He will one Day rise up, but for now . . .

      As you all know, or at least those of you who were here last week, I intended to preach this week on perseverance from the Letter to the Hebrews.  We talked last week about how the author is trying to remind us of the only One who truly is faithful in our lives, namely God.  Because He has promised, and because He is trustworthy and so powerful, we know that He can and will keep all His promises to us, even when the world might think He and we have failed.  The letter this week continues the discussion of God’s faithfulness to His people.  The author mentions corporate experiences like the Exodus and the walls of Jericho, as well as famous stories such as those of Rahab, Barak, Sampson, and Daniel.  And the author mentions nameless stories, the lives of those early saints of the Church who suffered for their trust that Jesus was the Son of God who died, rose again, and Ascended to the right hand of the Father.  The author shares the stories to remind us that the real challenge for us is perseverance.  Will we trust in God even in those moments when such faith seems hard or challenging or fruitless?

     Conversations and events in the world around us, though, have a way of changing my plans, or, to put it more aptly I hope, I think God wanted us to pay attention to something other than perseverance.  In this case, it seems justice, and God’s promise to judge according to His justness, were far more important to us.  Some of the questions Sunday afternoon and Monday were the result of a couple prior sermons or Bible studies, but then came the raid on our former President’s compound.  Then came reflection.  Then came the need to find out where God is in such messes.  I, of course, revel in such discussions.  Some of us are discovering that our politicians really do not care about us.  Brian may tell us that over and over, but we think he is bitter and cynical because of his involvement in the effort to awaken us to slavery in our midst.  The people I vote for care about me.  Don’t look so surprised.  I know.  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I sat in a pew.  I did the same thing.

     Thankfully, this example has happened fast.  Two years ago, which party hated law enforcement and which party championed law enforcement.  Today, which party loves law enforcement and which party wants to defund the FBI?  It’s almost like both parties hate when they are potentially held accountable for breaking the law, isn’t it?  We have a couple members who can speak to security issues with the authority of experience.  Ask them how they would be treated were they to be found with compartmentalized information in their residence.  Never mind the top secret stuff.  We all watch spy movies and read spy novels.  We think we understand that stuff.  Ask them about the reasons behind the compartmentalized classification, and you may learn why the flouting of such laws and protocols is so dangerous.  As you ponder those questions, though, remind yourself that the focus seems to be on division . . . again . . . on the same issues.  But the dividers have switched sides.

     A little closer to home, we have a debate playing out.  I am not being prophetic in the sense that God has given me a trustable vision of the future to proclaim.  We are considering raising $2 Billion or so, through our taxes, to build a new NFL stadium for the Titans.  Now, you all know I love football.  I played for 14 years.  I will remind you from time to time that the Steelers are God’s favorite team, even in the heart of Titan country.  Good, everybody is laughing and understands my next question comes from a place of God’s justice.  Why are we building a $2 Billion stadium for a billionaire family so that millionaires can play a game?  Our local politicians, for their part, don’t want us looking behind the curtain.  It will make us a destination city.  It will create jobs for the people of Nashville.   It will allow us to host future mega events like the Super Bowl, the NCAA playoffs, the World Cup, and March Madness.  We can host more concerts.  It’s an investment in us!  I see the nods.  But what is really happening?  We are investing $2 Billion in a family that pays millionaires to play a game.  None of us will get anything other than entertainment and frustration value out of $2 Billion of our collective money being spent.  Now, it’s true we Steeler fans get more entertainment value because our team wins more, but you understand the theory.

     Now that you have all laughed and prayed to God to turn His back on His favorite team and grant the Titans a Superbowl victory this year, why those two examples?  What are we talking about instead of perseverance that ties politics and corporate welfare together?  I have already told you.  We are speaking of justice today.  We are speaking of God’s commitment to His justice and our mental gymnastics to wriggle out of our commitment to Him and His justice.  Feeling indignant that I claim we try to wriggle out of His obligations and teachings?  I just spent 8 hours yesterday on the sin of racism in the Church.  The one place in the world where racism should not have a hold, or any other ism for that matter, is the Church.  If I believe human beings were created in the image of God, why should I think another being, with whom I interact, is not?  Yet, the Church is sometimes a bastion of racism.  How many of our brothers and sisters sincerely think Scandinavian Jesus looks the most like Jesus?  How many Mediterranean people have we met that are blonde haired and blue-eyed?  Y’all have been vaccinated against that nonsense because you have a rector with common sense and nearly 300 credit hours in Classical Studies.  Mediterranean people tend to be darker skinned.  Ethiopians are often very dark.  And, yes, God does love white people, but He came to earth as a Mediterranean Jew, not an Aryan or Celt or Scotsman or Viking.  Churches, or rather their members, often justify their treatment of others based on how they think God favors or look like them.  Some in the Church twisted the Scriptures to justify their support of slavery.  Most of them, like us, paid so little attention to the Bible that the letter to Philemon was seldom ever discussed.  If your slave is created in the image of Jesus, and he/she is your brother/sister in Christ, can you really treat them like chattel?

     Our psalmist today leads us in a quick discussion of justice and our enslavement to our own idols, even as he or she reminds us that God will one day judge the earth.  And as I get really started, consider this your commercial advertisement to join us on Monday mornings as we navigate the Psalms.  Now, for those who join me on Monday mornings, here is your chance to show off.  This is your chance to show how much you have studied, what a great student you are, and maybe win a jewel for your crown.  What literary device governs these 8 verses?  I wish y’all could see your faces.  Those in the class are fervently praying to God that I not call on them in church the way a teacher did in class, and the rest of you are wondering what I will do if no one answers correctly!

