But My Words

 

Sunday, November 30^th, 2008

Advent 1B (First of the liturgical year)

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Mark 13:24-37

Theme: keeping “awake” – working while looking for the Kingdom

 

 “²⁴“But in those days, after that suffering,

 

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
²⁵and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

 

²⁶Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. ²⁷Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

²⁸“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. ²⁹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. ³⁰Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. ³¹Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

³²“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ³⁴It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.³⁵Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, ³⁶or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. ³⁷And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

 

What does it mean to live in Hope? 

Let’s pray.  

The Eyes of Your Heart

 

Sunday, November 23^rd, 2008

Christ the King Sunday (last of the liturgical year)

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Ephesians 1:15-23

Theme: Seeing Christ as God has made him – Lord over all

 

 “¹⁵I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason ¹⁶I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. ¹⁷I 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, ¹⁸so 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, ¹⁹and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. ²⁰God 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, ²¹far 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. ²²And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, ²³which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

 

What is it going to take for us to truly live as though Jesus is indeed Lord of all? 

 

We speak of it on at least a weekly basis, some more, some less.  We think about it about as often.  Usually less. 

 

But do we truly live out the Lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives?  Do we really act as though Jesus Christ is, in fact, LORD of our everyday existence? 

 

Speaking for myself, I confess, ‘not in a consistent manner’. 

 

It’s not that we don’t intend that to be the case, it’s that we don’t live in the full meaning of what calling Christ “Lord” actually means to and for us.

 

In the first century of the Common Era, to call someone Lord actually meant something.  There was an immediacy to the title that became apparent the moment trouble arose. 

 

It is something that we as citizens of the United States living in the 21^st century are largely unfamiliar with.  We might have occasion to see it displayed in the actions of security details assigned to any given major political leader.  We have images burned into our memory of secret service agent Timothy McCarthy getting hit by a bullet that was intended for President Ronald Reagan at the end of March, 1981.  He placed his body between the assailant and his charge, the President of the United States. 

 

While that is an example of serving an earthly “Lord”, we can get our heads around the idea of what it means to simply HAVE a Lord.  In an egalitarian society, one that for the majority of it’s citizens holds to the truth that we are all, whomever we are, equal, the concept of having someone over us for whom we would submit to anything FOR is truthfully, a foreign concept.  It rubs against the grain of our national constitutional conscience that affirms that ‘all men are created equal’ to think in terms of there being someone – ANYONE – for whom we would give up such ‘rights’ as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.       

 

And yet, that is precisely the call of Christ on our lives.  In writing to the Ephesians, Paul was propounding the Lordship of Christ in its fullest sense.  Not simply inward in the manner in which it affected each individual who chooses to CALL Jesus Lord, but OUTWARDLY as well – in the long-term view of history. 

 

There is a given-ness in the passage with regards to Christ’s position in the universe.  Where the passage seems familiar is in Paul’s statement about praying for the Ephesians.  Where it becomes less familiar is where he DOESN’T stop there … he keeps going, and evolves in a few lines a view of Christ that underscores his glory and his power and his position as Lord.  Paul leaves no doubt as to how we are to view Christ, how we are to relate to Christ, and by implication, how we are to submit to Christ if we are to follow him.

 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Today is the last Sunday of the Liturgical year – the church year – next Sunday will be the first Sunday of Advent, and the first Sunday of the new Church year. 

 

We are familiar with the traditional New Year’s Resolutions that are associated with January 1^st of each year.  I would invite us all to contemplate and then to MAKE a TRUE commitment in the incoming year to be as consistent as possible, to be as intentional as possible, to be as humble and courageous as possible, to be unafraid to claim Jesus as Lord of our lives, to choose when we must and when we might hesitate to make those decisions and make them FOR Christ. 

 

To give you an example would be to limit the scope of what it means to make Christ our Lord.  I can name things, but please don’t take this list as comprehensive; the words that come out of our mouths, the thoughts that we allow our minds to entertain, the images we permit into our minds, the attitudes of uncaring, of hatred, of bitterness and outright cruelty, the desires to acquire more and more at the expense of our fellow human beings, to disregard the wellbeing of a brother or a sister in favor of our own, the quest for prestige and acclaim in the eyes of the world at the expense of our standing as a child of God. 

 

Can you see how all these are examples of denying the Lordship of Christ on our lives?  When we choose our desires, our will, our benefit over another’s, we are in fact denying Christ an opportunity to work on us as he is working through us, and we negate the claim that we sing or pray about having him as Lord. 

 

My prayer for us all is that in the coming year – both the ecclesiastical and the secular ones – we will live a consistent ethic of being under the Lordship of the one who taught us that to truly live meant to die to ourselves, and that in order to gain the world we must lose it first.     

      

Let’s pray.  

