twice David had opportunity to rid himself of this threat on his life; he spared Saul on both occasions. Absalom, David’s son, tried to kill his father, even going so far as recruiting a gang of cutthroats to help him. David took no action at all against Absalom, and in fact was heartbroken when Absalom suffered a fatal mishap. Yes, David behaved unconscionably with respect to Bathsheba and her husband.  David also knew he was wrong in this; so far from pretending that God sanctioned it, he knew he was judged for it. (And his life thereafter fell apart on account of it.)

Then what do the “black verses” of the older testament mean?  What appear to be dreadful threats and curses are not directed towards one’s enemies. What appear to be threats and curses in fact are prayers.  Prayers prayed fervently to God.  Prayers of trust in God. Prayers of confidence that God will act speedily.  They are prayers that God will vindicate his own name.  The older testament insists that vindictiveness is sin; at the same time it cries out to God to vindicate his name, his truth, his people.

          Vindictiveness is nasty retaliation rooted in a mean spirit.  Vindication is clearing someone’s name of the slander which surrounds it.  Vindictiveness is a mean-spirited desire for revenge. Vindication is public recognition that a good name has been spoken of falsely.  In the older testament what appears to us to be nasty vindictiveness is in fact fervent prayer that God will vindicate himself, his truth, his people.

What would you do if your child were expelled from school for thieving when you knew that your child had not stolen?  You would stop at nothing to have your child’s name cleared.  It’s not that you personally dislike the school principal or board of education director; there is no personal vindictiveness here. You simply want your child vindicated; you want your child’s name cleared. And if you were vehement in pursuing this, really vehement, no one would fault you for it.

For years my wife was a primary school teacher.  What would I do if parents circulated word that they didn’t want their children in my wife’s grade one class because she was promiscuous and they thought they shouldn’t entrust their youngsters to such a person? What would I do? I’d do whatever it took to clear my wife’s name and restore public confidence in her integrity and public trust in her suitability as a teacher.  And if I appeared vehement in doing this?  Would anyone expect me to appear placid in the face of such slander?

The black passages, so-called, in the older testament are the cries of God’s people pleading with God to rout evil; to rout evil so thoroughly that no doubt will remain that it has been routed.  It’s not that the psalmist doesn’t like children or takes fiendish pleasure in seeing them thrown on rocks.  The psalmist knows that vindictiveness is sin.         The psalmist, rather, is crying to God to vindicate himself as the God who resists evil and supports those victimized by it.  Right now, say the psalmist and other sensitive people from the older testament, God’s truth is falsified; God’s way is mocked; God’s people are set upon; God’s name is dragged through the mud.  In other words, evil seems to triumph; evil gloats; evil sneers; evil profits from evil and continues to work more evil.  Won’t God do something to clear his name and demonstrate his truth and protect his people? Then evil must be routed; every vestige of it.

Each Sunday at worship (if not every day) we pray, “Thy kingdom come.” Do we mean it?  If we genuinely want the kingdom of God to come fully, then we want the kingdom of evil to go utterly.  “Kingdom of God come fully” means “kingdom of evil go utterly.” But this is highly abstract. The Hebrew mind is never abstract. The Hebrew mind is always concrete. Where we say, “May the kingdom of evil go”, the Israelite says, “May the cocaine-dealer drop dead. Happy is the society whose cocaine-dealers drop dead.”   You don’t have any personal vindictiveness toward cocaine-dealers; you don’t even know any.  But you do want vindication of the rule of law; you do want a just society; you do want callous exploitation eliminated; you do want defenceless people protected.

When I pray, “Thy kingdom come”, I am asking God to deal with the wicked man who gets rich by fleecing the helpless, schizophrenic people who frequently come to see me.  I am asking God to deal so thoroughly with this man that he will never try to fleece defenceless people again.  This is precisely what the psalmist is doing in Psalm 139 when he cries to God, “Your enemies are my enemies; I hate those who hate you.  I hate them with perfect hatred.”   When Jeremiah prays that God will destroy his persecutors twice over, Jeremiah is not vindictive. He wants only that God will act so thoroughly, so unmistakably, that the whole world will know that God opposes persecution, God vindicates those who are persecuted, and God vindicates himself as the saviour of the victimized.

When next you read what appears to reflect a nasty spirit, read again with new understanding.

 

II: — What about the death penalty, especially the death penalty for moral offences? Should this strand of the bible be censored? I do not defend the death penalty, and have published an article opposing the death penalty.

Let me set you straight on one thing: Canada has not abolished the death penalty.  Canada has abolished the death penalty for first degree murder.  Canada has retained the death penalty for treason.  Did you know that? Canada has said two things: murder shouldn’t be punishable by death, treason should. Why Canada has made this distinction I shan’t discuss this morning.  My only point is that we shouldn’t consider Israel of old barbaric for classifying some offences as capital when we civilised creatures of modernity continue to do as much ourselves.

Before we fancy ourselves wonderfully enlightened compared to ancient Hebrews let me say something in passing.         When the criminal had to be punished in ancient Israel , it was decreed that he could not be punished in any way that degraded him. Right now the penalty for first degree murder, in Canada , is twenty-five years in prison, no parole; twenty-five years in jail, no hope of early release. Is this degrading or not? Have we made any advance on our Israelite forebears?

In ancient Israel property offences were not punishable by death.  No property crime was deemed significant enough to entail execution. But violation of family life was. Adultery, for instance. In Canada , adultery isn’t punishable at all, not even by a fine.  Doesn’t that tell you what we think of family life?

But keep your hands off my car.  My car is thirteen years old and has a market value of about $75.         If you steal it, you are going to jail.  And if you seduce my wife? No penalty at all. Tell me, which is a greater wound to me: theft of my car or alienation of my wife? What warps children more: loss of their dad’s vehicle or loss of their mother?

Question: Are property offences exceedingly serious?  Canada says yes, Israel said no. Are violations of family life exceedingly serious? Canada says no, Israel said yes. Is car theft more destructive humanly than adultery? Canada says yes, Israel said no. What do you think?

Let me repeat: I am not defending the death penalty.  But before we snicker at the ancient people of God because they exercised the death penalty here or there, we must understand that we differ from our ancestors only in what we deem valuable.

III: — Should the bible be censored? What about the incidents involving extermination, like Elijah’s slaughter of the Baal prophets? You know the story. Elijah, the prophet of God, confronts the prophets of Baal.  Baal was a fertility deity. Devotees of the fertility deity worshipped any and all reproductive forces.  The temples of Baal worship featured religious prostitution, male as well as female. You came to the church of Baal and worshiped the fertility deity by joining yourself to church-sponsored prostitutes of both genders.

The Israelite people assumed they could worship both God and Baal. They didn’t want to give up God, the living God, since he had delivered them from slavery.  But why not combine God and Baal?  Why not have one’s cake and eat it too?   Worship of God, worship of Baal, one-stop shopping, best of both worlds. Let’s have an inclusive church. Nobody excluded. God plus Baal.  Holy Communion plus hookers.  Truth plus superstition. Gospel plus greed. Why not have it all?

It still happens. While Jesus says we can’t be the servant of God and the servant of mammon, many preachers tell us we can. The banking scandals involving the Vatican can still be smelled around the world.  In the 1930s when Frankie Costello was the biggest mafia gangster in New York City he sat, by invitation, on the Advisory Board of The Salvation Army.  A prominent Canadian family has given millions to facilitate the worship of the God of Israel, when this money was made ruthlessly, illegally, even murderously throughout the prohibition era.  During the French Revolution the church was disestablished in France . Napoleon found he couldn’t control the masses. He told church authorities he would re-establish the church if they promised to keep the masses docile and subject to his tyranny.  Church authorities did just that.  Hermann Goering, head of Germany ’s Air Force in World War II and a Nazi party member (after the war he took the little white pill smuggled in to him rather than face execution) was married in a Lutheran church whose communion table was draped with the Swastika.

Is God honoured by all this?  Elijah said no. Elijah insisted that Israel desperately needed radical renewal of faith.  Elijah knew as well that radical renewal of faith entailed a radical break with Baal.

Let it never be said of me that I thirst for violence.  But may it always be said of me that I and Elijah are one with respect to this: the church desperately needs radical renewal of faith; and there can be radical renewal of faith only as there is a radical break with Baal.

 

Should the bible be censored?  You decide. For as long as I live I shall cherish what I have said today about the so-called sub-Christian passages in it.  In addition, I shall remember that Jesus my Lord was raised on the psalms – all of them – and died quoting them. I shall remember that Jesus maintained that his advent, his coming, meant not that the older testament had been abolished but that it had been fulfilled. Fulfilled, it remains the Word of God written.

And therefore I deem the Prayerbook Collect for Advent to be correct: concerning the Holy Scriptures we must “hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.”

 

                                                                                               Victor Shepherd                                 

30th November 2008      

 Advent I        
Church of St.Bride, Anglican, Mississauga

Searched and Known

Psalm 139

 

No one doubts the importance of knowledge. It’s important to know what a red traffic light means and what the poison label on a bottle means. Without such knowledge we cannot survive. It’s important to know whatever it is we are supposed to know to do our job. Without such knowledge we shall find ourselves without a livelihood. Everyone understands this. But what almost no one understands is that it is far more important, ultimately, to be known than it is to know. For our deepest-down identity and our innermost security it is far more important to be known than it is to know. Think of the child. A child grows up with an unassailable sense of who she is and an inner core of self-confidence not because she knows whatever it is that eight year-olds know; she grows up with self-confidence and security because she lives in a family where she is known. Her parents know her. Because they know her they cherish her; they do all manner of good to her. The child grows up without feeling neglected or abandoned or unwanted or useless. She grows up secure, resilient, confident, self-forgetfully helpful to others.

Unquestionably scripture says much about our knowing God. It even says that it is important for us to know God. But scripture says far more about God’s knowing us; it’s even more important that God knows us.   After all, to whatever extent I come to know God my knowledge of God will always be slight compared to God’s knowledge of me. And if my identity before God and my security in a turbulent, treacherous world depended on my knowledge of God, then so very much would be hanging by so slender a thread. What matters far more for me than my knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of me. The most significant truth concerning any of us is this: God knows us.

 

I: — In Psalm 139 the psalmist exults in God’s knowledge of him. “Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up…. Even before a word is on my tongue thou knowest it altogether.” The psalmist exults in God’s knowledge of him. And so he should.

We should too. You see, when the Bible says that God knows us it doesn’t mean that God is sniffing out negativities about us; it doesn’t mean that the cosmic “snoop” is spying on us. It means something entirely different: God prospers us, God protects us, God blesses us, God renders us useful servants. Listen to the prophet Nahum: “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him”. When Nahum says that God knows those who look to him and trust him, he means that God protects and prospers and uses such people even when, especially when, troubles without number come upon them. Speaking through the prophet Hosea God says to the Israelite people, “It was I who knew you in the wilderness, it was I who knew you in the land of drought”. To say that God knew Israel in the wilderness is not to say that God became aware that they were in the wilderness, that he acquired information which he had previously lacked. “God knew them in the wilderness” means “God sustained them, encouraged them, nurtured them, prospered them when they were without resources themselves and the taunt of the nations”. God speaks to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you… I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations”. God’s knowing Jeremiah makes him a prophet. The apostle Paul, himself a son of Israel , says two things in his first Corinthian letter about God’s knowing us. One, because God knows us, we can love God; God’s knowing us frees us to love him. Two, because God knows us, one day we shall know God in a manner akin to God’s knowing us now; God’s knowing us frees us to know him. We should never shrink from God’s searching us and knowing us. We should welcome it and exult in it. God’s knowing us can only prosper us.

 

We human beings are enormously complex and complicated at the same time that we are exceedingly frail and fragile. Let’s look first at our complexity. Think, for instance, of our tendency to rationalize. Now when I say “rationalize” I don’t mean “make excuses”. We make excuses after we have done something, make excuses to appease our conscience, and make excuses fully conscious of what we are doing and why.

Freud helped us to see, however, that rationalization is something else, for rationalization is entirely unconscious. And so far from being excuse-making after the fact, rationalization occurs before the deed; it launches the deed, precipitates it. It’s easy to be aware of what’s going on when we make excuses, since excuse-making is conscious and follows what we have found to prick our conscience. But it’s impossible to be aware of what’s going on when we are rationalizing, because the unconscious process deactivates our conscience and pushes us to proceed. Since you and I are rationalizing every day, do we know ourselves? profoundly know ourselves? How much of ourselves can we know?

Not only are we complex, complicated creatures, we are frail, fragile creatures as well. A germ so small that it can be seen only with the strongest microscope can crumble the champion weightlifter. An accidental nick in Norman Bethune’s finger ended the surgeon’s life in China . Since life is so very transitory, I shall have an identity eternally, I shall be “me” eternally, only as I am known to be “me” by the eternal one himself — for his knowing me makes me; that is, confers identity, even as his knowing me preserves “me” and honours me and exalts me.

What’s more, we are complex and fragile at the same time. The person who always holds me spellbound in his discussion of the peculiar blend of human complexity and fragility is Dr. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist whose work I read avidly. Everyone finds some kinds of neurological damage easy to understand: if someone has a screwdriver driven into his brain he doesn’t think as well or talk as well or walk as well as he used to. We readily understand that damage to different areas of the brain produces different kinds of impairment. But what about those stunningly bizarre mind-body interrelationships which Sacks describes? They defy understanding. One of Sacks’s patients displayed the jerky, convulsive, spastic movements typical of someone suffering from post-encephalitic parkinsonism. But when Sacks played music for her, he observed “the complete disappearance of all these obstructive-explosive phenomena and their replacement by an ease and flow of movement as Miss D., suddenly free from her automatisms, smilingly ‘conducted’ the music or rose and danced to it”.

Another woman, also neurologically damaged, had enormous difficulty walking alone. But if someone walked alongside her, without so much as touching her, she was able to walk perfectly. “When you walk with me”, she said to her walking-companion, “I feel in myself your own power of walking. I partake of the power and freedom you have. Without ever knowing it, you make me a great gift”.

Another patient, a man suffering from dementia (i.e., indisputably brain-damaged) was, said Sacks, “fluttery, restless, forever lost”, never at peace. The fellow could be “held” for a while by a mental challenge (e.g., a puzzle) but then he fell apart as soon as the mental challenge was taken away. He could also be “held” by contemplating art or music — or by taking part in the Roman Catholic service of the mass, after which he was at peace for a protracted period.

What is the precise relationship of mind to body? of mind and body to spirit? Nobody knows. We are dealing with uttermost complexity and fragility at the same time. Then what are we? Who are we? What is our end? God alone knows. But God knows. God knows us.

To say that God knows is to say much more than God understands or God is aware. To say that God knows us is to say that God has fashioned for us — the very wounded (Sacks’s patients) and the somewhat less wounded (you and me) — an identity which guarantees we shall not be overlooked or misplaced or set aside. To say that God knows us is to say that God will prosper us in whatever wilderness we find ourselves, even if the wilderness is going to feel like wilderness for as long as we are in it. To say that God knows is to say that while others may disdain those who are socially insignificant or intellectually ordinary or politically dismissable, God uses such people on behalf of that kingdom which cannot be shaken.

What is the psalmist’s attitude to this? Wonder. Amazement. Astonishment. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me” he cries; “it is high, I cannot attain it.” He means that he is grasped by this glorious truth without being able to fathom it fully. He means he is certain that God will ever prosper him even though right now he cannot conceive how.

 

II: — And then the psalmist exults in it all. “Just think”, he exclaims, “regardless of where I go, or think I might go, or try to go, I can never outstrip God’s knowledge of me”. As he revels in the God who enfolds him the psalmist asks two rhetorical questions: “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Then he jubilantly shouts the answer to his own question: “Nowhere. I can’t depart from God’s Spirit; I can’t flee from God’s presence. And isn’t it wonderful that I can’t.” The psalmist reflects on the geometry of grace: “If I ascend to heaven (up, God’s abode, where all is life and light and love); if I make my bed in Sheol (down, the abode of the dead, where all is dark and dismal); if I take the wings of the morning (a common Hebrew expression meaning the east); if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea (the sea symbolized many things in Israel, and here it symbolizes the west, since the Mediterranean Sea was always west of Palestine) – up, down, east, west — THOU ART THERE”. In other words, the living God who knows us (which is to say, the loving God who prospers us) is the sphere, the atmosphere, the environment in which my life unfolds.   The God who is the atmosphere of our entire life is none other than the God whose love is as wide as the outstretched arms of his Son, whose patience is attested by his centuries-long faithfulness to Israel , whose truth is as constant as the constancy of his promises to us even in the face of our inconstancy before him.

There would be little point in saying that God is love unless we knew how much God loves, to what extent he loves, and whether he loves undeflectably. Paul tells us in his Roman letter that God has so loved us as to withhold nothing in his self-outpouring. If God has withheld nothing, then he cannot love us any more than he loves us at this moment. He loves us right now with nothing of himself held back, nothing of himself retained for self-preservation in case his love is not requited.

Although the psalmist lived centuries before Calvary , he was aware of all of this by anticipation. In Psalm 139 he maintains that God’s hand leads him, and God’s right hand holds him. Think of it: we are held by God’s right hand. For Hebrew people the left hand symbolizes judgement while the right hand symbolizes mercy and strength. To be held by God’s right hand is to be clasped by a mercy whose grip on us will never relent. In other words, our security rests not in the strength of our grip on him (our faith), but rather in the strength of his grip on us. Because God’s right hand is strength and mercy in equal measure, his grip on us will never be brutal, even as his mercy will never be ineffectual.

Is it true? Does it ring true within us? And if it rings true now, would it continue to ring true if adversity rained down upon us? I must offer you the testimony of two men, both now dead, whose work and witness have meant more to me than I can say. The two men are Martin Buber and Emil Fackenheim. Both are Jews, and therefore both are acquainted not only with that adversity which is the human lot, but also with the extraordinary adversity visited upon Jewish people since they are the ones the world prefers to hate. In addition, both men lived through the adversity for Jews, the Shoah. Both men are aware that life is a life-long engagement with the Holy One of Israel, even in the most unholy circumstances. Buber’s work I have read. Fackenheim I have spoken with dozens of times.

In 1938 Fackenheim was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen, a forced-labour camp. Not everyone in Sachsenhausen was Jewish; Gentiles who had opposed the Hitler regime or were suspect for any reason were there too. One such Gentile was the Rev. Ernst Tillich, nephew of the famous German theologian Paul Tillich (Uncle Paul had long since moved to the USA ). On Christmas eve Ernst Tillich seemed unusually depressed. Fackenheim asked him why. “It’s Christmas eve”, the young Lutheran minister said, “and Christmas eve is the biggest festivity in the Lutheran church-calendar. For days I have been thinking of what I should say in my Christmas eve sermon if I had a congregation. But I haven’t a congregation, and that’s why I am depressed”. “I’ll get you a congregation”, said Fackenheim, and off he went. He rounded up all the rabbinical students he could find and sat them down in front of Ernst Tillich. “Here we are, Ernst, on Christmas eve in Sachsenhausen. Now you tell us what you would tell a Lutheran congregation of the God whose strength and mercy operate at all times and in all places — including Sachsenhausen”. When the sermon had been delivered the peculiar congregation sat far into the night discussing it. In the providence of God the privilege of speaking with Fackenheim dozens of times has been one of the most extraordinary blessings of my life. For as often as I have spoken with him I have found him overwhelmingly authentic in his acquaintance with the right hand of that God whose presence cannot be fled.

III: — So overcome is the psalmist as he rejoices in God’s knowledge of him that he — does what? says what? “O that thou wouldst slay the wicked, O God… men who maliciously defy thee, who lift themselves up against thee for evil. Do I not hate them that hate thee? I hate them with perfect hatred.”

