Reckoned To Us

 

Sunday, June 8^th, 2008

Proper 5/ Ordinary 10 A/ Pentecost +4

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 4:13-25

Theme: Salvation Through Faith

 

 “¹³For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. ¹⁴If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. ¹⁵For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. ¹⁶For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, ¹⁷as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. ¹⁸Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” ¹⁹He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. ²⁰No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²²Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ²³Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, ²⁴but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, ²⁵who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”

 

Back to basics. 

 

The heart of the matter. 

 

The central truth. 

 

The core argument. 

 

They are all ways of saying – and signaling – that what you are beginning to talk about is a fundamental aspect of the issue at hand.  That is what we are touching on this morning.  We are in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, and he is stressing the equality of the gentile and the Jewish follower of Christ – it is, in fact, one of his major issues to address in the letter – he was dealing with a stratification – a separation – that had crept into the church in the absence of the Jewish believers – those who most probably first established the church – after being evicted from Rome by the emperor Claudius. 

 

The argument, in fact, cuts both ways.  Paul is trying to get across to BOTH the Jews AND the gentile members of the congregation that NEITHER is greater or lesser than the other, but that, by the Grace of God through Faith in Jesus Christ, they are all brothers and sisters. 

 

Elwood made a particularly important point last week in his testimony.  At one point, after he said the he would live on this earth as long as God let him, and then he would go live with God in heaven.  Not because of anything he’d done.  He reviewed the fact that he is a deacon here at Jerusalem, that he has served as a Sunday School teacher, Sunday School Director, served on various committees over the years, but he reiterated the fact that not a single one of those things EARNED him the right to go to heaven.  That the only reason he knows he is going to heaven is because he has put his faith and trust in Jesus Christ who died for him on the cross, and made the way for him to go before the throne of God and have Christ stand in his place and be deemed worthy because Christ was worthy. 

 

That is actually the same argument that Paul is making throughout Romans.  He is underscoring that fact to his Jewish brothers and sisters who may be thinking that there have to be some sort of thresholds met in order to qualify for entry through the golden gates. 

 

It is likewise the argument that he makes to his gentile brothers and sisters who come from any number of pagan religious backgrounds that most likely ALSO taught that there were certain offerings, certain rituals that needed to be followed in order to please the gods – whoever they were – to allow one to prosper or succeed. 

             

The point Paul is making is that in light of the action of God in Christ ALL striving for the purpose of attaining salvation is null and void.  That we can’t beat each other to the finish line when it comes to that particular race because THAT race has already been run and completed and God in Christ won hands down, or rather, hands up and out on the cross. 

 

We’ve read it so often in scripture, in studies, we hear it in sermons – “salvation by grace through faith”.  So … what does that mean, exactly?  What is grace, and what is faith? 

 

Grace in this case is the action of God on God’s own part, not prompted by anything we’ve done or asked for.  For reasons that we can wonder about and only partially understand this side of heaven, God realized what needed to be done in order to remain in relationship with humanity, and that was, to come to earth and live among us.  To be with us and teach us what he meant it to look like when he set out on the adventure that resulted in creation. 

 

Faith is what we bring to the table that God invites us to.  Even then, it is not purely ours.  It is our spirit’s response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives and in our hearts.  It is that part of us that first surrenders to the Lordship of Christ and calls the rest of ‘us’ to follow. 

 

Faith is that part of us that sees what we can’t see with our eyes; that hears what we can’t hear with our ears; that feels that which we can’t feel with our hands; that knows that which we can’t know with our minds, but only with our hearts.  It is what understands when the rest of us is confused, that believes when the rest of us is saying it can’t be so. 

 

Now, here’s the rub.  Faith is a good thing to have.  Period.  We can have faith in a lot of things.  Faith that the floor will hold us up, faith that the light will come on when we flip the switch, faith that we will still be here tomorrow to complete the plans we’ve set for the day or the week … though in truth we do not know that for certain.  But when we speak of faith in the Christian sense, we speak of a very specific type of faith – it is faith in a person, faith in that what that person said was the truth about himself, about God, about what it means to be truly righteous, about what happens to sin that we confess, about what God really wants of us is US – not our deeds, or our works, our efforts.  Those are part of it, of course --- but they come AFTER we have given ourselves to God.  NOT before. 

