What Does This Mean?

Sunday, May 30th, 2004
Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:14-17

1 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" 13 But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."
14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17 "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19 And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20 The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. 21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'

Imagine it, if you will. Just a few short weeks earlier, Mary, and the disciples had watched as Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. Three days later, they were electrified at the news that he’d risen from the dead.

Over the next few weeks, Jesus continued to meet with them, talk to them, and teach them.

Then, just a few days before, he’d … gone. In a way that was not unheard of for the Jews, and yet, was as strange to them as it would be to us, Jesus was there, and then he wasn’t. As we read responsively last Sunday, from the text in Luke: “He withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”

I remember the fall of 1989 for several reasons, but one of the main reasons that it remains a pivotal time in my life was that over the course of that year, I watched things happen that I never thought I’d see. I’ll just mention one here: the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had not been born when the wall went up, so it was a case of something having been there as long as I could remember, though I knew that it was a possibility that it could come down, that possibility seemed utterly remote, growing up during the cold war. The scene of the crowds climbing on and subsequently breaching the wall were factual enough, but had a certain element of surrealism to them.

In some ways, I think the followers who were with Jesus had similar feelings as they watched HIM ascend. It was not out of the realm of possibility for them, but it would certainly not be an expected event.

In their case, I suspect if they’d spent any time around Jesus throughout his ministry, they would have become accustomed to seeing unusual things happen on a regular basis, so this may well have been the latest of many.

So this thing had happened in their lives. These events had taken place that basically shook the foundations of all they had believed to be true – up until the moment they met Jesus, culminating in his ascending into heaven!

What could possibly top that? What more could happen that would be better than their best day ever?!

Jesus never disassociated himself from the Jewish religion. He remained a practicing Jew all his earthly life. Consequently, his followers initially didn’t consider themselves as separated from that tradition. It wasn’t until they began to be called “Little Christs” at Antioch that the differentiation began. Up until then, they referred to themselves as the followers of “The Way” – that being the way of Jesus.

That is why they were celebrating the feast of Pentecost. Pentecost was a celebration of the closing of the harvest originally, similar in some ways to our own Thanksgiving celebration. It was called the Festival of First Fruits, for the first fruits of the harvest, or the festival of weeks, coming as it did, at the end of a period of 7 weeks of harvest. It had, over time, come to be a commemoration of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and that is how it was being observed by the time of Jesus, and a time to renew the Mosaic covenant. It was, because of that, the second most important festival after Passover.

Either way, the point is, the disciples were observing Pentecost as part of their Jewish heritage.

Somewhere in the back of their minds was the promise that Christ had made to them; that God would send a helper. But they probably didn’t have a clear idea of what to expect. They were accustomed to the Torah being their help, up until when they met Jesus.

Matthew and Luke both preserved the distinction John the Baptist made between his baptism- with water, and Jesus’ baptism – with the Holy Spirit. Luke connects the two here at the event at Pentecost. So Luke brings John's baptism of Jesus in the Jordan and the Spirit's baptism of assembled believers at Pentecost into a parallel in which each event is seen as the final determining factor for all that follows--for the ministry of Jesus in Luke's gospel and for the mission of the Church.

Pentecost was for Judaism the day of the giving of the law, for Christians it is the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit. So for Luke the coming of the Spirit upon the early Christians at Pentecost is not only a parallel to the Spirit's coming upon Jesus at his baptism, it also shows that the mission of the Christian church, as was the ministry of Jesus, is dependent upon the Holy Spirit. And by his stress on Pentecost as the day when the miracle took place, he is also suggesting (1) that the Spirit's coming is in continuity with God's purposes in giving the law, and yet (2) that the Spirit's coming signals the essential difference between the Jewish faith and commitment to Jesus, for whereas the former is Torah-centered and Torah-directed, the latter is Christ-centered and Spirit-directed.

There is, of course, nothing necessarily sensory about the Holy Spirit. Yet God in his providence often accompanies his Spirit's working by visible and audible signs--particularly at certain crises in redemptive history. This he does to assure his people of his presence. In vv.2-4 three signs of the Spirit's coming are reported to have appeared, each of them--wind, fire, and inspired speech--being considered in Jewish tradition as a sign of God's presence.

Wind as a sign of God's Spirit is rooted linguistically in the fact that both the Hebrew word ruah and the Greek word pneuma mean either "wind" or "spirit," depending on the context, and this allows a rather free association of the two ideas (cf. Jn 3:8). Ezekiel had prophesied of the wind as the breath of God blowing over the dry bones in the valley of his vision and filling them with new life (Eze 37:9-14), and it was this wind of God's Spirit that Judaism looked forward to as ushering in the final Messianic Age. Thus Luke tells us that one sign of the Spirit's coming upon the early followers of Jesus was "a sound like the blowing of a violent wind." Just why he emphasized the "sound" of the blowing of the "wind" is difficult to say. This sound "came from heaven" and "filled the whole house," symbolizing to all present the presence of God's Spirit among them in a way more intimate, personal, and powerful than they had ever before experienced.

Fire as a symbol of the divine presence was well known among first-century Jews (cf. the burning bush [Ex 3:2-5], the pillar of fire that guided Israel by night through the desert [Ex 13:21], the consuming fire on Mount Sinai [Ex 24:17], and the fire that hovered over the wilderness tabernacle [Ex 40:38]). John the Baptist explicitly linked the coming of the Spirit with fire (cf. Mt 3:11; Lk 3:16). The "tongues of fire" here are probably not to be equated with the "other tongues" of v.4 but should be taken as visible representations of the overshadowing presence of the Spirit of God.