     Brian, to no one’s surprised, got it right at the early service.  It is called a chiasm.  Anybody besides my wife remember what a chiasm is or does?  I tell people it is best described like a sandwich.  There are two lines on the outside, like bread on a sandwich, that say basically the same thing.  In the middle, where the meat is in a sandwich, is the point the poet really wants to draw our attention.  This chiasm happens to have cheese and veggies on either side of the meat, but you should get the idea.  God sits in the counsel in the first verse, holding judgment.  In the last verse, He is implored to rise up and judge the earth.  He judges who is wicked and who is righteous.  Everyone is wicked when compared to God, and, as the psalmist notes, God will have to deliver the weak.

     The psalm begins with a bit of a head scratcher.  If God is the only God, as we believe, who is in this divine counsel?  And why the promise that they will die like mortals?  Theologians grapple with this a lot.  The word our translators rendered as gods can rightfully be translated as great ones.  That means, it could be gods or the powerful.  When we add the “in the midst” part though, it could rightfully be the image of the great assembly of His people.  Like Shrek the ogre, the psalm has different layers.  We forget the layers, though, because we do not know the people impacted by its lesson.  Did the Jews believe Yahweh was God?  Yes, at least many of them.  Did they know that other people and cultures worshipped other gods?  Of course.  Did they understand that the cultures around them perceived there was a cosmic battle playing out in the heavens that was reflected on earth?  They depended on it.  Could the psalmist have had in mind that battle, where Yahweh eventually proves His might?  You bet!  Could the psalmist have understood that God gave authority and power to certain figures to exercise dominion?  Sure.  The problem, of course, is their failure.  Only those who choose to follow Satan, rather than God, truly fail.  How could a faithful divine being fail?

     We often forget, of course, God’s teachings about idols.  Throughout the entirety of Scripture, God reminds humanity, but especially His people, that idols are deaf, blind, mute, and powerless.  Worse, they exact from us the very things we seek.  The terrible irony is that we create the idols that govern our lives and end up losing the thing we most value.  In Scripture, there is no idol that enrages God like Molech.  When He gives the torah to Moses, God saves His most terrible pronouncements for those who follow Molech, even though it will be centuries before Israel, and even a couple of her kings, falls prey to that idol.  Molech seems to have been a god of fertility in Canaan and Assyrian mythology.  If you wanted a big family, more crops, or a bigger herd, you worshipped Molech.  The best sacrifice, the one that supposedly guaranteed you would get more, was to sacrifice your first born.  Imagine, were I a follower of Molech I would have to sacrifice Sarah or Nathan to get a bigger family or more material wealth.

     We do this in similar ways in modern society.  Many of us worshipped mammon or know those who did.  Ever hear the parable about the husband and father who worked incredibly hard to climb the corporate ladder to give his family everything they wanted.  It’s a tragic story, really.  Sometimes the man died from the stress of work and climbing.  Often, even when he made it, he found he had no relationship with his wife or children.  He spent so much time at work that they really did not know him.  Worse to him, they did not seem to appreciate that he did it all for them.  Know that story?  What did the husband/father value?  What did his worship of mammon cost him?

     We have other gods that we worship, political parties and the NFL are just two of them.  Whoa, you don’t think they are idols?  How many of us are more passionate about our party platform than we are about God?  How many of us would rather spend $2 Billion of our dollars on a billionaire family paying millionaires to play a game rather than supporting our schools, our roads, those food insecure in our midst?  Or better yet, how many of us have skipped church because of a noonday kickoff?  Ouch!  See.  Most of us are seduced by idols in our lives, idols we create but that subvert us from God and His teachings.

     How do we know?  Throughout the trajectory of Scripture, when God reminds His people of His power and cosmic scale, He always reminds His people that He loves the downcast and forgotten.  I, the Lord, the maker of all that is, seen and unseen, I love the widow and the orphan.  Time and time again, God’s people are reminded of His love for those on the margins of society and of His loving desire that His people would treat them as He treats us.  We visit the imprisoned and shut-in, we feed the hungry, we care for the sick, we care for the widows and orphans, we minister to those society forgets because we know God loves them as He loves us, and we know that He is glorified when we demonstrate His love for them in our lives.  Period.  We are His sons, His daughters, His ambassadors, whatever favorite title that you like.  We understand that we are called to live as if we are in that kind of relationship with Him.  Heck, our Collect today even reminded us of that truth—Jesus is a pattern of holy living!

     We are great at promoting fairness, but we cannot stand justice.  We rebel at the very thought that God gets to decide what is just.  Don’t believe me?  We do a fairly good job of feeding the food insecure in our midst.  The wider world thinks our work is rather stunning and, unfortunately, not like most Christian behavior.  But, check your heart this morning.  Are you concerned about people scamming the ministry?  Do you think only those who make bad choices are poor and need the help we offer?  Do you buy products and food to support the ministry that you yourself would not use?  Did you think those we served did not deserve ribeyes or NY Strip steaks?  Do you give aged stuff from your pantry or cheap quality items that, were Jesus Himself to show up at that door and want to use or eat them, you’d be embarrassed?  And that is a spiritual wedgie from just one ministry.  One of my jobs is to try and keep us on the right track for the right reasons.  My job is to remind us of God’s teachings.  When Adventers complain about imagined theft, of what do I remind us?  All things, including food and other stuff like toilet paper really belong to God.  If someone is stealing, they are stealing from God!  Not us!  Not you!  Not me!  It’s all His!  And, lest we forget, He has proven His willingness to bless His faithful time and time and time again through us.  And our hearts, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, reminds us of our need for God to rescue those we serve and to rescue us!