Before you turn off and accuse the psalmist of glorying in God’s mercy only to display a hardened heart himself, think; think back to what we have discussed here many times concerning the category of “enemies” in the psalms. Enemies, at bottom, are not those whom the psalmist doesn’t like or who do not like him. Enemies, at bottom, are those who oppose God. Enemies are those who endeavour to thwart God and work evil. “I hate them with perfect hatred” is the psalmist’s way of saying, “Just as you are uncompromisingly opposed to evil, O God, I am uncompromisingly opposed too. The people who wound you as they disdain your way and truth and mercy wound me too, for I share your pain”. “I hate them with perfect hatred” is the psalmist’s awkward way (to us Gentiles) of saying, “I am steadfastly loyal to you, O God, and I resist the workers of iniquity as surely as you resist them”. When he cries, “O that thou wouldst slay the wicked”, he is pleading with God to rout evil, dispel evil, end it. Is there any Spirit-quickened person who wants evil to flourish? The psalmist is not displaying a callous heart; he is displaying a sensitivity quickened by his intimate acquaintance with the Holy one who struggles with an unholy world.

And yet it is easy, entirely too easy, for you and me to recognize evil wherever it abounds “out there”, when all the while we are blind to more than a little evil “in here”. Did not Jesus himself insist it is easy to see the dust-speck in our neighbour’s eye while remaining unaware of the patio-plank in our own eye? Furthermore, in light of what I said earlier about rationalization, an unconscious mechanism which precipitates us toward sin, it is foolish for us to pretend that evil flourishes “out there” while there is no trace of it “in here”.

The psalmist was aware of it before we ever thought of it. Having stood at God’s side in God’s resistance to evil; having pleaded with God to rout evil and render impotent the workers of evil, the psalmist now wonders if he himself isn’t among those people he has asked God to deal with. And so he pleads, “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting”.

When we ask God to know our hearts and know our thoughts we are not merely asking God to examine us and then tell us what the examination has turned up. We are pleading with him to correct us. Remember, for God to know us, according to the Hebrew bible, is for God to prosper us, help us, bless us; ultimately, for God to know us is for God to save us.   And therefore we can only pray that God will know us afresh — know us, prosper us, bless us, save us. For then we shall walk that way which is everlasting; that way, says Jesus, which leads to life just because it is life.

Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        July 2005

On Praising God

Psalm 150

 

I: — There are two kinds of people who have to be told endlessly how great they are: the pathetically insecure, and the insufferably arrogant. The insecure must be told how great they are lest they collapse. The arrogant must be told lest they turn nasty.

Is God like either of these? Is God either pathetically insecure or insufferably arrogant? After all, God insists that he be praised. As a mater of fact the command to praise God is the most frequently repeated command in all of scripture. Our more effusive Christian friends frequently interject, “Praise the Lord!”, and interject it often enough to embarrass us, but not so often as to embarrass God, apparently.

In the psalms we overhear the psalmist praising God again and again. The psalmist urges us to praise God. Indeed, the psalmist is so stuck on praising God that he urges whales and cattle to praise God. How can a cow praise God, when a cow doesn’t even know she’s a cow? If this weren’t enough, the psalmist appears to approach the ridiculous when he urges “fire and hail, snow and frost” to praise God. Can any sense be made of this?

If we are to make any sense of it we have to begin with the matter of enjoyment or delight. Let’s think for a minute about our attitude to anything we enjoy, anything at all. Someone asks,
“How do you like your new car?”
    “It’s the best car I have ever owned.”
“Have you seen Timothy Findley’s new book?”
    “It’s the profoundest novel I have ever read.”
“What do you think of Mats Sundin?”
    “He’s a wizard with the puck within 30 feet of the net.”

You get the picture: anything we enjoy we praise. Enjoyment overflows spontaneously into praise. Our delight in anyone or anything overflows naturally into praise.

What’s more, whatever we praise we praise not simply because we happen to like it; whatever we praise we praise believing that praise is fitting. We praise the work of Shakespeare or Mozart or Rembrandt just because we know that our praise is not misplaced; we aren’t mistakenly praising something that actually merits our rejection. We are convinced that praise is a fitting response, an appropriate response, the only correct response. We praise what we admire, and our admiration isn’t wasted, isn’t evidence of tastelessness or insensitivity.

Another aspect of praise: you must have noticed that the people who are unhappy, cranky, miserable, sour-puss spoilsports are invariably those who praise least. They find so little enjoyment in life, so little that delights them, so little they admire that they can’t praise, since praise is the natural spillover of enjoyment and delight and admiration. And so they grope and grumble, chronically sour and sarcastic. On the other hand. those who praise most are always large-hearted people, profoundly contented, generous in their appreciation. In fact large-hearted, generous people can find something genuinely worthy of praise anywhere. The beefsteak was as tough and stringy as a tennis racket? Ah, but meat like this always has the best flavour! The movie was boring? But wasn’t it heartwarming to see the elderly couple in front of us who held hands all through it as though they were courting? The Blue Jays lost 5 – 0? Yes, but what a performance by the Baltimore pitcher! Those who praise most (because they find most to praise) are invariably the most delighted and delightful people. Ready praise is always a sign of someone’s inner good health.

Another aspect of praise. What we praise ourselves we implicitly recommend; we urge others to taste, know, cherish — and therein come to praise themselves. When I tell you enthusiastically that Glenn Gould is the finest pianist I have heard I am urging you to listen to Gould and discover his musical genius yourself. You see, I just know that any person with an ounce of musicality will find Gould praiseworthy too. What is IMPOSSIBLE is to say to someone, “I read the most marvelous book last night and I trust that you will find it dreadful.” We cannot praise something ourselves without urging others to find it worthy too.

Now let’s add up all that we have said and think once more about the psalmist. The psalmist invites us to praise God inasmuch as the psalmist has first, himself, found such delight in God that his delight overflows spontaneously into praise; and inasmuch as the psalmist has come upon riches in God he expects us to find the same riches in God ourselves. What is impossible is for the psalmist to have found his life enlarged and his heart inflamed by that fire which breathes into us passion and purity and peace, to have found his mouth pouring forth praise for this — only to add that there is nothing here for us. Impossible! The command of God, the invitation of God, is, “0 taste and see that the Lord is good”. Impossible for the psalmist to say, “I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and you will surely find him as vile as battery acid”. Whatever we praise we commend to others.

To praise the work of Timothy Findley is to be literarily attuned. (Not terribly important.) To praise the stickhandling of Mats Sundin is to be athletically alert. (Even less important.) TO PRAISE GOD IS TO BE SPIRITUALLY AWAKE. Exceedingly important. To praise God is to indicate that we are awake. (You see, people who are awake know the difference between waking and sleeping, while sleepers don’t know the difference.) To praise God means that we have not forfeited the good which God presses upon us in his Son; indeed, so far from forfeiting God’s priceless gift we have seen our name on it and now cherish it and want to thank him for it.

There is one more aspect of praise, any sort of praise, that we should look at today. Someone else’s praise of what we have come to enjoy COMPLETES OUR ENJOYMENT. Remember, what we delight in and cherish we praise spontaneously. Next, what we praise we commend to others as worthy of praise. Lastly, when others find it worthy of praise themselves our delight in it is magnified. My delight in Itzhak Perlman’s violin is so much greater if someone sits with me and by evening’s end has discovered the Perlman treasure for herself.

For this reason the New Testament tells us of the results of apostolic endeavours. It doesn’t tell us simply that the gospel was preached here or there. It tells us as well that those who heard it and came to faith WERE ADDED TO THE NUMBER OF BELIEVERS. We are told not simply that the gospel was announced in Thessalonica, but that it was received there with conviction and joy. The Christian missioners who had come to praise God for what the New Testament calls the gospel’s “unsearchable riches”; their joy was made complete by hearers who now praised God for the selfsame riches.

If we have grasped anything of the logic of praise then we understand profoundly why the psalmist tirelessly urges us, invites us, to praise God.

II: – In the time that remains this afternoon I want us to look briefly at Psalm 150. In the Bible the psalms are arranged in five hooks. Each of the five books concludes with a psalm of praise. The last book concludes with the 150th psalm, and it is surely the most unrestrained exclamation in all of scripture.

We are going to look at Psalm 150 under four headings: the “where” of praise, the “why” of praise, the “how” of praise, the “who” of praise.

WHERE: “Praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty firmament.” The sanctuary is the temple in Jerusalem. We are to praise God in our place of public worship. To be sure, a few psalms are written for private use, but most psalms characteristically urge congregations to praise God. It is the gathered people of God that most fittingly offers up praise; the liturgy designed for common use is the vehicle of praise. Israel always knew that God wants a people, and the public praise of God demonstrates that God has a people.

Yet the psalmist does more than summon us to praise God, “us” being we earth-bound creatures. He insists as well that God be praised in the firmament; that is, in heaven. In other words, those whose earthly struggles are over praise God eternally. We in assorted Protestant churches of modernity have almost no grasp of a truth which mediaeval and early-day Christians had in their bloodstream; namely, the church consists not only of those who trust Jesus Christ for righteousness and wisdom now, but also of all who have died in the faith and are eternally alive before God. As of this moment the church consists of you and me and all fellow-believers, plus Martin Luther, an unnamed Chinese peasant, Thomas Aquinas, a Roman soldier from the army that occupied Britain, Mother Teresa, as well as the anonymous Japanese Christians who came to faith through the Jesuit missions and martyrdoms in the 17th century. The church consists of all these people now simply because all of these people are alive before God now. While we still see through a glass darkly, the departed don’t, and therefore their praise must be richer even than ours. It is these latter people who praise God in the firmament. Sanctuary plus firmament means that all God’s people, ancient, mediaeval and modern; those alive now and those alive eternally; all God’s people praise God together. So much for the “where” of praise.

WHY: We are to praise God because of his mighty deeds. His mighty deeds are what he has done and what he continues to do. Anyone who is familiar at all with the Christian story can recite God’s mighty deeds: the creation which came forth through his word, the deliverance of his people from the degradation of slavery, the raising up of prophets who call the people to that love and loyalty and life which they are always losing sight of, the provision of God’s own Son as a remedy for our depravity and disgrace, the bestowal of that Spirit who is nothing less than the life-giving breath of God himself, the calling and equipping of Christian leaders of any era who have smiled in the face of suffering, opposition, even death.

God’s mighty deeds are startling. As we recall them our minds are taken beyond God’s deeds to God himself. At this point we resonate with the psalmist who cries, “Praise God according to his exceeding greatness.” The exceeding greatness of God is who God is in himself, not merely what he has done.

It is as we know ourselves included in what God has done that we praise him, and then praise him still more ardently as we adore God himself. This is why we praise.

HOW: “Praise him with trumpet. lute and harp, timbrel and dance, strings and pipe, cymbals of assorted shapes and sounds.” Plainly we are to employ any and all means in our praise of God. The list of musical instruments mentioned in the text is by no means exhaustive. Still, it is helpful to look at those that are mentioned.

**The trumpet was sounded to prepare God’s people for conflict. (Didn’t Jesus say that the whole world is gripped by that evil one whom we must resist?)

**The lute supplied bass notes, the foundational throb of praise, as regular as the throb of a heartbeat.

**The harp — made famous by Israel’s best-loved king — the harp spoke peace to troubled hearts.

**The tambourine supplied the rhythm for dancing and always meant celebration and rejoicing.

**The pipe was used at funerals. (If we can’t praise God in the midst of death then we are ignorant of the mightiest of his mighty deeds.)

**Cymbals were used in Israel to express ecstasy.

How is God to be praised? By every means, in every mood, on every occasion.

WHO: Who is to praise God? Everyone is to praise God. Everyone should. Only those will, of course, who are awake, whose delight in God and gratitude to God pulsate and spill over into praise. Still, everyone should, and everyone may.

It is John, living in unspeakable hardship in exile on the island of Patmos, who cries, “And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all therein saying, ‘To

him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever.'”

Victor Shepherd          

May 2000

 

The Instruments of Worship

Psalm 150

 

TAMBOURINE/TIMBREL   God’s deliverance of Israel from soul-destroying slavery in innermost Egypt; God’s rescue of Israel from Pharaoh’s cruelty at the shores of the Red Sea; no event would ever root itself more deeply or fix itself more securely in Israel’s consciousness. To this day Passover is a festival in Jewish homes, a day of rejoicing, frolicking, and even fun-and-games for children.

Miriam, a prophet in Israel, was one of the first to magnify Passover celebrations. She grabbed a tambourine and began to dance. In no time scores of others followed suit. The book of Exodus tells us that “Miriam … took a timbrel in hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dancing. And Miriam sang to them, `Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and the rider he has thrown into the sea.'”

In Israel of old the tambourine provided the rhythm for dancing. People danced whenever they beheld something magnificent at the hand of God.

When David came home after a major victory over the Philistines people turned out for a ticker-tape parade; as their hero passed before them they danced unselfconsciously.

The unselfconscious dancing of David’s admirers, however, was nothing compared to the unrestrained dancing of David himself a few months later. After their initial defeat, the Philistines regrouped, raided Israel, and carried off the Ark of the Covenant, the Ark being the sign of God’s presence among his people. When David’s men managed to wrest the Ark away from the Philistines and bring it back, David’s elation soared. He danced. The English text says, “He danced.” The Hebrew text, however, says, “He whirled about.” He leapt, he cavorted with greater agility than an acrobat. (David wasn’t into ballroom “gliding”; he had passion!)

Michal, his wife, on the other hand, had none. Michal was Saul’s daughter, a blue-blood, aristocratic. Compared to her David was a vulgar oaf who came from a social class 16 levels below hers. Then why had she married him? He was everybody’s hero. Once she was married, however, she found out that David loved to dance, while she couldn’t dance at all. Michal couldn’t dance for two reasons. One, she had no passion in her; two, the Ark of the Covenant meant nothing to her. (If the Ark had meant something to her, she would have had passion in her.) To be sure, the Ark of the Covenant was only the sign of God’s presence; it was God’s presence that mattered unspeakably. Yet because God mattered supremely to David, the Ark mattered too. But not for Michal. It didn’t matter simply because David’s God mattered less to her. She could never have written, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want… for God’s goodness and mercy will drive my life for as long as I have breath”; she didn’t have it in her. When David wept his heart out over his misadventure with Bathsheba and wrote through his tears, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow”, Michal didn’t weep one tear. She didn’t have any in her.

Michal never knew David’s God. For this reason she was deaf to the song in her husband’s heart. Those who are deaf always despise those who dance, don’t they? When David danced and his kilt flew up and the servant-girls snickered at his knickers Michal sneered, “You jerk!” David replied, “What’s your problem? I was dancing before the Lord. Nothing else matters.”

One thousand years later Jesus told a story about a young man who became sick of home; in a few months — poor now, degraded, humiliated — he was homesick; then he was home again. Sick of home, homesick, home. His father threw the biggest party the village had ever seen: a feast, music, dancing.

Shouldn’t we dance when someone dear to us finally bows to God and is restored to the Father and admitted to his household and family? Shouldn’t we dance when we ourselves are the person who is home at last, and home forever?

 

TRUMPET   I want with all my heart to be a pacifist (believe it or not). I am almost “there”, almost a pacifist by conviction, when I happen to see again a film clip of little children huddled on a railway platform anywhere in Europe. Distraught parents are trying to comfort the children, trying so very hard not to let their dread betray the false hope with which they can ease their children for a day or two. As soon as I see once more a film clip of this scene, my pacifism vanishes.

Recently I was discussing the U.S. Civil War with a parishioner. We were talking about the never-before-seen horrors that emerged in the civil war. The new horror was threefold.

One, the machine gun. It cut men down like a scythe. No soldier could escape a weapon that fired hundreds of bullets per minute.

Two, the pre-set artillery fuse. Prior to the civil war artillery shells exploded upon impact with the ground. When the shell exploded, the shrapnel flew upwards and outwards. The safest place to be was flat on the ground. The smart soldier lay down during an artillery barrage and didn’t lift his head so much as one inch. Then the new shell was invented. The shell’s fuse was pre-set to detonate the shell in mid-air, 200 feet above the ground. Now shrapnel hurled down on the soldier. He couldn’t hide. Lying down was no protection at all. And in the civil war, he had no protection for his head. During the fiercest fighting there were 25,000 casualties per day.

Three, the phenomenal increase in psychiatric breakdown. This horror was the result of the first two. In previous wars relatively few soldiers had collapsed psychiatrically. Now they were collapsing in droves. During the civil war psychiatric casualties outnumbered physical casualties three-to-one. Hundreds of thousands of 20 year-old fellows would be deranged for life.

The parishioner with whom I was discussing all of this remarked, “Then there was no justification for the civil war!” Whereupon I told her a story about Abraham Lincoln. One day Lincoln stood with the crowd at a slave-auction in New Orleans. Male slaves were auctioned off at a good price. Then a female slave was led up onto the platform. She was young and healthy and strong; would be useful in the cotton fields. She had a six month-old baby in her arms. A plantation owner said to the auctioneer, “I’ll take the woman — but get rid of the child. The child will only distract the mother from her work.” And so mother and child were separated, never to see each other again. Lincoln returned home and swore he would stop at nothing to overturn this iniquitous practice.

Twenty-five thousand casualties per day; hundreds of thousands of young men deranged for life. Was it worth it? Should we prefer to see a slave-auction with a baby ripped away from its frantic mother?

St.Paul writes in I Corinthians 14, “If the trumpet gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” I know, the conflicts he had in mind didn’t concern Jewish children in Eastern Europe or black children in North America. Nevertheless, there does come a time when the sound of the trumpet must be distinct lest someone think he has an excuse for not showing up when he should.

The conflict Paul refers to immediately is that spiritual conflict which rages in the heart of every believer. For believers would never agree with Oscar Wilde that the best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. (Yield to it, and the temptation is over!) Jesus sweat in Gethsemane until the sweat poured off him like blood from a forehead gash. Jesus wrestled with the evil one for 40 days in a contest to see who was going to face down whom.

We are called to do as much ourselves. The trumpet must sound a distinctive note — or else the sleepyheads among us might forget there’s a battle to be fought!

In fact there are countless battles to be fought in the name of Christ. Some of them all Christians are called to fight. Other battles only a few Christians are called to fight. (For instance, the few who are extraordinarily gifted intellectually are to meet the intellectual challenges of a world that thinks its self-understanding to be the only understanding possible.) And then there is that one battle that the individual Christian is to fight: the battle against that one besetting sin that the individual alone knows about, surrender to which is unthinkable.

“If the trumpet gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” The trumpet-note must be as unmistakable as it is undeniable.

 

HARP   Israel was — and is — unreservedly grateful for its release from Egypt. Yet Israel was not so disgusted at Pharaoh as to disdain everything Egyptian. Israel left Egypt with Egypt’s favourite musical instrument, the harp.

Throughout scripture the harp is the instrument of comfort and consolation. When King Saul was overcome by what is spoken of as an “evil spirit”, David helped Saul by playing on his harp. Now the evil spirit that overcame Saul was no small matter: Saul would become suspicious, then agitated, then paranoid, finally murderous. The harp defused his explosiveness and suffused peace throughout him.

Last October, when we honoured Isaac Watts, we learned that Watts wrote not only hundreds of hymns but also many different kinds or classifications of hymns. One classification he referred to as “Hymns of Consolation”. These “Hymns of Consolation” sing not so much about God in his glory as they do about us in our need, us in the comfort God lends us. Two of Watts’s better-known “consolation” hymns are “When I survey the wondrous cross” and “O God, our help in ages past”.

Did Watts write these hymns merely because he thought other people needed them? I think not. I am sure he wrote them also for himself. Watts, we learned last October, was mentally ill episodically. There were long periods when he had to be absent from his pulpit because he was in “different space”; very different space. Plainly he didn’t write hymns when he was ill. When healthier, however, he penned words that will comfort people until the day of our Lord’s appearing relieves them definitively.

I have been a pastor for 25 years. As I am rendered speechless at the “clobbering” life hands people, I am not at all amazed that some people break down; I am amazed that many do not.

The harp has its place. Hymns of consolation have their place. They aren’t the only hymns we should sing; they aren’t the chief hymns we should sing. But we should never be without them.

Think of some of the better-known consolation hymns. For instance, “Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts” — with its fourth stanza, “Our restless spirits yearn for thee, where’er our changeful lot is cast.” And then there is Charles Wesley’s fine hymn, “Jesus, lover of my soul”, with a poignant second stanza:

Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on thee.
Leave, ah! Leave me not alone;
Still support and comfort me.

 

And perhaps the most haunting of all, because written out of palpable anguish,

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish.
Come to, the mercy-seat, fervently kneel.
Here, bring your wounded hearts; here, tell your anguish.
Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal.

 

The harp has its place.