With These Words

 

Sunday, November 9^th, 2008

Proper 27 A/ Ordinary 32 A/ Pentecost +26 (All Saints Sunday)

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Theme: Encouraging one another through the hope we have in Christ

 

 “¹³But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. ¹⁴For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. ¹⁵For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. ¹⁶For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. ¹⁷Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. ¹⁸Therefore encourage one another with these words.”

 

It is a profoundly compelling vision, isn’t it?  To imagine what that day might look like, when Jesus comes back in all his glory, and according to Paul, with a cry of command ushers in the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth – life as it was intended to be. 

 

It is also, at its heart, a profoundly unlikely scenario – unlikely in the sense that it is UNLIKE anything we have ever – or WILL ever – experience here on earth otherwise. 

 

But that seems to be the whole point, isn’t it?  Paul is coming from the perspective of one who over the last few years had experienced the most UNLIKELY of lives.  This vision that Paul presents to his readers in Thessalonica is one that goes beyond what they could imagine… it speaks to their longing for a day they could look forward to when there would be no more struggle, no more sorrow, no more war.  It speaks to a reality so radically different from that which they had experienced all their lives that even to contemplate it required a leap of faith. 

 

We’ve skipped some of the text of the letter.  In some ways, Paul spends what seems an inordinate amount of time in greeting and expressing his love and prayers for the Thessalonians, and it is in the fourth chapter that he begins the conclusion of the letter – and to speak to some of the issues that he has heard have arisen among the believers.  We’ve jumped to one of the issues that the folks at Thessalonica were worried about – some in their number have died since Paul had left – perhaps even been killed in the persecution they suffered that was the cause of Paul’s hasty departure from their city. 

 

Something we need to remember about the very beginnings of the church is that their sense that Jesus was going to return – literally, physically, trumpets blaring, clouds rolling, thunder clapping, the whole kit and caboodle – was understood to be expected MOMENTARILY – RIGHT NOW or maybe this afternoon, or evening, or tomorrow at the latest, and that sense of expectation translated into an excitement that was contagious, to say the least. 

 

Now, remember also, Paul was of the same generation as Jesus – he was a contemporary of Jesus’.  Even though we have no scriptural evidence of his having seen Jesus before his crucifixion, we know that he DID know OF Jesus – enough to begin persecuting his followers pretty quickly, and we also know of his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, when Saul the Pharisee became Paul the Apostle.  So he had an image in his mind of what Jesus looked like and sounded like.  It is easy when you KNOW what someone looks like to imagine them around you – walking into your house, or into your room, running into you at the grocery store or in the pharmacy … there’s an understanding that it would not be a big deal if you DID happen to run into that person that you are accustomed to seeing IN your daily life.  It’s kind of that with Jesus for Paul.  Christ’s presence – even though it was that one time on the road that day, was a profoundly life-changing experience for Paul, and for MOST of his ministry he spoke of Christ’s return in terms that left no doubt that he DID in fact, expect Jesus to return within his lifetime.  It’s not until he wrote to the Corinthians that we begin to see his allowing for the possibility that he MIGHT not be around when Christ comes back. 

 

So he has left the Thessalonians with the understanding of the probability of Christ’s IMMEDIATE return.  They all look at each other and go “great, it’s going to happen in the next few days or weeks at most, let’s get ready and really show what we believe by how we live.”  And they did.  But then a couple of them died.  And they know what to do with that. 

 

Remember there were some Jewish believers in Thessalonica, and there were also some Gentile God-fearers – those who believed in God but had not taken the steps to become full-blown Hebrews.  While there were SOME segments of the Hebrew Religious community that believed in the possibility of a bodily resurrection – or for that matter, life after death – it was NOT a belief that was shared by ALL Jews, and it was even LESS available as a possibility among the pagan religions of the Greco-Roman world.  My suspicion is that there may have been a larger portion of believers of gentile origin than believers of Jewish origin, just by virtue of the response Paul received in the synagogue, but I don’t know that for certain.  So if these former pagans, who were expecting Jesus to come back anytime now begin to see their friends and co-congregants begin to die off, or to be killed or executed in the continuing absence of Christ, they were not sure what that meant for them.  This is what Paul is addressing. 

 

Up until then, the concept of life that prevailed was that it ENDED at death, period. End of story.  It was foreign to them to consider the possibility that life extended beyond the grave.  And that is natural.  All our senses tell us that.  When we see something dead in the middle or on the side of the road, we have a pretty good foundation on which to assume that whatever animal it was will not be moving of it’s own accord anytime soon – in fact, EVER again.  That’s just the way it works in the world. 

 

To say that something works in such a way that your friend, your loved one – who just died – will one day, hopefully soon, rise from the ground where he or she is buried, and that YOU will join him or her in the air as you BOTH approach the returning Christ in all his glory… that is to describe something that can only be accepted through the eyes of faith because it has never happened before.  There was no point of reference in the reality in which the Thessalonians lived for them to be able to expect something like that to happen.  There WAS in Paul’s experience, because he had a direct encounter with the risen Lord. 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

 

A phrase I heard repeatedly over the last part of this past week was “I didn’t believe I would see it in my lifetime.” 