Also significant is Luke's statement that these tokens of the Spirit's presence "separated and came to rest on each of them." This seems to suggest that, though under the old covenant the divine presence rested on Israel as a corporate entity and upon many of its leaders for special purposes, under the new covenant, as established by Jesus and inaugurated at Pentecost, the Spirit now rests upon each believer individually. In other words, though the corporate and individual aspects of redemption cannot actually be separated, the emphasis in the proclamation of redemption from Pentecost onward is on the personal relationship of God to the believer through the Spirit, with all corporate relationships resulting from this.

The last page and a half that I’ve read to you was pulled directly from the Zondervan NIV Commentary that is part of a software package I use to prepare the messages you hear on Sunday mornings.

It is informative, has good insights, and helps tremendously when I’m struggling with a particular passage, or struggling for words to say. Using them as a part of the sermon takes something away, though, from the process – for ME.

I read somewhere that preaching is speaking publicly about how God is working in your life, what God is teaching you, where God is leading you. It occurs to me that in that case, we should ALL be preaching, in one form or another. As our banners say, you shall be my witnesses – my preachers –
in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the Earth. All our words – the Greek word for “word” is logos - about God – the Greek word is Theos – Theos-logos – our Theology IS what God is doing in us – and hopefully, through us.
My sense of the leading of the Holy Spirit is one that is formed by a contradiction in terms - an expectation of the unexpected. In other words: the expected unexpected. Scripture is full of examples where, time after time, God popped up in the most unexpected places. In the voice of a donkey, in a field of dry bones, in a 12 year old shepherd boy, the youngest son of an aging father, who was much better at using a sling than a king’s armor, in a 14 year old teenager from a small backwater town called Nazareth, in the equally backwards state of Galilee. Though God’s spirit descended on the church in Jerusalem, the movement ignited by that inflowing took off in the unexpected place by even those who first saw it come – among the gentiles.

Last Friday night, at the lock-in, at the beginning of the evening, they had a devotional time. Not unusual, since it WAS a church-sponsored event. It was brief … maybe a half hour. There was a puppet show, followed by a meditation given by Phil Bryant, whose wife Karen works with the children at Rappahannock Christian Center. At the end of the devotional time we had a prayer time. Where I was sitting happened to be near where the Pastor of the church, Scott Adams, was standing. If you know about RCC, you know it is affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination. The AOG is what is called a charismatic denomination. They ‘practice’ the gifts of the Spirit. What that means is that on any given Sunday, you are going to hear people praying in tongues, being slain in the Spirit, speaking a word of knowledge, or of prophecy, or of wisdom, or people being healed… any number of manifestations of the Spirit.

Last Friday was not very different. As soon as Phil began to pray, so did Scott and several other members of the congregation – in tongues. I was expecting it, but it still caught me a little off-guard, and raised questions in my mind. I guess I could say it surprised me.

God seems to have a preference for surprising us. The question in verse 12 of the 2nd chapter of Acts would just as easily jump to our lips as it did to the people of Jerusalem in the 1st century:

What does this mean?

What DOES it mean, especially for us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It seems the rub in dealing with the Spirit of God is that, just like wind, or like fire, it is difficult, if not impossible to completely control. We like our religion to be … controlled, predictable. As I’ve said before, humans are creatures of habit. We don’t always like change. We prefer to see and hear and do things that we’ve done before, because we know what comes next.

Romans 8:

14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Again: what does that mean?

It can mean just about anything. The world IS an unpredictable place. Our hearts cry for predictability, for knowing what comes next, in reaction to that very uncertainty we experience every day. We don’t KNOW what will happen tomorrow, or even this afternoon, so we are comforted in the knowledge of what is to come.

I think what we can learn from both these passages – God is a God of unpredictability, in SPITE of unpredictability. God is an unpredictable God. He surprised Jonah with his compassion for the people of Niniveh, and in spite of Jonah’s protests, let the people live.

He surprises us with the offer to become children of his, to enter into relationship with him, to know him and be known by him.

Let’s pray.

What Hope! What Riches!

Sunday, May 23rd, 2004
Seventh Sunday of Easter (Ascension Sunday)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Ephesians 1:15-23

15I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. 17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. 20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

It’s been an eventful weekend. Maybe even caught a glimpse of heaven. Friday night we had the softball game, and after the game Caleb and Judson and I drove over to the Fitness center in Tappahannock for an all-night lock-in with the children and youth of Rappahannock Christian Center. It started at 10 and we pulled into our driveway yesterday morning shortly after 6 AM.

The boys actually lasted until right around 4 AM before conking out. Though I thought I was going to be falling asleep around the same time, it turned out that I didn’t. But it was an enjoyable night. We got
to swim, and play games, and eat way too much sugar and salty stuff for our own good. They had set up a relay-obstacle race to begin … around 2AM, but I wound up in the snack room talking to Blair Eiselstein.

Blair’s mother is from the Philippines, and his father is from the United States. His father was in the service, and when he retired, he retired in the Philippines. So at the age of 11, Blair moved to Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines.

Davao city is also home to one of the Baptist Seminaries in the Philippines. Back in the 70’s, when Blair was living in the neighborhood, the Tyner family was serving as missionaries through the Foreign Mission Board, doing theological education work there. Gaye Tyner was one of the daughters of the family, and she and Blair became friends and would hang out together.