     When we read God’s instructions in the torah and consider Jesus’ life, what do we learn about God’s justice?  He wants no one oppressed.  He wants no one to go hungry, to go naked, to go homeless, to suffer mental illness or possession, to lack education, to be enslaved, to be attacked in war, and any number of forms human beings develop to oppress other human beings.  Our idols could care less because we, often, care less.

     Thankfully and mercifully, God understands and knows!  Better still, He cares!  He knows the injustices forced upon the weak and needy, He knows the hearts of those who oppress.  At the end of the psalm the psalmist implores God to rise up and judge the earth.  All things belong to God and only He judges with justice.

     You and I are at an advantage compared to the psalmist and the original audience of the psalmist.  Often, we treat the psalm as a cry for the Second Coming, the eschaton, when Jesus will return for judgment.  But we have the vantage of understanding that God has already risen and judged the earth.  His Son came down, as we remind ourselves every single Eucharist, and became one of us.  He lived His life, our pattern of holy living to use the words of the Collect this morning yet again, in accordance with all those teachings of God.  How did we reward Him for His faithfulness?  We put Him to death!  And, yes, because we are Episcopalian/Anglicans and seldom skip church on Palm Sunday and participate in the liturgies of Holy Week, we understand that we participated in the need for His death as much as those who came before us and those who come after us.  We recognized this morning that our hearts, for all our wisdom and perspective, are no different than others.  And for what was He killed?  Feeding hungry people?  Curing diseases?  Casting out demons?  Living God’s torah.

     Lest someone gathered here among us thinks I forgot blaspheme, think on Pilate.  Even Pilate, a Roman governor through and through, who put to death a couple hundred other “messiahs,” realized that was a charge full of skubala.

     For His part, Jesus was completely unsurprised by the outcome.  Over and over He taught His disciples that He would be rejected.  Over and over He taught His disciples that He would be betrayed by them.  Over and over He taught His disciples that He would be killed.  And over and over He taught His disciples that He would re raised from the dead by His Father in Heaven.  He reminded His disciples and us that His death was necessary, that His death would put to death the powers and principalities that govern our hearts, that try to subvert us from the truth that our Father loves us dearly.  He even reminded us that He did not come that first time to judge us but to save us, to rescue us.  Some, to be sure, chose Him.  But too many in the world, as John reminds us, choose darkness and oppression rather than rescue and true and lasting freedom.

     But you all knew this.  Every bit of this is soaked into you because of the liturgies we pray and the Scripture readings we study, week in and week out.  All of us gathered here have chosen to follow Him, to accept His offer of salvation, and to live our lives as He calls us.  We do not claim to be the Savior or the one with THE PLAN for others, but we know the One who does.  Each time we gather, we examine our hearts, we ask for forgiveness, and we plead for the grace and perseverance to glorify Him in our lives.  As crazy as it might sound to our ears and the ears of those around us, such is the way He reaches others.  We have seen it; we have experienced it.  Such is the way that He calls the people of the earth to remember that the nations belong to Him and that He hears the cries of the oppressed.  Each and every one of their tears is known by Him, just as He knows each and every tear of ours!  One glorious Day in the future, He will return; He will rise up to finish what He started on that Cross, Death, and Resurrection so long ago.  One day He will return finally to judge the earth, and put to eternal death those who rejected Him and His faithful people.

     But to those who accepted Him, those who asked to become His children, His people, His heirs, there is no real ending in sight.  To be sure, we may all well die before that return.  We may well loose these bodies before that day.  But, as we remind ourselves over and over again, that death is just a horizon, a limit of our sight.  Those who have been baptized into His death will share in His Resurrection!  And so, my brothers and sisters, we labor in whatever ways He calls us to serve the oppressed in His Name, to speak Truth to those to whom He has entrusted power, to live and serve others, confident that He can and will use us as He will, and always to the accomplishment of His purposes!

In His peace,

Brian†

In His faith we trust . . .

      Today, our passage from the Letter to the Hebrews both helps assuage our fears and remind us of the pervasive nature of faith in God’s people even as some modern scholarship causes some of the very anxiety that is addressed by this instruction.  Those of you paying attention, of course, have figured out I will avoid the OT and Gospel lesson again, in favor of a sermon on the Epistle.  A few of you have shared your concern this week that I might focus entirely on the Epistles and Psalms going forward.  I won’t.  I do pray over the lessons and ask God to steer my focus.  So long as I stay prayerfully attuned, God will certainly make sure that each of us will hear what we need to hear.  And even if I do not stay properly attuned, He will still make sure we each hear what we need to hear, such is His faithfulness.

     Our passage from Hebrews today is perhaps the best known in the entire letter.  Those who suffered through Confirmation classes in their youth can often cite the first verse when asked to define faith.  I know when Larry led the Sunday morning Bible Study class through Hebrews, way back in the time before the pandemic, we spent several weeks just on that verse.