 

In president-elect Obama’s acceptance speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he referenced a woman from Georgia who had voted on Tuesday.  She is a hundred and six years old.  Her father was a freed slave at the age of twelve.  Imagine the improbable things she has witnessed in HER life. 

 

We really don’t even have to go THAT far to think of improbabilities, do we?  Think back on the span of YOUR life.  What seemed so far-fetched to you as a child but is now commonplace? 

 

The possibility of Christ’s return happening in the next minute seems remote, this far removed from those who actually walked and talked with him.  And it is open to discussion – and conjecture – when the actual time will be.  Jesus himself didn’t know when it would be.  My thought is, if it was something that Jesus didn’t concern himself with, that’s good enough for me.  I will worry more about what it means to live out his life through me than walk around looking to the sky for any signs of trumpets and clouds rolling around … the POINT is, though I don’t know WHEN it might happen, or exactly HOW, I know it WILL.  And that gives me the encouragement I need when I see some of the less than hopeful places in the world today.

 

Knowing the end of the story IS enough.          

 

Let’s pray.  

Urging, Encouraging, Pleading

 

Sunday, November 2^nd, 2008

Proper 26 A/ Ordinary 31 A/ Pentecost +25 (All Saints Sunday)

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

1 Thessalonians 2:9-13

Theme: Being open to guidance from brothers and sisters in the faith

 

 “⁹ You remember our labor and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. ¹⁰ You are witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was toward you believers. ¹¹ As you know, we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, ¹² urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. ¹³ We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.”

 

Again, we pick up where we left off last week, reading other people’s mail.

 

Paul is still in the “review and remember” phase of his letter.  He is going over, just in case the memory has faded for the folks at the church in Thessalonica, just what it was that he and Silas and Timothy did while they were there with them. 

 

The firs issue in THIS passage, is how he, Paul, supported himself – or rather, how THEY supported THEMselves. 

 

We know even today how overwhelmingly critical the issue of hospitality is in Middle Eastern culture.  The role of the host in any given modern-day Middle Eastern or North African country has evolved and been informed by the realities of living in a somewhat marginal environment: mostly desert, dry, dusty, and unforgiving to travelers. 

 

That was even more so the case in Paul’s time.  Those expectations of graciously providing for a guest – as well as the flipside – graciously RECEIVING AS a guest the hospitality offered, were critical to the fabric of the society in which he moved about.  But what we read in verse 9 and what we READ last week in verse 7 – “though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ.” – tie together the reality of Paul’s case – that he did NOT, in the case of the Thessalonians, accept that hospitality from the people he befriended and soon made disciples there.  It would seem to be counterintuitive for him to NOT take advantage OF that hospitality offered – especially in light of the basic difficulties that would have been involved in his missionary efforts. 

 

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to travel to a foreign country, and on arrival have had the added benefit of visiting in someone’s home, depending on the country, you may have been exposed to what would be in many cases an overwhelming degree of hospitality.  Leslie and I have experienced it each time we’ve traveled to Mexico, and I have truly precious memories of our visits with friends and newly-acquired extended family members when I traveled to Chile for my brothers wedding a couple of years ago.  The point is, it is not just incumbent on the host to BE a host, it is ALSO incumbent on the GUEST to BE a GUEST; otherwise, the expectation falls apart. 

 

Paul made it fall apart.  Or so it would SEEM. 

 

You see, not only was Paul working against the general culture of the time and place in NOT accepting the hospitality of folks in Thessalonica, NEITHER was he fulfilling the role of an APOSTLE when it came to that same factor in his travels. 

 

Why would he do that?  Why would he seemingly thumb his nose at the prevailing culture, the culture that he moved around in, breathed in and out on a daily basis, and which informed and provided him with the images to preach what he is preaching, as well as to provide the wherewithal to DO what he was doing? 

 

He did it because his focus was on the people he was reaching out to. 

 

There is a sense of obligation inherent in the “hospitality exchange” that sort of locks you into how you are going to respond in a given situation. 

 

Put it this way:  you hear an apostle of a great teacher, a miracle worker, is in town and he and his friends are at the synagogue speaking.  You go, you listen, you begin to question, and you want to hear more.  You ask the man and his companions to come to your home and stay with you while they are in town.  They accept, and you are now obligated to provide them with not only room and board, but also a platform – a place where they can expound on what they were talking about initially at the synagogue.  But more than that, as their host, you are now locked into the role of advocate/ally.  To argue with what they are teaching or preaching would be dishonorable and would be bad form for any self-respecting first-century host.    You either agree with what is being taught or you lose face and standing in a VERY big way. 