 

So what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton on June 8^th, 2008?  It means that we recommit ourselves to giving ourselves to God – hopefully we’ve all done that at some point in our lives – we’ve come to the realization that we can’t do this by ourselves, we don’t WANT to do this by ourselves, and we can ONLY do this – this LIVING IN THE LIGHT OF GOD’S LOVE – with God in us through the presence of the Holy Spirit THROUGH our faith in Jesus Christ.  And that involves a conscious decision.  A moment in which we change, in which we begin to turn control of our lives – ALL of our lives – our thoughts, our actions, our emotions, our bitterness, our resentments, our grudges, our unexposed, darkest corners – over to the light and the love of Christ. 

 

Did you notice I said ‘begin’ to turn control over?  That is because our old selves don’t vanish the moment we surrender to Christ.  That old self has been in control for a very long time, and is used to it, and doesn’t easily want to let go.  Yes, there are instances when it happens quickly – and those are the really mind-boggling testimonies we’d all like to have – where we were hooked on drugs and living on the street and eating out of dumpsters until we found Jesus; and the addiction – the desire to do drugs – vanished from one moment to the next.  We’d all like to be able to tell of such miraculous conversions, but the truth is much more … routine, much more prosaic. 

 

The truth is most of us made our decisions in the quietness of our home, or driving along the road one day, or in a quiet Sunday School room while some other function was going on in another part of the church.  And things went along pretty much as they always did after that.  So it is hard to distinguish the before from the after.  And that makes it harder to recognize the old self when it rears its ugly head and says “no, don’t apologize; they had it coming”, or the old self – that still sounds surprisingly like you yourself, convinces you that harboring that kernel of hate for that one particular person who did that one particular thing – regardless of how long ago it was – is not doing anyone any harm, but is keeping me aware of what they are capable of … that that is somehow acceptable, when Christ has equated hatred with murder … I hope you’re getting the picture here.  Our old self is going to be around for the duration.  Our GOAL is to be able to recognize and dismiss our old self when he or she tries to convince us to do, say or think what is contrary to the Gospel of Christ.                     

 

Let’s pray.  

To Show His Righteousness

 

NOTE:  This message was not preached - today.  Elwood Schools, a member, had asked for an opportunity to share his testimony.  Something he’d been dreaming about – literally – for two solid months.  Elwood was diagnosed with Melanoma 5 years ago – right about the time I came to Jerusalem, and was given a 5-10% chance of survival.  His testimony was the message we needed to hear this morning.

Sunday, June 1^st, 2008

Proper 4

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Romans 3:21-31

Theme: Salvation by Grace

 

 “²¹But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, ²³since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; ²⁶it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. ²⁷Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. ²⁸For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. ²⁹Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, ³⁰since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. ³¹Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.”

 

It is one of the greater challenges we face as believers if we hold Scripture to be in any way authoritative for the way we live our lives and seek to allow it to help us to understand our faith: that of engaging scripture as part of living out the greatest commandment that Jesus spells out in the Gospel of Mark and something we touched on this past Wednesday night: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind,” which actually substitutes the last word of the Old Testament version of that commandment where the original last word is “strength”.   Beginning long before Martin Luther, but especially SINCE him, the emphasis we as children of the protestant tradition place on the study of scripture demands that we exercise our minds and our intellect as well as our spirits when we encounter God through the written word. 

 

In looking at today’s passage, we would do well to first remind ourselves that Paul was writing to a congregation that, from what we can tell, he had not yet met in its entirety.  From the closing greetings of the letter we see that Paul knew many of the members of the congregation, but we do not know how big that church was, to be able to say whether he knew most or all of them.

 

We know from Acts that Paul’s call was to bring the message of the Gospel to the gentiles – and he is writing to a congregation that IS mostly gentile converts to Christianity.  It was not always the case.  The first converts to Christianity in almost every instance of the early days of the church were Jewish.  It was most likely no different – at least initially – in the Roman church.  But the Roman church was, as its name suggests, in ROME; the capitol of the Empire, home to Caesar and the government.  Roman Caesars were not your average civil servant.  They, in some cases, came to believe themselves to be gods in their own right.  As such, they were answerable to no one.  When you don’t have to answer to anyone for your actions it becomes very easy to lose any sense of perspective and any sense of accountability, since there is none enforced around you.  The emperor Claudius was not far off that model.  Though he did not, apparently, come to believe himself a god, he DID in many ways act as though he did.  In the year 49, for whatever reason, as most likely as not fabricated, he ordered all the Jews expelled from Rome.  The expulsion included the Jewish Christian converts that were part of the church, among them Priscilla and Aquila, good friends and fellow workers as well as fellow missionaries with Paul in his early days, as well as many others.  After Claudius’ death about six years later, his successor, Nero, reverses the edict and allows the Jews to return.  In that return those Jewish Christians came back to what might have been left of their homes and businesses and their congregation. 