 

FLUTE/OBOE/”PIPE”   Flute-like instruments (i.e., woodwinds) were used at weddings and funerals, events where people are most touched, most moved.

Let’s think for a minute about weddings. In ancient Israel a wedding was regarded as the most significant human event anyone could share in or witness, as well as the most joyful event. Because a wedding was the most joyful event in Israel, the prophets used the absence of wedding-joy as a vivid picture of national disasters. Whenever the prophets had to wake up the people to the bad times God’s judgement was bringing upon the nation, the prophets horrified the people not by saying that the interest rate was going to rise or the stock market was going to fall; they said, “There shall no more be heard in the land the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.”

Israel of old knew that there is nothing like a wedding, just because there is nothing like marriage. Marriage is the most significant human undertaking anyone can enter upon; it is also the most joyful. A rabbi’s instruction was deemed so important that nothing was allowed to interrupt it; nothing, that is, except a wedding. If a wedding procession wound through the village the rabbi and his students suspended their exploration of the word of God and fell in with the procession. They magnified the wedding-celebration and soaked up the joy surrounding it.

Scripture speaks profoundly of marriage. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife; the two shall be come one, one flesh.” Marriage entails radical exposure to each other, radical vulnerability before each other, radical commitment to each other, radical penetration of each other.

In the Hebrew bible marriage is the commonest metaphor for faith. If marriage is the commonest metaphor for faith, then faith means that God and I, God and you, are radically exposed to each other, radically vulnerable before each other, radically committed to each other; it means we radically penetrate each other, right to the other’s innermost heart.

To be aware of this can only mean that we must consecrate ourselves to God anew.

 

                                                                                             Victor A. Shepherd                                                

April 1995

 

You asked for a sermon on The Meaning and Timing of Confirmation

Proverbs 2:1-8

 

I: — Many of you have voiced to me your misgivings concerning confirmation, the service itself as well as the understanding behind the ritual. No one has suggested that we cancel the service outright. Nonetheless, even those who have never suggested that the event be cancelled continue to express serious reservations about it. A few people are plainly cynical. I imagine that virtually everyone feels that something isn’t quite right with confirmation; something important is somehow not happening, a mythology if not a superstition has taken hold, a game of “let’s pretend” is being played even though most of us can’t really pretend any longer. While almost no one is content with the current practice of confirmation, no one appears to have an alternative.

Everyone knows what happens on Confirmation Sunday. Some of the confirmands we know well. We have seen them and their parents at worship for years. Other confirmands we don’t know at all. We don’t recognize the surname, aren’t acquainted with the parents, assume that the youngster is being confirmed simply because his parents have made him come to the six or seven mandatory classes and get himself “done”, the parents plainly attaching much superstition to getting “done.”

When adults wish to join our congregation through transfer of membership the secretary asks for the transfer, only to learn, quite frequently, that the person in question was not a member of the previous congregation; may have attended, but was never formally a member. I then ask the person in question if she was ever confirmed. Very often she replies that she doesn’t know; she can’t remember whether she was ever confirmed. Were I to ask her, “Did you ever get married?”, she would be able to reply instantly. Apparently confirmation is not particularly memorable.

And then there are the photographs, in the hallway outside the choir room, of the confirmation classes of years past. Where are all those young people today? As painful as it is to say it, would it be truer to say that confirmation is less the congregation’s welcome to the young people than it is their good-bye wave to us?

Many people understand confirmation as a kind of graduation. Once we have graduated from high school, for instance, we don’t go back. Once we have graduated from “church” (Sunday School being a form of church) we don’t go back.

And then there is an aspect to the confirmation service which should jar us all, that part of the service where hands are laid upon the candidate. There is only one other service in the church where hands are laid upon a candidate: ordination to the ministry. Obviously there is close connection between the meaning of confirmation in the faith and the meaning of ordination to the ministry. What is the connection? What would we think of candidates for the ministry who were ordained at a public service and then promptly disappeared from church life?

Then of course there are the promises made during the service itself. One such promise is that the confirmand will be diligent in attendance at public worship. The promise is made by the confirmand and heard by the congregation when everyone knows that diligent attendance at public worship is the last thing many confirmands (and their parents) have in mind.

The promises are followed by the commissioning: “Go out into the world to fulfil your high calling as a servant and soldier of Jesus Christ.” “Go out into the world”: it appears that the theatre, the venue of the Christian’s discipleship is vast. “Servant of Christ”: it appears that extreme self-denial is involved. “Soldier of Christ”: it appears that hardship is cheerfully to be endured. What do we expect a 15 year old to make of all this?

Lastly, at a recent meeting of the Christian Education Committee grave misgivings were voiced concerning the adequacy of six or seven 45-minute sessions as preparation for an event as momentous as confirmation. Frankly, I don’t think that six or seven sessions times 45 minutes is adequate preparation. But surely these sessions aren’t the preparation! Surely the profounder preparation is 15 years of Christian formation through exposure to Christian truth and the Christian way embodied in congregational life and witness.

II: — Many people have asked me about the timing of confirmation, the age at which young people make public promises and are said to be “confirmed”. Why age 15? I simply don’t know. I suspect that it has much to do with the fact that around this age people graduate from elementary school and move on to high school. At the same time, Sunday School customarily concludes for people 14 or 15 years old. When I was new in Streetsville I commented, at a C.E. meeting, that I was concerned about the immediate disappearance of so many confirmees. I suggested that we try something different: postpone the event for a few years to see if the losses were as great then. My suggestion was shot down instantly. “If we postpone the class we might lose those people”, I was told right away. Might lose them? But the present practice has scarcely kept them! I cannot believe that we have genuinely, profoundly “kept” people within the fellowship of the congregation just because their names have been added to record-books.

(I’ll say more about timing later. Let’s move on to the meaning of confirmation.)

III: — The meaning of the service is stated plainly in the service itself. “When those who have been baptized as children have grown up and have been taught the essentials of Christian faith and duty, they come before the church to own for themselves the covenant (i.e., the promises) of their baptism. In this act they confess Jesus Christ openly as Saviour and Lord that they may be confirmed by the Holy Spirit and welcomed to the Lord’s table.” (Let me say in passing that I should welcome any person of any age to the Lord’s table at any time, confirmed or not.) The major point in all this is that those being confirmed now own for themselves and publicly endorse the promises which their parents made on their behalf as infants on the day their parents had them baptized.

Everywhere in the New Testament baptism is a sign of several things. (i) It is a sign of repentance. To repent is to change direction. Christians take their marching orders from a different leader. We walk resolutely that road which leads to the kingdom of God. Other roads — self-inflating ambition, wealth for the sake of wealth, social superiority, self-indulgence — these roads we shun as we move in the direction of the kingdom. (ii) Baptism is a sign of faith. Faith is keeping company with Jesus Christ. Living unashamedly in his company, we share his identity. We are publicly known as those who know him and love him and obey him. (iii) Baptism is commissioning for service. While we certainly love our Lord, we do more than merely love him; we work in his name, work on behalf of others whom he loves as surely as he loves us. (iv) Baptism means one thing more. It means that the repentance and faith and service we exercise, we exercise inasmuch as God’s own Spirit, God himself, has touched us and moved us and constrained us. We haven’t “decided”, of ourselves, to follow Jesus the way we decide to buy a Ford instead of a Chevrolet or a bungalow instead of a townhouse. We are disciples inasmuch as our Lord called us; our resistance melted and we couldn’t do anything else.

Baptism means this. Parents make promises concerning all of this for their children when their children are baptized. Then the day comes when the child, now much older, recognizes what his parents have sought for him for years. He recognizes too that he wants this now for himself. Therefore he owns it all for himself and publicly declares that this is what he will pursue until life ends.

When I was pondering the meaning of “confirm” I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. The O.E.D. gives four meanings for “confirm”. (i) to establish more firmly. Certainly when people are confirmed we want their discipleship to be established more firmly. (ii) to corroborate. Certainly we want their zeal for discipleship to be corroborated, supported, by the Holy Spirit and by others. (iii) to encourage a person in a habit or an opinion. Certainly we want confirmands to persist in the habit of discipleship and persist in their conviction of truth. (iv) the fourth meaning the O.E.D. discusses only in the past tense. It uses the illustration, “confirmed drunkard”, and mentions synonyms like “inveterate”, meaning “life-long”. And certainly we want confirmands to aspire after life-long loyalty to their Lord.

The United Church service speaks of being “confirmed by the Holy Spirit”. We should all want to add, “and by the congregation as well.”

IV: — This is what the service means. How do you feel now about our confirmation practice? Having asked the question, I am in no position to receive 300 replies at this time. But I shall gladly hear from any of you at any other time.

Having asked you a question, I can only go on talking myself. What I say next is only my opinion. Feel free to disagree with it, modify it, endorse it or bury it.

I think we need many “rites of spiritual passage” in our church life. There is nothing wrong with a public service for people 14 or 15 years old, a service which acknowledges the Christian formation they have undergone so far in their lives, a service which points them ahead to deeper understanding and faith and service, a service which encourages them to persist more profoundly in it. Therefore I am not suggesting for a minute that we eliminate the “rite of spiritual passage” for people of this age.

At the same time I have long felt that the kind of promise we ask young people to make at this age we should defer to a later age. We all agree that no 14 or 15 year old should be asked to make a promise concerning marriage. (For that matter no 17 year old should be asked, either.) We don’t ask 15 year olds to make promises concerning marriage because we know that they cannot understand the force of what they are pledging. Might it not be the same with respect to the promises made at confirmation? Teenage years are often characterized by religious enthusiasms, but also characterized by religious denunciations; doubts, perplexities, denials of all that their parents have cherished, questions, uncertainties, contradictions. A Roman Catholic woman remarked to me that when her daughter was 16 her daughter was vowing every day to become a nun; when her daughter was 17 she couldn’t get her daughter out of bed and to church on Sunday morning.

Teenagers 14, 15, 16 years old feel they have to question everything. There is nothing wrong with this. After all, none of us wants our children to grow up uncritical, mindless dupes. At this age too teenagers become aware that the world as it is is not quite the neat, cosy, justly-ordered world of their early childhood. They learn that there is nothing in the real world which unfolds like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. They learn now of the evil which excoriates the world, of the shocking unfairness which riddles life, of the misery in which most of the world’s people will have to live. And then they put all of this against the supposed goodness and mercy of God.

At this age too teenagers learn of the arguments brought against faith by Freud and Marx and Darwin. Dealing with these arguments may be “old hat” to a middle-aged person like me, but to a 15 year old it is all so new, so startling, so powerful as to hang a huge question mark above all that he has understood to date of the Christian faith. I often feel that the confirmation process stifles the teenagers’ searching, their inquisitiveness, their wrestling issues to the ground, when we should be encouraging all of this; we smother precisely what we should stimulate. Of course we should support them while they search. But what is to be gained by exerting pressure from parents, peers and congregation upon a teenager to conform to the confirmation practice when all the while some of them, at least, want to cry out, “But I’m not convinced yet; and I have many more questions; and why do I have to submit to this?”

I have long felt that we need to support youngsters throughout this searching, questioning, doubting, probing phase; support them and encourage them in it, and wait for them to emerge on the other side of it with a faith they have hammered out for themselves and can own without reservation. At this point, I feel, we should have another public “rite of spiritual passage” for those who are now 22 or 25 or 28 — or 55.

V:– While the congregation owns and supports teenagers throughout this process and then publicly celebrates the culmination of their search, its flowering into fruit-bearing faith, the congregation should also, I feel, recognize, own, support all kinds of people who act in the congregation’s name. Yes, we do recognize the UCW leadership each year when we install the executive. “Install”? We install heavy appliances, like stoves, fridges, washers and dryers. We shouldn’t “install” these women; we should commission them. We should commission them on behalf of the UCW for the ultimate blessing of the whole congregation. We shouldn’t “install” Sunday School teachers as we call it at present. We should commission them to bring to children, in the way that children can understand, the faith which this congregation as a whole owns. We commission the teachers to render this service for us.

What about the prime neighbours? We need a service which sets forth the way in which the neighbouring program extends Christian hospitality, and what we are trusting to result from this ministry.

The thrust of the visiting program is different. Whereas the prime neighbours have others into their own homes, the visitors go out to other people’s homes, with a different purpose in view. We need a service which recognizes this and commissions them for it.

Youth work in the congregation: youth group, girls’ work, Boy Scout/Girl Guide work. It all happens here in the congregation. We need a public service of recognition, gratitude and commissioning.

VI: —And then I think there may be one thing more needed. Perhaps we need to allow an individual to speak on Sunday morning from time to time. Not to make an announcement in the announcement period, but rather to share her testimony of God’s victory somewhere in her life, or to request special intercession of us in special circumstances, or to lay an extraordinary concern before us which is searing her heart. Do we need a place for this as well?

VII: — Let me say again what I said a minute ago. You asked for a sermon on the meaning and timing of confirmation. I have put before you my best thinking on the subject. But it is only mine. I need to hear yours. Speak to me, to anyone on the Official Board, to anyone on the Christian Education Committee, to anyone in the Sunday School. But be sure to let us know what is on your mind.

F I N I S

                                                                        Victor A. Shepherd
January 1994

Bread and Honey

Proverbs 4:14 -18        1st Corinthians             John 6:22 -34

 

 

[1]         When the Japanese besieged Hong Kong sixty-plus years ago and began starving the people inside the city, a British banker was found sitting on the curb with his feet in the gutter. He was dressed like a British banker: cutaway coat, Homburg hat, pin-striped charcoal trousers, grey spats. He was the picture of upper-class privilege.  He had found an orange in the gutter.  The orange had been stepped on several times, had been exposed to the sun, and was covered with grime.  He was about to bite into it when a British soldier knocked it out of his hand, shouting, “Do you want to get sick?”   Whereupon the banker, still sitting on the curb, hung his head and blubbered like a child.

Hunger is terrible. Hunger bends people. Hunger finds people behaving in ways they otherwise never would.         Hunger forces people to be what they never thought they’d become. The British banker would have given everything he owned, even his indexed civil service pension, for one slice of bread.  But there was no bread.

Bread was the all-important commodity in the ancient east.  Bread? Not money?   Money didn’t even exist in old, old Babylon ; in lieu of currency grain was the medium of exchange.  Hundreds of years later, in Hosea’s day, Hosea lurched broken-hearted to the market in order to purchase his “hooker”-wife from the clutches of the local pimp.         Hosea paid part of the purchase-price in grain.  In our society there are few public officials more important than the minister of finance and the president of the central bank.  In the ancient world, however, the most important public official was the one responsible for bread.

 

[2]         Bread isn’t eaten the way ice-cream or chocolate is eaten.  Bread is consumed in large quantities.  It’s one of life’s necessities.  Because bread looms so large in our lives and is essential to life, we use the word “bread” metaphorically.  “I’ve got to have a second job just to put bread on the table.” Everyone knows what the expression is meant to convey.  When we pray, as we are taught to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”, we are asking for all of life’s necessities: bread, to be sure, but also water and clean air and safe cities and national security and effective schooling and adequate medical care. What, after all, would be the point of bread (literal) to sustain us if disease then carried us off? What would be the point of eating bread to forestall malnutrition if we then had to breathe lung-corroding air or live in lethal streets or succumb to military aggression? When we pray for daily bread we are praying for all of life’s necessities as symbolized by bread.  When our Lord multiplied the loaves and healed the sick and raised the dead he wasn’t doing three different things.  He was doing one thing: bringing with him that kingdom whose manifestation we long to see.

Then is bread a physical matter or a spiritual matter?  To put such a question is to pose a false dichotomy.         All of us in Schomberg have been schooled in the logic of the Hebrew bible, and therefore we know that to dichotomize life into the physical (or material) and the spiritual is to dichotomize life falsely.  Dennis Niles, a thoughtful South Asian Christian of an earlier era, used to say, “If I lack bread – that’s a physical problem; if my neighbour lacks bread – a spiritual problem.”  Since the Christian community is birthed by the Spirit of God and is concerned with spiritual matters, the Christian community is therefore concerned with material matters – which is to say, the Christian community is always concerned with bread of every kind.

 

[3] While we are speaking of bread metaphorically we should recall the way the older testament speaks of the bread of tears and the bread of affliction and the bread of idleness and the bread of adversity.  Because bread was the staple food in the ancient world, it was eaten in huge quantities. Then as now people knew that in one sense they were what they ate. What they ate became so thoroughly a part of them that they were characterized by what they had had to swallow.

When the Hebrew bible speaks of the bread of tears or the bread of sorrow, it means that someone is so thoroughly grief-saturated she’s consumed by her grief; someone has been so thoroughly saddened that she’s characterized by her sorrow and is now identified with it.

Life is relatively easy for me.  (At least it has been to date.)  For others, however, life is exceedingly difficult.         We all know people whom adversity has devastated so thoroughly and so often that we would say, were we living in the time of our Hebrew foreparents, that they have eaten the bread of adversity.  As soon as we hear the word “adversity” we think of those people who exemplify adversity and whom we now identify with it.

We know too people who have eaten the bread of wickedness.  In scripture those who eat the bread of wickedness are also said to drink the wine of violence. People who plunge themselves farther and farther into wickedness have no choice but to maintain themselves by means of violence.  They have become so very wicked and necessarily so very violent that they are now identified with it all.

 

[4] In view of the different kinds of bread that we can eat and do eat, it’s plain that we need one more kind of bread as we need nothing else: we need him who is the bread of life. We are sinners and we are sufferers. We need our Lord, and he meets us at every point of our need.

In Israel ’s 40-year trek through the wilderness there was given them a most glorious anticipation of Jesus Christ, the bread of life.  They were given manna. Manna sustained them in that era when bleakness loomed wherever they looked.  “Manna” is a Hebrew word meaning “What is it?”  They were sustained by God’s provision, the nature of which they couldn’t explain (let alone explain away), yet whose presence and significance they couldn’t deny. “What is it?” How God sustains his people is always a mystery; but that he sustains them is never in doubt.  Manna appeared to be so very ordinary, yet it was extraordinary in its origin, its nature, its effectiveness.

Twelve hundred years after the wilderness episode some descendants of wilderness-survivors said to Jesus, “Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness. Moses fed his people.  What can you do for us?” Jesus replied, “It wasn’t Moses who fed your foreparents; it was my Father.  He gives true bread from heaven, and I, Jesus of Nazareth, am that bread. I am the bread of life, just because I am living bread. Whoever comes to me will never hunger; whoever comes to me will never perish.”

Manna was an anticipation of Jesus Christ.  To say the same thing differently, Jesus Christ was the hidden truth of the manna in the wilderness.  It was he who sustained the people even though they knew it not.  “Now, however”, says our Lord, “you people are to know that I am God’s provision. To be sure, I appear so very ordinary as to be readily overlooked.  Yet my origin, nature and effectiveness are rooted in the mystery of God. I am living bread, the bread of life; whoever comes to me from this moment neither hungers nor perishes.”

 

[5]         Today is communion Sunday. In the service of Holy Communion we eat ordinary bread, everyday bread, bread plain and simple, and yet we are fed him who is the bread of life.  The bread that sustains our bodies (and therein our minds, since the human mind is never found apart from the body) also sustains, by God’s grace, our life in him as our Lord Jesus Christ gives himself to us afresh.

Let’s make no mistake. It is by God’s grace, and only by his grace, that we are sustained in our life with him, advanced in it, and ultimately perfected in it, for of ourselves we are fallen creatures who are found eating the bread of wickedness again and again. Like all who eat the bread of wickedness we unfailingly drink the wine of violence, since there’s no wickedness that isn’t intrinsically linked with violence. The wonder of it all is that the human wickedness which conspires against our Lord, and the human violence which torments him and finally slays him; this, our sin, becomes, by God’s grace, the occasion of our restoration. Our sin becomes the occasion of our salvation. For at the cross the crucified one absorbs our violent wickedness and renders it that sacrifice for us apart from which we can only die the death that wickedness merits.

Everyday bread that we eat to sustain life is made the vehicle of the bread of life as Our Lord continues to feed us who crave the bread of wickedness. As he continues to fee us we find the bread of heaven quickening a new appetite in us, an appetite for living bread.  For this bread profoundly satisfies even as it never satiates.