As is usually the case, they finished high school and returned to the States, each going their separate way, and they lost touch with each other. But, at least on Blair’s part, they never forgot each other.

When I moved to Louisville in 1987, I plugged into an informal network of MKs (Missionary Kids) who live in and around the city. Most, obviously, ended up there because of a connection with the seminary. Some live there because their families are there.

One of the couples I got to know were Gaye and Wyc Rountree. He was finishing up his doctoral work at southern, and Gaye had completed her MDiv. We used to share Wednesday evening meals together at church on a regular basis. I never imagined that 18 years later I would meet someone who knew Gaye as a teenager.

I shouldn’t be surprised, any more, at how often that has happened.

How many of you have heard of the play or the movie, “Six Degrees of Separation”?

I’ve not seen either the play or the movie, but I understand the principle behind it. The principle is this: if you look hard enough and long enough, you can link yourself to the majority of the world’s population in 6 steps or less. Pick any person in the world, and there’s a high probability that you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person. If you have internet access, and do a google search on that title – six degrees of separation, one of the links that comes up will allow you to join the experiment – it’s an interesting test.

Folks on the Northern Neck shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever understanding the concept. Right? 

When Kori and Anna Kiss were here last week, I finally had the presence of mind to ask them if they knew Errol and Mary Simmons. Turns out they do. Errol was the director of the International Baptist Lay Academy in Budapest, where Kori and Anna met.

Errol was the first missionary I met when I arrived in Spain as a Journeyman in 1985. We got to be friends over the next two years. It was a few years after I came back to the States that the Simmons’ transferred to Budapest to establish the Academy.

You can say it’s a small world, in fact, we say it is each Sunday we share our benediction – the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

So we’re making connections. Or better said, we’re recognizing, we’re understanding what connections are there that we already share.

A couple of weeks ago, Cliff commented on one of the meal deliveries that he made to the house of an elderly woman, who, on the face of it, he had no relation to and no familiarity with. He stepped into the living room and saw pictures of someone he’d known most of his life … or at least a good part of it.

How many times does that happen? How often do we assume there’s no common bond between us and the person standing in line in front of us at the box office, or sitting in the car in the next lane over, or sitting in the doctor’s office across from us, and go on about our lives as though we really don’t have any effect on our neighbors, be they across the street or across the world?

How long can we go on believing that what we do here does not ultimately on some level affect the rest of the world?

I don’t want to draw a strict causality between any two events, or maybe I do … but we do need to be reminded that the United States, with a minor percentage of the world’s population consumes a vastly disproportionate amount of the world’s resources. How do we as Christians respond to that fact? How are we to carry ourselves? How are we to act, in light of that knowledge?
Let’s uncover another connection. Being followers of Christ of the Baptist persuasion means for the most part that we shy at the mention of the Catholic Church, or at least it used to. Hopefully, we are learning to live in harmony and cooperation with other Christian traditions in the world today. The word catholic, with a small ‘c’, means universal. In the sense that all Christian churches claim Christ
as the head of the church, we are all part of the church universal. That doesn’t go against any uniquely Baptist doctrine that I’m aware of. We recognize that, though there are differences between us, sometimes significant differences, we cannot disavow claims of other orthodox Christian traditions to be to a greater or lesser degree a part of that church as well.

What does that mean for us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Today we celebrate Ascension Sunday, marking, as the name says, the ascension of Christ to heaven. As we read in our responsive reading this morning, Christ opened the mind of the early church to understand the scriptures, and that understanding, followed by the inflowing of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, lead to the spreading of the
Gospel and the growth of the church to the point where there is no
point on earth that does not have the potential of seeing new disciples come to faith in Christ every day. Granted, there are some areas of the world where it is unlikely that it will occur, but we are not ultimately responsible for deciding where likelihood defines the movement of the Spirit of God.

What that means, for us here at Jerusalem, is that we truly are connected to our brothers and sisters around the world. Not just on Easter, or Christmas. Not just at Pentecost, but on a regular … ordinary everyday Sunday. And we don’t even have to dig deep to figure out the six degrees of separation between us and them. The phrasing itself is inadequate. There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’. We are all connected. We are family. We are community based on the Lordship of Christ. As such, we speak with many voices, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in dissonance, and yet, we are called to be brothers and sisters in Christ … BY Christ himself. As such, we are
to live our lives in shared community. The book of Acts records that all the disciples lived together and shared everything they had in common. It would be nice to see that happen. It does, to a greater degree here, than it has in past experience … though there have been a few notable exceptions … my point is not to discourage or encourage us as a congregation to copy other faith communities, but to seek to understand and follow what God has called this specific group of people, the family of faith that meets at 8800 History Land Hwy, in Emmerton Virginia, to do in order to be more and more like Christ every day.

That is an open question.

Earlier, I mentioned ‘uniquely Baptist doctrine’. There is one that comes into play here. It is the doctrine of “Soul Competency”. In just a few words, what the doctrine states is that each individual – each individual soul, has the ability to be touched by and respond to God’s movement in his or her life. We are each ‘competent’ to understand when and where it is God is leading us, and to follow that leading. That makes for sometimes complicated and sometimes fractured dealings within our church structure. That is why there are so many Baptist churches and Baptist denominations … if you’re not happy with the way things are done one place, you are free to go to a different place and begin with the vision God has given you.