 

That reintegration of the congregation after several years of separation set the stage for some dynamics within the fellowship that well might resonate today with us.  Granted, our particular congregation is not one that has been split recently, though that is not an uncommon event in any given group of churches, especially Baptist ones, nor is it too far removed from the collective memory of our faith fellowship – not as having suffered a split, but as having gained a number of members as a result of a sad turn of events in a sister congregation. 

 

There’s a subtle shift that takes place whenever a government sanctioned action takes place. As social beings, as people who define ourselves – to whatever degree – by how we fit into the society in which we live, we hold that society in fairly high esteem – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.  However objectively it may be otherwise, because we are integrated into it, we cannot always recognize those aspects of it that need work. 

 

Last Sunday’s offertory, the hymn ‘America the Beautiful’ holds a special place in my heart among what we would commonly refer to as ‘patriotic hymns’ – if you were sitting in the choir, which I was, the song was being hummed and SUNG – maybe not out LOUD, but it was definitely being sung – and it is easy to do.  We learned the words in elementary school, if not earlier.  They spring out of our minds almost immediately when we hear the first notes of the song played.  The reason it is special to me is that it is at its heart a prayer to God, asking for guidance, to confirm our self control, to mend our every flaw, to refine that which is good in our society – the gold in us – and if you think about it, in that process the impurities get burned out.  It is a statement of the fact that we are not there yet, we are imperfect, and that we cannot get there apart from divine guidance.             

 

It is the most fundamental expectation of living in a society – to live in peace.  To be able to get up, go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and know that for the most part, things are going to remain as they were between those two times.  It is the reason that those times when that DIDN’T happen – the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the attacks on September 11^th, stand out so strongly for those who lived through them – because they were a radical shift from the normal routine.  When a government can provide that peace we tend to be lulled into a sense of security that is in fact at odds with the reality of millions if not billions of our neighbors on the planet.  But it is a security that we hold onto really, really tightly, because it means so much to us.

 

I imagine that on some level, the gentile members of the church in Rome felt some kind of similar connection to that sense of security when the expulsion order came down from Emperor Claudius for the Jews to be kicked out.  Somewhere in the back of their minds the thought was born that ‘they must have done something to deserve this’.  And so, they became guilty in some vague way in the minds of their former brothers and sisters.  After they left, life went on, in some form or fashion as it had before.  Not in an Unfamiliar way, since the gentile converts were accustomed to things being the way they were in Rome.  And then, after six years of more routine, they open the door to their sanctuary to a knock and there they are, their Jewish friends and brothers and sisters.  And they welcome them back, of course, but there’s that nagging doubt in the back of their heads … what did they do … why did they come back … they may be kicked out again any time now … we can’t let them completely “in”.

 

Can you imagine that happening?  Can you see the divide opening up between the two groups?  Paul was aware of it, and wanted to stop it from blossoming – or devolving – into an outright fight – a disturbance that might lead to another mass deportation. 

 

So he calls on the Gentile Christians to not forget that they were actually in the same boat that their Jewish Christian friends were in not so long before.  He evens them out, so to speak. 

 

You see, the underlying cause and effect principle being subconsciously applied is ‘you did something to deserve this’, whether for good or bad.  The constant fight Paul had with the Judaizers in the early church was to dispel the notion that in order to enter into the grace of the gospel you first needed to meet the physical standards of converting to Judaism. 

 

Now he has to deal with the same thing from the opposite side of the spectrum:  Gentiles assuming that Jewish believers did something to become second class citizens – both in their society and in their church.

 

Paul rejects the notion in the most fundamental way he knows.  He goes to the heart of what unites them all: the question of salvation, and spells it out in no uncertain terms.  It has nothing to do with what ANYONE – Jew OR Gentile – has done.  It is purely because of God’s righteousness that God chose to offer salvation freely.  And it is in that free offering that God ultimately leveled the playing field.  Because God wants to make it plain and simple to anyone who is interested:  God wants everyone to be saved,   everyone.  So everyone should be treated with the same respect, the same tenderness, the same care, the same gentleness with which God treats US.