     One of the discussions we had was on the pervasiveness of and the need for faith in our lives, and not just when it comes to God.  By way of example, think of those pictures of the Webb telescope.  We are told now that astronomers can put together a map of the universe.  The scale is impossible for you or I to comprehend.  When you look at the images on social media or on Google, you and I have no ability to comprehend truly something that is 16.2 billion lightyears in diameter.  Our lives are measured in decades, a century if we are really lucky, so how can we truly comprehend a billion years?  And, although all of us are used to driving fast on I-65, as much out of self-protection or self-preservation as our desire to get to places quickly, how can we ever contemplate the speed of light?  All of us are Top Gun fans with a need for speed, but we cannot begin to comprehend 186,000 miles per SECOND, about the distance of circumnavigating the equator seven times each and every second, or just south of 6 trillion miles a year.  Yes, I am rounding, but it is close enough that we sort of understand my example.

     The point of that divergence, though, was to ask us how we know things like the Gravitational Constant are truly the same in every part of that spherical object we call the cosmos that is 16.2 billion light years across?  How do we know the speed of light is even the same everywhere?  Get the problem?  You and I accept on faith that such things, we call them theories or immutable laws in physics, are true everywhere.  We may not have been to Australia or Mars or Pluto, let alone the edge of the known universe, but we hold on faith that there are immutable laws like gravity and the speed of light and that the experiences in those locations would be identical to what we experience here in Nashville.

     All that is to say, faith is not a four-letter word.  We have faith in any number of things and people, regardless of our faith in God.  In Anglican/Episcopal speak, we would say that we do not see a conflict between science and religion because both are based on experience and lead to faith.  Theologians would say it far more eloquently than I, but I see some intrigued looks.  Let’s press on.

     I said a moment ago that we sometimes trust things.  All of us gathered here right now are of an age when we had a contract of sorts with the companies for which we went to work right out of college.  Workers promised to work hard, and companies promised to care for employees, in the form of pay and benefits.  That care extended into retirement and even survived our death.  All of you grew up into that system.  If you went to work for IBM, as one example, IBM promised to continue to pay you, so long as you did your work well.  When you retired, IBM paid the pension and healthcare, which you had earned by virtue of your work.  IBM even offered to continue those benefits until the spouse died.

     Starting 20-30 years ago, though, the contract was broken.  Companies pawned retirement income off onto the employees, even though wages were not raised to offset the real cost of living for those “valued” employees.  Companies even turned the healthcare over to the government and Medicare.  Why pay for something valued by the employee when we can stick them with the government’s version?  The effect was to save lots of money for companies and to decrease real income for employees and increase anxieties for workers.  Who pocketed the savings?  Yep, the execs.  Sometimes the shareholders, but always the execs.

     One of the sources of generational warfare is this example.  Those of a certain age and maturity complain that younger generations do not have the same loyalty as the older generation at that age.  I see nods.  Younger workers don’t have the same drive to stay late, cover someone else’s work, increase productivity without renumeration.  For their part the younger generations think the older generation stupid or naïve.  Why should I make sacrifices for an organization that will cast me aside quickly?  Why should I save my company money when it does not pay me the equivalent of what it paid someone doing my exact job ten, twenty, or thirty years ago?  Why sacrifice today when the company has already demonstrated it does not value my tomorrows?  Corporate trust is not what it once was.

     Neither is our faith in our government.  I can well remember sitting in civics classes as a youth and listening to the way government worked.  We elected officials based on our preferences how they should govern.  There was always a difference between Republicans and Democrats, but we thought the difference was a contest of ideologies.  Best of all, we had the opportunity every 2, 4,or 6 years, depending on the office, to elect a new person to govern in the way we thought best.  For their part, politicians were, this is now an oxymoron, civil servants.  They were elected to fulfill the will and desire of the people they were elected to govern.  Those elected officials had to reach across the aisle to negotiate laws or ordinances.  In those days they called it sausage making because few ever got everything in bills that they wanted.  But both sides recognized that elected officials from the other party had been elected by their own constituents.  If I asked for a show of hands this morning, though, how many of us think our elected officials really care about us?  It would not be many, so cynical have we become.

     And if you want to see another aspect of the generational divide in our country and families, ask your grandchildren if they expect to see Social Security checks when they retire.  Sociologists have noted that we GenXer’s, you know, they group Boomers and Millennials ignore in their generational fights, were the first generation to believe that Social Security would not exist for us when we retired.  That means most people my age believe we pay into the system and will never see a penny, such is our faith in the government and the politicians who lead it.

     I have been speaking of secular things, but the loss of institutional faith has happened to the Church?  Last week, I pointed out the most recent story of a preacher being robbed at gunpoint during a service of $400k worth of jewelry.  By way of being more accurate, in case you Adventers are conspiring to give me that much jewelry, it was closer to $600k worth.  Visitors are wondering if I am serious.  It was a joke last week.  Nobody was really shocked by the story.  No one was surprised when I shared that church members were coming forward later in the week, complaining how the pastor allegedly steered money they needed from the church to his personal use.  We might like to throw stones at our sister institutions, but we should always be aware our beloved church is no different.  We abuse people with the worst of others.  Heck, we avoid caring for those in need as well as any other Church.  We ignore our own calls, which we claim is governance at GC’s, to sell our building in NYC and move to a place with a lower cost of living and expenses.  Even in our BCP fights, we fight like it is a winner take all, but we likely do that because such fights in the past have proven to be exactly that.  And then we lament that the Church withers in our context, and we wonder why no one trusts the Church any more.

     Heck, this Epistle from which God has our attention today, is even a source of distrust in some places in the Church.  If you get bored this afternoon or this week, go read some of the discussions about Hebrews in the Church.  When I was a child, my Bible titled it “The Letter of Paul to the Hebrews.”  I see almost everyone nodding.  Now, it is just “The Letter to the Hebrews.”  Again, I see the nods.  Literary Critics have convinced many in the Church that Paul did not write this letter.  Many believe it was someone discipled by Paul, but that there are enough textual differences to call its authorship into question.