What that translates into is hope. There is always a place for the Spirit of God to move – in our lives and in the lives of those around us, and through that moving to spark in us a renewed sense of purpose and direction, when the old ways become stale.

It also translates into an incredible wealth of riches, in heritage, riches in choices, in textures, in sensations that can be experienced as we draw closer and closer to God.

At the beginning of this message I mentioned I may have caught a glimpse of Heaven over the weekend. What I envisioned was that heaven is like meeting someone and engaging them in conversation, and in a few short words realize that we’re part of the same family. And that family, found all around the world, has the same father and brother.

Let’s pray.

What is it about Forgiveness?

Sunday, May 16th, 2004
Fifth after Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Matthew 5:43-48

43"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Annette was a recently transferred missionary to Chile when my sister Lolly and I went back to visit my parents there in 1982. During mission meeting that July, she and a couple of other missionaries, who were likewise either newly appointed or newly arrived, had an opportunity to share their testimonies with the rest of the mission family.

The dynamics of a person standing up and sharing what has been a life-calling in front of people who’ve experienced the same thing is such that there are few boundaries to overcome in the depth of sharing.

In this case, Annette had been transferred from Colombia. She was appointed as a nurse to do medical missions there. In Chile, she would be working as a nurse at the Well-Baby Clinic in Antofagasta.

In the course of her testimony she shared about the event that precipitated her departure from Colombia. She was serving in a hospital, and a gunshot victim had been brought in for treatment. The staff had stabilized the man, and had assigned him to a ward to recover. A couple of days after his admission, a group of masked gunmen had entered the hospital and shot the man to death as he lay in his bed.

Colombia has had a decades-long battle with political insurgents and drug-related violence. This was just one of probably hundreds of such events.

The decision was made that, for Annette’s safety as much as anything else, she would be transferred to Chile.

Though that was one story she shared during her testimony.

The story that stuck with me more, though, was of her own family.

A few years earlier, her brother had been murdered as well. In the exchange of gunfight, his killer had been wounded, and was taken to the hospital for treatment. While he was there (and this is where she was not able to hold back the tears), her mother and father had reached out to the man who had murdered their son and ministered to him. She didn’t elaborate on how. In retrospect, I think just the fact that they were able to speak to him at all was overwhelming enough. In the midst of their own grief, they had found the … wherewithal to overcome, to … in a sense, set aside that grief in the face of the potential good they knew could come from what they KNEW would be a powerful witness to the young man who had taken their son from them.
What I remember most is the impact – both emotional and spiritual – that watching her parents do what they did had on Annette. Her own questioning in the midst of HER own grieving led her to the point of recognizing what it means to forgive your enemies … to pray for those who persecute you … and led her ultimately to the mission field.

Our text today comes from the Sermon on the Mount. This is in the same passage that calls the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, peacemakers, those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, blessed. It is the same passage where we find Jesus setting the bar high. Regarding anger, Jesus had the following to say:




21"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 22 But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Those are not easy words to hear. Not by a long shot. To equate anger toward a brother or a sister with murdering them … let me remind you that this was Jesus speaking … he went on to say if you insult a brother or a sister, you will be liable … where does it stop? How can we possibly meet that standard???

Jesus went on to address the issues of adultery, divorce, oaths, and retaliation. If you have heard the Sermon on the Mount read or preached on, you know what he did. With each issue, he raised the bar further and further. He internalized and personalized the responsibility for each one. He called all who heard him to a life of radical obedience to the SPIRIT of the law, not the letter of it.

But let’s focus on forgiveness.

In Genesis, beginning in the 25th chapter, we find a story that would make any daytime drama producer sit up and take notice. Isaac and Rebekah have twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Right from the beginning, the groundwork is laid. Isaac loved Esau more, Rebekah loved Jacob more. Esau was the burly he-man, the outdoorsman who had his father’s favor and the promise of the blessing of the birthright, since he was the firstborn.

Jacob was, to put it in modern terms, a momma’s boy. Rebekah and Jacob work together to arrange for Jacob to receive the blessing of the birthright instead of Esau from an aging, nearly blind Isaac. Through lying and treachery, Jacob brings on himself a blessing that rightly belonged to his brother. There is a subtext to the story, that of Esau’s recognition and understanding of what it meant to HAVE that birthright, what it meant to BE the patriarch of the family with whom God had entered into relationship through Abraham … nevertheless, the fact remains, Jacob was far from pure in motive and spirit. In fact, the whole family could serve as a textbook example of the term ‘dysfunctional’. The amount of manipulation, treachery, lying, cheating, stealing, selfishness, and idolatry that we read about in Genesis is staggering.

I believe the greatest miracle in the Old Testament was not about parting waters, or suns that stood still in the sky, but the simple fact that God kept God’s promise of blessing to the people of Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob, in spite of themselves. The promise to bless them with land, and with children, and through them bless the nations of the world.

To make a long story short, Esau comes to his father after Isaac has already given Jacob the blessing, and finds out he’s lost his chance. There is no other blessing to be given, no second place. Isaac is near death, and Esau starts talking about killing Jacob after that. Rebekah hears about it and convinces Jacob to go live with her brother Laban and build a family there. Isaac blesses him again and sends him on his way.

Again, there’s a subtext to the story of his time with Laban, and his taking Leah and Rachel, Laban’s two daughters, as well as Bilhah and Zilpah, two handmaidens of the household, as his wives. Laban is less than honest, promising Rachel to Jacob but instead substituting Leah for her at the wedding. He lassoes Jacob into another extended period of working for him in exchange for Rachel.