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

It means that we are commanded to make no distinctions either.  No From-Here’s or Come Here’s, no well to do or struggling financially, no white or black, no distinctions of any kind.  God’s grace does not distinguish, and neither should we. 

 

And that can be hard, because every other aspect of society, though it may claim otherwise, is modeling for us the need to make those distinctions.  This is a place where the Gospel calls us to do differently.  To NOT follow the role we’ve been shown; to go against the grain. 

 

And depending on how deep into the grain we are, it can be a task that will only come with the transforming of our minds and our spirits through the changing power of the Holy Spirit.                  

                    

Let’s pray.  

Hope In The Lord

Sunday, May 25^th, 2008

Corpus Christi Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Psalm 131: 1-3

Theme: A quiet, simple faith

 

 “¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

 

 

What a beautiful Psalm.  And one that I’d never stopped on before.  I don’t recall ever reading this one.

 

There are 150 of them, after all.  I hope it’s understood that, unless you are a scholar of the Psalms, or someone gifted with a photographic memory, you’re not going to be able to call to mind each and every Psalm.

 

But the images brought forth in these three short verses are like a deep breath drawn at the end of a hard day’s labor.  It is a mental pause to adjust an attitude, to refocus, to re-center – to regain perspective.  

 

And it couldn’t come at a better time. 

 

“¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

              

These last few weeks, it seems, have been … full.  With some good things:  births, anniversaries, celebrations; as well as with sad things … deaths, illnesses, unexpected surprises, troubles, worries. 

 

We’ve heard it before, things come in threes.  I’m beginning to think that it is more a matter of perception and coincidence that they seem to do that – as well as a matter of position.  By that I mean that depending on where you are RELATIONALLY speaking – who you are close to, who you know, who you are aware of – impacts how you perceive how many of those various ‘things’ happen around you. 

 

There was a period in my life when it seemed like everything was crashing in – and I DO mean everything.  It seemed that for a period of weeks, if not months, at least one thing a week happened that figuratively “slammed into me”:  the death of a Grandparent or an Uncle; the death of a friend’s parent, a terrible illness claiming the life of another person. But it wasn’t only manifesting itself through loss of life – illnesses were as much a part of that time as well – diagnoses that had lifelong repercussions, issues of mental as well as physical stability being compromised; people losing their jobs, marriages breaking up, couples breaking up, people who were once friends acrimoniously going their separate ways; all that against a backdrop of events on a national as well as international scale that just seemed to prove once again that the world was going somewhere not very nice in a hand basket.

 

I wonder how knowing this Psalm then might have helped my perception of those times. 

 

Because there are times when we ARE able to dedicate time and attention to ‘lofty thoughts’ – things ‘too great and too marvelous’ as the Psalmist writes – things that touch our spirits, that engage our ability to dream, to wonder, to swirl our minds around the misty heights of thoughts, and ideas, and concepts.  We’ve had a touch of that over the last couple of weeks – in these celebrations of Pentecost and the Trinity.  We HAVE been able to ‘raise our eyes, and lift up our hearts’.  Even in our worship this morning, beginning with our initial greeting, and in the acts of raising our voices together, in praying together, even in observing our discipline of silence, we have, perhaps some, perhaps all, if only for a few minutes, felt our hearts and minds and eyes lifted up. 

 

But if we are honest with ourselves, I would venture to say that there are probably a few of us here this morning for whom that did NOT happen.  It is the nature of a congregation – of any group – that the experiences of this past week, or this past month, or the accumulated experiences of this past year have combined in such a way that that initial claim of the Psalmist resonates most strongly in a voice that is weak with exhaustion, thin with defeat, small and lost in the vastness of space.            

 

 

“¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

              

There is more than a hint of depletion in those words.  And it is in the honesty of that voice that I find the closeness of a connection with the Psalmist.  The person who wrote those words knew what it was like to be bone-weary.  To be so spent that even though they KNEW there WERE things ‘too great and too marvelous’, that there comes a point when you have to say ‘not now’. 

 

Traditionally, we ascribe the majority of the Psalms to King David.  There are those that are pretty clearly his, which have over the centuries preserved their Davidic authorship pretty much unquestionably.  There are others that bear the marks of different authorship.  And there are those that seem to indicate that they may have been written by women.  The imagery we find in the Psalms for God, or for an aspect of God, crosses the full spectrum of existence – from storms and earthquakes to Lions and Eagles, to a mother hen and her chicks … and here we come to a mother and child.  And it becomes personal.    