 

Honey

[6]         Honey is a sweetener. Then is honey only a confection like candy?   No. While honey is a sweetener to be sure, scripture speaks everywhere of honey as a foodstuff. The book of Ecclesiasticus lists “the chief necessities of human life.”   They are water, fire, iron, salt, flour, milk, the juice of the grape, clothing, honey. (Ecclus. 39:26)         In the older testament honey is mentioned matter-of-factly with other items that everyone recognizes to be foodstuffs: wheat, barley, beans, lentils, cheese. (2 Sam. 17:29)  At the same time honey is that staple, a foodstuff, whose sweetness renders it especially attractive.

We modern food-procurers cultivate honey by building beehives and placing the beehives in orchards and clover-fields.  In this way we can maximize honey production and collect the honey conveniently. In Israel of old, however, there were no carefully constructed beehives: honey was simply gathered wherever it could be found.

And where was it found? It was found in the hollow of rocks, rocks that were unremarkably ordinary. It was found in trees, trees that were stately and beautiful.  John the Baptist found it in the wilderness of Judaea , the wilderness being just that: wilderness. Samson found honey in the carcass of a dead lion – which is to say, in the midst of rottenness.

Honey, our Hebrew foreparents said, is one of life’s necessities, and honey can be found anywhere. It can be found amidst life’s ordinariness, life’s beauty, life’s wilderness, and even life’s rottenness.  In other words, honey can be found wherever life lands us.  No one is so foolish as to think that life’s assorted settings produce honey; they certainly don’t produce it.  But the assorted settings of life are precisely where honey, God’s provision, can always be found.

 

The psalmist tells us repeatedly that the Torah is sweeter than honey. Torah is the truth of God and the will of God and the way of God as well as the path that God appoints us to walk, even our companion on the path.  Jesus Christ is Torah Incarnate.  He is the truth and will and way of God made flesh. In his company we find ourselves on the path through life that he has pioneered for us, even as he remains our companion on the path.   He is Torah incarnate. We have found him to be the necessity of life, even as we have found him to be so wondrously attractive as to leave us saying of him, “sweeter than honey.”

 

Today at our communion service let us eat bread, drink wine, savour honey (at the coffee hour, a part of congregational life), knowing that honey can be found anywhere in life.  For everywhere in life, in every crevice and corner, nook and cranny, in whatever beauty or bleakness, our Lord is to be found.  He is even to be found at a service of Holy Communion in a village church in Schomberg to be sure, but also on every occasion, on any day, anywhere.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd   

January 2007        

Of Gratitude and Grumbling and a Cheerful Heart

Proverbs 17:22 ; 15:15   

Exodus 16:2-3                       2nd Corinthians 9:11-12                 Colossians 2:7             John 16:33

 

I: — Petulant whining, complaining, grousing, grumbling; it always strikes us as so very childish. It rains on the day of the picnic. The child pouts and sulks, mumbles and mutters. Finally her mother has had enough. “I can’t to anything about the weather,” mother says, thinking that her reasonable word to the child will undo the child’s irrationality and sweeten the child’s sourness. Not a chance. The child seems to prefer to mumble and mutter petulantly, seems to enjoy being miserable. Mother, still assuming that her rationality can undo her child’s irrationality, sweetly replies, “All right; so we can’t have a picnic today. Just think of all you have to be grateful for.” Petulantly the child mutters that she can’t think of anything at all. Of course she can’t. Ingratitude shrivels hearts and distorts perception and perverts understanding. At this point mother shakes her head and finds consolation that one day her child will be an adult and will see such matters as powerlessness over weather from an adult point of view. At which time gratitude will appear and life will be assessed quite differently.

Yet there are some adults who, while “adult” in the sense of being post-adolescent, never mature. Ingratitude born of short-sightedness never gives way to gratitude for blessings visible everywhere. An unthankful spirit, worsened by petulance, is always a sign of childishness, to say the least.

But more than the least has to be said. In other words, while ingratitude is a sign of childishness, it’s also a sign of something worse than childishness. It’s a sign of grave spiritual sickness.

When scripture speaks of ingratitude and the grumbling that noisily advertises ingratitude, it gathers up the inner attitude and the outer manifestation in one onomatopoeic word: “murmuring.” Everywhere in scripture unthankful people are said to murmur.

We first read of God’s people murmuring when they are in the wilderness, halfway between Egypt and the Promised Land. Earlier they had been slaves in Egypt , and had found slavery unendurable. They had cried out in those days, and God had been moved by their outcry, since they had grounds for crying out. God had delivered them with his outstretched arm. Then he had forged them into a people after his own heart at Mount Sinai when he had given them the Ten Words, a way of living that would end forever the social chaos and the spiritual disintegration they had seen in the pagan nations. The only thing left them to do was to fall on their faces in gratitude; sheer, adoring gratitude. After all, they had been spared the misery and humiliation of slavery as well as the confusion and corruption of ungodliness. In view of what God had spared them, the hardship of the wilderness – rigorous to be sure – would nevertheless have been inconsequential. However, as their gratitude evaporated, reasonableness evaporated too. Now they wanted to go back to Egypt . “At least we had lots to eat in Egypt ,” they whined, “even if we were slaves.”

Are the ungrateful people, now advertising their ingratitude through grumbling, willing to forfeit their calling as God’s people? Do they really want to hand themselves over to the indignity and dehumanisation of slavery? Do they really want to embrace the spiritual vacuity and the amorality of the nations that haven’t been to Mount Sinai ?

Yes. Insanity of the sort just described is a spin-off of ingratitude. In view of what God had done for them; in view of what God continued to do for them; in view of all this, ingratitude could only spell disaster as surely as gratitude would have guaranteed their faithfulness as God’s people and guaranteed the fulfilment of their vocation as a light to the nations.

I am moved whenever I read the Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563. The Heidelberg Catechism is the crown jewel of the shorter Reformation writings. It is a gem. The first section of the Catechism is titled “The Misery of Man.” Ten questions and answers realistically probe and portray the human predicament in the era of the Fall. The second section is titled “The Redemption of Man.” Seventy-Five questions and answers tell us of God’s glorious mercy and patience and persistence, all motivated by his oceanic love of sinners. The third section is titled “Thankfulness;” simply that: “Thankfulness.” This third section begins by posing the question, “Why should we obey God?” It doesn’t answer that we should obey him lest we provoke his anger. It doesn’t even say that we should obey him out of enlightened self-interest (things will go better for us if we obey him.) It says that we should obey him out of gratitude to him for all that his goodness has done for us. In other words, according to the Heidelberg Catechism the whole of our discipleship, our obedience, whatever renunciation is asked of us; it’s all motivated by one thing: thankfulness.

By the time the Catechism gets around to speaking of prayer it’s at question #116. “Why is prayer necessary for Christians?” Why do you think prayer is necessary for Christians? Because it’s the instrument for getting what we need? Answer #116: “Prayer is the principal element in the thankfulness God requires of us.” Every aspect of our response to God derives from our gratitude.

“Gratitude for what?” someone asks. All Christians, together with our Hebrew ancestors in faith; all Christians have stood at the edge of the Red Sea; all Christians have stood at the foot of Sinai; and all Christians have stood, above all, at the foot of the cross. We are the beneficiaries of God’s goodness so many times over that minimal spiritual sanity means maximal gratitude. Ingratitude, murmuring, can only mean that we are so blind to what we’ve been given as to be insane.

 

II: — “Is unthankfulness as serious as that?” someone asks. “Is grumbling that dangerous?” Yes it is.

In the parable of the workers in the vineyard Jesus points out that ingratitude, grumbling, reveals resentment and reinforces it. In this parable some men are hired to work in the vineyard. At the end of their eight-hour shift they are paid the agreed-upon sum. Other workers, hired late in the day and therefore who have worked only four hours or two hours or perchance one hour; these other workers receive the same sum. This parable, we should note right here, has nothing to do with economics or labour relations. This parable has rather to do with God’s grace and mercy and help. You see, in ancient Palestine day-labourers, the bottom rung of the working class, were paid at the end of each day. They had to be. They lived so close to the line that they had no savings at all, nothing in reserve. With the money they were paid for that day’s work they fed their families the same evening and next morning. The men in the parable who had worked a full day were given one day’s pay – and immediately used it to sustain themselves and their dependents. The men who had worked less than a day were nonetheless given a full day’s pay. Why? Because anything less than a full day’s pay would have been useless. If they had received a quarter of a day’s pay for a quarter of a day’s work, they and their dependents would have starved. Because the owner of the vineyard was generous, all the men were given what they needed regardless of what they deserved. Even so, says Jesus, people with ungrateful hearts murmur and mutter and grumble at the vineyard owner inasmuch as they resent seeing others appear more fortunate than they. Had they been grateful themselves, they would also have rejoiced to see other needy people given as much as those people needed.

A clergyman who had served in the prairies during the Great Depression told me of the joy in his village the day a boxcar of vegetables from the east was uncoupled from the train and left in the village. People were given cabbages and turnips and carrots and corn and ever so much more. It so happened that the postmaster was the only man in the village with a permanent job. Therefore he was extraordinarily privileged. And when the vegetables were distributed, the old clergyman told me, this postmaster denounced the fellow-villager who had been given a slightly larger turnip. Ingratitude reveals resentment and reinforces it.

 

Ingratitude does something more: it cloaks a mean spirit. Thankfulness publicises a generous spirit; unthankfulness cloaks a mean spirit.

A woman fell at the feet of Jesus and poured out on his feet the costliest bottle of cologne as she wiped his feet with her hair. Why did she do this? She did it out gratitude to him for all that he done for her. Mark tells us that several bystanders, people who plainly were possessed of no gratitude at all, carped and complained, muttered and murmured, groused and grumbled, “This money could have been given to the poor.” Since when were these grumblers concerned with the poor? When have complainers ever been concerned with the poor? Every time Jesus had eaten with the poor the murmurers had murmured. They weren’t concerned with the poor. They were ungrateful people whose mean spirits found them relishing every opportunity to complain.

The price of the cologne indicated the depth of the woman’s gratitude. Then how grateful was she? She had spent 300 denarii on the bottle of cologne; 300 denarii, an entire year’s income. Luke tells us that the woman was a harlot. In those long-ago days of sweaty-hot Palestine when bathtubs and water were scarce, harlots used cologne as a tool of the trade. In other words, her gratitude moved her to a public renunciation of her sin and her sin-begotten employment. Her gratitude moved her to a public penitence. Her gratitude moved her to a costly sacrifice, for this woman had given up her livelihood.

How grateful are you today? And I? Grateful enough to renounce sin and proffer penitence and gladly make that sacrifice whose cost we count only to forget? Are we so grateful that compared to our gratitude the sacrifice our Lord asks of us is nothing?

Bystanders who watched the woman carped at her and complained, ungrateful grumblers that they were. Their inner ingratitude and their outer murmuring merely cloaked a mean spirit.

 

Ingratitude is lethal for yet another reason. Inner ingratitude and outer murmuring blind us to God’s breaking in upon us in the most ordinary moments and circumstances. It’s just the opposite with the grateful heart. The person whose heart is characteristically grateful recognises the incursion of God in her life in the most ordinary circumstances and in the most undramatic ways. The grateful person instantly, gladly, gives thanks. Whereupon she finds herself discerning more sensitively even more subtle incursions of God in her life. Once again she instantly, gladly, gives thanks. Whereupon she finds herself discerning even more sensitively the even more subtle incursions of God in her life. It all keeps spiralling up as her gratitude is rewarded with discernment and her discernment with greater gratitude and her greater gratitude with still greater discernment.

It’s just the opposite with the ungrateful grumbler. Everything spirals down for him. Jesus quietly announces that he is the bread of life, that gift of God no less miraculous than the manna which sustained God’s people day-by-day when they had no other resources. Immediately the murmurers around Jesus begin to murmur. “How can he be the bread of life? We know his mother and father. He’s nothing more than a carpenter’s son. He’s too ordinary to be God’s visitation and God’s definitive blessing.” Murmuring shrivels our heart, dulls our understanding, numbs our spiritual sensors. Murmuring invariably blinds us to those moments, ordinary to be sure yet not ordinary, when we know that God has spoken to us, whispered to us or shouted at us, nudged us or shaken us, startled us or quieted us, convicted us and corrected us yet also finally comforted us. We alone are aware of it inasmuch as the public event surrounding it is so very ordinary even as the private event within us is overwhelming. Ungrateful grumbling blinds us to this. Ungrateful grumblers find it all spiralling down as ingratitude is punished by non-discernment or insensitivity, insensitivity by colder ingratitude, colder ingratitude by still duller non-discernment.

 

It’s plain that prophet and apostle weren’t exaggerating when they insisted that inner ingratitude and outer grumbling were together a spiritual sickness severe enough to find the ungrateful person soon on the critical list. Neither were prophet and apostle exaggerating when they insisted that gratitude, thankfulness, wasn’t merely a sign of spiritual health but even the way to better health.

 

III: — It’s plain that prophet and apostle agree with the writer of Proverbs, “A cheerful heart is a good medicine; a cheerful heart has a continual feast.”

Today is Thanksgiving Sunday. Words like “continual feast” are therefore especially telling. “Continual feast” suggests “continual thanksgiving.” And continual thanksgiving is precisely what we find everywhere in scripture. The thanksgiving we are to render God, say prophet and apostle, is never grudging, never paltry, never “once-in-a-lifetime.” The apostle Paul says that the heart of the Christian “overflows in many thanksgivings to God.” As “grace extends to more and more,” he tells the Christians in Corinth , it will surely “increase thanksgiving to the glory of God.” He tells the same congregation that God’s goodness enriches us “in every way for great generosity” to others, and our “great” generosity in turn moves these other people to great thanksgiving to God. He tells the Christians in Colosse that they are to treasure Jesus Christ, with the result that they “abound in thanksgiving.” The psalmist tells us he customarily joins fellow-worshippers at church in “glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.”

Clearly the picture painted for us is a picture of the heart throbbing with thanksgiving. It’s the heart that “abounds” with thanksgiving, “overflows” with thanksgiving, is “greatly” grateful. It is this heart that is cheerful and has a continual feast.

Then do we ever have grounds for grumbling? Of course we have grounds for grumbling. In everyone’s life there is a ceaseless undercurrent, an undertow even, of stress, difficulty, suffering, disappointment, apprehension, uncertainty, illness, grief. Therefore there are grounds for grumbling.

Then is grumbling finally permitted, even though scripture insists, and we saw earlier, that grumbling is spiritually lethal? No. Grumbling isn’t finally permitted. It’s not permitted for one reason: our grounds for grumbling are always less than our grounds for gratitude. In a verse from John’s gospel that I memorized when I was barely past infancy (and therefore the last thing I’m going to remember when I’m a senile old man in the nursing home) Jesus tells his followers, “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” Our Lord has overcome, has already overcome, everything that is grounds for grumbling. In other words, our grounds for grumbling have been eclipsed by our grounds for gratitude.

Several years ago my mother had a major heart attack and was hospitalized for 75 consecutive days. In the course of visiting her I noticed that she never complained about her damaged heart or her restricted activity or her protracted institutionalization. On the contrary she always appeared grateful for the slightest service rendered her. When I visited her on Thanksgiving weekend I noticed on her tabletop her church bulletin, in which she had written fellow-parishioners thanking them for their many kindnesses. At the conclusion of her note she had written, “Psalm 59:16.” I looked it up. Psalm 59:16 is an exclamation of thanksgiving to God. “I will sing aloud of your [i.e., God’s] steadfast love, for you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress.” Since the fortress and refuge of God’s steadfast love were known and dependable; since tribulation had already been overcome, her grounds for gratitude would always be greater than her grounds for grumbling.

It is the ever-grateful heart that is ever-cheerful, and this ever-cheerful heart has a continual feast.

Blessings on you, every one, on this, the festival of Thanksgiving.

 

                                                                                           Victor Shepherd                                                                                                        

Thanksgiving 2004

The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride

Proverbs 16:18

                                                   Daniel 5:20 -23                     James 4:1-6                         John 13:1-15

 

I: — Recently I walked into a major department store, looking for an article I was eager to purchase. I didn’t know where to find it. I asked a salesperson. I thought she would be eager to help for three reasons: one, I had money to spend; two, she had no other customers to wait upon; three, I was in a hurry. But she wasn’t eager to help. “Over there”, she waved in no direction at all, “it’s over there, somewhere.” Doesn’t she have any pride in her work?

Some hockey players are known as “floaters”. They have above-average ability. They work hard for part of the game. They work hard if the score is still tied early in the game, or they work hard if they haven’t scored yet themselves. But as soon as their team is two goals ahead or two goals behind they “float”. As soon as they’ve scored a goal or two themselves they skate at three-quarter speed and avoid heavy traffic. Their name is now in the scoring column and they are taking the rest of the night off. “Floaters”. Don’t they have any pride in what they’re doing? Shouldn’t they be ashamed of themselves for drawing a huge pay-cheque for so little effort?

Speaking of shame, our society assumes that shame is everywhere and always detrimental, and therefore we should all aim at becoming shame-free. In fact nothing could be worse. The person with no capacity for shame is like the person with no capacity for guilt: he’s to be pitied (since his condition is genuinely pitiable) and he’s to be avoided (since he really is dangerous – he’s a psychopath). It is false shame that is detrimental and is therefore to be eliminated. False shame is being shame-bound when we have nothing to be ashamed of. But to remain unashamed when we should rightly be ashamed is nothing less than pitiable.

Plainly there are two distinct meanings to “pride.” One we shall discuss soon. The other meaning, the one presupposed so far in the sermon, pertains to the pursuit of excellence. Pride in the sense of the pursuit of excellence has nothing to do with pride as sin. In fact, not to pursue excellence is sin.   Irving Layton, late Canadian poet, has penned the line, “The slow, steady triumph of mediocrity.” He’s captured it, hasn’t he. Mediocrity will triumph if only because the many purveyors of mediocrity, joining forces, can always outvote and outmanoeuvre and outmuscle the few who are committed to excellence. Mediocrity is threatened by excellence and longs to submerge it.

Pride isn’t sin when it’s simply the pursuit of excellence. Pride is sin when it’s a God-defying and neighbour-disdaining arrogance. The key is the distinction between excellence and arrogance.

Then why is pride in the sense of arrogance to be abhorred? If the consequences of arrogance were merely that we appeared somewhat snooty and snobby then pride would be a trifle. Yet our mediaeval foreparents named it one of the seven “deadly sins”, the deadly sin. And in fact the consequences of spiritual arrogance, so far from being trivial, are ruinous.

 

II:(i) — Think of how arrogance blinds us. Pride blinds us to our fragility, our frailty. Pride leads us to think we are Herculean, a “cut above” everyone else, impervious to all the things that collapse and crumble those whom we deem “lesser breeds”. The hymn writer cries, “Frail as summer’s flower we flourish; blows the wind, and it is gone.” “Not so”, we whisper to ourselves, “not so. We aren’t frail and it’ll take more than a puff of summer wind to scatter us.”

When arrogant people boast of physical invulnerability, thinking themselves to be beyond the reach of disease and debilitation, we pronounce them fools. We also stand back and wait a while, knowing that soon they will prove themselves helpless against the tiniest microbe.

Yet having learned our lesson so thoroughly with respect to physical health, we appear to learn nothing about our spiritual well-being. Having detected the pride that leaves people foolishly thinking themselves to be physically invulnerable, we appear unaware of the pride that leaves us on the edge of spiritual collapse.

The saints of every tradition have known, for instance, that there is no spiritual resilience without frequent, habitual, heart-searching prayer on behalf of oneself and the same frequent, habitual, self-forgetting intercession on behalf of others. But if we have concluded that we have no time for this, not so much as ten minutes per day, we are pride-blinded to our own vulnerability and to the world’s need.

If we were to appear in public with lipstick on our teeth or our slip showing by three inches; if we were to appear in public with our zipper undone or egg-yolk on our necktie we’d be annoyed at those who saw us like this but never took us aside and told us quietly what had to be done. Certainly we’d never thank those who failed to spare us embarrassment, let alone humiliation. Yet our pride blinds us to our spiritual need and blinds us yet again to the gratitude we owe those who point out our spiritual deficits in order to spare us public embarrassment. When people who know us well, even those we deem good friends, gently try to tell us that we are unknowingly flirting with something that is going to be our downfall, our pride suddenly sours us and we resent being told this. We don’t thank them. We tell them to mind their own business; we tell ourselves that we are invulnerable. Why, our discipleship could never be collapsed. What can be next except collapse?   The person who thinks he’s beyond disgracing himself is already on the edge of doing just that.