Skip ahead twenty years, and Jacob is still to some degree up to the same old stuff. In the end, rather than leave Laban on good terms, honestly and in the open, Jacob sneaks out in the middle of the night. Though he gives one explanation for slipping away like that, the actions speak to a guilty conscience as much as anything else.

As Jacob approaches the old home place, he sends messengers ahead of him, to tell Esau that he is on his way. He sends them with gifts, afraid that Esau is still on the warpath on which he left him two decades earlier.

His messengers come back to him with news that Esau and 400 men are coming after THEM. Jacob is petrified. He is so scared at the prospect of what the coming confrontation holds that he divides his company into two groups and separates them, in the hopes that, if Esau and the 400 men destroy the first group, the second group will get word of the massacre and get away.

In the midst of the planning, Jacob says a prayer: beginning in chapter 32 verse 9:


9And Jacob said, "O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O LORD who said to me, 'Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good,' 10 I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. 11 Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. 12 Yet you have said, 'I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.' "



True to form, Jacob made elaborate plans to save himself and his family in the face of Esau's potential threat. He provided his servants with abundant gifts for Esau and instructed them carefully on how to approach Esau when they met. In it all his desire was to "pacify" Esau and deliver his family from his hand. Again we see Jacob the planner and the schemer. As he had taken Esau's birthright and blessing, as he had taken the best of Laban's herds, so now he had a plan to pacify Esau. However, it was not Jacob's plan that succeeded but his prayer. When he met with Esau, he found that Esau had had a change of heart. Running to meet Jacob, Esau embraced and kissed him and wept (33:4). Jacob's plans and schemes had come to naught, for God had prepared the way.

As they are approaching the meeting place, they camp for the night. We’ve heard the story before. Jacob wrestles with a man all night. The next morning, when the man saw that he wasn’t going to beat Jacob, he asks him to let go, because daylight is coming. Jacob refuses to do that until he receives the man’s blessing. It is in that moment that we see Jacob’s life crystallized. The man turns out to be God. He asks Jacob his name, and when Jacob gives him his name, God changes him. His name now becomes Israel, which means ‘you have struggled with men and with God and prevailed’.

The reunion scene with Esau resonates with other passages and parables we find in scripture.

Jacob bows down 7 times as Esau draws near. What is Esau’s response? Is he raging with 20 years of pent-up fury over the injustice he suffered so long before?

NO.

33:4But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.

Does that wording remind you of any other passage? Embraced, fell on his neck … and wept …

The parable of the prodigal son, which we find in Luke, has the father reacting basically the same way, on the return of his youngest son.

The rest of the meeting is a study in contrasts.

5 When Esau looked up and saw the women and children, he said, "Who are these with you?" Jacob said, "The children whom God has graciously given your servant." 6 Then the maids drew near, they and their children, and bowed down; 7 Leah likewise and her children drew near and bowed down; and finally Joseph and Rachel drew near, and they bowed down. 8 Esau said, "What do you mean by all this company that I met?" Jacob answered, "To find favor with my lord." 9 But Esau said, "I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself." 10 Jacob said, "No, please; if I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand; for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God--since you have received me with such favor.

We see the contrast of fear and grace, of mistrust, and an open welcome, the contrast of living with years of guilt and the knowledge of injustices perpetrated with a life, though affected by that, nonetheless, reflecting the freedom from that same cauldron of despair. Scripture doesn’t tell us what Esau went through on a personal level, except to bring out one pertinent detail: after Jacob left to seek his fortune with Laban, Esau went to Ishmael, his uncle, and asked to marry his daughter Mahalath.

So what is it about forgiveness, and what does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

What it is about forgiveness is this:

We’ve received from Christ a command that is nearly impossible to fulfill. The degree of difficulty is directly proportional to the degree of pain inflicted. In small things, where little harm has been done, it is relatively easy to brush the injury aside and reengage the person who caused it. In larger things, where the wounds are deep, it is much, much more difficult. But there is no distinction, no gradation, in what God has commanded us to do. The harm done does not change the requirement that we forgive it.

Some of Christ’s final words from the cross were asking for forgiveness on the very people who were crucifying him.

Esau seems to have received the teaching better than Jacob. His response reflected more of the presence of the Spirit of God than did Jacob’s.

It is our call as Christians to follow that example, to work for that to become a reality not only in our own lives, but in our world. In Hebrews, in the middle of the litany of faith, we find the following verse:

11:20 By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future.

Mahalath, Esau’s last wife mentioned in scripture, is the daughter of Ishmael, the son of Hagar and Abram, the same man whom the Muslims of the world consider to be their patriarch, after Abram.

We must make it our goal to bring the sons of Jacob and the sons of Esau back together, to recreate that encounter so long ago, in which past wrongs were set aside, and the fact that brothers were brothers was all that mattered.

Let’s pray.

Momma’s In the Kitchen

Sunday, May 9th. 2003 (Mother’s Day)
Fourth after Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
II Timothy 1:5-7, 4:7

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, 2 To Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. 3 I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. 4 Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. 5 I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. 6 For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; 7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

“They were praying for us.”

There were tears in her eyes and her voice was trembling with so much emotion that I was slightly surprised at the reaction.

