No Easy Answer

Posted on 24 December 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 9:1-7, Isaiah 53:1-12; Matthew 2:1-18)

Have you ever wondered why Jesus was born at night? We sing about it in any number of our carols—“Silent Night,” that we’ll be singing later; “O Little Town of Bethlehem”; “Away in a Manger”; and of course, the various references to the shepherds watching their flocks by night. Above Bethlehem’s “deep and dreamless sleep,” “the stars in the sky looked down where he lay”—where, if you believe the carols, he lay sleeping peacefully next to his mother, then woke up without crying. Because that’s what newborns do, right? But in any case, we have this mental picture—still, quiet night; sweet hay, contented animals; quiet, happy baby, radiant mother; and the stars shining serenely down on this beautiful scene—have you ever asked why? Jesus could have been born at 3 in the afternoon or 10 in the morning, after all; why was he born at night?

You might say it was so the star could shine, and be seen, from the moment of his birth. I’m sure that’s part of it, but there’s more going on here. I think what we have here is a parable brought to life. Jesus wasn’t born when the world was bright and sunny; he was born in the darkest part of the night, when there was little light by which to see. He was born at the time when the rhythms and energy of human life are lowest, when we are most vulnerable—physically, emotionally, spiritually—when it’s hardest to think clearly, and easiest to make mistakes. I don’t think that’s just a physical fact—I think it’s a metaphor, and one to which we need to pay close attention.

This isn’t just me, either. We celebrate Christmas in late December, but Jesus wasn’t born in December. Despite carols like “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming” with their images of “snow on snow on snow” “amid the cold of winter,” he was actually born in the spring. That’s why the sheep were out on the hills at night, rather than asleep in their sheepfolds: it was lambing season. Any other time of the year, the shepherds would have been back in town for the night. But the early church chose to celebrate the birth of Christ in late December anyway, for two reasons.

The practical reason is that celebrating this day in the spring would have put it right on top of Easter, which would just be impossible to deal with. More importantly, though, they wanted the symbolism of celebrating the birth of Christ during the darkest part of the year, the time when the night is longest and coldest. The early church set Christmas just past the longest night of the year in order to emphasize the Light of the World coming in the world’s deepest darkness.

For us, Christmas has gotten to the point that NBC’s medical editor can complain on-camera that Christmas is great but “religion is what mucks the whole thing up.” For the early church, it was very different. It wasn’t safe to be Christian in the Roman Empire until Constantine won the civil wars of the early 300s, and for decades to come the church remembered the times of persecution. They were grateful to have a ruler who worshiped Christ, but they didn’t assume it; they didn’t assume that the government would protect them, that they would be respected for their faith, that life would be generally comfortable and safe. Like the majority of people throughout human history, their mental image of rulers was much closer to King Herod than President Washington.

The one bad thing about separating out Christmas and Easter, as the church chose to do, is that it encourages us to treat them as two separate things; and they aren’t. They are the same story at different ends, addressed to the same reality: the terrible, crushing power of human sin, the unsolvable problem of evil permeating us and our world, and God’s unimaginable final answer. We sentimentalize Christmas, but the early church didn’t, and the gospels don’t. Matthew doesn’t invoke Isaiah 9 here, but the New Testament does elsewhere, for the great promises of verses 6-7; and look at the context of those promises. They’re addressed to “her who was in anguish,” to “the people who walked in darkness,” who “lived in the land of the shadow of death,” a land devastated by war and crushed under the burden of the oppressor.

When Jesus came, he came under the rule of Herod the Great—a man who had taken power in Jerusalem in a bloody three-year civil war against his nephew, and who maintained the peace through unhesitating brutality; he was a man so paranoid that he would execute several members of his family for supposed plots against him—including even his own wife. Under his successors, Jesus’ life would end in blood, the innocent dying for the guilty; Matthew makes clear that Jesus’ life began in much the same way, with the murder of the innocent to serve the fear and ambition of those in power.

And the world took no notice. Herod killed so many, after all; Bethlehem was a small town, there couldn’t have been more than 18-20 boys two and under. They weren’t important, their families weren’t powerful—to the Romans, who valued people for what they could do, they just didn’t matter. The most terrible thing about the slaughter Herod ordered is that outside of Bethlehem, nobody cared.

There is no easy answer to our evil. Human power won’t stop it; whether you’re talking peaceful political change or violent revolution, the unscrupulous always have the advantage, and will tend to rise to the top. Human institutions won’t stop it; there is no constitution so perfectly written that it cannot be destroyed in the end by those who would subvert it to their own purposes. Human cultures won’t stop it; just watch the way our own is going. We still react with horror and anguish to the atrocity in Connecticut—but many immediately begin trying to use that horror and anguish to serve their own agendas; and in the meantime, more and more voices argue that children aren’t that important, and neither are the elderly, because they can’t do anything for us. In the normal course of history, those who have no power are sacrificed to serve the purposes of those who do. Our world is dark, and there is no easy answer for the darkness.

And so God gave us no easy answer. He didn’t give us a better flashlight and tell us to find our own way out; he didn’t tell us to just try harder, be nicer, or like ourselves better. He didn’t even just tell us to love one another. He didn’t leave the burden on our shoulders at all; he took that burden, and he gave us himself. He knew our death; he knew the evil that we do, for he experienced it in his own flesh. He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows—he was pierced for our sins, and crushed for all our wrongdoing—he took the punishment for all our evil thoughts and actions, and freely made himself the sacrifice for our deep guilt. He took our wounds, so that we might be healed.

In doing this, he canceled the power of sin over us; in rising from the dead, he broke the power of death; and by this, he set an end to them and all their works. A voice is heard in Ramah—a voice is heard in Newtown—a voice is heard in Auschwitz—a voice is heard in Bethlehem—a voice echoes down the halls of our history of grief: Rachel weeping for her children, weeping for all of us, because they are no more. And then, in response, comes another voice, promised by Jeremiah: “Do not weep. There is hope for your future; your children will come home.” All the works of evil will be undone; as Sam Gamgee put it, everything sad will come untrue. The baby born in Bethlehem among the Temple’s sacrificial lambs is the Man of Sorrows who died to give us life is the risen Lord who is coming again to take his children home. All shall be made new, and all shall be well, and all shall be made right: because he has already done it.

The Way Leads Through

Posted on 23 December 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 43:16-21; Mark 6:17-29, Luke 7:18-23)

It didn’t end well for John, as the world counts these things. It’s no surprise; when you greet visitors with “You vipers! Who warned you to flee the coming wrath!” chances are you won’t be elected president of your local ministerial association, let alone offered a book deal and a radio show. This isn’t classic church-growth strategy; it’s more like bizarro Dale Carnegie: How to Win Enemies and Influence People to Kill You.