 

²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

 

This week one of our friends – a family with two young girls, aged 3 and 2, welcomed a son into their family.  I shared with you Wednesday night that Guillermo – “Memito” – was born that morning, weighing in at 6 lbs 3 oz, and measuring just 17 inches. 

 

On Thursday I took Guillermo – the father – and America and Casandra – the sisters – up to the hospital to meet their new brother.  The girls are still VERY young – and predictably, they were curious about everything and INTO everything – including wanting to get out the door of the room and head down the hall of the maternity wing at Mary Washington.  Felicitas, the mother, had gotten SOME sleep, but not a lot, what with getting used to Memito’s being in the room with her and beginning to breast feed him – it makes for some pretty exhausting time to face. 

 

This was not an expected pregnancy.  Though they were happy to welcome him to the family, Guillermo and Felicitas are well aware of the stresses that come with a newborn.  I watched the strain on her face build as the afternoon wore on and the girls became more agitated in wanting to explore and wanting to play and color and go somewhere and do something … and I realized that Felicitas is facing the prospect of handling a newborn and two toddlers alone for most of the day while Guillermo is at work.  And those first words of this Psalm seemed to sound out to me in her voice.

 

“²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

 

There is a calm acceptance in that second verse.  It is a statement of accomplishment.  We’ve seen it happen – a child is upset and crying and fussy, and no one can seem to bring it any comfort, to quiet it, to settle it down … until it finds the arms, or the lap of its mother.  And it is a miracle to watch a child quiet when he draws close to his mother.  It is a beautiful thing to watch a little girl go from crying and wailing to sitting calmly and even begin to smile when she is back with her mother. 

 

The Psalmist is taking that image and making it a description of what happens to our souls when we draw near to God.  But what I love about it is that second part of the second phrase – “my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

 

I have a favorite picture of Leslie and the kids.  It was taken when Judson was just a few days old.  We inherited a recliner from Claude, our friend that I lived with before Leslie and I got married.  It was your basic brown, sort of corduroy type fabric-covered recliner; wide arms, pretty deep cushions.  Lots of room, almost big enough for two people to sit in.  Almost.  When Judson was born Hannah was a little more than a month from turning four and Caleb was 18 months old. 

 

In the picture, Leslie has Judson in her arms.  Hannah is sitting next to her on one side, and Caleb is perched on the other side, on the arm of the recliner, caught in the middle of either saying or doing something.  The expression on Leslie’s face is a tired smile.  You can definitely tell she’s been through childbirth recently.  Her hair is ‘all over her head’, and there are circles under her eyes.  She doesn’t have any makeup on.  And you know what?  She never looked more beautiful.                            

So I have this image of a mother with her child sitting next to her or sitting in her lap, writing this praise song to God, caught up in the immediacy of childrearing, the “daily-ness” of it, the “one foot in front of the other”-ness of it, the “what has to happen next”-ness of it.  And the result is a calmed and quieted child who knows she is safe, who knows he is cared for and loved so completely that they cannot imagine a world – regardless of WHAT happens – where it would be otherwise. 

 

Is it any wonder that the Psalmist would then turn and call her people to that same sense of security – that hope that God wants them to feel in relation to HIM? 

 

³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

 

 

Let’s pray.  

Do You Not Realize?

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Trinity Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

2 Corinthians 13:5-14

Theme: The Trinity and the place of mystery in faith

 

 “⁵Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? —unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test! ⁶I hope you will find out that we have not failed.  ⁷But we pray to God that you may not do anything wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test, but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed. ⁸For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. ⁹For we rejoice when we are weak and you are strong. This is what we pray for, that you may become perfect. ¹⁰So I write these things while I am away from you, so that when I come, I may not have to be severe in using the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.

¹¹Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. ¹²Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. ¹³The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. ’

 

What place does mystery have in our faith?  Granting that there is a necessary degree of DIS-comfort in following the call of Christ on our lives, how comfortable are we with believing something we don’t readily understand?  I posed that question this past Wednesday night, and it seemed that at the time, the general consensus was ‘very comfortable.’ 