     As Anglicans/Episcopalians, you and I do not focus so much on the question of who wrote it.  Could Paul have written it?  Sure.  Do I think it likely that a disciple of his wrote it?  At least.  But, I and we all accept that the letter was God-breathed.  Heck, we pray that Collect twice a year to remind ourselves!  That means God caused the writing, the editing, and the collecting.  We care less about the details of authorship and more about the teachings contained therein, or at least we should.  But, we recognize that for some of our brothers and sisters in the wider Church, questioning the authorship is akin to attacking their faith.

     Our problem with faith and its seeming decline are not new.  Thankfully and mercifully God caused the letter to the Hebrews to be written and preserved that you and I might be reminded of the fact that there literally is nothing new under the sun.  And while many preachers in our church today will focus on the faith of the individual, and rightfully so, I will be pointing us toward another important lesson in this pericope.  Make no mistake, I understand faith for us as individuals is necessary.  That is a lesson in this selection, too.  But there are other lessons for us in the same lesson, and I think that was my job today to highlight one in particular.

     Had I been concerned with titles or mike drops, I would have said at the beginning of all this that the author of Hebrews calls us to a corporate memory of God’s faithfulness to those who came before us and of their responses and activity, in recognition of His faithfulness.  Put more bluntly, the author wants to remind us that only One Person, well—Three Persons in One Unity, if we want to be more exact—has proven Himself faithful and worthy of our trust.  Institutions fail us.  Human beings fail us.  Even the Church can fail us.  But God always is faithful!

     Those who lived before the Incarnation trusted in the LORD, Yahweh.  Our examples today point us to various figures in our ancestry.  Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham trusted in the Lord.  Each demonstrated that trust in a different way, but each trusted in God’s faithfulness, no matter how crazy their circumstances seemed.  More importantly, each was blessed by God, who credited their faith as righteousness.  Abel was killed for his faithfulness; Enoch did not die; Noah and his family were delivered from the Flood, and God swore His Covenant to Abraham.  The particulars are different, but each is declared by God as righteous because of their faith, and you and I remember them today because He presents them as examples, patterns of holy living, to use next week’s Collect about Jesus.  Pick your favorite OT hero or heroine.  The same is true of them.  God credits their faith as righteousness and deals accordingly with them.  And, to make their ultimate reward clear, Jesus, the Son of God who was raised from the dead, teaches us that God is the God of the living, that all those who believed in the Lord are alive!

     Fast forward to the NT.  The Incarnation, Jesus, lives His life the way we are all called to live our lives.  He trusts completely in the commands of the Father to the seeming end.  Though He came to save us, and did nothing that merited our rejection of Him, we put Him to death.  Why?  He fed people; He healed people; He cast out demons; He reminded us of our Father’s call on all our lives.  We chose Barabbas over Him.  We even mocked Him as He hung on the Cross.  Still, He had faith in the Father’s love and mercy.  He was willing to endure for our sakes that physical and emotion pain we call His Passion.  The same is true for all the other believers in the NT.  While they have the advantage of the fuller revelation, when compared to their OT brothers and sisters, it is still Jesus’ faith, God’s faith, that saves them all.  Thankfully and mercifully, it is His faith that saves us Adventers and all Christians still!

     There is a myth in parts of Protestantism especially, though my Roman brothers claim it is alive and unfortunately well in their denomination, too, that our faith saves us.  Prosperity gospellers use that lie or myth or subversion to their own benefit.  If you have faith enough to give me your last $1000, God will give you more!  If your faith is enough, God will heal you.  Brothers and sisters, that is skubala!  It is not of God!

     All that we do in worship, corporately or privately, is meant to remind us of God’s faithfulness.  It is meant to remind us that when we were sinners and unwilling to do His will, He was willing to bring His promises to fruition even in spite of our unfaithfulness.  We gather to remind ourselves of that truth, to immerse ourselves in that truth, to equip us to see His faithfulness in a world that teaches us there is no faithfulness, that no one or nothing is worth our faith and trust.  God alone is faithful.  When we rebel, He allows us to bear the consequences or sometimes punishes us, but only as a loving Father, and just as He promised before we rebel or sin.  And when we do those things He has called us to do, He gives us appetizers of the blessings He has in store for us.  But He alone is faithful.  He alone is worthy of our praise and thanksgiving.  And we recognize that by gathering together to give thanks to Him for all that He has done for and promises us!

     To make sure we understood His unique place in salvation history, God sent His Son, Jesus, into the world to save us, and to demonstrate once and for all the magnitude of His power to redeem.  When that stone was rolled away from that Empty Tomb and Jesus came out, our predecessors and us learned that absolutely nothing can prevent God from fulfilling each and every promise to us!  If death cannot separate us from Him and His blessings, what can?  Persecutions?  Privations?  The efforts of the Enemy?  No!  One reason behind the Resurrection is that it gives us perspective to see that, like Abraham before us, our focus should be on our inheritance, even as our attention is on the world around us.  All that we do in this life, in this place, in this context, is simply done to mirror, however poorly we do it, the heavenly homeland to which He calls each one of us.  Like younger Abrahams and Sarahs, we can trust He will fulfill each and every promise that He has made to us, even if it may seem to this world that we lived foolishly, or blindly, or whatever other scorn it would use to disparage our faith in His faithfulness.