We might say this is because John told the truth; but that doesn’t go far enough. Fact of the matter is, this world doesn’t necessarily mind truthtellers, so long as they keep it within acceptable bounds. You can preach truth all day long and not ruffle anyone’s feathers at all, if you’re careful about it, and a great many preachers do. It’s only when you go from preachin’ to meddlin’, as they say down South, that you’re in for trouble. John was a meddler, in a big way; he spoke the truths the world wanted to avoid.

The world wants to avoid them because it wants to avoid anxiety and pain. You can see it in how we react to the prospect of conflict—it tends to be fight or flight. Someone challenges us, or does something we really don’t like, and we get anxious; if we don’t consciously stop ourselves, we’ll let the anxiety drive us into reacting rather than thinking. We may opt for flight—avoid the conflict; back down, deny, change the subject, pass the buck—or we may choose to fight, to go on the attack and try to win the battle. Similarly, when we face doubt and the struggles in our souls, we tend either to flee—perhaps through denial, or losing faith—or to fight. We may fight our doubt by explaining it away; we may turn our anxiety outward, looking for someone else to blame. What we don’t do when we’re just reacting is deal honestly with the real issue, whatever it is.

When we see something unpleasant, we want to avoid it, or to make it go away. That’s perfectly understandable; but often, it isn’t healthy, and it isn’t right. What’s more, it produces tendencies in our societies, and in our churches, that really aren’t good. We hide our sins and our weaknesses, we deny them or pass the blame, because we fear how others will react if we’re honest; we don’t want to humble ourselves before those we’ve wronged or let down, and admit that we need grace and mercy. We don’t confront those who have wronged us, or who have done something we think is inappropriate or even sinful, because we don’t want to face the conflict; but that anxiety has to go somewhere, so we turn instead to gossip and complain about them to someone else. We cover up our doubts and our struggles, because we think real Christians don’t have those problems. And we don’t tell others about the salvation we have in Jesus Christ, about his love and grace and the price he paid for us, because we’re afraid of what they might say or do.

In short, when we see a problem, when we see an issue, when we see something hard, we look for a way to avoid it—we look for a way around. John shows us, through his whole ministry, that God’s way doesn’t lead around: it leads through. Sometimes speaking the truth, even doing so in love, brings conflict; we would prefer to avoid that conflict, but God leads us through it. Not that we should try to create conflict, but we shouldn’t let the threat of other people doing so dissuade us from speaking the truth or doing what God is calling us to do. As Paul tells Timothy, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, love, and self-discipline—the self-discipline and the power to look our fear and our anxiety right in the face, acknowledge them, and then do what they’re telling us not to do, in the love of God.

We see this in John, in his treatment of the Herods. They were a mess of a family in a lot of ways, some of which are on display in Mark 6. Herodias was at this point the wife of Herod Antipas; previously, she had been married to Antipas’ half-brother Herod Philip, until she divorced Philip and Antipas divorced his wife to marry her. What exactly John had said about the whole affair we don’t know, but it’s not hard to see why he felt the need to say something; if you’re calling the nation to repentance, you can’t really ignore that kind of flagrant public sin among the rulers if you want to have any credibility. So, John called out the whole situation, Herod Antipas had him arrested, and ultimately Herodias connived to have him executed.

It’s hard to face much more resistance than that; but even though it cost him his life, John did not back down from speaking the truth. Still, it’s clear that the whole situation rattled him. At the time of our passage from Luke, John is in prison, and he’s starting to wonder if maybe he’s made a mistake; yes, he’s known all his life that most of God’s prophets came to a bad end, but having it happen to him has shaken his faith. But you’ll notice, he doesn’t try to rationalize anything, and he doesn’t just give in to his doubt—he goes to Jesus with it, through his disciples. He moves throughhis doubt, to the Lord; and he is comforted.

That’s how it is, in the wilderness. We see the valley of the shadow of death, and we think we can find a way around it—or maybe even avoid the wilderness altogether. We can certainly find paths that look like they’ll do the trick. The thing about the wilderness, though, is that what looks like an easier way is usually a dead end, or even a trap. The path laid out for us may seem unnecessarily hard, and often seems to be going the wrong direction; but if you leave it for a shortcut, you’ll usually find yourself sooner or later in a blind canyon, or up on a ledge with no way forward and no safe way back.

If we want to make it to the end, we need to trust our Guide; he’s the one who made the way, and he’s been through it before. And more than that, he’s the one who promised to make the way for us in the wilderness, through the desert, and to provide for us along the way so that we can make it through.

Wildfire Season

Posted on 16 December 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 40:1-8, Malachi 3:1-5; Mark 1:1-8, Luke 3:7-9)

One of the realities of life in the wilderness is that fire is very much a threat. To the extent that there is any life at all, there are wildfires—in all but the harshest deserts, in the grasslands, and of course in the forests. We knew this well in Colorado: when wildfire season comes, you prepare, you keep watch, and you pray. It may not be you, but there will be those who see their whole lives burn. There always are. Whether you’re thinking about the threat or not, whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s always there.

One of the things that made me shake my head when I was at Trinity was how many people weren’tthinking about the threat, and in fact were actively refusing to. The fire danger for us was astronomical due to millions of acres of dead trees, killed by the mountain pine beetle; everyone was supposed to have their trees sprayed every year, to protect them from the beetle, and to thin the trees around their homes and other buildings, to slow the spread of any fire. Many homeowners, though, refused to do either. They didn’t want to cut down any trees, and they didn’t want to pay the money for spraying, so they just ignored the problem; and all their trees died.

By the grace of God, we didn’t see the whole county burn down; indeed, by his grace, it still hasn’t, and by now I’d guess most of the dead wood is gone. But as the threat of fire loomed, judgment for decades of mismanagement of the land, there were many voices warning of that judgment and demanding repentance; and most people understood that those voices were good and right. When judgment is real, when the warning is true, proclaiming it is not cruel or unkind—it’s a necessary act of love for others.

This is why John the Baptizer—or John the Forerunner, as the Orthodox call him—speaks so sharply to the Pharisees when they come down to see him. He doesn’t care to trim the message to fit what they want to hear; he’s not focusing on meeting their expectations, or judging his success by whether or not they’re happy with him. Instead, he’s telling them the truth. He’s proclaiming the comfort of Israel, but that message of comfort is also a warning, and they need to listen up.

His language here is striking. David Rohrer, teaching pastor at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, captures it vividly from his childhood experience of wildfires:

The image that comes to mind for me is the fires that burn various parts of the foothills in Southern California each year. One of my memories of growing up there is watching these fires destroy just about everything in their path.

After the dry summer, the chaparral plants were like fuel waiting for ignition. When that spark came and the Santa Ana winds fanned the flame, this fuel burned hot and fast. As these fires voraciously consumed chamise shrubs and sage brush, the chaparral animals fled before the flames, trying to find safety. John is making use of a similar image. In effect, he says, “You are like a bunch of little snakes coming out from under a burning bush.”