Frail as summer’s flower we flourish? Not we. In no time our proud denial of our frailty publicly demonstrates our frailty. Pride blinds us to our frailty, our fragility, our spiritual vulnerability.

 

(ii) — Another reason that our foreparents, wise in matters of the Spirit, deemed pride to be the arch sin: pride is also the arch-corrupter. It corrupts everything good; it corrupts everything that the gospel struggles to bring to birth in us.

Think of courage. Courage is the work of Christ within us, the work of him whose most frequent word to his followers is, “Fear not.” As soon as we are proud of our courage, however, we become show-offs. Show-offs are soon reckless. Reckless people are dangerous, dangerous to themselves and dangerous to others.

Think of affection. Affection too is fostered by him who loves us more than he loves himself. Yet as soon as we are proud of the affection we pour upon others, they feel patronised by our affection. So far from exalting others, our affection (now corrupted) demeans them.

Think of both thrift and generosity. (Thrift and generosity have to be considered together, since only thrifty people have the wherewithal to be generous.) The gospel quickens generosity in us. (After all, we are rendered Christian by the self-giving of him who gave up everything for us). Yet as soon as pride appears it corrupts, since the person proud of his thrift becomes stingy, miserly even, while the person proud of his generosity uses his generosity to advertise himself.

There is nothing that pride doesn’t corrupt, and corrupt thoroughly.

 

(iii) Our theological and spiritual foreparents, however, were quick to attack pride chiefly because they knew that blindness to our vulnerability and the corruption of our graces, important as they are, are mere spin-offs of the ultimately hideous illusion that our pride visits upon us. I speak now of the illusion that we are not creatures in that we acknowledge no creator; we are not sinners in that we acknowledge no judge; we are not to be servants in that we acknowledge no master; we are not to spend ourselves for others in that we acknowledge no claim upon us; and we are not to submit ourselves to the Other in that we acknowledge no one to be our Lord. This is the ultimate illusion.

Psychiatrists tell us that people who live in a world of cognitive illusion are psychotic. The word “psychotic” means that someone’s ability to test what is actually “out there”; this ability is grossly impaired or has even been lost. Our society is horrified at the appearance of psychotic people; our society’s response is to move them off the scene as fast as possible. In our horror at psychosis (which is a giant, all-encompassing cognitive illusion) we blithely overlook that spiritual psychosis which is far more common; universal, in fact, apart from a miracle at God’s hand. Spiritual psychosis is the spiritual condition where someone’s ability to discern God’s presence, God’s truth, God’s way, God’s inescapability; someone’s ability here is broken down (or not so much broken down as never quickened). Are we horrified at this? Not at all. The ultimate evil of pride is that it destroys our capacity to perceive the truth about ourselves under God. It even destroys our awareness that we are under God. This is the ultimate illusion and, if we were sensible at all, the ultimate horror.

The book of Daniel tells us that when King Nebucchadnezzar became swollen with pride his spirit was hardened; he was deposed from this throne; his glory was taken away from him; he went mad and ate grass like an animal. His pride brought on “melt-down”. His pride blinded him, blunted him, dehumanised him. The text tells us that he remained in this state “until he knew that the Most High God rules the kingdom of men….”

 

III: — Since all of us are afflicted with a pride comparable to Nebucchadnezzar’s, all of us desperately need to be cured of it. What is the cure? Where does the cure begin?

 

(i) It begins with truth; the truth (i.e., the truth of God); the whole truth. The truth is, we are unrighteous people who have nothing to plead on our own behalf. Since we can plead nothing of ourselves, we can only plead God’s mercy, his forgiveness, his remission of our sin.

As long as we think there is anything in us that God can recognise and reward, we are pride-deluded. The fact that our only righteousness is God’s gift tells us that there is nothing in ourselves that we can call up or brandish or use as a bargaining chip with God. Several years ago I was counselling a woman, on her way to a divorce, when her husband — a Texan — dropped into my office to pay me for the service – many hours of counselling – I was rendering his wife. I told this Texan that there was no counselling fee; I was paid by the congregation, and I was paid adequately. He insisted on writing a small cheque ($25.00) to the congregation. “I may not have a great deal of money”, he told me vehemently, “but I’m no ‘field nigger’.” Plainly a field nigger is someone with no standing and no respectability. This man was telling me he had some. But the fact of God’s pardon, his forgiveness, his mercy, his remission; the fact of this means that you and I are beggars before God. To be sure, forgiveness means more than this, a great deal more; but it never means less. The fact that we can live before God only by his mercy means that we have nothing to call up or brandish or use as a bargaining chip with God.

When Richard Nixon was charged and convicted, Gerald Ford, his successor, granted him a “Presidential Pardon”. The fact of Nixon’s pardon meant there wasn’t one person who could think of one thing to excuse one offence. Since there wasn’t one person who could think of one thing to excuse one offence, either Richard Nixon was to be sentenced or he was to be pardoned. He was pardoned. His pardon, however, presupposed his guilt. We must be sure we understand this point: Nixon’s pardon meant he was indisputably guilty. What is excusable we excuse; the wholly inexcusable, the utterly guilty, can only be pardoned.

If we think no pride remains in us, then we need to ask ourselves if we understand what God’s forgiveness means: it means that our Father can’t think of one thing that would excuse anything about us. God’s gift of righteousness – his gift of right standing with him pressed upon those who cling in faith to the ever-righteous Son – means that of ourselves we have no standing with him and aren’t fit to appear before him.

 

(ii)   If the first truth about us is that the gospel unmasks us, exposes us, the second truth about us is that the gospel gloriously heals us and exalts us. The second truth is also a second test: are we willing to wrap the healing/exalting gospel around us despite the gospel’s bloodiness (say pseudo-sophisticates) and despite the gospel’s narrowness (say the supposedly broadminded) and despite the gospel’s Jewishness (say the anti-Semites among us)?

Naaman was commander of the Syrian army. He learned he had leprosy. He longed to be rid of it. A young Israelite woman, a prisoner of war, told Naaman’s wife that a man named Elisha, a prophet in Israel , could cure Naaman. Naaman swallowed his pride and called on Elisha. What a humiliation. He, a military commander, a cosmopolitan Gentile, appearing cap-in-hand before this scruffy enemy fellow who also belonged to that people the world loves to loathe. Naaman was so humiliated he knew there couldn’t be any pride left in him — until Elisha told him what he had to do to be cured. He would have to wash seven times in the Jordan River (the Jordan being then what the Don River is today). Naaman stormed off, shouting at Elisha, “Can’t you just wave your hand and make me better? And if I do have to wash, can’t I wash in a river of my choosing?” That was what Naaman really wanted: he wanted to wash in a river of his choosing. He hadn’t quite swallowed all his pride. Meanwhile, Elisha was adamant: the Jordan or no cure.

All of us want an easy cure for our pride. We’d all prefer a wave of the hand; or at least a cure of our choosing. We all want relief from symptoms; we all want deliverance from self-deception and corruption. At least we all want deliverance from self-deception and corruption at the same time that we want to cling to our own righteousness, the righteousness we think we have, lest we have to admit with the hymn writer, “Nothing in my hand I bring; nothing.”

Naaman went home and thought it over for a while. He thought it over until his loathsomeness was as loathsome to him as it had long been to everyone else. Then he did as the prophet had commanded: seven times in that river proud people didn’t go near.

Seven is the biblical symbol for completeness, for wholeness. Naaman, a Syrian, (today we’d call him an Arab); this Arab remained immersed in the river of Israel until he was completely cured, whole once more.

You and I must remain immersed in the gospel until our life’s end; we must remain immersed in the gospel until that day when faith gives way to sight and our arrogance is behind us forever.

 

(iii) The third truth about our pride-warped hearts and the cure we need is this: we need to wash feet. Jesus washed feet. It was the work of a servant, never the duty of the householder. Jesus knew it was the work of a lower-class servant – and he said it was pure privilege.

The next time we are asked to do something we instinctively feel to be beneath us, something that makes us feel small, we need to do it. We must come to see that footwashing is a privilege in a world that boasts of its self-importance but only displays a shrivelled heart. We must come to see that only a very small person is ever truly big.

 

(iv) The fourth truth about us and the cure for our deep-seated pride: we have to allow our own feet to be washed. In some respects it’s much harder to be washed than to wash, because at least when we are washing someone else’s feet we likely feel somewhat heroic and hugely generous. To admit that our own feet need washing, by anyone at all, is very difficult. Years ago I spoke with a university professor who was struggling desperately with a temptation whose details we needn’t discuss; the professor told me the only man who had been able to help him was a truck driver who had been delivered from the same addiction – and he needed this truck driver as he needed no one else.

Thomas Watson, my favourite 17th century Puritan thinker, has written, “All Christian growth is finally growth in humility.

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd                                         

 February 2006

 

A Note on Humour

Proverbs 15:15 ; 17:22-9      Genesis 11:1      Matthew 6:16 -18

 

I: — Early one morning a hotel guest took his seat in the hotel dining room and ordered breakfast. He told the waiter he wanted two boiled eggs, one so runny that it oozed all over the place, the other cooked so hard that it bounced like an India rubber ball; a piece of toast so dried out that it disintegrated when you tried to cut it; some bacon whose grease was congealing on the plate; lastly, lukewarm coffee, half in the cup and half sloshed into the saucer. “Your order is highly unusual,” replied the waiter; “I don’t know if we can manage it.” Well,” the hotel guest came back, “You had no trouble managing it yesterday.”

Robertson Davies speaks of “that saddest of all spectacles; the person of one joke.” The person of one joke is the saddest of all spectacles for two reasons. One, he’s boring; two, he’s – sad. The person of one joke has far too little joy in his life. The book of Proverbs tells us, “A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones….A cheerful heart has a continual feast.”

Humour, laughter, are gifts of God for which God is to be praised. Paul tells us that everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. Humour is God’s gift; laughter is even God’s command. In the sermon on the mount Jesus says, “Don’t look dismal; whatever you do don’t look dismal. Looking dismal doesn’t honour God; neither does it help anyone else.” Still, we don’t avoid looking dismal by trying hard not to look dismal; trying hard will only make us look grim. Only by laughing can we avoid looking dismal, grim, gruesome even.

What’s more, I’m convinced that we have to laugh if we’re going to be life-affirming. I love the Hebrew toast, leChaim, “to life.” We can keep on affirming life only if we can laugh, just because there are so many contradictions and reversals and oddities everywhere in life. Laughter gets us through situations we can’t avoid and which would otherwise stress us frightfully.

Like hospitalization. My mother has always said that when we are hospitalized the first thing we lose is our modesty. She’s right. Now my mother and her offspring are unusual, perhaps, in that we Shepherds seem never to have had much modesty to lose. But if you have much modesty to lose, be sure to lose it laughing when you are hospitalized, because you are going to lose it anyway. In my various sojourns in hospital I’ve had roommates who were wound so tight, anxious and nervous and obsessed with saving face, their physical ailment seemed a trifle alongside their emotional distress.

Hospitalization is only one episode in life we’d like to avoid but can’t. Life is full of bizarre developments and incongruities. Humour helps us through them all. A year after our daughter Catherine was born in rural New Brunswick it was thought she might have water on the brain. The nearest paediatrician was in Moncton , 200 kilometres away over roads whose potholes resembled bomb craters. We set off. Catherine was strapped into an infant’s car seat between Maureen and me. My hat was on her feet. The rough road made her ill and she threw up on my hat. It was cold in Moncton that day, minus 20 degrees. Now I happen to be exceedingly prone to sinus infections, and I simply must wear a hat. I put my hat on my head. It was a red hat; it was now an odd-looking red hat, since it was adorned with yellow abstract art. Uptight now, in my mind I worked out a believable explanation I could offer quickly to anyone who saw me and wanted to put me in a strait jacket. Then I relaxed. If my hat was the occasion of laughter for someone who would otherwise look dismal, so much the better. Whereupon I wore my red-yellow hat proudly. Soon Maureen, Catherine and I were waiting for Dr. Paul Legere, no doubt the most popular people in his waiting room. Eventually Maureen took Catherine into his examining room where Maureen told him Catherine’s stomach had been upset. “No kidding,” was Dr. Legere’s only comment.

I know, life is a serious business. Only a fool thinks anything else. But “serious” doesn’t mean “grim” or “joyless” or “humourless.” Kierkegaard, a great philosopher, was surely correct when he said that genuinely serious people are those whose profundity is riddled with humour; serious people who lack humour, he added, are merely stupidly serious.

Humour allows us to be life-affirming in the midst of distresses that would otherwise submerge us. Jewish humour has been described as “tears dipped in honey.” It’s their humour that has allowed Jewish people to shout “LeChaim” despite their history of atrocious suffering. I love the humour that comes out of the Yiddish villages of Eastern Europe , especially the one-liners like, “When a poor Jew eats chicken, one of them is sick.”

Peter’s second epistle finds people crying, “Where is the promise of the Messiah’s coming? For how much longer do we have to suffer like this?” If we stare at the world’s grief and anguish we can be undone by it, for the Day of the Lord, with its resolution of distress and its alleviation of heartbreak; the Day of the Lord appears to tarry, doesn’t it? One day a schlemiel (“schlemiel” is Yiddish for a fellow who is an utter social misfit and is always a nuisance, always underfoot, someone whom everyone wishes would disappear); one day a schlemiel begged the village authorities to give him a job. He was put to doing many little things, but messed up at them all. Someone had a brain wave: send him up on the highest roof to watch for the Messiah. When he saw the Messiah he was to scamper down and inform the villagers. The villagers could then prepare themselves for welcoming the one they had awaited for centuries as their suffering cried out for relief. Week after week, month after month, the schlemiel climbed up onto the roof and watched. Eventually someone asked him how he liked his job. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “watching for the Messiah doesn’t pay very well, but it looks like steady work.” Tears dipped in honey.

Humour allows us to see and admit truths about humankind that we are otherwise prone to overlook. One day a vehement capitalist and a vehement socialist were arguing as to which system was better. A bystander jumped into the fray and settled the argument instantly. “Under capitalism,” he said, “people devour people. Under socialism it’s the other way around.”

Surely one of the most important features of humour is this: in laughing at ourselves we can laugh at our deficiencies and defects. The former treasurer of my congregation in Streetsville used to drop into my office frequently (every day, in fact) and only a little less frequently remind me that while it was easy to bring a minister to a church, it was very difficult to unload a minister. I never did figure why he mentioned this to me as often as he did. Nevertheless, his reminder always brought to mind the story of the rabbi in Montreal who was a terrible rabbi. The congregation wanted to unload him, yet knew that another congregation would take him off their hands only if they “hyped” him. And so the Montreal congregation told everyone they could that this fellow was a terrific rabbi. Why, he was like Moses; he was like Socrates; he was even like God. In no time a Toronto congregation called him. Within six months the Toronto people were enraged, and accused the Montreal people of false advertising. “There was nothing false about our advertising,” the Montreal people replied; “we told you the truth. We said he was like Moses. Moses stuttered; this man stutters. We said he was like Socrates. Socrates knew no Hebrew; this man knows no Hebrew. We said he was like God. God isn’t human, and neither is he.”

 

II: — At the same time not all laughter is born of humour; some laughter is born of cruelty. Think of the racist joke. Racist jokes are ‘funny’ for one reason only: deep down it is believed that black people or Asian people or aboriginal people are inferior or stupid or bumbling or silly or naïve or socially clueless. A joke about aboriginal people which substituted the Japanese wouldn’t be funny at all.

Sarcasm is another form of humour not funny at all. Sarcasm is saying one thing, meaning the exact opposite, and doing all of this with the intention of wounding someone. The committee member is scheduled to bring forward her report. Everyone knows that her reports aren’t the most detailed or the most accurate or the most helpful. Still she does her best, and shouldn’t be put down or humiliated in any way. The committee chairperson, however, priding himself on his malicious cleverness, thinks it’s smart to amuse himself and entertain everyone else at the expense of this woman. With a flowery, flattering introduction he announces that Mrs. Jones’ report will now be heard, “prepared, no doubt, with that matchless thoroughness we have all come to expect.” People titter or smile or smirk or even laugh uproariously. The chairperson said one thing, meant the exact opposite, and did it all with the deliberate aim of wounding. Sarcasm.

My psychiatrist-friends tell me that sarcasm destroys children. The child upsets his milk accidentally. Because it was an accident he’s not expecting any rebuke. His mother, fatigued and frazzled by 6:00 p.m. , has “lost it.” Beside herself, not knowing what to do next, she does what comes easiest: deal with the child by tormenting him verbally. “Isn’t that wonderful,” she remarks; “just wonderful. You spilled your milk. You should be commended. I suppose you’ll even want an extra dollar in your allowance on account of your grand achievement.” The child isn’t certain if his mother means what she says, but in any case he’s not going to pass up a dollar. He asks for his dollar – and gets cuffed in the head. Now he’s utterly confused; the breakdown in communication couldn’t be worse; and the pain of it all, inflicted deliberately, will prove destructive in the child’s mind and heart.

Sarcasm, however, clever, is never funny. Worse than non-funny, it’s lethal.

 

III: — Then what about God’s sense of humour? In several places in scripture God is said to laugh. I used to be bothered by the occasions of God’s laughter, since God’s laughter seemed to be mocking, contemptuous, derisive. Psalm 2 is a case in point. “Why do the nations conspire?…. The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed….He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord has them in derision.” I used to think that God was sneering at the puffed up politicians in Israel who fanned the flames of nationalism. I realize now, however, that there is no contempt. God is simply amused at the laughable spectacle of grown-up men and women making pompous speeches and strutting about pretentiously when in fact they reflect the same wild exaggerations of children at play, the same naiveness, the same silly pride and petulance and preposterousness of children at play who imagine themselves to be magnificent. Don’t you and I smile in amusement at the three year old who tells us he’s all grown up now and who fancies himself the world’s leading whatever?

Hitler ranted about his kingdom of purebred Aryans. It was to last a thousand years and model the kind of human superiority that only his Teutonic people could achieve and exemplify. A thousand years? The Third Reich lasted twelve. All it ever modelled was something people can’t mention to this day without loathing. God laughs at the spectacle of human pretence and puffiness, for it’s as silly as the six year old announcing that he’s leaving home and never coming back – as long as it doesn’t rain.

I was amused when the CN tower was erected in Toronto . It was publicized as the “tallest free-standing structure in the world.” It was going to put Toronto on the map. Immediately I thought of the Tower of Babel and its builders who said, “Let us build a city, a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” (Genesis 11:4) Word of this pride-soaked project reaches God. Whereupon God says to his assistants, “Let us go down and see this thing that they have made.” The tower is so small, such a pipsqueak, that God has to get down on his knees and get out his magnifying glass to see – see what? – the tallest free-standing structure in the world with its top in the heavens, by which people have made a name for themselves. Before God the tower is no taller than a toothpick, and the puffed up people who strut are laughable, for they resemble the child who has just learned to ride his tricycle and now tells the world he can pilot a jumbo jet.

I understand why God is amused at the ranting of the nations. “Barring catastrophe, shocking to think of, Canada will one day be ruled by the French-speaking people,” said a nineteenth Century political spouter. The French-speaking people constitute 20% of the Canadian populace (down from 55% at Confederation), and shrinking every year. “The sun never sets on the Union Jack.” I heard this repeatedly when I was a youngster. “The sun never sets on the Union Jack.”   Plainly it was a declaration of the superiority of the British Empire . Superiority? Today Britain ’s per capita wealth is the same as Italy ’s; economically the nation is three steps from sinking into the North Sea . Napoleon took France off the seven-day week (it was too biblical, he said) and put it on a ten-day week. This arrangement lasted one month.

The posturing of the nations, the puffed up pretences of the nations’ leaders; these are the occasion of God’s laughter, not because God is contemptuous but because God is amused at the unreality of it all, in the same way that we are amused at the unreality of the child’s fantasies.