It was sometime in the late spring of 1993, and Leslie and I had driven down to visit my parents in Franklin, KY, about 2 hrs south of Louisville. We were engaged to be married, and had recently set the date of the wedding for July 18th. Leslie had walked downstairs and was stumbling through the kitchen when she noticed that my parents were sitting at the breakfast table with their heads bowed. As she stopped and listened, she heard them praying for each of us children by name.

Neither the visit nor the fact that my parents were praying at the breakfast table was unusual – to me. I had grown up hearing my mother pray, not only in church, but daily, around the breakfast table. After getting the food on the table and calling us TO it, we would say grace, and while we were eating, she would read the ‘Open Windows’ devotional, and read the names of the missionaries who were celebrating birthdays that day.

As I recall, and speaking for myself, as a teenager, I was usually more concerned with simply waking up and thinking about the upcoming day at school than with what was being read, and unless a missionary whom we knew was celebrating a birthday, the names of the missionaries were of no great concern to me.
It wasn’t until I finished the last semester of my senior year of high school away from my parents that I realized how much I had become accustomed to that routine. During those last 5 months they came back to the States on medical leave and had made the decision to let me remain in Chile and graduate with my classmates. I lived with two other families with very different routines. It was then that I first missed that send-off in the mornings.

Home is as much the people as it is a place. The missionary mothers that I lived with those last 5 months, Aunt Betty and Aunt Kate, opened their homes to me, and made me a part of their families. Even now, 23 years later, they still hold a special place not only in my heart, but also in my spiritual pilgrimage. Though not related by blood, those two women witnessed the very beginnings of my spiritual growth outside of my physical home and immediate family.

We can hopefully all identify those strong women of faith in our lives – whether or not they are related by blood -- who played that role – who birthed something in us that spoke not only to their faithfulness, but of God’s faithfulness to us through them.

Hermana Elena de Alarcon was my 4th and 5th grade Sunday school teacher, her faithful presence and patient teaching of a rambunctious class of preteens sowed in me the seeds of faith that helped me to teach 4th grade Royal Ambassadors at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, KY, 14 years later.
The passage this morning is a testament not only to place, but also to people who form a spiritual home for Timothy.

The tone in which Paul is writing is in the manner of someone who is looking back over his life and, in gratitude, passing the baton. It is in 2nd Timothy 4:7 that we find Paul saying ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.’ But I’d like to draw your attention briefly to the verse before that, verse 6, ‘As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.’

A libation is an offering, a sacrifice.

Aunt Laura Frances, Aunt Clara, Aunt Carol, Aunt Georgia Mae. Combined, they probably represent over 150 years of missionary service. They were unmarried throughout their missionary careers, but any one of them would happily claim the 40 or 50 other missionary kids that I and my brother and sisters grew up with as their own. And we would happily and gratefully claim them as our own. We are probably all familiar with the story of Lottie Moon. She and my Aunts each dedicated themselves to fleshing out the gospel of Jesus Christ, not only to the children of their fellow missionaries, but to the hundreds of Chinese or Chilean men, women and children whose lives they touched during their decades of service, and in their lives and in their ministry, found themselves being poured out as a libation.

When I spoke to the Associational WMU meeting in Tappahannock last year, I told them as I tell any WMU gathering, that I felt as though I was talking to a roomful of my mothers. I was raised on their prayers, notes of encouragement, and love. Thanks to them and their promotion of and involvement in missions education and giving, my family had a roof over our heads, clothes to wear, and schools to attend. They put me through college, they supported me as a missionary journeyman in Spain for two years, they are, through their promotions of the Hispanic Ministry and the donations they’re collecting, pouring themselves out as a libation.
The way we have seen the women of Jerusalem respond to events such as the youth dinners, funeral meals on short notice, and bringing together the church family for Sunday evening family nights has been a pouring out. In John, Chapter 15, we find Jesus speaking to his disciples – saying, ‘no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ In lives of service, we find no better example, aside from Christ, than the giving we see on a daily or weekly basis of dedicated women of God who care for and teach, and most importantly, live out the basic truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The women who invest themselves in the lives of others, be they their own children or someone else’s, be they related or not, be they lifelong friends or recently-made acquaintances, those women are living out that great love that Christ was describing, to give your life for your friends.

“Momma’s in the kitchen”

“What’s she doing?”

“Piddlin’”

The word is usually said in a chuckling, shaking-your-head kind of way. We used to sit and watch her from the other room. She would slice a piece of cheese and eat it. She would put away a dish from the previous meal. She would chop some onion and celery for the next meal. Next, she would count out plates and cups to see if she needed to run the dishwasher. She would stand in front of the refrigerator for what seemed an eternity looking through recycled whipped cream containers for the green beans from last night. And when we asked her what she was doing, she would always respond with, “I’m just piddlin’.”

It is true, though. My mother’s favorite place to be is in the kitchen, not just in the house, but in the HOME – she has spent her life mixing and measuring the ingredients, watching the temperatures, layering where layers were needed, chopping where chopping was needed, tossing out what had no reason being in the kitchen.
More often than not, she reverts to the old favorites; zucchini casserole, chicken and rice, roast with vegetables. The ingredients are second nature and the cooking time is instinctively recognized.
Momma’s feast is in the works. What was once a meal she prepared by herself has now become a potluck, where her children are bringing their own dishes to the table, and there are LOTS of differently flavored dishes on the table. My sisters and brother and I hold a wide range of views both politically and in matters of faith, but those differences are minor when we gather. There is one ingredient that is common to all of them: God’s Love in Christ. We all know whose we are and from whom we came.