Calling them vipers is harsh. Not only are vipers poisonous and destructive, but snakes were associated with the enemies of God going all the way back to the Garden of Eden. John is looking out at those who considered themselves the best among the children of God, and he’s calling them children of the Devil. He knows they aren’t coming in sincere repentance; he sees their hypocrisy and calls them on it. But here’s the key: he isn’t just condemning them, he’s trying to grab their attention and shock them into listening. There is still time for them to hear his message, to understand the significance of his baptism, and to repent of their sin—or else, the judgment.

That’s why we have this oddity at the beginning of the gospel of Mark. All four gospels present John as the fulfillment of the promise of Isaiah 40; in the gospel of John, we see that that association comes from the Baptizer himself, as he uses that passage to tell the Pharisees who he is. That, of course, is a word of hope and comfort—God is announcing the end of judgment and the day of his favor. He is coming to deliver his people from slavery and bring them back from exile. This is good news.

But. Mark does something with this that none of the other gospels follow. He introduces the quote from Isaiah, and then he quotes Isaiah, but in between, he sticks another passage altogether. This sort of structure is pretty common in Mark—commentators have dubbed it the “Markan sandwich”—and it’s designed to emphasize whatever is in the middle. So here, right in the middle of this good news from Isaiah, right when his hearers would have expected the word “Comfort,” first they get this piece of Malachi 3.

Why is this important? Well, Malachi 3 is talking about the same thing as Isaiah 40, but in a profoundly different tone. He’s echoing a verse from Exodus 23, where God declares, “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.” There’s the promise, given for the first exodus, after they have already escaped Egypt for the wilderness. But then comes this: “Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him.” There’s the warning: God will guard and guide you, but only as long as you’re faithfully following him. If you don’t, watch out.

And so here we have Malachi, and here we have Mark pairing him up with Isaiah. “Comfort, comfort my people . . . make straight in the desert a highway for our God . . . the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together”—but, “who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” When the Lord comes, he will come like a conflagration—a refiner’s fire, that burns away all the dross and all the rubbish. For the righteous, he will be a purifying flame, but for the unrighteous, he will be a blaze of judgment, as their lives burn to ash before their eyes. No one is exempt; as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3, all of us will be tested with fire, to show what sort of work we have done and what sort of lives we have lived.

Wildfire season is coming; we know it, and because we know it, we need to warn others. It’s coming at the end for all of us, as we will all stand unguarded before the Judge of all the earth to be tested by the fire of his holiness, to face the reckoning for all we have done; and most of us will face it many times before that, as our world keeps trying to burn itself down, letting the passion-fire of its lusts and its hatreds set everything ablaze. Even earlier this week, I’d been thinking we’ve seen an awful lot of blood and death in the news lately, and then came the horrifying atrocity in Newtown, like a cherry of plague atop a sundae of moral disease. It’s wildfire season, once again.

This should not surprise us; and while it should make us weep, it should not make us lose heart. To borrow from Abraham, the Judge of all the earth shall do right. As much as we moderns flinch from the idea of any sort of judgment, the word of judgment is part of the word of comfort, and necessarily so, because the essence of God’s word of comfort is that all will be made right—which means that all that is wrong will be cast away. Which in turn means that all those who hold fast to what is wrong, who would rather be cast away than repent, will go with it. Randy Stonehill, after a ministry trip to Bangkok, wrote a song asking, “Can Hell burn hot enough to pay for all this suffering, the murder of the innocent? Can Hell burn hot enough to balance out these scales?” While I grieve that such a question could ever be asked, I have no doubt: it can and will.

At the same time, God’s judgment isn’t only for those people out there, it’s for us; when we look at the news from Connecticut, we are seeing nothing alien to any of us, but only the same darkness that twists our own hearts. We would not all be the same monster, but we are all capable of the same monstrosity; we all need the insight of G. K. Chesterton, to understand that when we ask what’s wrong with the world, the answer begins with us. And so we need to recognize that for us, and for everyone, the only alternative to absolute judgment is absolute redemption in the blood of Jesus Christ the Son of God. Our comfort: there is an alternative, there is a way out, there is salvation. Our warning: there is only one. All other roads anyone might ever take, the wildfires sweep over them, and they are no more. Only Jesus is the way through. Let’s pray.

Bearing Witness to the Light

Posted on 9 December 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 60:1-3; Luke 1:67-80, John 1:6-8)

As we saw last week, the herald of salvation, the one who came to announce that God’s great promise was at last being fulfilled, arose not in the capital, not among the powerful, but out in the wilderness. The word of life came in a place hostile to life; the message of hope rang out in a land of desolation. Redemption for the fallen, healing for the broken, and love for the deserted was proclaimed in the desert.

And as we said, so it must be, for in the desert, there is silence for us to hear God speak. The world makes an incredible racket, trying to get its way through manipulation and coercion, through bribery, seduction, flattery, threats, and blunt force trauma. It shouts down and corrupts, lies and cheats, and shades the truth until there’s nothing left but shading. Politicians talk about spinning the story, but what they’re really spinning is us; give them the voice of God that thunders over the waters, and they’d deafen us in the space of one 30-second commercial. God doesn’t do that.

Instead, he calls us from the wilderness—he calls us into the wilderness. He calls us away from all our striving to control our lives by controlling those around us, and all our attempts to control our world through the application of whatever power we can grab. He draws us away from our efforts to cover up our sin and hide from our inadequacy. He leads us out where our maps don’t work, we have no landmarks to steer by, and we do not know the way. He brings us to the point where all gods fail, and we have no one else but him—where he is our only hope, and our only way—where we have to face the bad news of our life: we are broken and we can’t fix it. Our world is fouled up beyond our ability to make it right. And once we understand in the marrow of our bones and the pit of our stomach that we are in desperate need of a salvation that we cannot provide, then we know that we need a Savior; then we can hear the good news as good news.

And once we get to that point, we can begin to see something else: if the problem of our sin is far greater than we would otherwise believe, so too is the salvation God is working. What does Zechariah say of his son? “You will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.” If you have an ear tuned to the Bible, as Zechariah most certainly did, that’s a cataclysmic statement.

Remember Isaiah 40: “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places shall become a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.” In Isaiah 43, God declares, “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert . . . to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.”

God calls us into the wilderness so that we must face our need, but also that we might see his power and his glory. He brings us out where the lights of our cities no longer protect us from the darkness of the night—where the darkness goes on forever, leaving us isolated and alone with the darkness of our hearts and the shadow of death, crying out for any light we can find; and then over us like a sunburst comes the word of his promise: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you! Darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness all the nations, but the Lordwill arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”

This is the knowledge of the salvation of God which John proclaimed to his people, the forgiveness of all our sin; it is the sunrise of the grace and mercy of God in the darkness of our guilt and shame and the black shadow of death, to give us light and hope and guide us in the way of his peace. God isn’t just about making the wilderness a little easier to live in, or giving us a little better flashlight so we can walk a little more easily. The purpose of God is the utter obliteration of all that is evil and unholy and wrong, and the redemption and healing of all creation, us most of all; it’s to bring life where there is death, and light up the darkness from horizon to horizon. God is making all things new.