 

Though Paul may have stayed with Jason and his family, as we read the week before last, he did not depend on them for sustenance, and from the way he is phrasing it in the passage for this morning, he was not taking from them what an Apostle would be within his rights to expect from his or her host – he and Silas (Silvanus) and Timothy covered their own expenses by working – probably at a stall in the local market – repairing tents and sandals.  Paul’s learned trade. 

 

What did that do, besides free Paul from the dependence on the kindness of his hosts, as well as the expectations of the hospitality rule in Middle Eastern and to be more precise, Southern European culture?  It also freed his HOSTS from the expectation on THEM to be assumed followers of the same teachings of Jesus that Paul was espousing.  

 

Let me say that another way.  Absent the freely-offered-freely-received hospitality rule, the hosts were free to accept or reject what Paul was saying.  There was no assumption, no expectation, and no socially normative pressure on them to behave a certain way because he was in their home. 

 

These were all things Paul had been and would be accused of in the course of his travels, including there in Thessalonica.  Of abusing his role as an apostle for the sake of personal gain, of buttering up the people he came in touch with to make his trip easy and to not have to work TOO hard – to not say ‘at all’ in the course of his trip, and basically just live off the fat of the land. 

 

Paul has already said he COULD have, but he has chosen NOT to play his ‘apostle’ card (v7).  What has been happening is that people have been attacking Paul’s motives. Those making the attacks know that the Gospel is incredibly appealing to the gentile populations of Greece and Turkey.  They KNOW that people are responding to the Gospel in ways and in numbers that they couldn’t even imagine.  Paul has seen the power of those arguments and the sway they can have on the people of the churches he has established.  He knows the power of persuasion, and he also knows the reality of HIS situation in NOT being able to be there in person to respond to each of the attacks on his character.  So he has, to put it in somewhat modern terminology, an established procedure, a policy, if you will, that will head off some of that argument on its own.  He gets accused of being a freeloader, his folks can come back with ‘but he didn’t accept anything from us without paying us for it or buying it himself.’  He gets accused of being lazy, and taking advantage of the people who he’s convinced of the Gospel and they can point to the fact that he worked from early – sometimes before dawn – until dark – that is what ‘labor and toil’ means – in order to sustain himself and his friends.  There was no freeloading going on.                         

 

Last week Paul provided us the image of a nursemaid with her baby at her breast, today we have the image of a father with his children, “urging and encouraging, pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.”

 

You know, it’s the parenting illustrations that do the most to convict me when I read scripture.  When I read of Paul’s urging and encouraging and pleading with the new believers to live a life worthy of God, that in and of itself, apart from the explicit understanding it provides me in reference to how I am to be and to act with believers – new or old – that I come in contact with in the dailyness of life – calls me to an IMplicit understanding of how I am to be with my own children.  So I read over that verse and I asked myself “do I ‘urge, encourage and plead’ with MY children to live lives worthy of the God?” 

 

What does all that have to do with Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

Something I shared with the group that was here on Wednesday evening at our Bible study following our prayer and share time was that I don’t really in any way think of them – of YOU – as my children.  We are very much ‘fellow pilgrims on a journey’, as the hymn ‘The Servant Song’ says, but the call to urge, encourage and plead with you to live lives worthy of God still applies.  And it is not a one-way call, it is a two-way street.  The call applies to me as much as it applies to anyone else here this morning. 

 

What I find incredibly encouraging about this passage is that in verse 13 it centers down on the fact that, although the message we are receiving has been passed down through human voice and words, that it has never stopped being so much MORE than JUST human voice and words – that it is the word of GOD – and when Paul says that “it is also at work in you believers”, that word that has been translated as work is energeitai – the same word we now translate as ‘energizes’.  It speaks to the fact that it is not simply something of which we are recipients, it is also – and maybe even MORE so – speaking to something that is happening to US as WE receive the Gospel – truly take it into our hearts and lives and live it out.  In this particular form, it is in the present tense – keep in mind that Paul is writing to them AFTER he has left Thessalonica – he is underscoring the fact that this living out the Gospel is an ongoing thing – not just a boost to be received and to coast along afterwards … it is an ongoing transformative event in the lives of the new believers in Thessalonica … and in OUR lives as followers of Christ.       

 

What Paul is underscoring is that what he came with, what he was living out and teaching, what he spent his days talking about and his evenings teaching about was a Gospel rooted in love.  A Gospel that wasn’t banking on the established norms of Middle Eastern culture to carry it along, but a message of love and grace freely offered and freely received – with no attached expectations save that of a transformed life.  Just as the invitation God extends to us is totally dependent on our free will to accept or reject, so was Paul’s presentation of the Gospel THEN.

 

May we be as receptive as the believers of Thessalonica.  

 

Let’s pray.