In talking to her now about how she raised us, what comes through most poignantly is how aware momma is of what she didn’t do. The harsh word that haunts her decades later but is lost to our memory. I do remember the occasional chase through the backyard with a switch, and an equally memorable spanking, but those are different stories. What overwhelms those memories is the sure and certain knowledge that more than anything, my mother loved me. And as I’ve grown older, it is most obvious that she loves me because God first loved her.
Even in her own life, looking back on what she considers a mixed bag of successes and failures, Momma is very aware of the grace that surrounded it all. Grace that allowed siblings who gave new meaning to the term rivalry to grow into loving brothers and sisters, Grace that kept us all close in spite of thousands of miles of distance between us, and Grace that draws us together even now.

There are women I’ve known who’ve found it necessary to rely more heavily on that grace. Women who’ve suffered through parenting in ways that I can only imagine, or who’ve survived a childhood with an absent mother, who have found in one of those other women in their lives, sometimes much later in life, the mother they never knew. It is in those relationships that we can see the faith community that Christ is calling us into. Christ has provided for us a family, related not by OUR blood, but by HIS blood. Mothers, Fathers, Sisters and Brothers.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? I would invite you to ask yourself these questions: who is YOUR Lois, who is your Eunice, or, can you name someone who might be your Timothy? I would encourage you to take a minute at some point today, perhaps before the end of this service; to thank God for that Woman who played such an important role in your life, and if you can, let her know directly how thankful you are for her presence in your life.

Let’s pray.

Lights and Switches

Sunday, May 2, 2004
Third after Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 1: 1-5

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
“Watch this!” he shouted over the pounding music, and promptly fell back to the floor.

Mike simply leaned back, put his arm out, and fell to the floor. It wouldn’t have been anything extraordinary, except for the fact that we were at one of our first parties as teenagers.

The year was 1976, and black lights and strobe lights were the big thing. Mirrored balls hadn’t yet gotten to the high-school dance level, but we, the geekier crowd, were happy to occupy ourselves with what cool lights could do, since we certainly weren’t busy doing any dancing. 

This particular night, the guys who set up the lights and music had set up a strobe light. I don’t remember if it was connected somehow to the music to vary the speed at which it flashed on and off, but it was enough of a novelty to draw a small crowd of 6th and 7th graders who didn’t have anything better to do in front of it, to see who could come up with the best way to take advantage of the strobe effect.

On and off. On and off. On and off. Again and again. Hundreds if not thousands of times. It was very much like watching a stop-motion movie. Each flash of light showed the person in a slightly different position. Mike’s fall, had it been in steady light, would have been unremarkable. One smooth motion from standing to lying on the floor.

As it turned out, the fall was captured in steps. In very definite clearly demarcated steps. A progression of positions, but more of a stair step than an escalator.

Let’s do a little exegesis. Read out of the text what is in it. Unwrap it, as it were. Verse one consists of 3 statements:

In the beginning was the word
And the word was with God
And the word was God.

First statement: in the beginning … what does that remind us of but the first words of what was then and still to this day remains the beginning of the beginning? To those who came from the Hebrew tradition and were hearing the Gospel read, the tone at the beginning of John is the same as at the beginning of Genesis. In the beginning was the Word speaks to the nature of Christ as being preexistent.

Second statement: and the word was with God … the preposition "with" in the phrase indicates both equality and distinction of identity along with association. The phrase can be rendered "face to face with." It therefore suggests personality and coexistence with the Creator, and yet is an expression of his creative being.

Third statement: and the word was God … this last phrase speaks to Christ’s divine nature.

It is amazing to me that in those three short statements, John said so much about who Jesus is.

We can accept the statements in faith, but we can’t always wrap our brains around them.

Verses 2 & 3 are simply restatements of what was compacted into verse 1.

Eugene Petersen uses these words in his translation of verses 4 &5:

4 What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by. 5 The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn't put it out.
So we have this life-light in us. Those of us who have taken that light into our lives, those who have taken on the life of Christ.

Doing a little more exegesis: the term “life” (John uses it 36 times throughout the Gospel) is used in the same way each time it appears. It refers either to the principle of physical life or, more often, to spiritual life. Frequently it is coupled with the adjective ‘eternal’ to denote the quality and power of the believer’s life. The life was embodied in Christ, who demonstrated how God’s purpose and power are made available to human beings.

Here we come to verse 5, first part: The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;

Because my hope lies in Jesus Christ, I have to believe that that statement is as much a statement of history and theology as it is a statement of physical fact. You’ve heard it before. Get a room as black as you can. Close it completely off. No seams, no cracks, no windows, no doors, nothing to let the light in … and light a single candle. The darkness, as dark as it is, can do nothing to stop the light of that one candle from shining through and shining out.

My father was stationed in Alaska during the Korean conflict. As part of their exercises, the soldiers would go out into the countryside and stay there for several days. At the time he was in the army my father smoked cigarettes. He was warned to never light his cigarette in the open at night. Especially if the night was cloudy, or there was a new moon. He should at least cup his hand around the flame. The reason? The flame from the match would serve as a beacon – a target ready made for any potential enemy sharpshooter. The darkness, however vast, truly cannot overcome the light, however small.