This is the message John was given, to proclaim that God was coming to his people—not to do anything for himself, but all his life dedicated to bearing witness to the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This is the message we have been given, to proclaim that God has come and is coming again, to bear witness to his light in all that we do and all that we say; and in that, there are some things we can learn from John’s example.

One, he reminds us that spiritually, we too live in the wilderness. We talked about this as we were going through Romans 8; as followers of Christ, we have passed out of the land of slavery, but we have not arrived at the promised land—we are in the land between, the place of testing and challenge, where we have to live by faith and we have to follow God because he’s the only one who knows how he got us here, and he’s the only one who knows how to get us where we’re going. We’re still in this world, but we no longer belong here; and like John, God has raised us up as his heralds to call others into the wilderness, to hear his promise and to know his hope.

Two, this means that our focus needs to be as laserlike as John’s was if we’re going to do what God has called us to do. He had one task and one message, to proclaim to Israel that the kingdom of God was at hand, that the day of God’s mercy was dawning, and to call them to seize the opportunity and repent; and so to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. That was the content of every sermon, and the purpose of everything he did, down to where he lived, what he wore, and what he ate.

This doesn’t mean we need to do exactly what John did; but as for him, in everything we do and say, our goal should be to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ. In our preaching, in our teaching, in our programs, as we give counsel to one another, we only have one word that gives life. The late ex-Communist Arthur Koestler once declared, “One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up”; I don’t think ruthlessly is really the right word, but we have been brought into relationship with the One who is truth, and we should follow the spirit of Koestler’s advice. We should relentlessly proclaim the truth of the gospel, in every situation, in every issue, by our words and by our actions, or else we should be silent: God is speaking.

Now, Jesus isn’t literallythe answer to every question; if someone asks you what has four legs, a bushy tail, climbs trees, and eats nuts, well, sometimes a squirrel is just a squirrel. Even John, if you’d asked him the best way to prepare locusts, probably would not have said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” There are technical questions and technical challenges that need technical answers. But those questions and challenges come in the broader context of life, of how do we live and why do we do what we do and what are we living for; yes, fixing the washer just requires the ability to identify and replace the broken part, but knowing why you do the laundry—that requires the gospel.

We need to be honest with ourselves, with each other, with the world, that we need more than just better tools, better skills, and a better to-do list; that the problem with us, with our marriages, with our children, with our relationships with our family, our friends, our co-workers, is not a technical problem, and can’t be solved by trying harder or managing things better. I have sometimes regretted letting off that crack about “disorganized religion” where Dr. Kavanaugh could hear it, but I stand by it, and I don’t think he’s wrong to keep bringing it up. The problem with organized religion is that it too easily communicates the idea that being organized is the answer; being honest about it when we’re rather less than organized keeps our hearts soft to be honest about our greater struggles and failures, and keeps us honest about our need for grace.

“God Is Coming!”

Posted on 2 December 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 40:1-8; Matthew 3:1-8)

It all begins in a desert. It has to, really—out somewhere quiet, out away from the world; the world talks too much. In fact, it shouts too much, and always pretty much all the same thing. That might sound strange to you, but when you get right down to it, it’s true; everything the world shouts boils down to this: you have to do this, and do things this way, and you can’t do that, or do things that way. It’s all part of our frantic effort to pretend we’re in control, that if we just try hard enough and do it right, we can make our lives be what we want them to be. The problem is, nobody agrees on whatwe have to do and not do; and so people shout, hoping to drown out all those other voices, or at least make them give up and go away.

And out in the desert, out in the wind and the howl of the coyote, is another voice, with another message altogether. Out away from the world and the riot of all its news, down by the one river running through a land dry as bone, stands a man offering something different: good news. Out where the sun and the heat stab like knives, where the harshness of the land sandblasts our defenses and lays our weakness bare, suddenly there is a word of hope. We’ve made a mess of things; but God is coming to make things right.

God is coming! That’s the good news John is preaching; though if you’re not sure that’s exactly comfortable news, you’re not alone. Certainly a lot of people back in the city didn’t think so—especially the professional religious folk who thought they had everything under control and God all figured out; that’s why they came down to the river, not to follow John, but to spy on him. They wanted to convince themselves that John was a fake so they could go back to their nice comfortable existence in the city where they were the experts who had all the answers and had their lives all together. God already had them to do his work for him—what did he need with some anti-social loudmouth out in the desert eating bugs? And in the backs of their minds—not that they would have admitted this to themselves—had to be the thought: if God really was coming, what could he do but upset their applecart?

But if you understand that your cart’s missing a wheel, it’s already fallen over and the apples are bouncing down the street, and you don’t even know for sure where some of them got off to—well, then you get it: this really is good news. If you recognize that you don’t actually have it all together, that in fact you don’t have all the answers, and that nobody really does—if you see that all our efforts at control amount to little more than a house of cards, which stands only until the first hot wind blows in from the desert—then you can hear John’s message as a word of hope. It’s only when you recognize that you aren’t going to fix your life yourself—and none of us do, and none of us can—that the announcement that God is coming is reason to rejoice; because then we know that everything needs to be made right, and we need someone bigger than ourselves to do it.

We don’t have to act like we’ve got it all figured out and we’re doing everything just right; and in truth, we aren’t doing ourselves or anyone else any favors if we try to. Our message isn’t that if you just try hard enough and do things our way, you can work your way up to God; it’s that God came down to us, because he loves us. It’s not about us being good enough, or having to be good enough—it’s about Jesus being good enough for us, when we never could. This is the good news; and if we really understand this, we don’t need to pretend. We can be a place where it’s safe to be honest about our sin and our weaknesses, our shortcomings and our struggles, both with each other and with God—where confession and repentance are met not with proud condemnation, but with humble grace. That’s a gift. Let’s pray.

Give Glory

Posted on 25 November 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Genesis 3:14-15; Romans 16:17-27)

Some of you are probably familiar with the work of J. I. Packer—most likely his book Knowing God, if nothing else. I had the privilege of taking several classes from him at Regent. You had to pay attention, and no mistake. His lectures were dense—he always said, “Packer by name, and packer by nature”; plus, he’s a Brit of the old style, very formal, very reserved, and even by English standards his sense of humor is dry as bone. If you appreciate that, though (and I do), he’s really quite funny. At first glance, he might seem all intellect and no heart, but that’s nowhere close to being true. You can see that quite clearly in Knowing God; we saw it in many ways in his lectures, and perhaps most of all in his favorite saying, which was sort of a purpose statement for all his theology classes: “Theology leads to doxology.”