 

IV: — Humour is wonderful inasmuch as it lets you and me admit how puffed up we are and how silly our posturing appears to others. The visiting preacher was taken to the farmer’s home for supper before the evening service. The farmer’s wife had gone to great pains with the dinner. The visiting preacher declined the fine meal, informing her, with more than a touch of arrogance, that he simply could not preach on a full stomach, any more than a world-class opera singer could sing a full stomach. Disappointed, the wife stayed home to put the food away and wash up the dishes. Her husband drove the preacher to the church. When her husband returned homes she asked him how the preacher had done. “He could have et,” the farmer opined.

Charlotte Whitton, the former mayor of Ottawa – feisty, formidable – was introduced to the mayor of London , England . He was bedecked in all the medals and chains of his office, while she had only a flower in her lapel. There was something fitting, about this, wasn’t there, the London mayor asked. After all, what was Ottawa , a city of 600,000, compared to London , twelve million? Whereupon he leaned forward and said most haughtily, “If I sniff your rose, will you blush?” Charlotte replied, “And if I pull your chain, will you flush?”

Humour does more than expose our ridiculous self-importance and let us see it. Humour also lets us admit our secret shame; humour lets us admit our secret shame without being crushed by it. Jesus came upon a woman beside a well in a village in Samaria . They began fencing with each other and kept it up for a while. Finally Jesus decided the fencing had gone on long enough and determined to end it. Right out of the blue (someone must have whispered something to him beforehand); right out of the blue, apparently, he said, “Go call your husband.” Not missing a beat the woman tossed back, “I don’t have a husband. With a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face, I’m sure, Jesus said to her, “You are telling the truth; you don’t have a husband. You’ve had five husbands, and the man you’re living with now isn’t your husband. It’s always good to hear people tell the truth.” Why am I sure he said all this with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face? Because the woman didn’t flee him; she stayed with Jesus, kept talking with him, got serious, came to believe on him and loved him ever after. If Jesus had simply denounced her, simply berated her, she would have stormed away, cursing him for his nosiness and insensitivity, furious with him at the way he had humiliated her. It was our Lord’s gentle humour that both allowed her to admit her secret shame and drew her to him at the same time.

Because humour is a gift of God, it’s true that a merry heart does good; more profoundly still, the more loudly I laugh – especially at myself – the more I shall be aware of my need of my saviour, and the more dear my saviour will ever become to me.

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd    

April 2005

 

You asked for a sermon on Ecclesiastes

   Ecclesiastes 1:2-9, 3:1-9, 12:13-14 

 

[1]         Is there any point to life? Is living worth the effort? Why bother when all of life is “vanity”, nothing but “vanity”?   The word “vanity” occurs more than thirty times in twelve brief chapters. And even where the word itself isn’t used, the meaning and mood of the word are heard anyway. “Who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life…?”, says the author. Or think of the assertion as stark as it is bleak: “I thought the dead more fortunate than the living” — and the stillborn more fortunate than either the dead or the living. (Ec. 6:12; 4:2-3; 6:3b-5)

According to Ecclesiastes human existence is anything but rosy.  Not only is individual existence overwhelmingly pointless, the social order is anything but encouraging.  To look out on the wider society is to find injustice rampant, to find oppression severe; and it’s to find little reason for thinking that the social order will ever improve.

In the sermon today we are probing the book of Ecclesiastes.  Before it’s the title of a book, however, “Ecclesiastes” is the self-styled description of the book’s author.  Ecclesiastes is a common Greek word that means “lecturer” or “preacher.” We don’t know the author’s name. It appears, however, that he or she was a Jewish person living in Jerusalem (or near Jerusalem ) approximately 200 B.C.E. Persian forces had overrun Jerusalem , and the subsequent occupation had made matters difficult for Jews in Jerusalem . Soon Persian domination gave way to Greek domination. Greece ‘s rule of Jerusalem wasn’t only onerous; it was corrupt, exceedingly corrupt.  Now matters were worse. The author wrote his book out of his reflection on human existence in such a setting; ultimately, human existence in such a setting under God.

 

[2]         “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, the book begins.  The Hebrew word translated “vanity” strictly means “transience”, “ephemerality”, the state of being short-lived, of passing quickly. “Transitory, transitory, everything is transitory; nothing lasts.  Everything comes only to go.”   The obvious question then is, “If everything is fleeting, then is anything real? Then is anything worth doing, or is everything pointless?”

Some readers see the book as a counsel of despair; they think the book preaches despair. But in fact it doesn’t. The book, rather, is a sustained critique of secularism, a sustained critique of secularised religion. The author adopts the standpoint of the secularist and speaks from that perspective in order to render himself credible with the secularists of his era and ours. The author wants us to know that he has grasped the essence of secularism.  At the same time, the shafts of light from God that pierce the bleakness of secularism here and there disclose the author’s heart.  While secularist existence is dark and bleak and transitory and pointless (says our author), he knows that life ultimately isn’t like this in that life’s ultimacy is God.  To be sure, the author states in line after line that all roads lead to dead-end futility; all roads, that is, except one.  And this one road is the road that leads to life. (Matt. 7:14)

 

[3]         Ecclesiastes points out several occasions of secularist despair.

(i)         The first one is the ceaseless round of things.  “A generation goes and a generation comes….The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.  The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.  What has been is what will be….”   A treadmill. Ecclesiastes is telling us that life is a treadmill. We have to work ceaselessly merely to survive. But if we are toiling just for the opportunity to toil, what’s the point of bothering?

The best-known passage from the book begins, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, a time to die…”, and on it goes.  It sounds romantic. It adorns greeting cards and one of Karsh’s books of superb photographs.  But Ecclesiastes himself didn’t put this passage forward as something romantic; he put it forward as an instance of secularist despair. For he concludes his repeated “there is a time…” with the “zinger”, “What gain has the worker from his toil?”  You must have noticed that no modern romantic who quotes this passage (“For every time there is a season…”) ever quotes the conclusion to the passage: “What’s the point of bothering with anything, since the ceaseless round is ceaseless?”

 

(ii)         Another occasion of secularist despair is the fruitless search.  The secularist assumes that learning, pure scholarship, will give her the profoundest contentment. (2:12ff)   She wants to acquire the intellectual subtlety of the philosopher and the comprehensiveness of the encyclopaedist.  To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with wanting this. God has made us rational creatures and we are to love him with our minds.  But it takes more than learning alone to content the human heart.  It’s no wonder the secularist cries out, “I applied my mind to seek and search out by wisdom all that is done under the sun; it is an unhappy business…he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” (1:13,18)

I am the last person to denigrate scholarship.  What’s more, I deplore intellectual mediocrity, never hesitating to pronounce it sin. At the same time I’m aware that intimate acquaintance with God does not arise from subtle philosophising. I’m aware too that intellectual rigour and academic mastery guarantee us nothing with respect to wisdom. At the end of the day intellectual mastery doesn’t yield contentment.

 

(iii)         Another occasion of secularist despair is the preoccupation with pleasure. Now pleasure is good. Pleasure is preferable to pain. Yet even the noblest pleasures, the most sophisticated pleasures, can’t finally satisfy the human heart, never mind transmute it.  The aesthetically refined person watching the ballet is no closer to God’s righteousness than the blood-thirsty lout at a bullfight.  Cultural sophistication doesn’t render anyone godly; it doesn’t promote innermost peace.

 

(iv)         Another occasion of secularist despair is misgovernment.  The author weeps when he sees how oppressed people are violated.  “I saw all the oppressions that are practised under the sun.  And the oppressed had no one to comfort them.” (4:1-3)  Injustice abounds. Violence and victimization are virulent. Governments, whether intentionally or accidentally, invariably oppress at least some of the people they are mandated to protect.  “Man lords it over man to his hurt”, cries the author. (8:9)   To be sure, he adds, some rulers are virtuous and some are even helpful. Still, where political authority is concerned nothing can be counted on.  At any time a society may find itself in the hands of political rulers who are fools, weak or dissolute.  “Folly is set in many high places”, Ecclesiastes adds laconically. (10:5-6,16) None of us would disagree.

 

(v)         Another occasion of secularist despair is misfortune.  Life is riddled with radical accidentality.  “Like birds that are caught in an evil snare, so the sons of men are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.” ( 9:11 -12) We never have life domesticated; we can never render life risk-free.  Piercing misfortune may stab us at any time. What we can’t foresee we can’t protect ourselves against.  It’s almost as if we can only wait to be “clobbered.”

 

(vi)         Another occasion of secularist despair is death.  To be sure, there are moments in life so unambiguously glorious that in such moments we can’t help being life-affirming.  At the same time, says Ecclesiastes, life is characterized by a struggle wherein we struggle every day to keep death at arm’s length. Proof of our struggle is our betaking ourselves to physician and surgeon and pharmacist as often as we need to.  Struggle as we might, however, we are going to succumb; what’s more, we know we are going to succumb.  Life is a journey, says Ecclesiastes, from a naked beginning to a naked end. ( 5:15 ) When all the romantic mythology surrounding life is set aside, life ultimately adds up to zero.

 

[4]           It all sounds so very bleak. Is it unrelievably bleak? Or can the bleakness be lessened in any way?         Ecclesiastes suggests several matters that mitigate the bleakness.

(i)         One such mitigation is life’s simple joys.  Simple joys sweeten life. The simple joys of food, wine and marriage (yes, Ecclesiastes says marriage mitigates life’s harshness); simple joys are oases of rest and peace and fruitfulness in the face of life’s difficulties and distresses.  These simple pleasures are God-ordained and are therefore to be enjoyed with a clear conscience: “Go, eat your bread with enjoyment and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.” ( 2:25 )

 

(ii)         Another mitigation of life’s bleakness is homespun helpfulness.  Right in the middle of the book (chapter 7 of 12 chapters) the author interjects a host of proverbial sayings; e.g., “The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit”, and “Be not quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.”   Nobody is startled upon hearing this; nobody regards it as life-saving revelation. Still, everyone knows that homespun helpfulness does much to soften the “bite” of life’s bleakness.

 

(iii)         Another mitigation of life’s bleakness is enterprise (11:1-6)   Just because life unfolds so very uncertainly (“You know not” is repeated four times in six verses) we ought to do whatever we can to stabilize life. While life is riddled with uncertainties, there’s always one certainty: death.  Therefore we should always be doing what we can while there’s time to do it. Why keep life bleaker or harsher or more onerous than it has to be?

 

[5]         Near the beginning of the sermon I indicated that the book of Ecclesiastes is a sustained critique of secularism (or of secularised religion), and as such it starkly depicts many occasions of secularist despair. To be sure, there are several mitigations (just mentioned) that lessen this despair. Still, does the author have anything positive to say?         Does he have anything theologically profound to say?  Is there any good news, any gospel, in the book?  Indeed there is, for ultimately the author points us to the truth and reality of the God who shortly incarnated himself in Jesus of Nazareth.

 

(i)         The final chapter of the book begins, “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth”; i.e., remember your Creator from the days of your youth; remember always that God is your Creator.  Specifically, the author insists we remember that God our creator has made us upright. ( 7:29 ) While humankind isn’t upright now but is rather fallen and bent, our present sin and misery can’t be charged to God. He made us upright. Human perversity isn’t God’s fault. Life’s harshness, arising it does from our perversity, isn’t his fault.  Insofar s we are warped, we are self-warped — and the wonder of God’s grace is that he hasn’t quit on us in disgust or lost patience with us or given us up as intractable.         Precisely where we are handcuffed, he isn’t.  To “remember” our Creator is to have the love and power that created us in the past become operative to recreate us in the present.  To “remember” our Creator is to find that God can do something with respect to human perversity precisely where humankind cannot. This is good news.

 

(ii)         The next item of good news is that God is judge of all.  Many people don’t look upon this as good news; they regard it as ominous. They think that to say God is judge of all is to feel threatened with bad news.  Actually, the fact that God “will bring every deed into judgement” ( 12:13 ) is great good news, for now every deed matters; every deed now has eternal significance. We should recall that our author told us that everything is pointless from a secularist standpoint; but from the standpoint of truth — God is going to bring every deed into judgement — everything is not only significant but eternally significant.  From a secularist standpoint everything is fleeting, transitory; from truth’s standpoint everything has lasting importance.

Our Lord Jesus Christ insisted that a cup of cold water given to a needy person; this simple deed was so hugely important as never to pass unnoticed beneath the gaze of God, never to pass unrewarded. (Matt. 10:42) Our Lord spoke of those who clothed the exposed and attended the sick and comforted the isolated and generally succoured the wretched of the earth; our Lord said that anything done for the sake of these people was ultimately done to him, and he would see to it that it was rewarded.  What the secularist sees as pointless actually has everything to do with one’s eternal well-being.

There’s another feature of God’s judgement we do well to heed.  A few minutes ago I mentioned that we are to find pleasure in life’s simple joys in that God has ordained them.  When Ecclesiastes tells us we are to relish life’s simple pleasures he adds, “But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgement.” (11:9) Ecclesiastes’ reminder isn’t meant to dash cold water on our simple pleasures; his reminder is meant to magnify our pleasures as our awareness of the coming judgement keeps our pleasures pure and our joys unstained.  To hear and heed this reminder is to be the beneficiary of good news again.

 

(iii)         Lastly, the good news of Ecclesiastes is reflected in the closing paragraph of the book: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” ( 12:13 )

Is a command to fear God good news?  Yes. Because to fear God is to reverence him, honour him, thank him.         Reverence and honour and thank him for what?  For who he is. But we know who he is only on the grounds of what he has done for us in Christ Jesus our Lord. He has given himself up to death for us; gone to hell and back for us; lavished himself upon us without reservation or hesitation; promised that he will never fail us or forsake us. Reverence, honour and thank him? Only the most benighted wouldn’t. Obviously the command to fear God is actually an invitation to soak ourselves in the mercy and patience and promise of God.

Then what about the command to keep God’s commandments, which keeping Ecclesiastes speaks of as “the whole duty of man”?   Is the command to keep God’s commandments good news? It certainly is. Israel always knew that life is a minefield.  To say that life is a minefield is to say that missteps or blunders in life trigger explosions that cripple or kill.

The commandments of God, said our Israelite foreparents, tell us where the mines aren’t in the minefield.         Therefore the commandments of God point out the path that is right, righteous, life-giving, wholesome in the midst of a minefield that will otherwise blow us apart. This being the case, keeping the commandments of God is the soul of wisdom.  It’s also the soul of self-fulfilment. Therefore the command to keep the commandments of God, so far from being onerous and chafing, is in fact the most delightful good news.  The command to keep the commandments of God is in fact the warmest invitation to thrive under God.  If you ever doubt this then think of our Lord’s command (or is it an invitation?) in the gospel of Matthew: “Come to me, all who toil and are burdened to the breaking point, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28) Our Lord’s word has the imperative form of a command: “Come. You come. You come right now.” On the other hand, the youngest child, upon hearing our Lord’s word, knows it’s the warmest invitation imaginable. In other words, the command of God is always at the same time the gospel of God. The imperative that constrains our obedience is always at the same time the good news that woos and wins our heart.

When Ecclesiastes says that keeping the commandments of God is the whole duty of man, he wants us to know that God’s good news is all-inclusive; it’s our all-inclusive privilege and blessing.

 

[6]         I’m hoping that some of you will go home and read the book of Ecclesiastes at one sitting. If you do, you’ll likely want to come back to me and say, “Victor, there’s good news in the book all right, just as you said.  But the good news is proportionately slight compared to the protracted bad news of secularism.”  True enough. Then let me speak to the book’s overall method.  Ecclesiastes doesn’t depict the truth and light of God on line after line. Instead Ecclesiastes describes the darkness and bleakness and despair of secularism on line after line — occasionally interrupting it all with shafts of God’s light. While the author may speak of the shafts of God’s light relatively infrequently, he does so in order to have the light appear so much brighter than the darkness. He knows that the light of God shines brighter in the dark.  And he knows that the light of God is light enough for anyone.

When Johann Goethe, the learned German philosopher and poet, was dying he called out from his deathbed, “Mehr Licht.  Mehr Licht.” “More light.” He didn’t need more light. There was nothing wrong with the light he had.         The light of God is all the light there is, and is light enough for anyone.

“Fear God, and keep his commandments.  This is the whole duty of man.”  Our whole duty is also our whole privilege.  As we are invited to fear God, and as we do fear him, we shall find light enough amidst the darkness.         We shall find light enough to leave us exclaiming with the apostle John, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    November 2005

 

The Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon 7:6-9            1st Timothy 4:1-5    Matthew 19:10-12

 

I: — The book of Proverbs tells us there are four things too wonderful, too mysterious, for the human mind to comprehend: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the seas, and the way of a man with a maid. (Prov. 30:19) The Song of Solomon is a collection of love-poems celebrating the way of a man with a maid, celebrating romantic love. Some of these love-poems were recited regularly at Hebrew weddings.         While the poems might be the occasion of embarrassment today, they were clearly no embarrassment to the people who wrote them and no embarrassment to the wedding-guests who heard them, and no embarrassment to God who gave them.

They might be the occasion of embarrassment at a church wedding today in that we tend to confuse eroticism with pornography and find ourselves rightly upset at pornography.  We ought to distinguish clearly between eroticism and pornography. Pornography is the exploitation of the erotic. Pornography is the vulgarisation, the debasement, of the erotic.

Pornography has become a huge industry today. How huge?   Pornography is the single largest use to which the internet is put. Despite the billions of dollars gambled through slot machines and casinos, the “porn” industry generates a cash flow ten times greater.  Psychologists have long recognized that pornography is more addictive than heroin. Pornography therefore should be abhorred.

At the same time, the erotic is a gift of God. “The way of a man with a maid” is something for which our Israelite foreparents praised God when they worshipped. Because Israel knew the erotic to be God’s gift, therefore good in itself, Israel wasn’t embarrassed around the erotic even as Israel recognized and repudiated the dehumanisation that arises whenever something as deep in us as the erotic is divorced from human intimacy, divorced from the profoundest encounter of two persons in a union whose mystery is so deep that it can never be adequately described.

While Israel rightly abhorred reducing the profoundest encounter of man and women to animal instinct-gratification (we should never forget that David’s earthly life kept going downhill after his affair with Bathsheba, even as we should remember that last year in Canada 100,000 people were diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases), Israel nonetheless remained as unashamed at the beauty of the way of a man with a maid as it was unashamed at the beauty of mountains and stars. To this day Orthodox Jewish couples have intercourse on Sabbath Eve, and refer to it circumlocutiously as “Sabbath blessings”.  Reflecting the Jewish conviction of the sanctity of marriage, Rabbi Akiba said, “The whole world isn’t as worthy as the day on which the Song of Solomon was given to Israel ”. Another rabbi insisted that anyone who looked upon these love-poems as disgusting – such a person had no share in the world to come.  “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved”, says the man in the poems. Longing for him the woman says, “O that his left hand were under my head, and his right hand embraced me.”

Because the church has always had difficulty owning its Hebrew root, the church has traditionally not known what to do with the Song of Solomon.  For this reason the church has traditionally tried to turn the Song of Solomon into an allegory. An allegory is a story in which every item in the story represents something else.

For instance, some people maintained that the love-poems are an allegory of God’s love for his people Israel .

Another allegory was (is) that the lover in the poems is God, while the beloved is the individual Christian.         (Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote fine hymns such as “Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts”; he thought this.)

Still another allegory: the lover is God, the beloved is the Virgin Mary.

Martin Luther was the earthiest of the earthy, yet somehow his earthiness deserted him here, leaving him saying that the love-poems celebrate the loyalty that King Solomon’s subjects have for Solomon himself.

When Bernard of Clairvaux read verse thirteen of chapter one – “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts” – Bernard couldn’t stand the thought that the verse might mean exactly what it says, and so he allegorised it this way: the bag of myrrh (costly spices) is Jesus Christ crucified, and the two breasts mentioned in the text represent the two terrorists crucified on either side of Jesus.

All such allegories, of course, aim at denying what the love-poems want us to know; namely, that the mystery and wonder of the deepest encounter of man and woman is good because it’s God’s gift.