 

As you have heard me say before, and as we’ve found time and again in scripture, the Christian faith is about putting beliefs into action.  It’s not about simply understanding something to be so, or believing something to be the truth, it is about translating that understanding and that belief into something palpable, something real, something genuine, something … hmmm … measurable, visible. 

 

Christ’s whole beef with the ways of established religion in first century Palestine was that the two had been separated.  His main problem with the religious leaders in Jerusalem was that they had divorced their belief – their faith – from what they lived, to the point where it had seemingly become the norm, and not the exception to disassociate what the intent of scripture was from how one lived one’s life – and THAT was the accepted model of behavior. 

 

Last night I was called over to Riverside to the ER on a chaplaincy call.  The nurse who called me, who is a woman of deep faith, advised me at the outset of the call that the reason she was asking me to be there was to provide pastoral presence, not simply to translate. Calls like that come in not quite regularly, but sometimes frequently in a short space of time.  As I drove over, I was aware of the clock, and wondered how long I would be there, medical tests being what they are, and waiting periods for the results being what THEY are, I expected to be there for several hours at least. 

 

When I arrived, the young man I was seeing and helping with was in some pretty serious pain.  Within just a few minutes of my arrival, he seemed to go into some sort of seizure.  It was a fairly mild one, but still unsettling to watch.  My thought as I was holding his hand and telling him to breath – because he had stopped – was that there was something else going on here.  I had no idea what, exactly, but knew that he wasn’t well.  He came out of the seizure and was babbling under his breathe for a long time after that.  As I helped get him ready to be transported to the radiology department for an x-ray and a CT scan, I was explaining to him what they needed to do while he was in there – the images they were going to be taking – and he seemed to only be half aware of what I was telling him.  As clear as I tried to be with him, his mind was elsewhere.  There was something else going on there.

 

When the ER doctor finally came in to see him after he’d been brought back from radiology, he began asking him a fairly routine set of questions, in order to get a baseline idea of what he was dealing with.  The young man was still pretty much out of it from the pain and was preoccupied with other things, and try as we could, we were only able to get a couple of somewhat straight yes or no answers out of him.  After several minutes of asking questions and not getting answers, the Doctor, somewhat exasperatedly, said he needed to hurry up and get answers, because he had other patients waiting.  We were able to get one or two more answers from the man, enough for the doctor to order a couple of other tests, and then he was off to the next bay and the next patient. 

 

As I sat next to him, I looked at the clock again, and realized there were things that I needed to get back home for, but I also knew that whether I realized it or not, my being there in the room with him was providing him more that simply someone to translate for him, to help with hanging the IV bags or transport him to the CT room, there was something else going on there. 

 

But I had to keep reminding myself of that as the evening wore on.  A few minutes later, three bays emptied of their patients, and the staff was scrambling to get the beds ready for the next patient as well as keep up with the care of the patients they already had.  I stepped out and grabbed a sheet for the gurney in the next room and started helping the nurse put it on.  She laughed and asked me if I was getting bored.  I told her the man I was with was resting a little better, so I figured I’d make myself useful.  What ensued was a conversation about how God works through different events and circumstances in our lives to bring us to himself.  We weren’t just changing the sheets on the bed.  Something else was going on.

 

Wednesday night I began putting some thoughts together with you about how we are to go about the business of living in what is for us a very real, physical, touchable, concrete world, while professing a faith that by definition involves a belief in someone who is – at least to the untuned mind – long dead and gone.  Specifically, I mean Jesus Christ.  In a slightly larger sense, I’m also speaking of the Trinity; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  It is what our catholic brothers and sisters refer to as one of the mysteries of our faith.  It is something we hold to be foundational TO our faith, and at the same time we admit to not being able to understand it – not because of any lack of mental capacity, but due to our status as finite human beings. 

 

Our passage this morning, as several other places in the New Testament, witnesses the author signing off at the end of a letter.  In the farewell he uses what has become a benediction -- The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Some estimates of when the letter was written put it around 55 of the Common Era.  That means that it was within 20 years of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.  What is significant about that is that it underscores the fact that even early on the three persons of the Trinity were already being identified together – in communion with each other and infusing the life of the early church. 

If we back up to the beginning of the passage – this morning’s passage – we find Paul wishing the church of Corinth to spend some time figuring out what they believe – “Do you not realize” he asks, “that Jesus Christ is in you?”  

 

It would seem a fairly standard question, to those of us who have grown up around Churchspeak – or Christianese – the language that is unique to protestant churches – sometimes unique to a denomination – that has developed over the past several hundred years. 

 

But let’s put ourselves – as much as we can – into the brains of those folks in Corinth who were getting this letter and hearing it for the first time.  “Jesus Christ in us?  What does he mean?”  I would suggest that it is as valid a question for us today as it was to our spiritual ancestors in Corinth.  Do we not realize that Jesus Christ is in us? 

 

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of the Father, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all. 

 

What we are asked to begin to understand – and if not understand, accept – and if not accept – allow for – the possibility that in Christ there was something else going on than a religious genius ‘getting it’ all over again after ‘it’ had been lost for several centuries.  What we hold as central to our faith is that Jesus was not only a man, fully human, but that he was also divine – fully God.  And beyond that, in his absence we have what is in essence his presence through the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.  In other words, we are, once again, not alone. 

 

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is chock full of hands on, common sense, nose to the grindstone get along suggestions, recommendations … orders, in some cases.  Though he does delve into some theology – the underpinnings of the faith – he is very PRACTICAL in speaking to the problems the church was experiencing.  But with all the practical applications he was giving them, there was an awareness that those were just superficial things, that underlying the actions was a worldview, an understanding of humanity in relation to God that was coming through in just those ways.  There was something else going on there.

 

The scans and X-rays all came back after being read by a radiologist across the world, and they were all negative.  What seemed to be classic symptoms of a kidney stone were at least initially disproven by a specialist.  The head CT’s also came back negative, nothing to show that might have caused seizures.  The doctor decided to keep him under observation for most if not all of the remainder of the night.  After explaining all that to the young man, I asked him where he lived.  He told me, and I wished him well, and told him I hoped we would be able to see each other again soon.  I explained that the Doctor was going to keep him for most of the night, and that I was going to need to go on home.  He extended his hand and thanked me for being there with him.  Started to stumble through it in English, and I laughingly told him to please talk to me in Spanish.  He said “You are a good man.  You were good to be here with me.”  I had wondered in the back of my mind if he would even be able to remember the night’s events, between his pain and the seizures and the pain medications, it seemed unlikely.  But he lucidly dispelled those doubts in our saying goodbye. 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

It means we go about this business of living out our faith in a concrete world, in a concrete way, in very real and genuine expressions of faith – whether that be expressed in the visitation of the sick, or calling and checking in on someone, or sending them a card, or sharing a meal, or asking a question of care in the full expectation of engaging in conversation, not just a passing greeting.  But we do all that in the awareness that there is something else going on here.  Just as there was something else going on through the life of Christ on earth, there is something else going on in our life as the body of Christ in Emmerton.  We are not just a place to house a food pantry, to collect money for our benevolvence fund, we’re more than a staging area for meals on wheels each January, we are not just engaging each other on this physical, finite, palpable plane of existence; we are breaking through this veil and bringing in the Kingdom of God.             

 

Let’s pray.  

Parthians, Medes, Elamites

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Pentecost

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Acts 2:1-21

Theme: The Holy Spirit for ALL

 

 “¹When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴But 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. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o”clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, 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. ¹⁸Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. ¹⁹And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. ²⁰The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. ²¹Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

 

Something caught my eye as I was preparing for this morning’s sermon.  I knew, of course, that we would be celebrating Pentecost Sunday this morning, and I knew there was a connection with the JEWISH celebration of Pentecost … but I wasn’t completely clear on how that originated. 

 

The alternate reading for today’s text – that is, the birth of the church – is found in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, chapter 11, verses 24 through 30.  In an interesting parallel, THAT passage speaks of the Spirit of the Lord descending … some would say jumping … from Moses to 70 elders of the tribes of Israel.  The story is an odd juxtaposition to the account in Acts.  Yes, the Spirit of the Lord descends on the 70 elders, and they do prophesy, but it is in what appears to be a radically different context.  The people of Israel have just been complaining about not having MEAT to eat, and it gets to the point where God seems to say, ‘If it’s meat they want, it’s meat they’re going to GET!”… and God proceeds to overwhelm them with all the meat they could want – more than they are able to eat, really.  The text even has God saying they’ll have so much it will be coming out of their nostrils! 

 

Pentecost – the Jewish Pentecost – celebrates the giving of the Law, traditionally something that happened 50 days after the Passover – that is, 50 days after the Israelites were permitted to flee Egypt.  So we as Christians recognize our roots in the Jewish tradition by sharing the name of the celebration, but with a different emphasis.  The Law defined the people of Israel.  It is the Spirit of God which would be intended to define us as Christ followers. 

 

What stands out for you in the story?  That there were people from all over the Roman Empire represented?  That there was a sound like a rushing wind?  Tongues of flame over their heads?  That they were talking in every tongue represented there?  It is certainly one of the more colorfully described events in the New Testament, in fact, probably THE most colorful. 

 

You see, in a sense, the Christian Pentecost paralleled the original Pentecost.  While the first commemorates the giving of that which defined for us how we should ACT, the second defined for us how we should BE – that is, where our actions, where our thoughts, our sense of self, our place of rest, our source of hope, should reside.  In the first, God is saying ‘This is what I tell you” in the latter, God is showing us “this is who I AM”. 

 

Because that was, in the end, what happened at Pentecost.  We speak of God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.  It is one of our basic tenets of faith – one of those foundational pieces of what we build our understanding of faith on. 

 

Another piece of the foundation is the Trinity.  God in three persons, blessed trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Now, we have God with all of God’s attributes – immortal, invisible, wise, beyond our understanding and yet accessible through the person of Jesus and … and … the Holy Spirit – the comforter, our companion, the intercessor. 

 

We sing about the Holy Spirit, we study about him to some degree, but do we really live out the reality of his presence in our lives?  It is the Holy Spirit that moves our own consciences to first recognize his presence, and in so doing, sensitizes us to an awareness of the Holy in our lives – and the immediate and direct CONVERS – the Unholy as well.  we are made aware, by his prompting, of what we are doing that is grieving to the Spirit of God, that is not of the Kingdom, that is bringing darkness rather than light into our lives, that is tearing us down rather than building us up – and not only ourselves, but those around us.

 

Last week and earlier this week I sat with the family of Chano Arellanes, and wondered at the way they were still able to find it in themselves to laugh and joke, to play after suffering through the tragedy that took his life.  There were moments of profound grief – when we first greeted each other – at the airport and at Minerva’s home – the tears didn’t stop for a long long time.  But in the next few days, I watched as Cristel and Juan Carlos and Angel Gustavo and even Minerva at different times broke out of their sorrow and were able to laugh and kid around, surrounded by family that loved and supported them and cared for them – and communicated in a completely accessible way that they – Chano’s family – were not facing their future by themselves. 

 

In a similar way, the disciples were still struggling between the grief of the death of Christ on the cross, and the utter astonishment of the resurrection.  Part of them was still thinking that this MUST be a dream – there is no WAY this could really be happening.  And yet it was. 

God is again letting the disciples know – letting US know – that we are not going about this on our own, running from the starting gate under our own steam, finding out how far we can get before we run out of fuel, out of energy, whatever.  God is providing for us that which we MUST have to make this work – GOD GOD’S SELF – dwelling in us!

 

The simple truth of the matter is that were it not for the Spirit of God in and through us, the church would not exist today.  I firmly believe that.  We can talk about it in philosophical terms, or we can experience it in emotionally charged services and tearful confessions at the altar, but ultimately we have to come to grips with the fact that God has chosen to dwell in US – fallible, fragile, proud, egotistical, bull-headed, shallow, selfish people … not terribly unlike the people of Israel who complained of not having enough meat to eat after being freed from a life of slavery … and that the promise of presence PERSISTS. 

 

We are his presence in the world.  We are his light.  We are his Joy.  We are his Love.  We are his help.  We are his hope. 

 

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church on Pentecost Sunday, 2008? 

 

It means that we are not only ourselves, though we ARE that – we need to understand that as well as anything else.  We ARE us --- but we are MORE than that --- we are the US God intended us to be – or that is our GOAL.  God wanted Hilda to be Hilda, of course, and God wanted to shine through her gift of music.  God wanted Cliff to be Cliff, and God wanted to shine through his gift of leadership.  God wanted Sam to be Sam, and God wanted to shine through his gift of steadfastness – faithfulness.  God wanted each of us to be who we are, and through being who we are he wanted to highlight one other aspect of who HE is. 

 

We are not all expected to play the organ, or the piano, or sing, of lead, or be caretakers, we ARE all expected to be a facet of an incredibly multifaceted gem – the body of Christ named Jerusalem Baptist Church. 

 

Let’s pray.