     The Christians of Jewish ancestry to whom this letter was written were, in many ways, just like us.  They were, of course, ridiculed by the wider culture and even those with whom they once worshipped, for believing a Man could be raised from the dead.  On top of the public and religious scorn, though, they experienced true persecution.  As we read in Chapter 10, some had had their property taken from them, some had been imprisoned, and some even lost their lives.  Their persecution was real, not at all like the skubala that some of our more boisterous brothers and sisters claim today.

     Their responses to all of it, though, should sound familiar.  Some turned from the faith, as described by the author in chapter 6.  Some tried to make the Gospel sound more attractive by watering down the miracles, especially that of the Resurrection.  Some decided to quit attending worship as described in chapter 10.  Others were not receiving the signs that they mistakenly thought would confirm their faith.  That response describes some Adventers and some self-identified Christians today, does it not?  I told you, well God told us, there is nothing new under the sun!

     But the glorious news today my brothers and sisters, the Gospel news, is that we are saved by God’s faithfulness!  He alone has proven Himself worthy of such trust!  He alone has demonstrated the power necessary to keep every single promise He has made us.  Yes, we proclaim our faith each time we gather.  Each time we gather we recite the Creed; we even remind ourselves that Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and that Christ will come again as we partake in the Sacrament; y’all even suffer through such teachings we call sermons in the Liturgy of the Word, as part of that reminder, that it is God’s faithfulness that saves us, that He alone is worthy of our praise, our thanksgiving, our loyalty, and our trust.  Some of us do it when we gather joyfully; some of us sometimes do it through gritted teeth; still others of us do it worried that it might not be true, that we might look foolish to those in the world around us.  I get it.  Some days we seem closer to God, or rather closer to understanding God, than on other days.  So did all those saints about whom we read.  The author of Hebrews certainly understood it, whoever that person was.  Best of all, God understands it, too! 

     All He asks that we trust Him, that we put our faith in Him.  All the hard work of salvation is up to Him, and He has already accomplished it in the life, and in the death, in the Resurrection, and in the Ascension of His Son.  Because of that faithfulness to His people, we know that He will accomplish all His purposes and all His promises to us!  It is a wonderful reminder to a people beset by betrayal; to a people beset by natural disasters and even a pandemic; to a people worried about where they will lay their head or how they will feed themselves; in short, to a people like us and like all those to whom we are sent each and every day of our lives in this place, in this land.

 

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†

Living in the present with the end in sight . . .

      I have had a number of conversations with Adventers over the last couple weeks about my preaching.  Nearly all of it has been constructive.  Most who have engaged me, though, have complained that they wish I preached more on the Psalms and on the Epistles.  So, in a shock to everyone, I will preach on the letter to the church at Colossae today.  Now, before I get started, if you feel ripped off, you can go back either 3 years or 6 years on my blog.  One of those on Ecclesiastes was pretty good.  I compared human efforts to puffs in the wind–vanity—to God’s breath! I did not remember I had preached it, and the imagery was far too poetic to be mine, so it must have been a Holy Spirit thing!

     The letters or epistles are valued by the Church because they teach us a few things.  First of all, they teach us that little in the Church really changes.  If Lambeth has taught us anything this week, it has reminded us that people in the Church and in our churches like to fight.  And no matter the dispute, and make no mistake, few disputes are new, both sides are great at pontificating the mind of God and denigrating the other in ad hominem attacks or, in today’s world, offering snarky tweets and sound bites.  Second, these disputes should teach us about the pervasive nature of sin even within the Church, which, as Paul reminds us again today, is made up of individuals in the process of being sanctified by God.  If we, those who claim Jesus as Lord, can be so easily trapped by our own sins, what of the rest of the world?  Our understanding of sin ought to impel us with urgency and empathy to share the Gospel with those in the world outside these walls, even as we examine our own motivations and efforts.  Finally, and perhaps most comfortingly, we should be reminded by the letters that there is nothing new under the sun.  God is not surprised by our own or the propensity of others to choose our own ways over His.  And still He loves us!

     One of the reasons I have likely not preached much on the letter to the church in Colossae is the fact that we Adventers likely do not relate to it well.  It was a agricultural-centered town on the Lycus river.  About 100 miles to the west was the city of Ephesus, about 10 miles to the northwest was Laodicea, and about 10 miles to the west on the opposite side of the river was the city of Hierapolis.  Some of you have likely figured out from geography, and some of your travels, that we are talking about what is present-day Turkey.  To be fair, if you did not know anything about Colossae before this introduction, you are not alone.  Few people know much of anything about it.  Its only seeming importance to us in the Church is that Paul wrote them a letter in response to some issues their leadership raised with him.  But at least we hold it in some importance because of that.  The ANE seemed to value it less.  Nothing exists about the town of Colossae after the great earthquake of 61-62AD.  The other cities were rebuilt, and we have extent material discussing the reconstructions, but Colossae seems to have been wiped off the face of the earth by that one quake.

     Such knowledge is not all bad, though.  Academics, as you know, love to argue.  One of those great arguments in the Church is the authorship of the Pauline letters.  Our academics love to fight about whether Paul really wrote a letter or the order in which he wrote them.  I suppose an academic would remind me at this point that Paul mostly dictated the letters to his manumissives, Luke and Timothy and maybe others, who did the writing.  I would, of course, goon them and remind them I have seen the wall in Paul’s prison with my own eyes!  Some of the contents of the letters in our Bibles are on the walls of his prison.  All that is to say, we can be fairly certain, as a result of the earthquake, that Paul’s letter was written before then.  As was the case in the early Church, it was copied and shared with churches in Ephesus, Laodicea, Hierapolis, and eventually us, as it addressed issues facing the wider Church and other churches.

     If you have read the letter, you will note that Paul does not seem to be too hard on the Colossians.  Paul has a reputation for being a hard-you-know-what in our church because he holds churches and individuals accountable to what God has taught, instructed, or revealed to them in his letters.  And woe be to the man or woman who ignores God’s teaching or tries to subvert God’s teaching!  It sounds hard to our ears because we, like the Colossians, have been seduced by philosophies and the teachings of the world.  We forget that we, with teenager-like attitudes to our Parent, do not really trust our Father knows best.

     Paul’s reputed hardness, though, is easy to understand.  As we have been talking in our Acts Bible Study on Tuesday nights, Paul literally met the risen Jesus.  Other witnesses heard thunder or saw a bright light, so something happened.  Still other witnesses saw the scales fall from his eyes.  And still other witnesses saw the 180 degree change in his behavior.  Just like that, Paul went from being the chief persecutor of the Church, and Jesus, to being a zealot for the Messiah.  I think the other part of his perceived hardness is the fact that he was a great rabbinic student, likely Gamaliel’s best student.  He learned and taught by dialectic.  Y’all have heard of my adviser and professor, more thanks to Nathan and Robbie, but if I had a dollar for every time he asked me “Mr. McVey, how can you be so stupid and still remember to breathe?” . . . we’d certainly have a balanced budget!  Y’all laugh, and rightly so.  To be fair to Dr. Arieti, I was not always engaging my brain to the very best of my abilities.  Nor were my classmates.  We were 18-22yo boys.  It was his job to turn us into good men and good citizens, and it was his passion to cause us to discover truth.  I did not appreciate his job or passion at 8:30am at that age the way I should have, especially after great fraternity parties on Thursday night, but with some age and experience comes wisdom.  And though such creative . . . . encouragement is the source of hysterical tales among his former students today, the college had a list of such statements he was not supposed to make because they were too harsh to young ears. 

     Much like my former professor and adviser, Paul was seeking truth.  In our Prayers of the People we would say Paul was seeking the Truth, with a capital “T.”  The central Truth for him, thanks to that meeting on the road to Damascus, was that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  Because of the Resurrection, and God’s other works, we now have a fuller understanding of God’s plan for salvation history.  Because of Jesus’ Resurrection, we can trust that God knows what He’s doing and that we are free to be who He created each one of us to be, in Christ!  For us, like Paul, it should be the Truth.

     Which brings us to the letter.  For those who want to see what the problems at the church in Colossae were, read chapter 2.  Academics point to verses 8 to the middle teens as giving us an idea of the questions asked of Paul.  Part of the purpose behind our reading today is to remind us of the same truths, in light of vain philosophies, skepticism, and sin.

     Notice, for example, Paul’s gentle reminder that we are not supposed to be fixed only on the eschaton, the end times.  Those of us who grew up in other denominations may understand the wider Church’s fascination with life after death.  I was raised in a tradition where we learned we will walk on gold streets, will live in mansions, will wear crowns with jewels, and will be esteemed for our works righteousness.  Make no mistake, I teach and preach that faith without works is dead, but I also preach and teach against valuing or devaluing, depending on the individual and their perception, of any work given by God.  I also remind us that, at the end, we will toss all our crowns at the feet of Jesus, recognizing all that was made possible through Him.  And in that way, we are reminded of the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes today.  Our works, in the grand scheme of salvation history, only have meaning if God gives them their meaning and purpose.  But I digress.

     We are not called to focus exclusively on the eschaton.  When we consider the eschaton, and all Jesus’ warnings about it coming like a thief in the night, we should be impelled to work harder and faster for His glory.  We should want no one to be outside His saving embrace, were He to return this second.  But, because of sin and human nature, we think we have all the time and that God really doesn’t care THAT much about our sins.  I mean, it’s not like He thought only He could redeem our sins . . . oh, wait.  Yes, ironic laughter is appropriate.  Paul fights that complacency and reminds his readers, including us in Nashville 2000 years later, of the truth of baptism.  Because we have been baptized into Christ’s death, we are promised a share in the Resurrection.  But notice Paul’s language.  That promise has present day consequences.  Paul instructs us to seek the things above, where Christ is, and to set our minds on the things above.  Specifically, since Christ sits at the right hand of God, we are to seek His things and set our minds on His things.  Spoken more bluntly, that eschatological promise and understanding should govern our life today!

     Think of those Christians who get press today.  They do not represent Christianity in our minds, but for many in our country they do.  How many focus on the belief that they will live in heaven, but do not change the way they live on earth?  Nearly every denomination says the Lord’s Prayer; many Christians, however, live as if there is no call for things on earth to resemble those things in heaven.  My favorite example this week was the pastor in California, I think it was, who was robbed at gunpoint during the service of about a half-million dollars’ worth of jewelry.  I see some nods, but I see more confusion.  A pastor in the wider Church was robbed at gunpoint last Sunday.  The robber took all the pastor’s jewelry.  It was a good haul.  My first thought was, of course, why does my church not pay me enough to buy and wear that much jewelry?  Y’all are laughing, but only because you know me, right?  You know I am a sinner in need of God’s redemption just like you.  Do not get me wrong, I do have the same financial worries as many of you.  Well, that is not completely true.  Most Adventers are far better off financially and no one else is raising seven kids.  But you get the idea.  Of course, as the story further unfolded this week, members of the congregation began asking questions, questions for which they did not like the answers.  Soon, allegations of predatory stewardship and misuse of discretionary funds were alleged.  Was the Church or the world scandalized by the accusations?  Of course not.  Most were like us and nodded “of course.”

     Paul reminds us, and all those who claim Christ as Lord, that we are to be concerned about the things with which our Lord is concerned because of our baptism.  The sins of fornication, greed, pride, slander, evil desire, and name your favorite were literally crucified with Christ at our own baptism.  We have asked God to put them to death in us!  We are promised they will one day be killed in us.  But, like Paul, we know we will also suffer those thorns in our side.  How are we reminded to respond to our thorns?  By repenting again, and again, and again.  Over time, we sometimes notice that our sins change.  The Church calls that sanctification; we think of it as God’s grace.  But it really is a pattern of living in the present.  When we are seeking God’s things on a daily basis, we cannot help but draw near Him and He near us.  We become focused on doing those things He would have us do, no matter the perceived futility or our own frailty.

     Each of us gathered here today knows this on a fundamental level.  Will we ever rid our country of hunger?  Our state?  Our county?  Then why do we do it, if we know we can’t rid ourselves of that evil?  Because we know the One who can and will!  And because of our faithful service, how much more has He blessed us?  We have literally given away a couple hundred thousand tons of food we did not purchase since the pandemic began.  Tons, as in each ton is 2000 pounds.  Each one of us has had the privilege of living through an Exodus experience.  Because of God’s blessing, we have a reputation for generosity in the face of hunger.  Because of God’s blessing, we have a reputation for being the kind of Christians that non-Christians lament should be the kind of Christians all are.  Are we doing anything crazy or creative?  Not really.  We feed hungry people, like Jesus did.  Nancy might be a bit more forceful about us taking carrots than Jesus would be . . . lol  We remind them of God’s love for each one of them.  And we lament and repent that so many “Christians” live life focused on those things they supposedly put to death when they, themselves, were baptized.  Most of all, we trust that God’s grace will reach fattened or hardened hearts as a result of our obedience to His calling on our parish and our lives.

     Another reminder for us today is the reminder of both our sanctification and of our relationship one to another in Christ.  So often people like to think all identities are equal when reading these lists put forward by Paul.  In one sense, they are right.  God loves all humanity and woos every single human being who ever lived or will live.  God created all human beings in His image and has always taught His people that it was their job to reach those outside His covenant or outside that knowledge.  But what unites all those races and tribe and identifiers is the One in whose image we are stamped!  It is only when we are set on the mind of God and the things of God that we truly begin to show the image with which we are stamped.

     Those at Colossae seem to share the modern belief that the Resurrection is not THAT important, that those people were duped into believing it happened because they wished it or were too simple.  We hear such philosophies and attitudes repeated throughout the Church today, right?  The Apostles and disciples stole the body and created this myth.  The early Church suffered a kind of mass hysteria because they could not accept their Teacher had died.  We created the Bible.  We do not have to accept the creeds.  Such teachings make sense outside the Church, among non-believers.  But Paul reminds us all of the consequences of seeking those things that God desires, of setting our minds on His things.  The creeds remind us of the central Truth, that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that through believing in Him we will be redeemed, even from our own death!

     One of the chief complaints of non-Christians, but even among many Christians today is the seeming hiddenness of God, and especially Christ.  On one level, it is perfectly understandable.  Who would not want to meet Christ in person?  Heck, Paul is unique in that, of all the Apostles, only he was given the opportunity to meet Jesus after His Ascension!  Jesus, for His part, is unsurprised by that desire in us, right?  He reminds His Apostles and disciples that those who believe without seeing are truly blessed during His Resurrection appearances.  Heck, we vilify that desire in some way by naming Thomas the Doubter, as if he had a problem the other Apostles, disciples, and we did not have.  But both Jesus and Paul are unflinching in their reminders that we are called to follow God’s instructions and repent of our sins.  Period.  In some ways, such teaching sounds like a stern taskmaster.  But look at Paul’s teaching here on the consequence of setting and seeking God by virtue of our baptisms.  What happens?  We are being clothed with our new self, being renewed in our knowledge!  Put less formally, as we draw closer to God and those things He loves, we are becoming remade and renewed.  Better still, as we draw closer to God and those things He loves, we become incarnations with a little “i.”  We become the image of God, you might prefer the term “saint,” in the lives of those who desire to meet God.  Our identity, through God’s grace and our daily seeking and setting, becomes reflective of the Messiah, of the Incarnation.  Yes, by virtue of our baptism, by our daily seeking and setting, and by God’s grace, we become heralds of the Gospel, ambassadors of God, those who come in His Name!

     And this is, for our part as Anglicans, intentional, right?  When we gather for the Eucharist we always pray that God will use us for His purposes.  We pray that He will make us a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice; that He will sanctify us; that He will use us as He will to reach others in His Name.  We know, by virtue of experience and by our liturgies, that we cannot make anything of ourselves.

     Make no mistake, as cool as it may seem to be recognized as His in the eyes of others, especially the eyes of non-Christians, it is still a cross-bearing calling.  The world will treat His image as poorly as it treated Him.  But, we bear those crosses He has given us to bear, certain that the glory He has planned for each one of us in the end will surpass the esteem, the glory, anything that the world offers, and that His glory will be beyond all we can ask or imagine, and last for eternity!

 

In His Peace,
Brian†