It’s plain that asceticism in principle is foreign to the Hebrew mind. Paul, a Hebrew thinker himself, writes to Timothy, “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” Asceticism in principle is simply sub-Christian.  Paul tells the Christians in Colosse that they mustn’t heed ascetic teachers who wag their finger and say, “Don’t handle; don’t taste; don’t touch”. “Disregard them”, the apostle urges; “their teaching is sub-Christian”.  A woman from a distant city visiting one of my previous congregations spoke to me about her situation as a single person (it’s never easy to be single) and indicated she would very much like to be married (this is understandable) – to a clergyman, no less.  “A clergyman?” I remarked; “Why do you specify a clergyman?” “Because clergymen are so sexless”, she intoned.  Buried in her mind, obviously, was this: sexlessness is a Christian ideal. Truly spiritual people, godly people, holy people, are sexless.  Such a notion any Israelite would find incomprehensible.

Because the Israelite mind is always earthy, the bible is always earthy.  At the same time, the bible is always modest.  Modesty and earthiness together fend off two sub-Christian distortions. Modesty fends off vulgarity; earthiness fends off asceticism.  “Abraham knew Sarah, and Sarah conceived.”   Everyone knows what’s meant.         The reality of love-making is acknowledged and its delight upheld; at the same time, it isn’t described in minute detail in order to entertain the prurient. Everywhere in scripture realistic earthiness is joined to fitting modesty.

We must never think that the bible’s frankness encourages an “anything goes” attitude.   Quite the contrary. Hebrew conviction never condones wantonness; never approves illicit sexual behaviour; never winks at violations of God’s command.  Hebrew conviction forthrightly declares that God will not fail to punish any and all violations of his command, which command is given for our blessing. When Israel was surrounded first by the Canaanite nations and then by the Babylonians, Israel was always pressured and therefore always tempted to set aside the command of God and abandon itself to whatever its neighbours were doing.  The Hebrew prophets were unrelenting in their insistence that pagan sexual practices were degrading because dehumanising, and dehumanising because violations of the command of God, and violations of the command of God just because God’s command is God himself in person protecting his people.

The Hebrew mind, Hebrew heart, knows that erotic intimacy is to be reserved for human intimacy, and the expression of human intimacy, according to God’s command and counsel, is a union between a man and a woman that admits no rivals, aims at lifelong faithfulness, and is therefore to be terminated only by death.

 

II: — Plainly, then, for the Hebrew mind marriage is good.  But it isn’t the good. The kingdom of God is the gift. Scripture speaks of marriage as gift. But it isn’t the gift.  When Paul exults, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift” (2nd Cor. 9:16 ) he means Jesus Christ and him only.

Everyone – without distinction or qualification – is invited to flee the world of defiant disobedience and joyfully enter the kingdom of God . Everyone is summoned to embrace – without hesitation or reservation – the only Saviour we can ever have.   The kingdom of God is now and ever will be the good.  Jesus Christ is now and ever will be the gift.

Marriage is a good; marriage is a gift. And this good, this gift, we might as well admit right now, is not for everyone.         We should say at the same time that marriage isn’t essential to our humanness. To be unmarried isn’t to be humanly deficient or humanly defective.  In a sermon several years ago in Schomberg I said that all humans are gender-specific: to be human is to be either male or female.  I said too that gender-specificity is related to gender-complementarity.  Not only am I male (only), I’m male only in the context of female. Females are female only in the context of males. Since I can’t be human without being male, and since I can’t be male except in the context of females, therefore my gender opposite is essential to my humanness. True.  At the same time I relate to any number of women, and must relate to any number of women, in many different ways without being married to them.   Gender-complementarity is essential to our humanness; marriage is not essential.

Jesus wasn’t married.  Yet the gospels tell us that Jesus never fled women.  On the contrary he was always found with women, both single and married (we do well to note); he related warmly to them, and related to them in ways that defied long-standing social custom, even as he never transgressed the command of his Father with respect to the women to whom he wasn’t married.  No one, I trust, wants to suggest that our Lord’s humanness was deficient or defective in any respect.

Moses was married; Elijah was not.  Hosea was married; Jeremiah was not.  Peter was certainly married; Paul appears not to have been or else he was a widower and therefore wasn’t married during the time of his apostolate. In no case do we say that those who married were superior to those who didn’t marry or were no longer married.

Overlooked too often is the simple fact that Genesis 2 leads on to Genesis 3.  Genesis 2: “It is not good for man to be a lone….I will make him a helpmate.” Genesis 3, however, discusses the fall of humankind.  Genesis 2 speaks of the goodness of the creation, a goodness that never disappears entirely. Genesis 3, however, speaks of the distortion of the creation, of the disorder throughout the cosmos. In the wake of the fall, with its distortion and disorder and distress, we must admit that marriage won’t be for everyone, and this for several reasons.

In the first place, many people who want with all their heart to marry and should marry are deprived of the opportunity to marry. They are victims of sheer misfortune. Think of the European nations at the end of the Great War, and then at the end of World War II. Since twenty or thirty million young men had perished, there were now twenty or thirty million young women who would never have the chance to marry.  Canada , a country with a small population, lost 70,000 men in the Great War alone. Those 70,000 were all of marriageable age. The women their age who remained in Canada ; whom were they supposed to marry when the war was over?  Many people are deprived of the opportunity to marry through sheer, simple bad luck. For this reason “old maid” is a dreadful expression and should never be uttered. “Old maid” jokes aren’t jokes; they aren’t funny at all.  I despise them as much as I despise the racist “joke” or the anti-Semitic “joke”.

There’s another reason some people don’t marry. They are psychologically unable to sustain a marriage.  When discussing the matter of eunuchs – men who aren’t going to marry – Jesus says some men were born congenitally damaged and therefore won’t marry. He also says that some men were made eunuchs by others; that is, they suffered irreparable physical injury and therefore aren’t suited for marriage.

We should admit right now that in a fallen world some people are going to be born with defects of body and mind that render them unsuited for marriage.  And in a fallen world some people, in the course of moving from infancy to adulthood, are going to sustain psychological damage of such a sort, and to such an extent, that they ought not to marry.  To be sure, all of us have some psychological quirks and personality peculiarities. Still, there are psychological quirks and personality peculiarities that render some people unsuited for marriage. This is not to say that such people are greater sinners.  It’s merely to recognize that marriage requires certain personality traits which, when absent, make it wiser not to marry.  Among other things, marriage requires enormous accommodation and adaptability. Marriage requires two people to flex themselves around each other.  Marriage requires a huge elasticity that allows us to be closer to one person than we are to anyone else, and distant enough from the same person as to allow him or her to thrive without being smothered.

Rudeness, slight, insult; when it comes from someone we don’t know we’re scarcely aware of it. The same rudeness or slight or insult; when it comes from a friend it wounds. When it comes from our spouse it’s lethal – unless in the next instant we have sufficient resilience and elasticity and flexibility to get the marriage past a jolt that will prove fatal in a brittle person or brittle relationship.

Recently a young woman approached me who is manic-depressive, with episodes of out-and-out psychosis.         (That is, episodically she’s deranged.)  She has married a fellow who is schizophrenic, and he too has psychotic episodes. She suffers from a major affective disorder; he from a major cognitive disorder. She told me she didn’t think her marriage would survive.  Does anyone doubt her?

When people volunteer for the submarine service the navy doesn’t jump and down for joy, “Are we ever glad to see you: there are never enough volunteers for the submarine service.  Step this way immediately.”  Instead the navy first assesses the volunteers to see whether they have the psychological configuration required in those who have to live in cramped quarters under immense pressure for long periods of time. There’s no disgrace in learning that you don’t have the psychological configuration essential to living in a submarine.  Jesus says that in a fallen world some men are eunuchs either on account of congenital malformation or on account of brutalisation.  Such men don’t marry. As much can be said about psychological damage.  Such people shouldn’t marry.

And then Jesus gives a third reason as to why some men are “eunuchs”. “These men”, says our Lord, “have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”. Plainly he’s speaking metaphorically here.  He means that there are men who forego marriage inasmuch as they have a vocation from God that entails their not marrying.         In the church catholic we call this “vocational celibacy”.  Scripture upholds marriage as a good, a great good.         At the same time, scripture declares that when the kingdom of God collides with a disordered world, some of the kingdom’s servants are asked to forego marriage because of a special task to which God assigns them in the midst of the world’s disorder.  In other words, just as marriage is gift and calling, celibacy is gift and calling.

Protestants usually flounder here.  Roman Catholics, on the other hand, have less difficulty understanding this point, since Roman Catholic clergy have remained unmarried for centuries. My problem with the Roman Catholic understanding is that it relates vocational celibacy too one-sidedly to priests and nuns.  In truth there are lay Christians who are never going to be priests or nuns who are nonetheless called to an expression of Christian service that renders marriage inappropriate.  Think of people whom God has summoned to a work that is extraordinarily dangerous or difficult, extraordinarily disruptive of all that marriage requires.

We must understand too that celibacy is significant even for us who do marry.  Celibacy is a sign, not just a sign for unmarried people themselves but a sign for all Christians, whether married or unmarried; it’s a witness, a reminder to all Christians that obedience to God requires self-renunciation. The same self-renunciation isn’t required of all Christians, but self-renunciation of some sort is required of all Christians.  After all, our Lord insists that all his disciples, all his followers without exception, have been appointed to cross-bearing of some kind.

Celibacy is a reminder that specific kinds of service in God’s kingdom require specific expressions of obedience.         Think of the Sisters of Charity, the order established by the late Mother Teresa. These sisters assist dying destitutes in India . There’s also a chapter of the Sisters of Charity in Toronto . What do they do in Toronto ? They assist terribly deranged women in downtown Toronto who are otherwise friendless. These sisters render a kingdom service on behalf of the world that married people simply cannot render.

This isn’t to say that celibacy is a higher calling than marriage. There is no hierarchy of callings in God’s kingdom.         There are only diverse callings.  Married people are called to serve God in such a way that their marriage is characterised by a faithfulness and caring and self-giving that are signs of God’s faithfulness and caring and self-giving.  Unmarried people are called to serve God in such a way that their vocational celibacy reminds the world that the world is vastly sicker than the world thinks itself to be, and extraordinary service must be rendered if the world is to be healed.

Present-day Christians have difficulty understanding what the apostolic church knew well; namely, the self-renunciation to which God summons us varies from Christian to Christian. The kingdom-service to which God calls us requires greater financial renunciation for some, less for others.  It will require geographical dislocation for some but not for others. It will mean special education or training for some, but not for all.  In other words, there are only two issues that any Christian has to settle. One is discernment; specifically, discernment of God’s will for me. The other is obedience. Discernment plus obedience equals discipleship.

 

In the first part of the sermon I indicated that people such as Bernard of Clairvaux missed the point when they allegorised the Song of Solomon and turned it into a secret story about Christ’s love for his beloved people. Allegorisers like Bernard, I said, were wrong, since the Song of Solomon is really about God’s gift of romantic love.

At the same time, since marriage is the commonest metaphor in scripture for faith; since scripture speaks of Christ as groom and his beloved people as bride; since scripture uses the metaphor of adultery to speak of the unfaithfulness of God’s people, allegorisers like Bernard of Clairvaux weren’t entirely wrong.

The last word today belongs to Christ Jesus our Lord: “Let anyone accept this who can.”

 

                                                                                                      Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           January 2006

 

Lest We Forget

Isaiah. 2:1-4
Mat. 10:34-39
Mat. 5:9

 

[1] For years now I’ve arrived at church on Remembrance Day with my heart in my mouth. For years I’ve wondered what our service says to people of Germany ancestry. Have we implied, however unintentionally, that German people are the ogres of the world? that they are people of impenetrable hardness and incorrigible cruelty? Oh yes, we in Streetsville United are both orthodox enough and charitable enough to say we agree with the prophet Jeremiah that the heart of everyone, everyone without exception, is “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, beyond understanding.” (Jer. 17:9) But even as we say we agree with the prophet do we quietly qualify the statement so as to suggest that the hearts of one nation in particular are especially corrupt and unusually ununderstandable? The last thing I want to do today is foster the myth of superiority; namely, that some of us are superior because our hearts are more benign than the hearts of others.

Yes, the two major wars of this century found Germany our enemy and France our ally. If we were to push back one century earlier, however, we’d find the situation reversed: France was the enemy and Germany the ally. Following the battle of Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington defeated the French forces, Wellington remarked, “Never have I come so close to losing.” He would have lost for sure had the British troops not been supported by German forces. In other words, labels like “enemy” and “ally” change in a twinkling.

Think of the United States. We Canadians have been allies of the U.S. throughout this century, as have the British. But the British and the Americans haven’t always been allies. They warred in 1776 and 1812. The Citadel, that massive fortress in Quebec City, was constructed in the last century to protect you and me from the Americans. At the turn of the century British and American navies vied for superiority just in case the two countries went to war again. The United States had on file plans for war against Great Britain as late as 1932. When the Parti Quecbecois came to power in Quebec in 1976 and began talking about asserting sovereignty over the St.Lawrence Seaway and impeding American access to electricity and fresh water, the United States government moved an entire infantry division (10,000 men) to upstate New York opposite Kingston so as to be able to move immediately should American interests be threatened. We mustn’t assume that because America is Canada’s ally today it will always be Canada’s ally.

The expression “concentration camp” has been especially distasteful in the past one hundred years. Who invented the concentration camp? Not the Germans; the British developed concentration camps in their war against the Dutch in South Africa. The Dutch suffered more fatalities in the camps than they suffered through enemy fire. Jeremiah is correct. Human sinnership is universal.

At the same time, while all hearts are deceitful and corrupt, there do occur in history particular concentrations of evil that are to be resisted relentlessly. We can’t use our common sinnership as an excuse for not resisting the appearance of a particular evil, a concentration of evil. Nazism was such an appearance, such a concentration.

 

[2] While there are many aspects to the evil of Nazism that we could discuss today we are going to examine one in particular: Nazism’s victimization of the Jewish people. We mustn’t think that the holocaust was simply part of the war, or at least a consequence of the war, neither more nor less evil than war inevitably is. The holocaust was unprecedented as evil for the sake of evil. Acts of war are customarily undertaken for the sake of something else. A military invasion, for instance, is undertaken for the sake of acquiring territory. Acts of war are customarily viewed as evil (at least by victors) even as those acts of war are undertaken for the sake of garnering natural resources or restoring national reputation or expanding “living room.” The holocaust occurred for none of these reasons; it was evil for the sake of evil.

We should consider several respects in which the holocaust differs from acts of war. Wars are fought by competing parties where both parties have power. Both parties may not have equal power, but both parties have some power. The Jewish people had no power. They made up less than 1% of Germany’s population. They had no access to the armed forces or the government. They were never a threat to the Third Reich; they couldn’t be. Therefore the aggression visited on them can’t be called an act of war.

Neither should we regard the holocaust as another of those collateral “spillovers” of war. Wartime “spillovers” occur when passions are unleashed inadvertently and people are found behaving subhumanly. The holocaust, however, wasn’t the result of mindless passion loosed unintentionally. The holocaust, rather, was planned with utmost rationality, executed with utmost deliberation, perpetrated with utmost detachment. Passion is spent quickly. If the holocaust had been the result of passion loosed in the course of war, it wold have disappeared as quickly as it flared up. It didn’t disappear, however, in that it had never flared up. It was coolly conceived, rationally implemented, deliberately executed, dispassionately protracted. It wasn’t done as a result of collective loss of self-control; it was done with utmost self-control. It was evil for the sake of evil.

Neither should we regard the holocaust as yet another instance of racism. Needless to say, the Nazis were racists. But they weren’t anti-semites because they were racists; they were racists because they were anti-semites. The Nazis, we should remember, pronounced the Japanese to be honorary Aryans! Since the Japanese were honorary Aryans, the Nazis weren’t racist in principle. They were racist to the extent that they were anti-semitic in principle. Moreover, racism asserts that some races are humanly inferior. In North America black people have been deemed inferior to white people; in central Africa, brown people inferior to black people. The Jewish people weren’t deemed humanly inferior, however; they were deemed not human at all but rather verminous. The racially inferior are customarily enslaved; vermin is always exterminated.

Neither were the Jewish people mere scapegoats in the holocaust. To be sure, in the early stages of the Nazi movement they were used as scapegoats. Jews were blamed for all of Germany’s woes; they were blamed for Germany’s loss of international prestige, its financial collapse, it’s defeat and humiliation in World War I. Very quickly, however, the Jewish people ceased to be a scapegoat for anything. As long as any were to be found alive they were to be ferreted out, degraded, and then murdered. Now they were singled out as evil was done for the sake of evil. Auschwitz wasn’t the first time they had been singled out. They had been singled out at Sinai. There, however, they had been singled out for life and a task. Now they were singled out for torment and slaughter.

Let’s be sure we are clear on a point that most people confuse: the holocaust wasn’t an aspect of Germany’s war effort, however misguided. The holocaust wasn’t perpetrated because it was thought to advance Germany’s war effort. It was never going to advance the war effort. By 1943-44 the tide was turning against Germany. An all-out effort was needed if Germany was to regain military ascendancy. Freight trains were needed desperately to transport materials to troop-fronts and airfields and naval depots. These trains were diverted to other destinations and used to transport people to death camps. Zeal for the holocaust undermined the war effort. After D-Day it was obvious that Germany would be defeated. Allied leaders announced that those who were orchestrating the holocaust would be tried, at war’s end, as war criminals and punished. And still the zeal for the holocaust didn’t abate. The holocaust wasn’t an aspect of the war effort; it jeopardized the war effort. It was evil for the sake of evil.

 

[3] In light of such monstrosity we ought never to undervalue the sacrifice that so many Canadians made in the face of it. We ought never to undervalue it, even though we persist in downgrading it to a trifle, even denouncing it. If you think I invent or exaggerate let me refer you to several textbooks in Canadian history written by Canadians for use in Canadian university and highschool classrooms. Discounting the 30,000 men Canada lost in the last war; discounting the 10,000 air crew that were lost in defeating Germany the only way Germany could be defeated, the most recent textbooks on Canadian history discuss Canada’s contribution in only a paragraph or two if they discuss it at all. I consider all such Canadian writers of Canadian history to be violating the ninth commandment, the commandment that enjoins us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. I consider all such revisionism to be disgusting, as revisionism always is.

When the best-selling, two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples comes to discuss the different fronts on which Canadians fought in World War II, its entire discussion lasts one paragraph. Robert Martin, a law professor at the University of Western Ontario whose father perished in the last war, pointed out in a November, 1991 newspaper article that recent history textbooks in Canada had “airbrushed” off the page the sacrifice Canadians made. In a November, 1996 submission to the Globe and Mail a school vice-principal from Surrey, B.C., asked why, on Remembrance Day, her school should have “some veteran…come in and stand up there and bore us all to death with his medals.” When “Victory in Europe” Day was being highlighted overseas (particularly in Holland) Nova Scotia’s Ministry of Education provided no curriculum resources concerning the event of V-E Day and the anniversary celebration currently underway. One board of education in Nova Scotia, however, did hold a daylong training session for teachers on the topic of human rights. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t tragic. Had the Third Reich lasted 1000 years as planned, no teacher would be sitting around a coffee urn discussing human rights. In 1996 an attempt was made to provide curriculum resources for Remembrance Day in Ontario’s schools. The Ministry of Education at Queen’s Park stifled the attempt.

What occurs at the provincial level occurs at the federal as well. In 1992 the CBC and the National Film Board colluded to show on national television The Valour and the Horror. Brian and Terence McKenna, the two men who crafted the details and mood of the movie, implied that the RCAF was a clone of the Nazis. We should note that while the movie vilifying Canadian airmen had the support of the CBC, the CBC refused to air No Price Too High, the response of air force veterans. Canadians forget because Canadians are programmed to forget.

The Dutch, on the other hand; the Dutch don’t forget. The Dutch remember because they want to remember. In May, 1995, the Dutch people festooned their homes and streets with banners commemorating the Canadians’ liberation of Holland. The Dutch have never pretended that Canadian efforts were of the same order as those of the Nazis. The Dutch remember the brutality of the occupation. They know who Anne Frank and Corrie Ten Boom were. They remember the cold-blooded killing of underground resistors who were captured. They remember the treachery and ignominy of fellow-citizens who collaborated. Does this mean that the Dutch harbour an ever-festering hatred towards Germans? Of course not. Myself, I have found very few Dutch people who don’t speak some German and are glad to speak it. The border between Holland and Germany today isn’t armed; in fact, it isn’t even manned. There’s only a sign that tells travelers they are leaving one country and entering another. Dutch and German forces train together today in NATO exercises.