Here we come to the problem as I see it. The second part of verse 5: and the darkness did not overcome it. Perhaps I should rephrase that. Here we come to the hard part, as I’ve experienced it, and I suspect, as all of us in this room have experienced it at one time or another in our lives. We have all had days, nights, weeks, months, or God forbid on rare occasion, YEARS where it seems as though darkness has in fact, overcome the light.
It might be in the experience of living with constant pain. It may be in facing, as Margaret Franklin is facing, the uncertainty of steadily declining health and the best our modern medicine can do is wonder, while treating the symptoms. It may be in watching a longtime friend slowly leave your presence, while losing his own presence of mind. It might be in the trauma of losing a husband or a wife … your lifetime companion. The one whom you thought, somewhere in the back of your mind, would ALWAYS be there.

In my own life, I can point to a span of time during which depression was a darkness that overshadowed most, to not say all the light in my life. There were days when I would have welcomed death if he had knocked on my door, if only to escape the shadowside of pain through which I was wandering. What went into effect, as I’ve shared with you before, was that, even though I felt like I was being swallowed up in darkness, I had the presence of Christ surrounding me in the form of my sisters Karen, Becky and Lolly and my brother Jimmy. In the prayers of my parents. In the words and open arms of my friends Jim and Janet Rittenhouse, Sue Milton, Jim Ruby, Stacey Littlefield, Jay Voorhees, Kirby Geiger, Eloise Parks and Claude Drouet. It wasn’t so much a single presence in my life, as it was a constellation … that cloud of witnesses I keep coming back to, all pointing to the one true source of light.

Friday evening, Leslie and I had the opportunity to help out at the concession stand at the little league field up next to the elementary school. We met and got to know Kim and Clifton Balderson. Kim and I spent the better part of the evening talking about her experiences on a mission trip she took to Mexico two years ago and about how the church she attends has been growing over the last 5 months. At one point in the evening, an older gentleman walked in. She did not introduce him, but in the course of the conversation he mentioned that Billy Brann woke up and recognized his father, and he may have even spoken a couple of words to him, or at least responded in such a way to show that he is still fighting, still present. A huge smile broke out on Kim’s face.

Light on.

A few minutes later, another man came into the concession stand, a jocular man, with a big smile, very boisterous. He started joking around with Kim and with Clifton. There was a slight change in the feeling of the room … Kim started to say several times “Please don’t” … but was never able to complete the phrase to where I could understand what she was trying to head off. The man started to tell a joke, actually, several jokes. Turns out, they were jokes that were … not in the best of taste … and actually offensive, if the truth be told.

Light off.

Yesterday afternoon, we drove into Richmond with the kids.
We were walking around a shopping center that has a little train that runs around every few minutes, and after much prodding and pleading from the kids, I decided to get tickets to ride it. I walked into the Customer Service Office to buy tickets.

I suppose I’d been thinking about my family, because I asked for 7 tickets. That would have been enough for my parents, my three sisters and my brother and me. I had the kids with me, and they were, of course, bouncing off the walls with excitement. As we walked back out to the courtyard, Leslie was coming out of the store across the way, and I caught her eye and we walked up to each other. As I started to hand her the tickets, I realized that I’d bought two extra tickets. I explained what I thought my thought process must’ve been, and asked her to wait a minute or two while I returned them.

I walked towards the office, and as I did, I started thinking about the movie ‘Pay It Forward’. I decided as I walked in to return the tickets but not take the money, and asked the woman at the counter to simply give the next person who walked in to buy two tickets to simply give them the tickets.

Light on.

It’s been a long week, and there’s not been as much rest gotten as there probably should have been, either for me or for the kids. We dropped Leslie off at Food Lion to pick up a couple of things as well as to pick up the other car. I drove on here with the kids. They were getting a little louder than I was able to deal with and I lit into them. Oops, wrong term: I tore into them.

Light off.

It’s not just between different people that the light is on or it’s off. It’s within me. There seems to be a switch that can be turned on and off. If the darkness cannot overcome the light, how does the darkness keep rearing its ugly head? Again, it brings to mind what Paul refers to as “the law that is at work within us” in the 7th chapter of his letter to the church in Rome – “when I want to do good, evil is right there with me”. We cannot, in this
world, escape the fact that we are susceptible to the power of sin, even though, spiritually speaking, we are dead to it. It is a question of choice. The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that we now have that choice, through presence and the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we can IN FACT overcome sin. I would invite you to read on, into the 8th chapter of Romans, take a minute this afternoon to do that. In fact, read the 7th and 8th chapters together. Paul takes on this issue head on – we live in a broken world and are weak … but thanks be to God, it is through our weakness that Christ is strong.

So what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Are we living in a strobe light of our own making? What choices do we make individually and collectively that result in the light staying on or going off?

Yesterday morning, the youth of our church put on a car wash in the parking lot at Northern Neck State Bank in town. As of 11:30, they had raised $200.00. The decision had been made that all proceeds from the event were going to go to the Billy Brann fund at the bank.

Light on.

This afternoon, we have the opportunity to reach out to comfort the family of Tina Schools, after her sudden death on Thursday morning.

Light on.

Next Saturday, the youth will be preparing and delivering another meal to the shut-ins of our church family and those dozens of people in our community who’ve come to look forward to their visits as well as the food.

Light on.

This last Wednesday, while I stood at the front of this sanctuary and the hymn played, how many of you came forward and told me you wanted to be … you wanted to rededicate yourself to being a shining light, a burning light, a living light for Christ? My response to you then and now is the same: we will do that together. We’re not called to do it alone, but we ARE commended to each other – to redefine what family is in light of the spiritual bonds that now tie us together.

LIGHT ON.

Let’s pray.