In other words, we don’t just study about God so that we know more stuff, or so that we can win arguments or tell people what they’re supposed to do; nor is this about our own empowerment, or getting us what we want. If those are the kinds of results that our theology produces, we’ve gone very wrong. What we do as we read the Bible, as we pray, as we study together and teach one another, isn’t primarily about us, and it isn’t determined by our goals, our desires, or our ideas of how things ought to be. It’s about God, and seeing him as he truly is, not as our passions and fears drive us to imagine him; and not just so that we know things about him, but so that we come to know him, as we come to know our family and closest friends. And the more that happens—the more clearly we see him and the more truly we know him—the more we’re moved to worship.

It’s fitting, then, that as Paul closes his longest and most theologically dense letter, he does something that he doesn’t do anywhere else: he ends with a doxology, with a song of praise. That’s ultimately what all this is about, what his whole letter has been for, that the Roman church—and all others who would hear or read his words—would understand God’s holiness and glory and goodness and grace somewhat better, and would be inspired to bow before God and worship him.

It does matter that we believe what is true about God, so that we worship him truly; thus we have this digression in verses 17-19. His greeting in verse 16 from the churches he founded brings to mind the fights he’s had in those churches, and so he warns the Romans: there are false teachers out there, and they’ll be coming after you. Be wise enough to see through their lies, and avoid them. But again, this isn’t about being able to out-argue false teachers. We counter their lies with truth, but not so that we can win the argument; we don’t want to focus on the argument. The point is to keep our focus where it belongs: on God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Thus Paul ends with praise “to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ.” What is Paul’s gospel? It is exactly the preaching of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty. It is the triumphant declaration that Jesus has done the impossible, and has saved us when we could not be saved any other way. This isn’t about Paul; he calls it “my gospel” not because the gospel belongs to him, but because he belongs to the gospel.

This is how God strengthens us; this is how he gives us hope and peace to stand firm—through the relentless and joyful proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ. The world tries to create them through symptom control, on the personal level (through self-help programs and medications) and on the national level (through laws and programs), but those aren’t enough; and if the church just offers Christianized versions of the same, we’re selling everyone short. Those things have their place, but they only deal with the effects of sin; they can’t address the real issue, the heart of the matter. At every level, at every point, by every means, we need to be proclaiming the gospel. Only that truly strengthens us and enables us to stand firm because only the gospel goes to the root of the problem. It’s God’s answer to sin—and he’s answered it once and for all.

This is, Paul says, “according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God.” Those prophetic writings were centuries old; why does he say the mystery is nowrevealed through texts written long before? The answer has to do with the nature of mystery. In the biblical sense, it doesn’t mean God was concealing his plan, or the truth about himself; mystery is something hidden in plain sight, not by any effort of God to disguise it, but by our inability to understand it—or, even more importantly, experience it. The prophets pointed to the mystery and proclaimed what God would do, but no one really understood them; but when Jesus came and fulfilled the prophets, the world saw what they meant, and their message became clear for the first time.

Why? “So that all nations might believe and obey him.” The gospel is not just one way to God, for one culture or one sort of people; it’s the one way God has provided for salvation for all people. His plan is broader than just Israel, and broader than any other nation or group we might name; his purpose is for the whole world, and indeed for all creation. And it’s his purpose that matters in the end, not ours, and his plan that carries through, not ours, because he’s God, and we’re not. It’s his to decree, and ours to obey.

The one who has done all this, and is able to do all this, is the only wise God. It’s his wisdom that formed a plan for the redemption of the world after our rebellion broke it and shrouded it with darkness, and his wisdom that set the plan in motion and brought it to completion. His wisdom is fully expressed—is incarnated, made flesh and bone—in Jesus Christ, and it’s in Jesus Christ and him alone that we have been saved, or can be saved; thus it is through Jesus Christ that we give him glory. His glory is forever, as he is forever, as his wisdom is forever, as his gift of life is forever; and so our worship is forever, for he deserves nothing less. He has saved us, he has set us free from darkness and shadow, he has delivered us from death and given us his life; he has given us hope in a world of despair, peace in a world of anxiety, joy in a world of grief, and love in a world of bitterness and hatred. To the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen. Let’s pray.

Give Honor

Posted on 18 November 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 91:14-16; Romans 16:1-16)

It’s typical of Paul to greet various people at the end of a letter, but nowhere else does he greet so many. It makes sense; the church as a whole is unfamiliar with him, and so he sends greetings to everyone in the whole church that he does know—which is to say, all the people who can vouch for him. That’s an ulterior motive, though, merely a reason the list is so long; it isn’t Paul’s primary purpose here. You can see that by what he says about those whom he names: his focus isn’t on himself, it’s on them. We don’t know much about most of these folks; for most of them we can’t even guess much; but from what we do know we can be sure there are some great stories behind this passage.

Phoebe was a Gentile convert from the church at Kenkhreai—the eastern port for the city of Corinth—and apparently the person carrying the letter to Rome. Paul calls her a deacon; the formal structure of church offices was only beginning to develop, but it seems safe to say that Phoebe was a recognized leader of the church with responsibility for visiting the sick, caring for the poor, and quite likely helping manage whatever money the church there had. She was clearly wealthy and socially prominent, since Paul names her as a benefactor or patron to him and to many in the church. This probably means that the church met in her home for worship, but there’s more than that here. The word Paul uses was actually a technical term for someone who came to the aid of others, and particularly foreigners, providing them with financial and legal assistance. In a busy seaport like Kenkhreai, this would have been especially important, and it seems likely that Phoebe took up this ministry on behalf of visiting Christians—including Paul. Now, he says, she needs the Roman church to serve her as she has served so many others.

After commending Phoebe to the Roman church, Paul greets his old friends and co-workers Prisca and Aquila; you probably know Prisca better by her nickname, Priscilla, since that’s how Luke refers to her in the book of Acts. They were Jewish Christians whom Paul first met in Corinth—they had been expelled from Rome along with all other Jews by Claudius—and they played a major part with him in the founding and growth of the church in Ephesus. By this point, Claudius has died and they’ve returned to Rome, and are no doubt among the chief leaders of the church there. Paul notes that they risked their necks to save his—we don’t have that story, but it was most likely during his three years in Ephesus; for that reason and many others, he isn’t exaggerating when he says that “all the churches of the Gentiles” give thanks for them.

In verse 7, we have greetings addressed to another pair of Greek-speaking Jews. This verse has been made a point of argument over the ordination of women, but it shouldn’t be. The text is clear: Paul greets a husband and wife, Andronicus and Junia—just like Aquila and Prisca, or Philologus and Julia—who he says are “esteemed among the apostles.” Which is most likely to say that like Prisca and Aquila, they were a married couple who traveled, and who used their travels to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. The fact that they had been imprisoned for the gospel, like Paul, bears this out.

Of the rest, we can say much less. Epainetus, the first Christian convert in Asia, must have come to faith through the work of Prisca and Aquila, and perhaps came to Rome with them. Herodion, and the household of Aristobulus—we can’t be sure, but this is likely Aristobulus the brother of King Herod Agrippa I, who killed James the brother of John and tried to kill Peter. Aristobulus was dead by this point, but it appears the church had spread even into his family and their servants. Rufus may well be the son of Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross of Christ part of the way to Golgotha; we don’t know for sure, but there’s good reason to think so.

Obviously, we don’t know much, and we can’t even guess much. There’s one thing we can say for sure about every person greeted here: Paul considered them worthy of honor. Just look what he says about them. “My fellow workers in Christ”—“my fellow prisoners”—“my beloved in the Lord”—“approved in Christ”—“chosen in the Lord”—“workers in the Lord”—“Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you”—“Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord.” He values these people for their faithful service to the Lord and his church, including in many cases to Paul himself; he greets them because he wants to honor them, and to hold them up for the church to honor.

And you know, he succeeded, far beyond anything he could have imagined. Even with those for whom we know nothing more than their names, we at least know their names; we’ve at least heard of them. Everyone they knew, or almost everyone, has been forgotten for nearly two thousand years—but their names are still remembered, and with them, Paul’s approval. And more than that, this may be just a list of names, but it’s still Scripture, it’s just as inspired by God as any other passage in this book. If Paul honored them for their faithfulness, I think we can safely say that Jesus honored them, too.

This matters. I preached a sermon last week basically promising you blood and pain and strife if you follow Jesus, and you know, I won’t take back a word of it; but you could be excused for wondering, if that’s what following Jesus gets you, why bother? This world values comfort, ease, material wealth, security (financial and otherwise), physical pleasure, and that’s just not what Jesus promises his people. Oh, you might get those things, but you might not—and if you do, it might not really be a blessing. So, if not any of those things, what do we get out of this gig, anyway?

There are several parts to that answer, many of which we’ve talked about before; one of the most obvious, of course, is eternal life. Part of this, too, though, is honor. It’s not about reputation, which is ultimately in the world’s hands. Lois McMaster Bujold, in one of herVorkosigan novels, has the protagonist’s father tell him, “Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.” A little later, he adds, “Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will.” From a Christian point of view, the only thing I’d add is that honor is ultimately what Jesus knows about us—which means it’s rooted in the truth that he has redeemed us and paid the penalty for all our sin, and is transforming us by his Holy Spirit.

As such, reputation may come and go, but in Christ our honor is solid; as we follow him, he is making us people of integrity, faithfulness, and true character, worthy of respect, in and through whom he can do his good work. We don’t need the world’s approval, we have the Lord’s; we don’t need the world to validate us or vindicate us, because he will. And because we are worthy of honor in his eyes, we will be honored by those who also give him honor.

The flipside to this is that, like Paul, we should honor those who serve the Lord with honor. This morning, I think especially of those who were here last night doing all the work of a funeral dinner for Deb Eberly’s family, after the death of her sister. I won’t make them stand, but I honor the service of Sue Gunter, Marilyn Rice, and Alice Seiman, Pam Chastain, and Mary Ann Cox. We had two craft shows going yesterday, selling peanut brittle to support local missions, and Mom’s Day Out; we had a lot of people busy in service yesterday, some doing more than one thing. And of course, beyond the activities of the church, we have people serving Christ in many ways—in the health-care system, in the schools of our community, through involvement in mission to other parts of the world, and so on.

From the Front Lines

Posted on 11 November 201211 March 2017 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 52:13-53:1; Romans 15:14-33)

“Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of the gates of hell.” So said the great missionary C. T. Studd, and he lived it. After graduating from Cambridge in 1883, he went to serve with Hudson Taylor on the China Inland Mission. From there he went to southern India—to Ootacamund, actually, where Carolyn Dann is now teaching; he pastored a church there from 1900-1906. He returned to Britain after that, but he didn’t stay; concern for Africa led him to travel to the Sudan and the Congo. That began the Heart of Africa Mission, which Studd expanded several years later into the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade, sending workers into South America, Central Asia and the Arab world as well as central Africa.

This is a man who could say in all sincerity, “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.” Paul would have understood him well, for he was energized by the same thing—being on the front lines of God’s work in the world. Indeed, Paul appeals to that in verses 15-16. He’s written in quite strong terms to a church he didn’t plant, and he acknowledges that, but he justifies it on the grounds of the grace he was given by God to be a minister to the Gentiles. Maybe he’s never served in Rome, but he still has flag rank, if you will, and not in some staff position back at headquarters, either. He’s been in the heat of the battle for a couple decades now, at God’s specific and express appointment; he has earned the right to speak with authority.

Indeed, to say that Paul served in the heat of the battle is to understate the point; in the spread of the church across the Roman world, he was the tip of the spear, practically a one-man revival, and that’s the role he felt strongly called to play. You can see it in verse 23—it’s almost plaintive: “I no longer have any room to work in these regions.” It’s not as if there were churches all over the place in the eastern Mediterranean; but there were enough that Paul felt he was being squeezed out. You may remember the story of Daniel Boone, who thought that if he could stand in his yard and see smoke from a neighbor’s chimney, the place was getting too crowded and it was time to move; that was about Paul’s attitude. If there were other Christians around who were ready to lead the church, then it was time for him to head off someplace where that wasn’t true.

Now, most of us, if you were to ask where the front lines are for the church today, would think of Wycliffe, of missionaries to the Muslim world, and people like that; and certainly, that’s true. What we don’t rightly see is that even more, the front lines run right through Western culture. Look at Europe, look at Canada; look at New England, or the West Coast. Look to the mountains—where I last served, I think our best guess was that 9% of the population was in church any given Sunday, and many among that 9% weren’t there for God. Look to those places, because that’s the direction in which this community is moving—it’s just slower here. Even here, the front lines between the church and the world begin right at the doorstep.

You might be thinking at this point that you do see this—but the problem isn’t that we don’t see anything, it’s that we don’t see rightly. One of the greatest lies the Enemy has ever pitched has been to get the church to see spiritual battles in worldly terms, and especially political terms. He’s gotten us to identify our goals in terms of biblical moral behavior backed by legislation, and in terms of economic results to be achieved by political means. For some, it’s left-wing concepts of moral behavior and economic fairness, while others hold up right-wing understandings of the same—either way, I assure you, the Devil’s just as happy, because he’s gotten us to identify the kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man, and at that point we’re no longer a threat. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter what our political ideas are, I’m not saying the laws don’t matter, but I am saying, unless God calls us specifically to that work, all that is secondary.

We need to understand, from the front of our consciousness to the pit of our stomach, that we are on the front lines every bit as much as missionaries in hostile countries; and we need to understand two things about that. One, our goals and our enemies are not physical but spiritual. Political parties are not the enemy, and better laws are not the goal. Our goal is that “those who have never been told of Christ”—or worse, who have been told lies about him—“will see, and those who have never heard will understand”; and that those who do know him will be filled with his love and grace and with the desire to know him better, that we may all be able to teach one another. Everything we do should be all about the gospel of Jesus Christ, nothing else; and nothing else will heal our community or our nation.

Two, we will suffer; and though our enemy is entirely spiritual, our suffering won’t be. We will be attacked spiritually, yes, but also emotionally, financially, legally, politically, reputationally, and ultimately physically. We will hurt, and we will bleed. We cannot make the mistake of identifying success as the people of God with good circumstances, financial security, and the absence of conflict; in truth, that was always a mistake, but in times when looking Christian was part of the cultural expectation, that mistake was easier to get away with. Now, “the times, they are a-changin’,” and that’s a confusion we simply cannot afford. We need to commit to following Jesus Christ with the full understanding that following him may leave us bankrupt, despised, wounded, and maybe even imprisoned—just like Jeremiah, Paul, Jesus . . .

I say this as one to whom wisdom has come late. I’ve been praying since my early teens that God would bring revival, and that he would use me in part to do it. I’ve prayed that the Holy Spirit would work through me to win battles for the kingdom of God. At the same time, I’ve complained every time I got hurt and asked God to make life easier. He was very gentle with me—it’s only the last few years that I’ve realized that these two sets of prayers are incompatible. You can have a relatively easy life, far from the front lines, where nothing is really at stake; but if you want to win real victories, you must go to the battle, risking all. That means—that inevitably means—struggle and strife and hardship and pain; those are part of the necessary price of victory. As the Duke of Wellington said, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”

I’m going to do something now, I want you to follow me carefully. Today of course is Veterans’ Day; all of you who are veterans of the American armed services, please stand. We honor you for your service, and rightly so, for it is an honorable service for those who serve with honor—and as the depressing news about General Petraeus reminds us, the hardest thing of all is to serve with honor all the way to the very end.

And in that, we profit from your example, and the reminder of your presence. You are veterans in a particular way, in a particular service to which God called you, of which the risks and the struggles show especially clearly; as such, you provide a model for us in our own service, and we need that. We need the example of Paul, who could write at the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith”; but we need the example of those in our own day who have fought the good fight to the end, to help us do the same.

As Christians, even above our allegiance to this nation, we have a higher allegiance, for we are citizens of the kingdom of God, and we are all on active duty; we are all soldiers against the darkness. Would you all then please stand. You are all soldiers in the army of the Lord of Hosts; your battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers and authorities and rulers of the evil of this present age. You go forth not in your own strength, but in the power of the Spirit of God who is in you, to set free those who are enslaved to sin and deliver them from the hand of death, that they too may be raised up by the Holy Spirit in the life of Jesus Christ our Lord. The fight will at times be fierce, but you do not fight alone, for we all go forth together; and though there will be losses, yet the victory is certain, for Christ has already won it. Let’s pray.

As Christ to One Another

Posted on 4 November 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 69:6-12, Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:1-13)

As we’ve seen the last couple weeks, Paul is dealing with a conflict in the Roman church between a group who feel they have to keep the Old Testament law in order to please God—it’s a crutch to prop up their faith—and a group of those who understand that they don’t who are quarreling with the first group. The first group is mostly Jews—not all the Jews in the church, I’m sure, and there were likely a few Gentiles among them, but it’s essentially a Jewish group—and the second is no doubt mostly Gentiles, and so the strife between them has been causing and inflaming division more generally between Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome. That’s a lot of why Paul wrote this letter.

In our passage this morning, Paul lays out the bottom line for everything he’s said in chapter 14: we aren’t in this to please ourselves, we aren’t in this to get what we want, and we have to understand that when we get into a conflict in the church. Yes, the strong are absolutely correct that they are free in Christ to eat non-kosher meat and ignore the Jewish feast days and festivals—but if they are doing so in a way that hurts others in the church, that’s a sin. If they’re living to please themselves and not taking thought to what is best for the weaker members of the church, that’s an abuse of their freedom in Christ. Christ hasn’t set us free to be selfish, he’s set us free from being selfish.

This does not mean, though, that we need to give others in the church whatever they want. Look at verse 2: “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, that is, to build him up.” The problem with the “strong” in Rome is not that they were making the “weak” believers angry: their behavior was actually making the weak even weaker, tearing down their faith and making it harder for them to follow Christ. The point isn’t to keep everyone happy, but to build each other up in faith and help one another grow in spiritual maturity. Sometimes that means making someone unhappy, challenging them about an issue in their lives and telling them things they don’t want to hear. The key—note Paul’s use of the word “neighbor,” echoing Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves—is that everything we do should be done out of love, in a spirit of grace.

We should stop a moment to emphasize that this passage is about our responsibility to others in Christ, not about our expectations from others. I think I’ve noted before that we like to read the commands in the Bible as addressed to other people, and then try to use the Bible to make them do what we want; but you know, I can’t think of a single passage of Scripture that was written for that purpose. Like all the rest of this book, this was written for us to apply to ourselves, to learn what God wants us to do; what others are supposed to do for us is not for us to worry about. It’s between them and God.

In verse 5, Paul ties this back to what he said in chapter 12 and chapter 8. 8:5: “Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” In 12:3 he uses this word to describe the mindset, the perspective, we’re supposed to have about ourselves and our lives; in 12:16 he says the same thing he says here: “think the same thing toward one another.” Not “have the same opinions,” not “agree on all the issues”; he’s just spent a chapter and more telling the quarreling factions to respect each other’s views, after all. He’s on about something deeper.

The point here is the same one he makes to a squabbling church in Philippians 2: “Let this mind be in you, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who didn’t insist on his rights and cling to his prerogatives, but opened his hands and let them all go to serve us, humbling himself in obedience, even to the point of death on a cross.” It’s a completely different basis for unity than anything the world knows. We unify around points of agreement—if you like hymns, you go to this church; if you like electric guitars, you go to that one. If you have this political view, you go here; if you have that political view, you go there. If you hold this set of opinions, you vote for the elephant; if you hold that set, you vote for the donkey. And in so doing, we divide ourselves into all these little groups, and we define ourselves against everyone who thinks different from us.

In Christ, we’re supposed to go deeper than that; our unity isn’t supposed to stop where our uniformity stops. If you’re unified with those who agree with you on everything you care about, who cares? Even the world does that. If we’re in Christ, if we love him and are truly seeking to follow him and to be obedient to his call in our lives, that’s what matters. We aren’t all going to agree on what that means for what we’re called to do and think; and indeed, we shouldn’t. Remember Paul’s body imagery—if we were all the same, there would be a lot of necessary parts missing.

We ought to be able to come together in all our differences and disagreements—rockers and classical musicians, hymn-singers and hip-hoppers, Baptists and Presbyterians, and, yes, even liberals and conservatives—and worship together as friends, as brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes, we disagree on many things, but we ought to recognize that we share one salvation in one Lord through one faith by one grace, and none of us has any claim to stand above anyone else. The more we appreciate our own desperate need for grace—and even the best of us stands in desperate need, make no mistake—the less we will be inclined to look down on others for their need; and the more we see one another as the beloved of Christ, for whom he died and rose again, the less free we will feel to beat one another up to get our own way. Which is a good thing, because Jesus does not take it kindly when we hurt someone he loves.

This doesn’t mean soft-pedaling our disagreements, pretending they don’t matter or don’t exist. We should take each other seriously enough, and trust one another enough, to be open and honest when we disagree, or when we have a problem with someone in the church, when they’ve hurt us, or even when we just don’t like them. Talking to other people instead of confronting those with whom we have an issue is just as unloving as attacking people and tearing them down. But even in our disagreements and our hurts, Paul calls us to receive one another—not merely tolerate one another, but receive one another, as Christ received us; not just as people we have to put up with until we can get rid of them, but as family, as people we love. He tells us to stand as Christ to one another, not just when it’s easy, but seeking to serve and bless one another even when our disagreements are severe—because that’s when we need it most. Let’s pray.

Grace for the Weak

Posted on 28 October 201218 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Leviticus 10:8-11; Romans 14:13-23)

Law is about control, and the mind set on law is a mind set on control—control of self and control of others, in some combination. It’s possible to be a faithful keeper of the law and not be a legalist, if your focus is not on the law but through the law; thus we have the psalmist and others in the Old Testament who speak of the law of Moses with great love and joy, because their minds were set not on the law, but on God. For them, the law was not an end in itself, but a way to see and know God. They were using the law as God desired it to be used. But when we collapse law into law—or when we collapse anything else into law—so that our focus is on the law itself and keeping the law rather than on the reality behind the law, then we betray what we claim to serve.

This is easy to see in the “weak” party in Rome, who were insisting on keeping the purity laws and the Jewish religious calendar; they were clearly making the kingdom of God about eating and drinking. Less obvious is the fact that the “strong” were doing the exact same thing. We miss that because we think of religious law as telling us not to do worldly stuff (and commanding us to do churchy stuff), but you can be just as legalistic, arrogant, and self-righteous about notkeeping that sort of law as about keeping it. All you’ve done then is replace “thou shalt not eat meat and drink wine” with “thou shalt eat meat and drink wine.” Either way, you’re making it all about your dinner, rather than about the Lord, and that’s not what God is on about.

Unfortunately, legalism is hostile to listening and learning, because it breeds the conviction that I’m right and I already know what I need to know; learning, after all, must begin at least with the admission, “I don’t know,” and usually with the willingness to say, “I’m wrong.” It’s also hostile to compromise, because it turns winning the argument into a moral imperative. As such, neither side in this dispute is willing to back down.

Now, as we saw last week, Paul agrees with the theology of the Gentiles here. You’re absolutely right, he says: the old categories of ritual purity, of things you can’t touch and foods you can’t eat because they’re unclean, are meaningless in Jesus. None of that matters anymore. Given that, you might think he would support the “strong” group—but he doesn’t. Instead, he tells them they are the ones who need to change. No, they don’t have to start keeping the law, but they do have to respect those who are weaker in their faith, and be considerate of their scruples. The strong have been flouting their freedom, breaking the Mosaic law right in front of their Jewish brothers and sisters, and pushing them to do the same; Paul commands them to knock it off.

Why? Because they were the ones with the stronger sense of Christian freedom. It was their responsibility to compromise because they were the ones who were free to do so. For the weak to compromise their behavior for the sake of the strong, they would have to compromise their beliefs, to break their faith, by breaking what they believed to be a moral obligation. For the strong to compromise their behavior for the sake of the weak, all they would have to do is voluntarily restrict themselves—to use their Christian freedom to not act as they would prefer in certain circumstances out of respect for the beliefs of others in the church. They didn’t have to compromise their beliefs, betray their morals, or give up their Christian freedom; all they had to do was honor others above themselves and put the good of their neighbor ahead of their own desires, just as Paul had already told them to do. Doing whatever we want is never a moral obligation.

It’s easy to imagine how the “strong” party in the church in Rome would have howled at this, but Paul has three arguments for them. One, they are causing others pain by their insistence on getting their own way; that’s not loving, and so it isn’t an appropriate exercise of their freedom in Christ. If the “weak” party were demanding they do something which was actually sinful, it would be different, but that isn’t the case. Two, Paul says, their behavior is counterproductive, because pushing the Jews in the church to break the law won’t help them understand that they are truly free in Christ. In the end, all it will do is harden their conviction that not keeping the law is bad.

And three, the strong need to understand that in pushing their weaker brothers and sisters to break the law, they are in fact driving them to sin. True, the kosher laws are no longer binding on Christians, and so it isn’t a sin to eat non-kosher meat—but if you believe it’s a sin and you eat it anyway, then for you it’s a sin. That might seem strange, but think it through. If you believe an act is sinful and you decide to do it anyway, what do you have to do? You have to decide to disobey God. That decision is a sin, regardless of anything else. If you’re absolutely convinced that God forbids us to step on cracks in the pavement, that doesn’t mean stepping on a crack is a sin—but if you believe you’re defying God, your intent is to sin, and so you are guilty of that intent.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we must be bound by the scruples of others—the mere fact that someone believes something we’re doing is wrong doesn’t mean we have to agree with them. But we must respect their scruples. For one, we need to listen to them humbly and respectfully, since they might be right; God might be using them to alert us to sin in our lives that we hadn’t been aware of. And even if they aren’t, we need to respect their concerns and be careful not to lead them into anything that would be sinful for them, even if it’s not sinful at all for us.

Now, as we say this, we need to remember that there’s another sort of weakness in faith, one common to all of us in one way or another, which we can’t just blithely expect people to grow out of; it’s not exactly what Paul’s talking about, but his argument applies nevertheless. Let me turn things over for a minute to Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show, who puts it better than I could: [NB: start at 9:21; I can’t figure out how to make the embedded clip begin at that point]

Drinking alcohol isn’t a sin for everyone, but for some people it is. Why? Because you have to know your own weakness, and be wary of it. We all have temptations that are particular weaknesses for us; some are just more societally acceptable than alcoholism, and more subtle. Whatever they may be, we have to respect the danger they pose, and set guards in our souls around them, because even going near them is playing with fire. To take another example, if sexual temptations are a particular weakness for you, there may be times when even turning on a computer is sinful, because that will be the trigger for temptation; that’s your point of no return.

We all have temptations for which even creating the possibility of being tempted is going too far; they’re like a black hole in our heart—once we cross the event horizon, we’re going to be sucked in. We have to draw lines around them in our souls, because whatever anyone else might be able to do, we can’t even go toward them safely. We can’t insist that everyone else has to draw the same lines, though we can certainly tell others why we’ve drawn the lines we have for ourselves; and we have every right to insist that our fellow Christians respect those lines when they’re around us. By that same token, we have the responsibility to respect the lines others have drawn for themselves, so that we don’t put a stumbling block or a cause of offense—in the Greek, a skandalon—in their way. Therefore, let us not judge another for their weakness, but let us instead judge our own behavior, so that we do nothing to make our brother or sister fall.