Still, the Dutch remember what Canadians did for them. They take entire schools to the cemeteries of Canadian servicemen and remind their schoolchildren that political freedom comes with price tag attached. On the anniversary of V-E Day in 1995, fifteen thousand Canadian veterans marched through the city of Apeldoorn. The parade was scheduled to last two hours; it lasted eight, so frequently did the Dutch people run into the parade to hug, bedeck and press gifts upon the veterans. Mothers still in their twenties held up their infants so that the baby might receive a veteran’s kiss. The Dutch remember because they have reason to remember. We Canadians have reason too. Yet the CBC refused to televise No Price Too High. PBS, an American network, aired the film in any case.

 

[4] Yet as fine as Canada’s contribution was in the last Great War, Christians can never pretend that war is glorious, let alone godly. General George Patton was never more wrong when he said, “War is humankind’s noblest effort.” What can be noble about the human activity that advertises our innermost depravity and outermost wretchedness? What can be noble about the spectacle of those created in the image and likeness of God sparing no effort to maim and kill others made in the image and likeness of God? So far from being glorious, war proves as nothing else proves what the church holds up as patently obvious: humankind needs saving, and humankind will never save itself. Humankind doesn’t need to be helped; it doesn’t need to be inspired; it doesn’t need to be “topped up” with tonics intellectual or moral. Humankind needs to be saved.

To be sure, on Remembrance Day Sunday we are “remembering” in church. At the same time, the church knows that war isn’t an aspect of the kingdom of God or a herald of the kingdom of God. George Orwell was surely correct when he said, “War has never been right; war has never been sane; but sometimes war has been necessary.” In order to gain proper perspective on the matter we should invert Orwell’s aphorism: war has sometimes been necessary, but war has never been sane, never been right. Never been right in the sense of never been righteous. Righteousness pertains to the kingdom of God, and war is a contradiction of the kingdom of God.

How unrighteous is war? Who knew war better than Ulysses S. Grant, and who waged war more masterfully? When Ulysses S. Grant was leader of the Union forces during the War of the Great Rebellion (its official title in the U.S.A.) Grant used to say, “The purpose of war (the purpose of the war he was waging) is to end war. Then war should be ended as quickly as possible. War is ended fastest when war is waged against civilians. Governments surrender much faster when their civilians are being slain. Therefore always endeavour to wage war against civilians.” War, however necessary, has never been right, righteous. Only the kingdom of God knows righteousness.

Then the church’s responsibility, especially on Remembrance Day, is to exalt the triumph of the Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. Our Lord has been raised from the dead; not merely raised from death, he’s been raised beyond death, beyond the reach of death. The powers of evil that overtook him once can never overtake him again. Raised from the dead and raised beyond death, he now bestrides the world as the guarantee of that new creation in which, says Peter, righteousness dwells. (2 Peter 3:13)

Unquestionably evil afflicts God’s creation at this moment. Then is evil to distort and disfigure forever what God created out of his goodness and pronounced good? Is evil to linger so long as slowly but surely to gain the upper hand and thereby submerge even the residual goodness of the creation? No! Our Lord has been raised from the dead. His victory can never be overturned. God’s decisive intervention has already occurred. The struggle between the righteousness of God’s kingdom and the unrighteousness of a fallen world is a struggle whose outcome can never be in doubt. Because of our Lord’s victory we who are called to resist evil can never be involved in a losing cause. In resisting evil, rather, we are bearing witness to that triumph whose irreversibility renders our resistance fruitful.

Yet we must be sure to understand that resistance to evil is more than mere defiance of evil. Defiance of evil is certainly necessary; yet defiance of evil is never sufficient. Defiance of evil leaves us locked in a stalemate, with evil always setting the agenda. Defiance of evil, then is essentially negative. Resistance to evil, on the other hand, is essentially positive. Positively, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, we are to “go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” (Isaiah 2:1-4)

For the Hebrew mind “mountain” always has to do with revelation, and revelation is God’s gift of himself accompanied by the illumination of his gift. “House of God” has to do with the venue of worship. The God who longs to give himself to us is apprehended – that is, both understood and grasped — only as he is worshipped. It is only as we worship that we know ourselves the recipients of God’s gift, find ourselves illumined as to the meaning of this gift, learn the ways of God and therefore, ultimately, walk in God’s paths.

Resistance to evil, essentially positive whereas defiance of evil (admittedly necessary) is only negative; resistance to evil always entails peacemaking. Here we should note carefully the difference between peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacekeeping (once again necessary in our world) presupposes the capacity to wage war. All peacekeepers are armed. This point is surely significant: all peacekeepers are armed. In other words, peace is kept only as the threat of non-peace is a real threat. Peacemaking, however, is different. Peacemaking, so blessed that Jesus pronounces peacemakers “sons (daughters) of God”, those who mirror God’s nature; peacemaking has to do with shalom, and shalom is a synonym for salvation. God has made provision for us in the cross, his characteristic deed of sin-absorbing self-renunciation. We can make peace only as we “go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob”, and there “learn God’s ways and walk in his paths.” It’s plain that God’s way is the way of the cross; it’s plain that to walk in God’s paths is to walk the way of the crucified.

Ascending the mount of the Lord, worshipping in the house of the God of Jacob and learning his ways; all of this exists for one thing only: that we might walk in his paths. Walking in his paths happens to be most difficult of all. Ascending, worshipping, learning: all of this is easy compared to walking, for that walking which is the closest following of our Lord always entails crossbearing. Peacemaking, then, is every bit as arduous and dangerous as warwaging. Peacemaking entails as much hardship, discipline, self-renunciation – sacrifice – as warwaging.

Therefore we must always support those who pursue peace. We must never think that warriors are virile while peacemakers are “pantywaists.” We must never think that peacekeeping, necessary to be sure, is more important than peacemaking. We must always thank God for peacemaking wherever it occurs on however small or large a scale. The resurrection of our Lord from the dead (which resurrection is irreversible) means that the self-renunciation of peacemakers is never finally futile. Peacemaking, on whatever scale, is ultimately an anticipation of that God-appointed day, itself irreversible, when, in the words of the prophet Micah, all

shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Micah 4:4)

 

                                                                    Victor Shepherd
November 1998
 

Remembrance Day 1998

 

It Could Happen Here

Isaiah 6:1-8   Mark 4:13 -20

 

Yes, I’m aware that Sunday morning has almost passed and there isn’t much left of a rain-free weekend, one of the few we’ve had this summer. Perhaps, then, you want me to conclude the sermon and service as quickly as I can.  For this reason we may have come to this service with something on our mind besides the adoration of God.

Yes, I’m aware that this is the 33rd time I’ve preached in Knox Church . Many of you have heard me speak dozens of times. Since there are a finite number of synaptic firings in everyone’s grey matter, many of you have already figured out how my ‘noodle’ works. As soon as I announce the text you can outline the sermon.  As soon as I announce the text some of you can write the sermon.

Yes, Isaiah was sitting among fellow-worshippers in the Jerusalem temple, in yet another service, where he had worshipped for years.  What the clergy and congregation were doing that day — singing, praying, speaking, offering — they had done countless times before. He wasn’t expecting anything beyond doing it all one more time.

And then it happened. Precisely when Isaiah expected nothing. It happened to him at worship, as it has happened to me at worship and may happen to anyone at worship.  What happened? “I saw the Lord, seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the skirt of his robe billowed throughout Knox Church at Spadina and Harbord.

“But God is spirit”, someone wants to remind me, “and since God is spirit he doesn’t wear a robe with a swirling skirt”.   Let’s not be pedantic. Let’s not trivialize the episode in Isaiah’s life that left him forever different, as Jacob’s wrestling through the night at Peniel left him forever different, as Paul’s prostration on the way to Damascus left him forever different, as my stomach-churning recognition, during an evening service when I was fourteen years old, left me forever different, unable to deny what I knew loomed before me (the ministry of Word, sacrament and pastoral care) and unable to escape it.  It happened to Isaiah during worship.  Why shouldn’t it happen to anyone at St. Matthew’s By-The-Gas-Station on any worship occasion at all?

 

I: — What exactly happened to Isaiah? “I saw the Lord!” Almost.  He almost saw the Lord. The Hebrew bible insists that no one on earth can “see” God and live. Strictly speaking, Isaiah saw, in his life-altering vision, throne and robes and attendants. Throne and robe and attendants point to Him whom no one can see and live.

Isaiah was sitting in church for the thousandth time expecting nothing more than what had happened (or hadn’t happened) last week when inexplicably the incense-smoke used in worship to symbolize God’s presence suddenly symbolized nothing: it was the palpable presence of God. While the rest of the congrega­tion sat bored half-to-death wishing Rev. Drone would learn to stop when he was finished, Isaiah felt the foundations of the building tremble as though an earthquake were underway. With his Spirit-sensitised sight he saw the Seraphim, creatures who extol God’s holiness, surrounding the throne.

The Seraphim had three pairs of wings.  With one pair they flew around the throne of God, honouring the One whom only the spiritually quickened can approach.  With another pair they covered their eyes but not their ears, their task being always to hear what God utters, never to try to pry into the innermost recesses of God’s ineffableness.  With their third pair of wings they covered their “feet” (feet being a Hebrew circumlocution for genitals; their modesty constrained them to “cover up” before God.)

 

Each Seraph called to the other, “Holy, holy, holy”. To say “holy, holy, holy” of God, rather, is to say that God is uniquely holy, inexpressibly holy, unsurpassably holy, incomparably holy. That’s it — incomparably holy. When Isaiah overhears the Seraphim calling “holy, holy, holy” to each other as they surround the throne of God there is seared upon Isaiah forever the awareness that God is uniquely holy, solely holy, singular­ly holy.

It all adds up to one thing: God is incomparable.  God is not the “nth” degree of anything human.  God is not a projection of humankind at its best or humankind at its strongest or humankind at its most mysterious.  God is uniquely, irreducibly, self-existently GOD.

Vague? Abstract?    Ethereal? Hard-to-find?   Not for Isaiah. God is an evanescence we can’t locate?  God, rather, is the densest density we can’t avoid.   Never will I forget the day I went to see my favourite philosophy professor, Emil Fackenheim, about a term paper I had to write.   (Fackenheim, a world-class philosopher, was the crown jewel of the philosophy department of the University of Toronto . We talked about my essay for five minutes. Then he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, tipped his chair back, put his feet on his desk, and fired up a big cigar.  “Philosophy”, he said to me, “we’ve talked enough about philosophy. Let’s talk about GOD. (I can’t pronounce the word properly. When Fackenheim said ‘God’ the whole room filled with the shekinah, the presence.) Shepherd, if modernity thinks about God at all, it thinks God is vague while we human beings are concrete. The truth is just the opposite. It’s God who is concrete and it’s we who are vague.  There’s no question mark hanging above Him; the question mark is hanging above us. There’s nothing problematic about Him; but in the wake of the depredations of the past 100 years there’s everything problematic about humankind.”  Puffing out a huge cloud of noxious cigar smoke (by now the cloud of cigar smoke was to me the incense in Isaiah’s temple), Fackenheim concluded, “Just remember, Shepherd, God is not the answer to our questions; God is forever the question to our ‘answers’.  And don’t forget: it’s we who are ‘iffy’ and insubstantial and dubious; but concerning him there is nothing ‘iffy’ or insubstantial or dubious at all.”

Whenever the Hebrew bible speaks of God as “The Holy One” the thrust of the passage is that God distances himself from every kind of human presumptuousness; God distances himself from every kind of human project and projection and prejudice and pet peeve.  God distances himself from all that is not worthy of him, not true of him, simply not him.   The Holy One is incomparable.  Hosea comes upon some Israelite people with vindictive hearts who are bent on retaliation. At that moment Hosea overhears God say, “I won’t do what you people are bent on doing, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst.” (Hosea 11:9)

As Isaiah sat in church, doing whatever it was he had already done a thousand times over, he “saw the Lord, high and exalted”.  He heard the Seraphim magnifying the holiness of God as they called to each other, “There is none like Him!”   In that instant Isaiah knew that “the whole earth is full of God’s glory.” God’s glory is the outer expression of his innermost splendour.  God’s glory is the earthly manifestation of God’s unearthly Godness. And just when Isaiah knew the whole earth to be full of God’s glory, he felt the whole earth to be reeling as though it were breaking up.  Isaiah was threatened. He had nowhere to stand. Where can anyone stand in an earthquake? Every last security he possessed evaporated like a water droplet beneath a blowtorch.

 

II: — What did Isaiah do? He crumbled.   “Woe is me! For I am lost!” He didn’t say, as so much denominational literature says, “This is a meaningful worship-experience. Let’s write it up so others can see if it’s meaningful for them too.”         He crumbled.

Why did Isaiah crumble? “Woe is me. For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.”  Plainly he is horrified. A man of unclean lips? Lips express what lies hidden in the heart. Unclean lips mean defiled heart.  Isaiah knows it of himself; and he knows it of everyone else.   Because his heart is defiled there’s no chance he can make his unclean lips clean, acceptable to God.  Then can his community do this for him, as the collectivists among us like to tell us? But every last person in his community is similarly defiled, corrupted, sin-riddled throughout. Then God is the one to make clean what is now filthy and putrid.   But Isaiah has apprehended God, and now he knows that before the Holy One defiled people aren’t cleansed; they are annihilated.  Intense heat doesn’t cleanse a moth’s wings; intense heat annihilates them. Ultra-intense light doesn’t improve the eye’s sensitivity to light; it annihilates it. “Woe is me!   For I am lost; for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.” The horror is as unendurable as the annihilation is inescapable.

We must always be careful in speaking of God’s holiness.   We must never create the impression, in our experience-hungry era, that an experience of God’s holiness is something like an experience of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing our favourite Beethoven composition: a warm bath of aesthetic immediacy soaking us in pleasure, relaxation, sentiment — all of which finds us leaving the concert hall profoundly satisfied. Isaiah didn’t say of his experience of God’s holiness, “More delightful than a Mozart piano sonata, more satisfying than a good meal, more stimulating than an article in The New Yorker.”    Neither did Isaiah, prophet that he was, leave the temple thinking that as a result of his experience he now had enough sermon-material for the next three weeks.         Isaiah didn’t leave the temple.  He didn’t move. Why move when you are milliseconds from annihilation?

Goethe, the greatest of Germany ’s literary giants; Goethe said, “No one can contemplate sheer evil and remain sane.” Goethe may have been right; I think he was.  Isaiah knew, however, that no one can view pure holiness and remain.  It may be that we can’t behold sheer evil and exist sane.  It is certain that we can’t behold the Holy One and exist.  John the seer, the writer of the book of Revelation; John too was exposed for an instant to his Lord, risen, ascended, glorious, “whose eyes were like a flame of fire and whose voice was like the sound of many waters and whose face was like the sun shining in full strength.” (Revelation 1: 12-17) In that instant, John tells us, “I fell at his feet as though dead.”

The holiness of God is incarnated in the Son of God.   Then it’s readily understood why Peter, upon seeing Jesus on one occasion, fell at the feet of the master and cried, “Depart from me; just leave me!” Peter knew, as John the seer knew, and as Isaiah knew, that when we are face-to-face with the Holy One His departure is our only hope of survival.

 

III: — Or is it? Isaiah did survive the dreadful encounter. But not because God departed. “Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven.’“

Can you imagine what it would be to be touched — anywhere — with a live coal? And to be touched on the lips, one of the most sensitive areas of the body?  It would be painful beyond telling. Yet even as the pain seared Isaiah and his knees shook from it he knew that the one thing needed had been done. He was now fit to face God and could endure God’s holy presence.

For our Hebrew parents the altar in the temple was the venue of sacrifice. Sacrifices were the God-ordained means whereby defiled people could approach the One who does not tolerate sin. Worshippers brought to the temple the very best animal they had, always a male; a ram, for instance. Why a male? Anyone connected with agriculture knows that the best male of a flock or herd is ever so much more than a good-quality animal; the best male of a flock or herd, used for breeding purposes, is the owner’s future.  When a superb racehorse like Northern Dancer wins the Kentucky Derby or the Queen’s Plate, the racehorse doesn’t keep racing (and winning) until he’s past his prime.         Every time he races he risks injury; an injured horse has to be shot. Once the horse has proven himself by winning two or three big races, he never races again; instead he breeds. Northern Dancer raced for two years and then impregnated mares for 25; Northern Dancer made millions for his owner.  He was his owner’s future.

The best of the flock or herd lent material prosperity to the owner and his family; material prosperity meant social superiority; it all added up to power. In other words, owning a prized animal meant the owner could “lord it over” his neighbours. To give up the animal meant no wealth, no social advantage, no power.  So far from “lording it over” others one could now only serve others. To give it up at worship meant that the worshipper was abandoning the future he had orchestrated for himself and was entrusting his future to God.   Specifically, in bringing the best of flock or herd to the temple as a sacrifice the worshipper was declaring that God was his future.

Isaiah was at worship that day.  He would have brought something to offer at worship.  He may have been “going through the motions”, as we say, aware in his head of what the temple-liturgy meant even as his heart was who knows where — when it happened.  In his vision he saw the seraph take a burning coal from the altar and touch his lips with it. As the coal seared his lips it remedied his heart.  His guilt was purged, his sin forgiven, his sacrifice sealed.         The God whom he couldn’t withstand only seconds ago was now his sole future.

 

As painful as it is to meet up with the holiness of God, we can survive it. We can survive it, however, only as the pain of it becomes a little more painful: the burning coal from the fire which is consuming the sacrifice we say we have brought in good faith, the burning coal from the fire which declares we say that God is our future; this coal has to scorch us. As it scorches us it forever alters the expression our life takes (our lips); it also alters the innermost essence of our life (our heart).  At this moment our profession that God is our future begins to be credible.

 

IV: — The result of it all for Isaiah was that he knew God to be calling him.  “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”         Isaiah could only reply, “Here am I!   Send me.”

Encounter with the Holy One leaves us neither merely prostrated nor merely pardoned. Encounter with the Holy One causes us to hear and quickens our response.   To be drawn into the life of the One who sends all sorts of people and whose sending culminates in the sending of his Son; to be drawn into God’s life is to be sent oneself.         And so Isaiah is sent out.

Will the people to whom Isaiah is sent hear him and heed him?  Will Isaiah’s mission be a howling success? It isn’t going to be a howling success. They will neither hear him nor heed him.  They will only plug their ears and harden their hearts.  Then has Isaiah been commissioned to a fruitless, useless task?   No. Not all of Israel will plug their ears and harden their hearts.  Some will hear and heed; some will respond eagerly and offer themselves as the vehicle whereby God’s purposes are forwarded for the world.

It’s no different with us.  Face-to-face with God we are neither merely prostrated nor merely pardoned. God calls us and commissions us to a work that frequently seems fruitless and largely appears useless. Ultimately, however, it isn’t fruitless or useless.

In his parable of the sower and the seed Jesus maintains that relatively little of the seed that is sown ever issues in a full-grown plant. But the little seed that does germinate and mature issues in a full-grown plant whose yield is staggering: up to 100-fold. (This is a yield of 10,000 %.) Much seed is sown, says Jesus; little seed germinates and thrives; but the little that germinates and thrives issues in a huge yield, far beyond what anyone could imagine.

Therefore the one thing we must never do is assume that the work to which God appoints us is fruitless.  We must never assume that because so much seed issues in nothing therefore all seed issues in nothing.  We must always know that the little seed that takes root and matures issues in what is beyond our knowing or telling.  We must put behind us all calculation as to how much fruit our work is going to bear and therefore whether we are going to serve. Our only response can be to say with Isaiah, and to keep on saying, “Here am I; send me” — and then leave the outcome in God’s hands.

This is where it ends. It begins in worship. Isaiah was at worship putting up with several old hymns and a highly repetitive sermon when his world overturned. Someone engulfed him and he knew that the whole earth was full of God’s glory.  Thereafter he never doubted what he was to do in the church, where God’s glory is known; thereafter he never doubted what he was to do in the world, which God’s glory will never abandon.

 

                                                                                                   Victor Shepherd  
August 2008                                                                                                                 

preached on 17th August 2008 at Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto